"To be blunt, the USA views STEM as low class."

"... Really? Since when?"

The counter-culture started it in the 60's when they realized the U.S. Military was fairly technically advanced with respect to the rest of society. They started to look down on anyone pursuing science and tech. That helped spawn the ecology movement. They too viewed sci and tech as causing all the trouble in the world and more importantly, their lives...because they were the ME generation and everything revolved around them in their tiny little world.

That helped spawn "geek" and "nerd" labels that really took hold in the 80's. Hollywood jumped in when they found they could use the anti-sci and anti-tech feelings to greater monetary rewards. And the ME generation ate it up thinking they were doing their part to fight against "The Man".

Then gaming got really going in the 90s and 2000s. No longer were sci and tech people invisible, you could spot these degenerate gamers hunkered down on their machines, speaking gibberish as though they were fighting with the fundamental forces of the Universe. Women looked and decided they'd rather have guys who took pride in their appearance.

All this only exacerbated the feelings among many Americans that they were too stupid to handle all the high math and science education. It is now fairly common to hear people pass off their inadequateness by claiming all that stuff is above them and expecting a sympathetic ear.

And this has finally spawned the Republicans..."we don't need no stinkin' education" crowd like Rand Paul and the rest of the libretards. They feed off the Christian Right who first started thinking that Science was some sort of dodge and conspiracy to sink Christianity among a groundswell of empathy for non-Christians. They also felt that G-d gave the Earth to Man to screw up as Man sees fit. It doesn't bother them that the world is getting more polluted since they are sure Christ returning is just around the corner.

So it turned out the ecology nuts were onto something even if it was for selfish reasons. A polluted world won't be fun to live it and somehow it was all sci and tech's fault. And to some extent it is since sci and tech allowed populations to boom by conquering a fair number of diseases and increasing crop yields.

Just look at the controversy surrounding Common Core. The states get to implement the standards anyway they see fit but the Right and Left wing both see nefarious plots at the edge of their imagination.

So, hell yes, America does look down on its science and tech, and as soon as they stop producing new electronic whizzies, then the American people will really get upset. Don't believe me yet, look at the 9/11 truthers. Their biggest gun is a retired theology professor. They take comments out of context, they claim to follow Sherlock Holmes' principle eliminating the possibilities and then claim that leads them to their conviction...completely disregarding that (a) they can never KNOW all the possibilities before they start to discard them, and (b) somehow their explanation is mystically the only one standing. And they claim to be educated. The anti-truthers have 100s professors of engineering and science, and industry construction experts on their side, but somehow they are all "compromised" in a giant sticky wad of a conspiracy all directed by...by....well, they are sure someone is directing it, probably space aliens.

Not Scheme, but rather Haskell. Haskell is a modern functional language with very strong typing. Scheme is a holdover from Lisp with static typing but no strong typing. Plus, Scheme adherents are insufferable. That alone should spike the language.

hmmmm...suppose you spend $1 Billion to develop a new drug...just about $1 worth of chemicals per pill. How much are you going to sell it for? Care to make back your investment? Overhead for factories to make it? Promotion so that doctors know about it? Health care for your employees? A retirement plan for your employees?

The drug companies are a bunch of greedy suits. However, attempting to simplify the problem using your reasoning doesn't help anyone.

Islam has been at war with everyone else from its inception. The West had to do nothing to incur their wrath. In fact, they need the West so they can claim to be victims and prepare their followers to die for Islam...and virgins...don't forget the virgins. Apparently, Heaven is full of them just waiting for a bunch of hairy, smelly jihadis.

As the AC below commented, many of ISIS fighters are foreign nutjobs. And guess where their passports will allow them entry when their work there is done?

A tree limb falls on a vehicle and kills the driver. When asked about it, the county highway department issued a statement saying that tree had never shown any intent to fall before and hence there was no reason to suspect that it would fall this time. The public can feel safe knowing that trees do not have any particular interest in killing you. If they wanted to do, they could have fallen on you years ago when you went to the grocery store.

That isn't the issue, Scotland is part of the West and should contribute to its shared defense. From this side of the Atlantic, Europe is starting to appear as a lot of spoiled brats hiding behind the U.S.'s skirts whenever things get difficult. And when they should act or could act on their own, they still insist on waiting for the U.S. lest your politicians get unelected.

Really? Care to compete against the physics, chemistry, mathematics professors, Einstein?

What you see as a monopoly, MS users see as integration.

There is no obvious candidate to offer what MS is offering businesses. And the entrenched apps only run on Winders.

I'd like to see MS destroyed, every last venomous tentacle of it. Currently, I see no vehicle for that to happen.

"de-incentiving"...clearly you are not MBA material. This should be "de-incentivising". Let's use it in a sentence, shall we: With the leading indicators trailing down, and the trailing indicators leading up, we are energizing the workforce into a synergistic Total Product Reversal by de-incentivising the individuals with respect to their personal incentives so that they may contribute to the overwhelming strategy we are developing vis-a-vis our growth outlook.

What is more important is why the economy tanked. The initial tanking was because Greenspan and the Bush Administration saw no need to pop the housing bubble. The Democrats were surely not going to rock the boat either. The Fed and the Bush Administration went that extra mile by relaxing regulation so everyone and their uncle's dog were able to flip houses. The Fed and the Bush A. were continuing the proud tradition of Clinton and his Republican Congress to allow the investment and the commercial banks to cross each others business lines. And that allowed them to tap into the increasingly open international financial system to unload their hot potatoes.

Obama's main claim to fame is that he saved the banking system from collapsing. And he did, but he was continuing the Bush A. policies of saving the banking system since TARP was started during the waning days of the Bush A. And the banks paid most of that back, so they were only bailed out with what amounted to loans. None of the bankers went to prison because they broke no laws, the politicians had stripped the laws down so that they could do what they wanted.

What Obama then did made matters worse. He refused to cut government spending and he allowed the Bush tax cuts to become more or less permanent...well, Congress did the latter and helped with the former, but Obama never vetoed the extension. This guaranteed government would be underfunded thus increasing the deficit, and that encouraged business to keep their powder dry and not spend into a recovery. Those tax cuts had a sunset provision of 10 years and were passed in an era when there would be "surpluses as far as the eye could see"...which wasn't very far given Bush's policies and fighting two wars.

Overlaying all of that was the economy of things fundamentally shifting to higher automation. So the workforce was blindsided because then they didn't have the skills to put into a new economy that emerged after the meltdown. And business's exports had tanked because when Wall Street exported the hot potatoes, it had the knock on effect of tanking the world's economy so U.S. businesses had less of an export market.

And just to drive the butt plug home, the Republicans in Congress have been tilting at every windmill they could find instead of working with Democrats to fix the structural problems in the economy. This was the product of being enthralled with libertards who claim that if the government got out of people's lives, everything would be rosy....neglecting health care (libertards are always employed and never get sick), the environment (companies are naturally clean (see coal companies for counter examples)), financial regulation (those Wall Street hyena are still there), research and development (apparently, research grows on trees and just happens), etc.

It depends upon the industry. The drug companies are hard to defend, but there'd be no drug companies without patents. That's because it can easily cost well over $1 Billion to develop a new drug. No one will risk that kind of money without some guaranteed payback should they succeed.

"What?" you say, "Let the universities develop the new drugs?". They do some. So now you want the federal government to fork over $1 Billion on a research that may not pan out. That's only one drug. The government doesn't have the resources to pick and choose which compounds are the most promising.

And you then have to deal with the libertards who will bitch and scream that you need to get government out of their lives...at least until Grandma needs a place to stay to while away her dotage.

Yep, after Western sanctions on Putin's Russia, Turkey recently announced they were going to make trade deals with Russia to make up for what the sanctions were stopping.

I think in the past, Turkey was a real member of NATO. Now, they are not really and Erdogan is creating another theocracy. In 10 years, there will be no democracy left in Turkey and no reason to keep Turkey in NATO.

On the other hand, you are assuming the parts of Germany's gov. that were "shocked" by U.S. spying even knew about their own. They may not have been hypocritical at all. Similar things happen to the U.S. government. Some agency does something and immediately the other side assumes a conspiracy. Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of it. It is sort ingrained in human nature to "connect the dots". The same silliness occurs with the WTC "truthers".

Spying serves a valuable purpose. It allows a country to ascertain whether another country's pols are lying or telling the truth. It can also help prevent surprise attacks, and it can help explain another country's behavior. We should want countries to spy on each other, then there are fewer secrets.

Nation states arose not because of mistrust, but from shared language, culture, and so on. Trust has almost nothing to do with it.