Street Performer is a euphemism for public nuisance.

Higher IQ's likely get diverted into research and education which may not pay as well as something like investment banking. We should really start tracking sociopath scores and seeing if they have any correlation with income.

In any type of reasonable court the "social contract" concept would be thrown out due to Unconscionability. One side has grossly unequal bargaining power. Social Contract is a nicer way of saying "Ultima Ratio".

The flip side of that is that NO western job is worth the prevailing wage, except in ultra competitive fields with international mobility like movie or basketball stars. For all other jobs, cooks, engineers, doctors, street vendors, architects and bankers etc., you will always find some equally qualified individual in some developing country ready to work for (significantly) less.

If skilled workers were paid what their production was actually worth, employers wouldn't profit from the transaction and hiring them would be counterproductive for employers. Employment is an arbitrage game, where employers offer employees some stability in return for being paid less than the actual goods they produce are worth.

The fact that globalization, technology and the liberalization of gender roles has expanded the workforce and thus pushed wages down is predictable. It's somewhat interesting that the fields that still have a large gender gap (Nurses, Computer Programmers) have some of the highest wages...likely because of a lack of supply of workers. Nice to see Google is trying to "fix" that....

what you're looking for is called "reddit"

As a fan of lights myself, that's pretty darn awesome - great job David.

Bummer the video didn't have any product demonstrations in low light while on a bike ...

You forgot to include lifetime costs for VA health care for surviving vets, who tend to have fairly difficult to treat injuries that would have killed people in prior wars.

This is why there's such a backlog in the VA.

No it's not. The majority of the people at the VA are mostly Vietnam vets with a few WWII and Korean War vets hanging on. Most of your Iraq/Afghanistan vets are under the age of 50, meaning they have their own health insurance through the company they work for. For example, ME! I've never been to a VA hospital. Never had to. I always had my own insurance.

As for the total cost, right now, it ranks at about $1.5 trillion for 14 years. Since the expensive part of launching million dollar missiles to blow up a $100 tent and fueling tanks that get gallons to the mile are over, the rate at which the cost is increasing is slowing substantially. It is unlikely that it will reach $2 trillion.

Either way, you said "wastED", meaning past tense. We haven't spent $2 trillion and won't for many years, if ever.

Finance guys are so cute.
I was an IT guy so....

For example a retail bank needs two tables in it's accounts database. One for the account, a second to record the transactions.
The DB needs a customer table (name, address, phone, address, ect), transaction table, account type table, account table, interest rate table, payee table, payroll tables (complete with more account data from other banks, employee names, etc) etc. There's a LOT of data involved, and this still doesn't include the cutesie stuff banks throw in like customer preferences.

The database may be queried by other databases (ie: the guy approving loans), but it is not actually a part of those databases.
Actually, different systems maintain different databases. For example the Internet Banking side will maintain it's own database. the ATM side will have it's own side. Then there's the credit card system, ACH systems, wire systems, the core system itself and others. All of these systems must interact with eachother. For example, the a customer may log into the Internet banking side, which will have to hit the core to get the current balance, EOD balance from yesterday, unprocessed transactions, processed transactions, interest rates, any messages from the bank, and so on. It also has to be able to inject transactions such as payroll into the core system, wires into the wire system and so on.
Of course, all of these systems are different. The ACH system uses a flat text file. The core is usually an UNIX based system with a terminal interface. The Internet Banking is probably an Apache Tomcat connecting to a MSSQL system. Then, there is the bank end that is comprised of DB front-ends, screen scrapers, batch files, transaction injectors and so on.

You could probably convince a bunch of PHB-English Majors your database is more complicated because you have six different, totally unrelated databases in the same file, but don't try that shit in front of engineers.
Not just different DB's but completely different architectures. And, of course, different states have different laws. For example, all states that take income taxes have a different method to pay them. Then their are business taxes, both federal and for all 50 states, loan laws, interest rate laws etc.

And there is much much more, but this is getting out of hand. Suffice to say that you have no friggin' clue as to what you are talking about when it comes to everything a bank does, much less when it comes to tying all those systems together.

Compare that to the ACA system which involves user data, finance data, what companies are available per state, what plans available per company, and an interface system to communicate between the handful of ACA authorized insurance companies per state and the back-office system. Many states run their own system. The government has claimed that their system doesn't even keep the data!

HealthCare.gov does a lot of actual calculations itself. Once it knows your location it has to ask several other databases for your income level, at which point it compares that income level to the poverty rate. This is step one of determining your subsidy. Step 2 is to query a second database for a list of plans in your area. The second lowest cost silver plan is the "Base Plan" which is the second number used to calculate your subsidy. That's not just a database query, it's executable code.
Everything you described here can be done within a database engine, making HealthCare.gov essentially a database frontend that reinvented part of the wheel.

Moreover the database front-end is probably the most complicated database front-end in actual production anywhere.
No. No it's not, or at least it doesn't need to be. I would say credit card authorization databases would be the most complicated, followed closely by the banks. There are also several customer databases that are outright huge. You have parts inventories for large companies and databases used by engineers designing various components for bridges, air liners, jet fighters, combat vehicles, electric cars, etc. Of course, let's not forget the databases used by Internet companies like Google, government agencies like the IRS, census, and the Fed, and the multitude of databases need to run our phone and communication systems. All of these systems require front-ends. The frontend my bank uses for their online banking system is more complicated than HC.gov and deals with a more complicated system of DB's on the backend.
If this is one of the most complicated database front-ends in existence, that is proof that it is designed and written by incompetents.

it's querying multiple completely different databases, most of whom weren't designed to be compatible with each-other. It all needs damn-near-perfect security. It needs to deal with complex legal questions such as what happens when Louisiana decides some insurer has been cheating a bit on some legal requirement? Is the desired result under Louisiana law different then Ohio?
So, it's the type of system you find running every bank in America, minus the need for international transactions.

(disclaimer: I've worked in Internet Banking Systems and the defense industry)

First, the cost of both wars was less than $2 trillion, making the 's' on the word "Trillion" misleading and dishonest.

Next, we have a government run, single payer, health care system now. It's called VA. How's that working out?

So many of my books only work on certain platforms :|

I can't read a bunch of my books on my glorious 4k screen because Amazon's treating Windows 8 like a second class citizen. Peter Thiel's new book? Nope. Half my machine learning books (eg Blondie24?) Nope. Most of my typesetting books? Nope.

Even stuff that works on Windows 7, or on Windows 8 Phone, ffs.

Right. And that is science!

I'm not disagreeing with you. The ISS is the only place to do that kind of science, which the parent you were responding to seems to think there is some cheaper way of doing.

Toshiba is not legally required to honour OCZ's warranties

Who cares? If you buy a company that performs fraud, admit that the fraud happened, and refuse to make right, it is legitimate for the victim to warn other people away.

you can file a complaint with the state attorneys generals office allege fraud

Not worth my time. It's far more cathartic, besides, to steer tens of thousands of potential customers away with public recitation.