I think it is more about how many compression/decompression cycles an aluminum-skinned aircraft can handle before you end its service life. Inflate the aircraft to a higher pressure and it will cause more stress.

It was not clear from your initial comment - it sounded like you were agreeing with all of the parent's points and saying that the same situation was true in the US. In fact, nimbius was making exactly the opposite point - he was saying that they were trying to churn out uneducated "working man" soldiers. You are making the point that education was seen as essential to prevailing in the Cold War. I happen to think you are correct and nimbius is wrong. Or at least that nimbius's comments cannot be applied to Vietnam-era America.

Fair enough, but nimbus was using the term to describe why they needed so many conscripts from the Eastern Bloc satellite states. I'm claiming that there simply wasn't that kind of need for men. Same with Vietnam. Losses there were heavier, but there were still many, many men available for the draft. Most of the army was volunteer.

By whatever standard you want to use, it is hard to lump the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan into the "meat grinder" category. There are more highway deaths in half a year in the US than in the entire conflict.

That's great, except that going to college was one way to have a good shot at dodging the draft. Heck, only about 1/4 of US troops were drafted. This just doesn't fit that narrative.

I don't know enough about how the Soviets manned their force in Afghanistan, but with so few losses it is hard to imagine that they needed troops so desperately. It certainly was not a "meat grinder".

I'm not sure either conflict counts as a "meat grinder". Total USSR losses were under 15,000 troops over a 9 year period. Total US losses in Vietnam were under 59,000 over 19 years (but almost all over a 7 year period). To put this in perspective, WW2 cost the Russians around 9-14 million troops, depending on who you ask. The US lost 400,000. WW1 cost Russia around 2 million troops and the US around 100,000 - and the US was only in that for around 6 months! Hell, even the Korean War managed to kill 36,000 in just 3 years.

This sounds like the beginning of a movie about sentient robots.

Yes, I perhaps have the one computer in the office that no one even tries to use any longer. Even IT just leave irate sticky notes.

I'm simply suggesting that you might also be willing to learn a new keyboard layout if it made you some magic number more productive. The magic number will be different for different people, obviously, but it exists for most people.

I remember the articles, but the only company that I can recall actually following through was RIM. It obviously never took off, and I'm in agreement that simply shuffling around a keyboard will not be enough to make the masses shift - it would have to be more dramatic than that.

While the keypad was around for decades, people were only using it to enter text in rare circumstances - 1-800-MATTRESS and the like. Only with the advent of SMS did people need to start entering a lot of text. People did NOT have the letters memorized until after SMS came into being, and in fact the old touch tone pad lacks certain letters altogether. So you had people quickly memorizing the keypad in a short period of time, and in fact inventing an entire "texting" shorthand language - then completely changing behavior again with the invention of T9/iTap/etc.

Once you have kids firing off messages 3x as fast as other kids, whatever method would take over. Slightly changing the key layout will not be this event - it has to be more substantial.

If only there were some examples of everyone quickly learning how to interface with their phone in a new way...

Kids even mastered the horrendous "multi-tap" rather than use valuable minutes on their phones.

T9 dramatically improved upon multi-tap despite requiring a new usage pattern and some training time. If someone comes up with a similar improvement over the iPhone-style finger poke and Swype-style entry systems, people will adopt it.

Let me introduce myself...

Everyone makes fun of me, though.

I think all sixes would have been cooler :)

I'm not going to do any original research, I'm afraid. Even if I had the time, I'm certain that I'd do a crappy job as it is not my area of expertise. If you are aware of any research supporting media bias in this regard, I'd certainly read it.

Certainly you are aware of the existence of confirmation bias? I don't trust myself to judge when something is over-reported without looking at some kind of objective data. I certainly don't trust your judgement. (No offense meant.)

Google can be a source of objective data, but like I said black-on-white police shootings are more rare than white-on-black police shootings... naturally the latter will be more common on Google.

I'm not dismissing your claim completely - it's certainly conceivable that mainstream media would have an agenda, or at least a narrative that draws viewers. But without data, it's just a claim.

I haven't seen any data on that, but I'd be interested in seeing that if you have it.