It isn't so far fetched. I just recently completed some refinancing paperwork for my mortgage, and they want some pretty excruciating detail. I was surprised to see they wanted bank/investment account numbers and asset details. I care way more about that stuff then any facebook data.

In this age of soundbites your hypothetical candidate would get exactly that far and then be roundly denounced by the Tea Party, not to mention Grover Norquist. There is no room in the hysteria of modern politics for nuance or complexity.

I wish they would just abandon these stupid schemes and implement a simple e-book lending model. I don't see why they can't make it so I can lend a book to a friend and have it 'locked' until the friend returns it. This wouldn't really impact publisher sales and it would give e-books the same sort of social interactive power that traditional books have.

It seems from reading on some of the skeptic's websites, they always knew that the temperature was rising, and this study confirms nothing, has not been peer reviewed and is flawed is several ways. The kettle defense!

I have often wondered if this same phenomenon is why houses cost so much more to buy than say 30 years ago. Has the rise in credit dramatically outpaced wages? Does it lead to a self perpetuating cycle which pushes up costs, and requires bigger loans? The biggest negative about federal student loans is how easily exploitable they are for the 'for profit' institutions. The drop out rate is very high, and the default rate is too, but the for profit colleges make their money regardless.

I have spent some time working on government contracts where I was one of many contractors sitting at the client location full time. Part of the reason that particular agency used contractors was because their HR process was very difficult to deal with. It was very hard to hire new full time employees and it was almost impossible to fire anyone. The director knew he was paying more for the contractors, but he also knew he could quickly alter his workforce if his budget changed.

As far as costs go, the full time employees were probably paid 10-15% or so less than the contractors (in terms of what the contractors took home), but they had much better benefits (not to mention job security). Most of the contractors worked for consulting companies, and they were the ones raking in the cash, not the actual contractors. In fact the agency I worked for forced everyone to go through a middle-man company if you wanted to do any work for them. The middle-man took from 10 to 20% off the top just for time entry and billing.

Don't forget that many government agencies have no real incentive to save money. If an agency improves their efficiency and slashes the budget by 10 million dollars, it just means they get less money the next year. It is why you sometimes hear about agencies going crazy at the end of the fiscal year and using up their remaining budget to buy whatever they can, regardless of need, so they can show they spent their allocated monies.

This reminds me of a client I had where the in-house developer was unhappy with my choice to remove his homegrown database abstraction middle-ware from a simple internal application I was tasked with enhancing. I added a ton of new features and cut down the code base by about 80%, but all I ever heard from him is "but what if we decide to switch to ORACLE?!?"

This is known as the gaze heuristic : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze_heuristic

Norway has a much more homogeneous population than the US (I assume). I wonder if that has certain advantages in terms of governance? Also, the per cap number is nice, but how does that translate to quality of life?

There is a discovery channel documentary about beauty which talks about how they think symmetry is partly determined by the fetal environment. Each half of the body grows at the same time--mirror-like, so changes in nutrition or stress can impact the one side or the other. The theory they developed based on this information is that selection for symmetry is really just expressing a preference for a mate who is more likely to be in better environmental circumstances than a less symmetrical mate. If this is true, it would make sense that woman (and men) in general are more symmetrical today than they have been in history. Nutrition, disease and stress (from violence especially) are much better for larger numbers of people.