The economy is not a zero-sum game. This is not a race to the bottom. As low cost-of-living places get more and more jobs, their standard of living rises and costs go up accordingly.

It may not be a race to the bottom, but it sure appears to be a race to somewhere much closer to the Third World mean than the First World one.

Cops in NYC are now just blowing people away just for being in a stairwell. And as for filing complaints against the police, unless one of the steps is "leave town, permanently", you'd be foolish to do so.

The way to definitively solve the problem would have been eliminate all of the little Cities in Michigan that make up Metro Detroit.

And by "eliminate" you mean "merge them into Detroit", thus making Detroit's problem their problem. Which, since many of the residents of those cities moved there to get away from Detroit's problems, isn't going to fly. Detroit needs to solve its own problems, not figure out a way to suck tax money out of the suburbs which it can then waste while still not solving the problems (and eventually destroying the suburbs).

Unless, of course, you'd have the greater city governed from the former suburbs rather than old Detroit... can't see any racial tension there, no sir.

If that was sexist, then CSEdWeek is sexist too -- because it appears that interesting young women in coding by providing a tie in to Disney heroines is exactly their goal.

and effeminate,

What's wrong with that? You say it like it's a bad thing. If it's neutral, why bring it up at all?

Pretty sure the word he's going for is "effete".

Where in Satan's holy name is a self-taught American programmer with no degrees supposed to go? Galt's Gulch? Not fuckin' likely.

I understand there's money to be made in black-hattery. Observe the 11th commandment, however.

I remember some old CAD displays in the 80's which were square (1024 x 1024 I think). That's a bit extreme for me; I think the sweet spot was around 16:10.

/unsubscribe
fucking /unsubscribe

I worked with a rockstar once. Well, he played in a moderately successful cover band anyway.

The value of an agent to me is the difference between what I can get and what the agent can get, minus the amount the agent skims off the top. The worse I am at negotiating, the larger the difference is... but the greater the amount the agent skims off the top. Most likely outcome: the agent, whose entire compensation is based on separating me from as much cash as possible, manages to take more than that difference and I get screwed while thinking I got a good deal.

Well you see that's kinda begging the question of wether or not video games are art in the first place; I'm a real skeptic on the question, I really don't think most video games rise to that level, and I'm pretty sure that if something isn't art, if its purely a commercial good, it may be regulated. This is basically consistent with US law and custom on the issue -- films in the US, for example, weren't entitled to 1st amendment protections until the 1950s.

Which is to say that this is no longer consistent with US law and custom.

Does Madden NFL 15 really deserve the same benefit of the doubt as Lolita? Does Electronic Arts really have the same moral rights as Ai Wei Wei? I think if a video game is going to be protected by "those who believe in free expression," the people making the video game, at a minimum, should have to cop to the fact that the game is actually trying to express something, but a lot of people on the gamer side of things seem convinced that video games are just "fun" and shouldn't have to "mean" anything.

If they don't express anything, there's nothing to censor. If they DO express something (even something banal) they're protected.

Leisure Suit Larry.

ITYM "Softporn Adventure".

This is a consequence of believing that video games are Art.

Really? Because I haven't noticed any sort of outcry lately against painters and sculptors about how their works are horribly sexist. When there have been such outcries, they've rightly been countered by those who believe in free expression, even if free expression involves naked bodies, degrading imagery, etc.

The idea of some sort of sexism rating for art is laughable. The idea of a "rating" is only because of the commercial aspect, not the artistic one.

A *real* woman wouldn't be mindlessly chasing her prince charming... she'd be building a tyrannical empire on her own power, maybe displaying the severed head of Prince Charming on a pike next to her throne built of skulls, and have a horde of male slaves who would...

Sure, but if Galadriel had taken the One Ring it'd be a whole different movie.

Since any portrayal whatsoever of women, or no portrayal at all, can be deemed "sexist", and that same portrayal or lack of portrayal can be deemed "not sexist", depending entirely on who made the game, it will be a very simple rating -- 100% sexist if made by a man or a woman who is not a third-wave feminist. 0% sexist if made by exclusively by third-wave feminists.