One could always try to work for a plumber to learn the trade. Many tasks done by a plumber are unpleasant, but don't require years of training. Maybe they'd accept someone to help them doing the easy or dirty tasks (that they can still bill the customer for) so they can only work on the clean or hard parts, like welding pipes, making threads and waterproofing fittings.

Anyone who can watch YouTube for a few hours a week can learn to change valves, connect a faucet or sink. Declogging sinks and toilets is even easier, and there's still customers who will pay someone else to do it.

YouTube is today's community college. Declogging toilets, installing SAT tv, repairing fans in a computer or changing oil on the car. Everyone has at least some aptitude in something and with some time can learn at least enough to be a slight help for an established small business or craftsman. But yeah, you can keep using it to watch cat videos all day and claim The Man is keeping you down.

The horrors of the free market, where call center employees are accepting a wage of $9.25 out of their own free choice instead of learning how to be a plumber where they could earn 22 or 40 per hour.

Apparently, dealing with customer's shit on the phone for $9.25 has about the same appeal to the general population than dealing with actual customer's shit on their toilets for $22-40.

I suggest a law for lowering income of the plumber, that greedy capitalist pig.

That article hits the nail in the head. For Europe, this is not about Greece: Their economy is small, and by itself, if they sank nothing would matter. It's what it says to Spain, a country with a general election coming pretty soon, and who has its own new, populist left wing party that runs against corruption and austerity.

The Eurozone can handle anything that happens to Greece. But if Spain decides to ignore the troika, beware.

Let's be fair to George Lucas: Jar Jar only appeared in the movie so that he could be to blame for making Palpatine emperor. The only way he could have made it better is if Yoda had gone after Jar Jar and chopped him into pieces for voting for a Sith Lord.

Have you talked to those H1-Bs? Mist do not want to be in the US temporarily: They want to immigrate permanently, but the best way to permanent residency involves years being an H1-B temp worker.

Under the current immigration regime, removing H1-Bs is pretty much the same as closing down the border for tech people altogether. And if you find that a good idea, I am sure you'd also find it to be a good idea to do the same for doctors, right? If America needs more doctors, people just should pay a lot more for healthcare, until any doctor can expect half a million a year right after residency. I am sure that'd be the best thing for America, right?

No, what would happen is not that corporations make less money, but that you see actual offshoring grow again.

I am a former H1-B, now permanent resident, soon citizen. Do you really think I'd just not be as good a programmer here and I am back home? The difference is that here I can get paid like Americans do, and back home, I'd be making between half and a quarter of what I make here, probably for a similar corporation.

I had one of those vaunted H1-B transfers, when my first ever employer decided to move all R&D that was being done in the US to Brazil. Some jobs remained in the US, but none of those that a good programmer might want: They hired the cheapest, least experienced American programmers they could get away with for customizations and customer-specific bug fixes, on top of the now Brazilian codebases, and hired all the senior programmers in Brazil. A Brazilian working from Brazil is far cheaper than if he moves to the US and competes with Americans directly, buys in American shops, and pays American taxes.

So instead of getting foreign programmers to compete with Americans in a way that concentrates the talent here, you'd make programming a big growth industry pretty much everywhere else. It might be helpful for a few years, for the experienced American programmers, but like other forms of protectionism, the trend would be negative for programmers in the US.

Speculation, to a point, produces value, as having the prices that best reflect supply and demand is very valuable. We see a lot of that in treasuries: Isn't it incredibly useful to have the best possible guess of what interest rates will look like for the next 10 years? Currency speculation can be just as valuable.

We'd not want an economy that is based on speculation: There's such thing as spending too much on finance. But a world without any currency speculation is a pretty dire one. It's just very hard to imagine it though, as speculation happens naturally.

It's basic game theory: To be well informed is expensive. The actual utility that we get for voting, and voting for the 'right' guy, is minimal, because most people's votes do not matter, or come even close to mattering. So why spend a lot to get nothing?

Some people that really care about a few issues have little trouble getting informed about said issue cheaply. They just have to forget anything else.

Now, if you have 200 million dollars in net worth, and choosing A vs choosing B will make a sizable difference in said net worth, then not only is voting correctly important enough to be informed, but spending a bunch of money making sure other people vote the same way you do, whether it's best for their interest or not, seems like a very good idea.

So not being well informed at all is an extremely rational decision. It just happens that if everyone does it, equilibrium leads us to a pretty dismal state. To change this, we have to change incentives.

You don't need thugs, you can just purchase votes .Show me that you voted for my candidate, and I will give you $x. You could just hand muffins in exchange for a vote. If it happens in elections for class president, it will happen for elections that actually matter.

You don't even need a big malicious organization to do the vote buying. It can be family members, coworkers, peer pressure. Being unable to prove you voted for someone after the fact is actually a feature. And it's precisely to keep that feature that electronic voting is a terrible idea, as any electronic system that keeps this secrecy is a system that can be easily tampered with.

Slashdot will really be in trouble if Natalie Portman ever goes into politics.

Whether it ruins the game or not is not relevant: It's just optimal strategy at the very end of a tournament. 2 players, and there are only two outcomes: The tournament only ends when one player runs out of chips.

So you are sitting there, with your cards. At any time, the other player can go all in. He can do that to start, or he can do that after you bet something. In either case, you either match, or fold. If you bet a small amount, then either it doesn't matter (if you call), or it does, negatively to you (as your fold makes you lose more money than if you folded in the first place). Since the chips are not deep, it's not like you can play more conservatively and hope to do better: The game won't last long enough to do that.

So you just remember what the mathematically correct play is, and do it all the time. If your opponent bluffs, you are happy, because you are not even paying attention to him. If he plays conservative, then great, because he is letting you win hands you should not, and he doesn't have the time to do that.

So yes, heads up tournament play might be exciting because of how much is on the line, but it's far simpler than the rest of the tournament was.

Yep, there are apps out there that worked in a 5 with KitKat just fine, and are either unstable or do not work at all in Lollipop. I have about 5 apps that ceased to work after upgrade, and I got absolutely nothing of value out of it.

Kinesis makes a mechanical ergo keyboard with Cherry Brown keys, but its design is really not for everyone. A friend of mine swears by it, but I find it unusable, unlike the MS Natural Keyboard. Every time I tried to use the thing I ended up with elbow pain, as it does not work well unless your wrists are parallel to each other. With that kind of design, if the keyboard width is too big or too small, you'll end up hurting more than with a regular, non ergo keyboard, because those at least are more tolerant to angling your arms as you see fit.

They have a split keyboard design too, which would be great... except it uses crappy keys.

If true - how is this not a flagrant antitrust violation?

Company X provides a device that collects personal data.

Company X announces a standard that prevents anyone from using such data for purposes such as advertising without the user's consent.

Company X exempts its own services from this restriction, such that its services - which otherwise compete on par with third-party services - can utilize such data notwithstanding, or even contrary to, the user's explicit withholding of consent.

Company X's services therefore have an unfair competitive advantage that is directly leveraged on Company X's sale of the device to users.

This is pretty much the definition of unfair competition in the form of tying, If the FTC / DoJ Antitrust Division had any teeth and, er, other body parts, it would be all over this.