Starship Troopers?

Really it is this idea that a firm should be forever, and all the effort to make it happen, that creates inefficiencies in the free market.

Here, here. Of course, if there's a lot of government interference to this end, it's not really a free market.

When a company goes out of business, as others have noted, it's not like they shoot the employees and dynamite the equipment - all of that capability goes to competitors who are doing things differently (absent bailouts) and can be used more effectively. I am sad to see such a scion of my childhood near death, business-wise, but change like this is part of life, and when we block change, we get the stagnation we're in right now. Both sides of the political aisle fight this kind of change.

Just for fun, here's a Wikipedia list of the world's oldest companies. Zildjan (the drum folks) are really old.

You didn't make this awful enough. Replace Angelina Jolie and Zach Gali#$)(*#)(*# and I'm in the seat at the theater. Who am I kidding? I'm in the seat either way, I'm a Whovian.

Wrong - though you're in perfectly respectable company to see things this way.

We don't want jobs, we we don't want products (per se) - we want wealth. A lot of confusion results from not understanding what WEALTH is - it's not money, it's not luxury, it's not even security. The grand-unified (and very values-neutral) definition of wealth is:

A quantity of solved problems.

The problem can be as simple and straightforward as an empty stomach to a sandwich, or as complex as a production line to produce an IPad. What we want is to maximize the quantity of solved problems - this is, almost by definition, how a society solves its problems.

If someone decides that a canal (I've also heard "bridge" and "dam" in the story) is a good and desirable thing, then it is a good and desirable thing because it solves a problem. The goodness and desirability comes from the problem it solves, not by the means that it is achieved. What productivity allows us to do is to solve problems A and B at the same time when before we could only solve problem A with the same resources. It should be clear from this definition that this makes us wealthier: we now have the sandwich AND the IPad production line at the same time.

This definition illucidates a lot of why certain societies developed before others did. "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond is all about this - societies on latitudinally oriented continents were able to take advantage of crops that had developed east and west, making them wealthier. Crops, domesticated animals, cultural practices, even intellectual systems like musical notation - these all represent quantities of solved problems. They therefore constitute wealth.

In short, the jobs are only a means to the end - if we could have food in our stomachs, and canals and IPad production lines WITHOUT jobs, we'd be perfectly happy.

1. Graphene can throw a perfect game with one pitch.
2. Graphene once played Russian Roulette with a muzzleloader and won.
3. Graphene simply walks into Mordor.
4. Graphene once beat a wall at tennis.

Sounds like a CafePress opportunity...

That was definitely kicking around in there somewhere...

I took a long look at Convergence, but it suffers from the old fax machine problem...until there are hundreds of notaries, we have the same "trust agility" problem that the system seeks to address.

Furthermore...I would hate to be the subject of a later video from Marlinspike about how all these users gullibly accepted his notarizations of these certs. The whole situation is a nasty, twisty problem...and the worst part is that hosts can't do a thing about it.

Please mount for critiques of capitalism in terms that don't also apply to personal liberty.

Maybe we could clean up that headline with a couple of dashes?

We have pigment for a reason, presumably, so a fully developed animal would not survive direct sunlight?

Of course, a baby mouse would have fur, as well. Still, probably a really messed up looking mouse.

I'm certain that they're protected against legal action from the developer. That's not the problem.

The problem is that Gamestop falsely warranted product as new, i.e., reasonably unaltered from point of manufacture, that they had knowingly altered in a fashion which adversely affected its value. Ever wondered about those "Don't remove under penalty of law" tags on mattresses? That's what they're there for - so that someone cannot warrant a product as being something that it's not.
,br /> The penalty will come from a class-action suit from customers...I doubt that it will be significant monetarily, but it may well kill the company in terms of what it does to the public's perception. They've chosen a big title to make a terrible mistake in bad economic times at the worst possible news-cycle time (late summer), after a series of PR bungles over the past few years. Nothing short of firing the people involved and issuing a profound mea culpa will fix it. This, of course, will not happen.

Oh, and good luck with that new online service...you've given it a hell of a launch story.

We are in the age of keep your head down, and try to make it through the next decade intact. The age of big ideas comes when this age ends:

• Civil War => Transcontinental Railroad / Opening of the West
• World War II => Walking on the Fricking Moon
• Bankrupt America =>

I'm pessimistic / optimistic - we're not at the worst of this time yet, but after we pass it, (literally) unthinkably wonderful things will become possible as our civilization regains its collective confidence.

I am an economist AND a Polywell tech follower - you are correct in all of this, and Bussard himself made a lot of these points before he passed on.

I will also say - and I absolutely hope and pray that the Polywell reactor works out and creates all of the good you've described here - it is quite easily predictable that this will lead to a terrible, terrible war in the Middle East, as those currently rich societies collapse because they've kept all of their societal wealth eggs in single baskets. Not all of the Middle East is like this, Dubai is, for example, more diversified, but many are.

But essentially, this is how markets work - when a company is making huge profits, it attracts competitors. If you see a company making huge profits with no competitors, the government is probably blocking competitors on their behalf somehow. That may be as formal as a legal monopoly, or as subtle as requiring health benefits for your workers - that means no business smaller than the minimum size necessary to pay health benefits (on top of the cash portion of a market salary) is permitted to exist. But I digress...

Furthermore, that is the mining yield based on the current demand for Thorium. There's every reason to believe that as demand rises, we'll look much more carefully, and expend more effort to extract...this idea comes up every time Slashdot talks about "running out" of oil.