Crypto-currencies have been strongly deflationary in practice as well, so I don't know what point you are trying to make. In 2010, a bitcoin was worth $0.001. Today, a bitcoin is worth $280.

IEEE is an organization of engineers who have a vested interesting discouraging competition to keep their salaries high, and Spectrum has always pandered to that perspective. Their views of this issue as about as slanted as Slashdot's hive mind.

So would I. Most STEM fields have an unemployment rate of 3% or less, while the national average is over 5%.

Nonsense. That is NOT the definition of "average".

Government backed fiat currencies tend to be inflationary. Mild inflation of around 2% is actually beneficial for the overall economy, since it encourages people to spend or invest their money rather than sitting on it. But it means that fiat currencies are a poor store of value.

Crypto-currencies tend to be deflationary. That is terrible for the overall economy, but it makes them a good store of value. Plenty of people have made a lot of money by holding onto bitcoins, but they would make a poor basis for an economy.

It doesn't make much sense to directly compare crypto-currencies to fiat currencies. They serve different purposes.

Yes, but with responsibility comes control. They will be able to censor and control what crosses their network, shut out competitors, and charge premiums. They will be able exploit their local monopolies to muscle into the content business.

It is not absurd, and they will probably get away with it. America is the only nation powerful enough to stand up to China, and America is unlikely to go to war to defend Vietnam's or Indonesia's territorial rights. The only American ally with claims in the SCS is the Philippines, but their claims are rather modest, so China can compromise with the Philippines, and take the rest. Who is going to stop them?

If you add up all the fatalities from all those "disasters", you get this number: 0.

A petawatt for a picosecond is one kilojoule. That is enough energy to warm a liter of water by 0.24C.

Yes. Emotional connection is not complicated. Many people felt a connection to Eliza, which was a trivial program.

This works:
1. Look people in the eye, and smile.
2. Agree with what they say.
3. Instead of talking about yourself, ask other people questions to show you are interesting in hearing them talk about themselves.
Follow this formula, and you will be popular.

Have you ever gotten laid?

I wonder how many of these nipple-challanged babies grow up and go to work for Microsoft.

Did you sleep through the 1990s? Microsoft got sued.

GG should be much less creepy, since it does not, and can not, continuously record. Most of the complaints about GG came from people that didn't actually understand what it was.

90% of the cost of taxis/Uber/Lyft is compensation for the driver. Vehicle non-ownership is only cost effective in urban cores. Self driving cars should make on-demand car renting far cheaper, and make non-ownership a viable option for far more people.

No, you can't be sure about that. In movies and fictional TV shows, CPR is depicted positively, with 75% of CPR recipients getting up and going about their lives with no ill effects, often within minutes. In real life, most CPR recipients die, and those that survive the procedure often have severe brain damage or debilitating injuries to other organs. Many are confined to bed or a wheelchair for the rest of their life. Less than 5% have a good quality of life outcome.

About 80% of the public say they would want to be aggressively resuscitated. For emergency room doctors, about 10% say the same.

You are underestimating exponential complexity. If you are using 1024 bit encryption, then 1024^80 is way, way, way, way smaller than 2^1024. The difference is more than that between the a single planck time and the age of the Universe.

Transistor count is a poor indicator of complexity. Most of those transistors are used to implement cache memory, which is just the same simple cell repeated millions of times.