Almost. They specify where and how they will use it. Content written in Los Angeles will not show up in New York City. And the decision to post to your neighborhood website or to multiple (within a radius of a mile or so) is made by the user at the time of the post. This isn't nearly as awful as Facebook letting companies stick your name and face next to their product.

Full Disclosure: I use Nextdoor. I have my own issues with parts of it, but I overall like the product. And I did receive a free t-shirt from them last year.

I RTFA. Since a quick free automated process resolved 27% of their 5000 records, they decided to see what a little human time and money could do. They sampled 100 of the 5000, and found data for 91 of them (91%). The sample might not be fully representative of the larger set, or of data in general.

Even if this law were to pass in your jurisdiction and be effective immediately, think it over from another angle: Start a VERY small business. If you're the sole employee, then you can pay yourself 12x what you pay yourself. Your salary is now unlimited, which sounds like a recipe for success to me!

Humor aside, best wishes for the biz, the house, and the baby.

Or by outsourcing the janitors and secretaries and keeping the programmers. Gone will be the opportunities to work your way up thru a company from the mailroom to the boardroom.

PBS and NPR are not saints, but I think they are better than the alternatives I know of. This Old House has product placements, but they're far more realistic than Extreme Home Makeover. All commentators have biases, but The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and BBC News tell me something of what's going on in Washington and globally, while my local station seems to drool over an individual car crash or apartment fire.

But you've piqued my curiosity: given the flaws in each of these, where/how do you get your news? Is it a scalable solution that I could start using? Ultimately I keep wanting to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of my information without subjecting myself to confirmation bias. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

It could be different, but it would require us to pay the news services ourselves instead of asking someone else to do it. In business, the golden rule is "He who has the gold makes the rules." As a result, I get better (my subjective judgment) news from public radio and public television, because they don't need to drag out minimal news across four commercial breaks but can instead present more thoughtful in-depth material about things other than celebrities and tragedies.

Yes, people often choose ignorance. But most of the time, most people do so rationally. Does each of us know who won each college football game this past weekend, and which players contributed what to the results? We could ... but odds are, many of us "don't feel like it," and are therefore ignorant about who's up or down in the BCS standings.

If you want to talk about the educated populace, scientists often choose to stick with what they know or believe, as documented in Thomas Kuhn's "Theory of Scientific Revolutions," which noted that sometimes new scientific theories could not come into prominence until the highly-entrenched supporters of the old theories had died out. For scientists looking at competing theories in their field, this should be inexcusable. But educating oneself can be highly time-consuming and costly.

For the average Joe, keeping up on all the options, facts and alternatives for all the possible opinions they could hold would easily be several full-time jobs, and that presumes they have the scientific training to read between the lines on the write-ups of medical studies and identify whether the experiments had hidden biases or poor controls that might skew the results. Or they can just keep their "ignorant" beliefs about things which don't matter too much to them on a daily basis and focus their education and attention on the things that matter to them. If fingers are pointed anywhere, Elon Musk is right: they should point at the journalists who are paid to research and write about these things so that they can inform us accurately.

Given a limited amount of time in my day, I'm not going to be researching car accident rates, adjusting for the age/reliability of the technologies chosen, the skill of the driver, the road conditions, the vehicle age/reliability, etc. I already have to research and decide where to invest my savings, research and decide the best route home after a long day at the office, and choose which of 70 cereals (let alone other breakfast products) to pick up at the store.

"If you like your operating system, you can keep your operating system."

Both parent and grandparent are correct. Sovereign currency issuers can give away newly-printed money and tax receipts (other people's money). But if they give away too much "new" money too often, the result is to decrease the purchasing power of everyone else's money, so this too is taking away "other people's" money. One example is in American higher education: it has been shown that when federal tuition assistance increases, colleges raise tuition. So if you get the maximum federal aid possible, you still pay about the same as pre-aid programs, and if you don't, you're paying more than before. My alma mater does not turn out students twice as smart as a decade ago, though tuition has doubled over that timeframe.

There are at least two categories of midwives in the US. There are home-birth midwives, and registered nurse midwives. The latter have just about every power that an Ob-Gyn has, with the exception of surgery and maybe a few other things. And the benefit to delivering at a hospital with a RN midwife is that they are experienced in normal births and how those are supposed to progress, the range of variations possible, and methods for encouraging the birth process without jumping straight to drugs and knives.

By contrast, many OBs are highly experienced in all the possible situations where major complications arise, and are more comfortable in those settings than a natural but slow labor process. At least some OBs are more comfortable delivering via C-section because its duration is better controlled than natural labor. (Some allege that the increased cost of a C-section, and the ability to make one's tee time or opera concert also play a role in OBs encouraging or pressuring for pitocin, epidurals, and major abdominal surgery.)

Bottom line: UK-level midwives do exist in the US too, and I can recommend some fantastic ones in Silicon Valley if you're reading this and looking for one.

I think there is room for us to disagree about the interpretation of what GP said. Based on the SJMN article, I think GP is saying it should rise by $7k per annum, over a period of time. I've added the link to the SJMN article for your information, and note that today Matt Drudge linked to it on his home page: http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_24248486/obamacares-winners-and-losers-bay-area

So is how much I paid for my house and where I live, my voting registration, every federal license I've been granted and a variety of other things. But I don't want this all over the Internet accessible to everyone; the professional Big Data corporations are scary enough without having every Tom, Dick, and Harry being able to find out exactly where I live right after I pay for lunch with my credit card, and deciding to raid my house while I'm back at work. Or other crazy-but-plausible hypotheticals.

Sorry to be a math stickler, but a $7k increase for a family of four is $145.83 per person per month, and looking at it per person is not realistic with a family, as it is likely a $583-per-month change for a single wage earner.

The San Jose (California) Mercury News's top headline today was "Health law's reality sets in," and quotes a 60-year-old retired teacher whose individual annual insurance rate is rising by $1800. She says tellingly, "Of course, I want people to have health care. I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally." (emphasis mine) Another 52-year-old self-employed engineer's coverage for a family of four will rise by $10,000, and he says, "I really don't like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family's pocket each year, that's otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy."

Brought Arlo Guthrie to mind:

You know, if one person, just one person does it, they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out.
They may think it's an organization.
And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in, singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out.
And friends they may think it's a movement.

You make some very good points. And if college is measured solely as a step to professional careers and higher wages, then these three did not do well. By that measure too, many majors of study should be disbanded or moved to community colleges because their likely ROI is negative. Another /. story covered the dearth of jobs available for newly-minted Physics Ph.D.s. And if you measure education primarily on its financial ROI, I'd argue that high school curriculum needs revamping: more home economics and less world history, more budgeting and less Advanced Algebra, more wood shop and less drama.

Things have changed a lot, for a variety of reasons, and I don't know all of why, though part of it had to do with our manufacturing strength following the destruction of other countries in WWII, and those countries' recoveries.

I do think that social mobility will decrease, not increase, if we tell students at Ball High and others, "You started here -- there is no point in going to college -- by virtue of living on Galveston Island, your future in low-wage jobs has been pre-written for you." Is college a losing proposition? So then is starting a business -- 8 of 10 fail in the first couple years. The odds are stacked against us in so many ways, it's a wonder we don't all off ourselves one morning. Thank you for some thoughts on what makes the system work better, and I hope that we can help steer the country in some of those directions.