How are defined-contribution plans better than defined-benefit plans?

If the 401k plan wasn't tied to the specific company I might be able to see your argument, but given that it's tied to the employer and all of the things that employer could do (ie, ride the company off the rails) I don't see how it could be considered better.

I've wanted the country-of-origin to be prominently displayed on the front of the packaging for a long time. Certainly there are some things that I will buy that are imports, but I think that the average consumer doesn't even check country-of-origin, and it's all the more insidious when long-running American brands are offshored while still masquerading as being American.

The most insidious was when we went to an Ethan Allen store several years ago to buy some bedroom furniture. We had been looking at a particular set for a few months and finally decided to spend the many thousands of dollars to get everything. We were literally filling-out the triplicate form when I asked the saleslady, on a lark, about country-of-origin. They were imported. She backpedalled about how they'd trained the production staff (Vietnam if I remember right) and how the quality was just as good as the furniture coming out of their American plants. Tore the form in half and walked out. Part of what pissed me off so much was that they were charging the same as they charge for furniture made in the USA, so they were simply doing it for profit. No benefit to the consumer even in the form of lower prices, just profit.

Sears has stopped buying Craftsman-branded tools from American tool forges and is now making them in China and Taiwan. I'm wondering if the introduction of the "Evolv" line a few years ago was to test the waters with the manufacturer that they went with before migrating the bulk of the tool line to them. Either way, if I want a lifetime warranty hand tool made overseas I can get one a lot cheaper at Harbor Freight than at Sears, and with identical warranties, why would I continue to buy from Sears?

Maybe they've demonstrated the real economic cost of importing goods?

If imported products were inspected as thoroughly as they should be they would be a lot more expensive, possibly to the point that some manufacturing would return.

The whole point of the intermodal shipping container is that it drops into multiple forms of transport with ease. Specific shippers will put van-trailers on freight trains, but that's for speed for final delivery. Freight coming across this route, if by rail, would probably be packed into double-stacked intermodal shipping containers to maximize the volume for bulk delivery. Some final-delivery happens from China, but not most.

I find reviews for most durable goods that include the suggestion of purchasing more to be suspect unless the reviewer illustrates why they would need more than one. Makes me wonder if the seller has signed up with a fake reviewer service to try to bump up the ratings.

Then how are devs supposed to get sponsored vacations out of their benefactors?

I've noticed a trend- conferences that are paid-for by third-parties that sponsor the attendees, be they employers or charities or governments, are usually held in places where people want to go, while conferences that are paid for by the attendees themselves are usually held in less-desirable places or times (ie, winter in Minneapolis or summer in Phoenix). If the attendees are sponsored they go whole-hog, and if they pay themselves the venue tends to be the cheapest possible.

I wonder which Berlin is in November? I've never been there myself.

Which is itself something of a straw-man argument, since the Federal Reserve System is something of a hybrid- created by Congress, its direct administrators appointed by the President, and with mandatory participation by the biggest banks, and with a return on profit provided back to the US Government. If anything it's a bit like another branch of government.

It's probably good that the executive and legislative branches do not have direct control of monetary policy as it reduces the chances of fads from disrupting the economy. As for problems with the banks that plug-in to the Federal Reserve System, those have jumped the shark because conventional commercial banks are allowed to commingle too many of their risky business ventures and are allowed to overleverage against their deposits, so of course they end up begging for more money when they inevitably screw up. Laws that have changed over the last 30-40 years have given the banks too much freedom, that's not a function of the Fed but of Congress and of the Presidency. Restrict banks into having be banks first and foremost again and my guess is that a lot of these problems would be reduced.

Definitely not a Fiat then... *grin*

If you're going to play on stereotypes, so will I...

In married couples it's almost always the man that configures the technology in the house, unless there's technology-oriented male offspring available to do it instead, and there will be a fairly large number of them that are already used to blocking ads in their browsers; a large chunk of them will look for how to block other ads now that they know such a thing can be done, and they will turn to their broadband routers and prewritten lists to do so even if that requires periodic manual updating.

Now to get off of stereotypes, anyone annoyed with ads that has access to their broadband router and is willing to read the documentation could blacklist ad websites. It doesn't require more than the ability to log-in to the web interface on the router and copy-and-paste a prewritten list. A housewife, if she knows that it's that easy, could do it as long as she has the credentials to log-in and can find that list.

Some people don't maintain their own technology because they're afraid of breaking things or because they don't understand enough to know how the discrete parts and the big-picture tie together, and because vendors have done a fairly decent job of making things integrate to at least function without tweaking. Throwing something else to change the status quo (ie, the ads) may be enough to motivate a fairly large number of people to make a change.

The bitcoin attitude has amused me. Sure, I get that some people don't believe in, don't trust, or don't like their government and as such want to avoid using fiat currency issued by their government, but since the use of third-party intermediaries seems to have become the de-facto standard for using Bitcoin, one has all of the downsides of a fiat currency (ie, no natural value of its own) without any of the normal advantages associated with a government interested in the security of a currency or the ability of a government to correct issues associated with that currency. It's also possible to lose or destroy wealth simply through the loss of information due to the specific nature of Bitcoin, so wealth lost cannot be regained.

Most likely, retrofits to existing trailers will require some form of fresh certification and documentation describing the new characteristics of the trailer. I don't know the industry terminology for heavy trucks, but for light vehicles that are modified from the original manufacturer specifications there are usually added door-jamb tags that indicate that it's a modified vehicle, when it was modified, and the new characteristics of the vehicle post-modification. Roadtrek and other Class-B RV conversion companies that retrofit RV chassis into full-sized cargo vans come to mind.

Just a guess, but retrofits will probably only be made as kits for extremely common trailer lines too, so that a given popular trailer from Hyundai or another manufacturer that exists in the tens of thousands can be easily retrofitted to a common standard, as opposed to random or haphazard retrofits each with its own characteristics. It'll obviously depend on what the shippers are using and how willing they'd be to buy electric trucks and how readily their trailers could be adapted, plus the lifespan of truck and trailer.

One thing that humans have been very good at over the last 200 years has been finding new sources of energy. At times this quest has meant gross pollution, but there have been developments, that when not let to get out of control, have produced vast amounts of energy without much more pollution than waste-heat.

If further energy production technologies are developed that continue to produce less and less pollution, and if humanity eventually concludes that it wants to stop mining Earth for whatever reason, there may come a tipping point where it makes sense to start mining extraterrestrial sources for our raw materials, especially if normally-polluting means to refine those materials into products en-route from the source to delivery.

I do not expect this to happen quickly, it'll be on a hundreds-of-years timescale. We will have to continue to pollute, then continue to engage in destructive forms of mining, and continue to grow as a population all while continuing to develop new space technology and new means of energy production, such that the population gets fed-up and either governments or companies decide to try it. It might also have to wait for space-based outposts to exist and for those outposts to work toward self-sufficiency and away from being entirely dependent on Earth-based supply, such that material refining tech that works off-Earth is developed. Regardless it won't happen in our lifetimes, our childrens' lifetimes, and probably not their childrens' lifetimes, so long as it's still not cost-effective and there's not enough will to do it.

I hope they find significant pieces that don't lend themselves to being easily transported. Unfortunately a single relatively small piece of plane is not enough evidence to prove that the plane went down in the ocean, only to prove that a single, relatively small piece of plane was found in/near the ocean.

To quote myself:

Does this not address your circumstances?

I drive a '95 Impala SS. I love my car. I crossed 30,000 (thirty thousand, not a typo) miles this weekend. I'll probably drive it for another twenty years. We're strongly considering replacing my wife's car with an all-wheel-drive Chrysler 300. She's kept her current car for fifteen years, we expect that she'll keep this one for the same amount of time. I'm not trying to force anyone into a mold, I'm simply expecting everyone to acknowledge that their way, whatever their way happens to be, is not going to fit everyone else's circumstances.

If you're in a high-density city the grocery store is probably on your block. If you only go once every couple of weeks, you can hire a ride for those trips for less than the cost of subscribing on a regular basis.

There's also this mythical device called a bicycle, that can be equipped with these high-tech things called folding baskets, that can be used to move groceries from one place to another from time to time. Even here in suburbia we've bicycled for our groceries, three baskets per bicycle, allowing for at least six bags, possibly more depending on how we pack the bikes, to be transported the less-than-a-mile home.