Local Motors is an investment of Bre Petis, of Makerbot fame, as noted on his web page.

I don't know if it is deliberate viral marketing strategy of his or just good investment instinct, but I have noticed that products which make headlines on tech sites trace back to his investments. Another example is the new LIDAR offered at SparkFun from PulsedLight, which, according to this YouTube video, is linked to DragonInnovation.com, another Petis investment.

The term for this is soft despotism.

It was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville and first described by him in the second volume of De la démocratie en Amérique, first published in 1840.

Actually, what really reduced crime was legalized abortion.

From "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," by John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt, appearing in the The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed signiZcantly to
recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion
legalization. The Zve states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines
earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade.
States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime
reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after
abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears
to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

If that is correct, still either the Cosby Show or banning leaded gasoline could have accounted for up to a 50% of the drop in crime.

There is a great interview with Elon Musk on youtube here. He is remarkably transparent about his reasoning. One key to his success is that he works very hard to understand motive and purpose when making decisions.

Musk makes that point that it costs about as much to fuel a rocket as it does to fuel a 747. Space launches are mostly so expensive because the vehicle is sacrificed with each launch, not because of the energy requirements for a space launch. The other big component of the expense is that rocket manufacturers charge a lot. According to Musk the value of the raw materials from which they are formed is reasonably inexpensive. Those were two hugely important realizations because they meant that space launches were not inherently expensive and therefore there is enormous potential for reducing launch costs.

By being Space X instead of Boeing the cost of launch is reduced to about 25% of conventional launches because Space X can assemble a rocket from raw materials for that much less. A re-usable vehicle, Musk predicts, would reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude.

So those are the motives and reasoning underlying the X-wing grid fins and re-entry discussed in the Slashdot summary.

your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being

I am not disputing that that is the best correlated variable, but in my experience it is not the lack of technical competence per se which causes problems with bad bosses but instead the concomitant pathologists exhibited by low-skill bosses to compensate for their own incompetence.

I have a story which illustrates the point: Earlier in my career I worked for a state government. One day I get to work and the lead programmer is having something of a breakdown in front of the project manager and they both happen to be standing in front of the entrance to my cubicle. So all I could do was wait there and listen. Turns out that the lead programmer had been devoting all of her time, and struggling for months, to find any way to digest and print the document files previously used in the old oracle/COBOL/dumb terminal system in our new custom client software running on OS X and which was replacing the dumb terminals. So I stand there and listen to the irate complaints from the lead programmer about how the problem was impossible to solve. At the end of the conversation I ask if she would like me to take a look at it. I was done by about 2:00pm the same day. It was easy. I just asked the DB programmer in the cubicle next to me for a sample of a document file. Looks like gibberish so I figure it's not PostScript and therefore must by PCL. Download and install the free GhostPCL renderer, an offshoot of the GhostScript project. Built and installed it. Wrapped the command-line GhostScript in Cocoa's NSTask. Threw together a GUI in interface builder. Wrote a little glue code in Objective-C to invoke Cocoa native classes for loading and displaying the output of GhostPCL and to invoke my NSTask GhostPCL wrapper. And checked the GhostPCL license, which I think might have been GPL, but since I was running it as a separate process and not modifying the source, or redistributing it outside of or organization, we were not compelled to share our custom OS X client source.

Worked great. Everyone was happy. Except the lead programmer, who was livid and from then on set about trying to make my life hell. She banned the project manager from speaking to me. She excluded me from meetings.

The fundamental problem was that the lead programmer did not know how to code. That is not a criticism of her programming skill, I mean she really did not know how to code. As in, literally, could not have programmed a single line to save her life. (Although I can not think of an actual circumstance where anyone would have to do that.) She did not understand what a pointer is. Did not now how to check code out of the repository. Would not have done any good if she had because she did not know how to build code. (In XCode. You click the build button.) Being technically incompetent, she was completely preoccupied with compensating for her own lack of skill, and it was that, not the lack of skill itself, which caused the problems.

The noted gun rights advocate John Lott, Jr. makes a point here.

... consider the advice from PoliceOne, whose 450,000 members make it the largest private organization of active and retired law-enforcement officers in the U.S. It surveyed its members last March and asked, “What would help most in preventing large scale shootings in public?” Their No. 1 answer: “More permissive concealed carry policies for civilians.” (It was followed by “More aggressive institutionalization for mentally ill persons.”)

So my father grew up on a dairy farm near Frederick, Maryland in the 1940's. After the Columbine massacre I commented that that kind of thing, students shooting each other in school, seemed new and wondered what gave rise to it. He said he did not know, but that when he was in grade school, the boys brought rifles to school so that they could hunt squirrels on the walk home. There was never a problem.

Some time later I ran into ESR somewhere or other, up on his gun rights hobby horse. I mentioned the thing about the squirrels. His only comment was, "that's a healthy gun culture."

I grew up in rural Ohio where hunting was an excusable absence from school. Many of my classmates owned guns. There were never any problems with threats or gun violence.

Children own guns. And that has been going on for a while. The student massacre thing is new. Which suggests that the underlying cause of these student-on-student gun massacres is not caused by the introduction of guns.

Tax avoidance schemes are remarkably common among large successful coporations. Other successful U.S. tech companies exploit the "Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich" loophole. Ikea pays almost no tax by incorporating in Holland and exploiting its permissive rules for non-profits.

Which raises two questions:

- Are tax rates so high that it is necessary to engage in complicated tax avoidance schemes in western democracies to be successful in business?

- Is it best that companies do avoid taxes? Do we trust Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla and Bill Gates to invest efficiently for the betterment of society more than we trust Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? And I would ask the same of the Republican counterparts of those politicians. Though that the comparison is somewhat unfair to Republican politicians because it is their objective to reduce the concentration of wealth under their own control by shrinking government, regardless of the political persuasions of those who would benefit from that dispersal of wealth. I have never understood why, for those who believe wealth is dirty, that its transfer to the political class is somehow purifying.

Life appeared when the earth was tens of millions of years old, but evolution didn't go into high gear until the "Cambrian Explosion", nearly a billion years later.

Another leading theory which explains this delay is Snowball Earth, a super ice age enveloping the entire surface of the planet.

Both parties deserve credit for cooperation. Republicans and Democrats have been working together in the House to enact many reforms, not just patent reforms.

... as of August, 356 bills passed by the House sat languishing in the Senate. Some 200 of those bills were passed with bipartisan majorities and 100 with the support of 75 percent of the House Democratic conference.

link.

The problem here is specifically Harry Reid, not the Democrat party in general. However, Democrats will not replace him on their own, and the only way to do that in this election cycle will be to vote a Republican majority into the Senate. Hence support for the Republican party when the actual target is only one Senator.

from the summary:

Now Kimberly Hefling reports that for-profit colleges who are not producing graduates capable of paying off their student loans could soon stand to lose access to federal student-aid programs.

A secret about those private "not for profit" colleges which the Department of Education exempted from that regulation. They are for profit. Huge profits. The distinction is not that these institutions do not earn profits, but rather that they are exempt from business taxes on those profits and the income accrues to the administration and faculty instead of to business owners.

So I had a friend in college who worked part-time in the payroll office and had access to the campus salary database. From her dorm room. So one evening she asks if I want to know what any of my professors make. Looked them all up. In 2014 dollars the mid-level salary for recently-tenured faculty was about $300,000 / year. Deans, provosts and presidents made much more.

Subsidized college loans have created a glut of education dollars and "not-for-profit" educators are raking them in. They are not opposed to earning huge profits themselves, the just do not want competition from other colleges which are run as business. So they lobbied Arne Duncan to enact a regulation which, for no legitimate rationale, applies only their competition.

Don't believe me? Universities try to keep this information locked away tightly but occasionally it leaks out. Here, for, example, is what Treasury Secretary Jack Lew received as severence pay from New York University:

President Obama’s nominee to lead the Treasury Department, Jacob J. Lew, got a $685,000 severance payment when he left a top post at New York University in 2006 to take a job at Citigroup.

NYU is a private "non-profit". And, as that link indicates, as such they receive additional benefits from the federal government beyond tax exemption.

A proposed internet tax is the least of problems with Hungary's current government. Selected headlines from around the web:

The Guardian: Hungary's rabid right is taking the country to a political abyss

The Tablet: Meet Europe’s New Fascists

The Telegraph: Inside the far-Right stronghold where Hungarian Jews fear for the future

Aljazeera: Hungary: Towards the Abyss Investigating why critics of Hungary's authoritarian government believe it is leading the country towards fascism

The Tablet's, tagline is "A New Read on Jewish Life" and of course Aljazeera is Islamic. The Telegraph and Guardian are respectable British publications. They all agree that Hungary is leaning fascist.

from wikipedia

Franchise fees are governed under Section 622 of the Cable Communications Act of 1984.[2] Section 622, states that municipalities are entitled to a maximum of 5% of gross revenues derived from the operation of the cable system for the provision of cable services such as Public, educational, and government access (PEG) TV channels.

Franchise fees are fixed at a maximum of 5% of gross revenues. So how do municipalities maximize revenues from franchise fees? By maximizing cable company gross revenues. And how do municipalities maximize cable company gross revenues? By creating monopolies! By awarding exclusive license to one provider to extract monopolist profits from the public.

Note that there is nothing inherently wrong with permitting local governments to charge cable companies fees. That is justifiable to the extent that local governments incur costs of infrastructure repair with damage from cable installation. All that is needed is a single addendum to the law, one prohibiting local governments from creating monopolies. The law could simply mandate that municipalities must offer franchise licenses to all ISPs if they offer licenses to one and that all licencees must be be charged at the same rate.

The only reason we have cable monopolies in the U.S. is because the Cable Communications Act of 1984 created that perverse incentive. Other countries without such laws have much faster service at much lower prices.

If federal law permitted local governments to do this sort of thing with groceries, computers and cars we would have regional monopolies for those products as well. Be grateful that your town council is not permitted to sell grocery, computer and car franchises.

Not true. The cops can pull you over and help themselves to you cash. There is no "legal process" involved whatsoever.

There is a fascinating and unexpected inversion here: Corporations are now standing up against government to protect the rights of citizens. Of course, most of us expect that relationship to work the other way around.

It is not just Facebook. The first sentence of this article reads: "The FBI director has slammed Apple and Google for offering their customers encryption technology that protects users’ privacy."

Today, a product which includes protection from the government has added value. A prediction: In the future, corporate protection from government intrusion and persecution will become the product. Smart corporations such as Tesla (see Nevada tax deal) or Apple and Google (see double Irish Dutch sandwich) have special rights or have exempted themselves from government rules by using loopholes. Meanwhile, every day there is news of the federal government becoming increasingly insane. Like today. Increasingly, the government is engaging in unethical, illegal activities such as theft. As demand from protection from the federal government increases with the growing abuses, corporations will meet that demand by sheltering customers under their own umbrellas.