eh, I'm becoming kinda interested in energy policy, esp. since we're gradually transitioning from a production economy to a purely imaginary intellectual-property-based economy. Also timely now that we're poking/griefing at Russia's largely oil-based economy and their relationship with China.

If you have some reading on US foreign policy / military intervention strategy that's less naive than "spreading freedom and democracy" or even "cheap energy" (like the GI Joe and Transformers cartoons I grew up with), I'd gladly read it ;-)

Well, apparently there's money to be made in products that people can use worldwide.
http://www.businessinsider.com...

If 3 mediocre software engineers could match the capabilities of one good one, I'm sure we'd see more application of that principle outside of government contracting (cost-plus) work.

Well, get ready to start beating, because apparently the (interim) solution is asexual reproduction:
https://xkcd.com/1259/

I don't think NASA does insurance because it's a business decision and NASA isn't a business.

The DSCVR launch was delayed because the Air Force (which is run more like a business) insisted on taking out an insurance policy on the SpaceX launch. They were involved because they were paying for it, since DSCVR was sort of an odd collaboration between NOAA, NASA, and the USAF.

Spacecraft insurance is expensive since the insurance actuaries actually want comprehensive statistical data on each launch vehicle, and that's simply not available on new launch vehicles with less than ~21 (remember the threshold for statistical significance?) launches.

I have a stock Nexus 5 with Lollipop (Android 5.something) and they put in a pretty excellent data meter under Settings | Data Usage

It shows a cumulative graph of data usage over time, and a linear projection up to the end of the month for your billing plan, along with a customizable warning threshold. Under that it lists a histogram of how many MB is used by each app. Click on those, and you can configure background data for each app to restrict them to only update on wifi (or not at all).

This is pretty much a solved problem if you can convince your phone manufacturer to update you to Android 5 (or just flash a CyanogenMOD build yourself like I used to do on every phone I had before my Nexus 5)

Yeah, that's why they just call it "unlimited data" with 2GB of "high speed data". I don't find it confusing, though I'm a bit confused why other people do.

Yeah, I was thinking that too! The stories from Metatropolis were sort of the polar opposite of the world of Snow Crash, where the only workers left worked on big government projects to unwittingly destroy humanity as we know it (or well, at least just the CS nerds)

I do kinda think this is the way of the future, though, whether we like it or not. Used to be that you got a job with one employer for life, and a 30-year mortgage to tie you down and help maintain "stability" in the economy.

But to some extent, that "stability" also prevents free market forces (snicker) from arranging things optimally... things change every 5 years or so, and your skillset could probably be put to use better elsewhere, hopefully for higher pay. So now that people have increased "freedom" to jump between jobs and employers, hopefully they're doing better work and supporting the economy better than if they had just stagnated at their first employer filling a seat.

Of course, people can and do bounce around too much... Personally I try to stick to each employer for a few years because it takes me at least 6 months to learn enough about their IT systems to reach what I'd consider full productivity enhancing and building new ones. Of course, unskilled labor needs less spinup time to reach full productivity.

But what I anticipate will happen (heck, most businesses are halfway there already) is that we'll just all become contractors, both skilled and semi-skilled workers. We'll all become full-time employees of a labor farm which will handle training and HR and benefits, and they'll subcontract us out to whatever corporation actually has money to do projects. The corporations working on projects just want to get shit done and don't care to maintain big HR departments and take care of their people. The contracting agencies just want to maintain their labor farms and negotiate the highest rates possible for the just barely competent enough employee in their pool. Yes, there will be a proliferation of middlemen, but on the plus side they'll be negotiating a higher salary for you since they get a cut.

oh, we have (unlicensed) AC gold here!

Argh, I never listen to any commentator who obviously didn't bother reading the link, but I'll give you a pass since all I could find was the silly youtube video. Here's another post in text form:
http://stormcloudsgathering.co...

The point isn't that the US buys foreign oil, the point is that oil is only traded in USD on the world market, and we primarily take military action against countries who dare to try to sell oil to others in their own currency.

Another good narrative is the "Covert Origins of ISIS", which explains how the media is used to convince democracies to go to war in other countries by vilifying, well, villains that are mostly of our own creation in the first place. So now whenever I hear news about how bad conflicts are in the middle east, instead of worrying about terrorists I'm can be pretty comfortable knowing that things are probably going exactly as planned.

Oh, here's where it went: http://stormcloudsgathering.co...