Greece is running a primary surplus right now. So try again

Um, according to their own figures which are highly dubious they were, but now are not anymore. And whilst a primary surplus is an interesting metric, you can't simply ignore debt. It's not ignorable. What they actually have is a massive deficit they cannot fix.

Spain and Ireland were running large surpluses when the crisis hit.

Bear in mind that there was a lot of lending from bad banks which was then taxed.

Says you. Meanwhile here, in the real world big state countries like Canada, France and Germany seem to sustain their debts without problems. Yes creditors asked for a smaller state. What else is news? Yet their interest rates are extremely low, which shows that at the end of the day said creditors are happy with the status quo.

As I pointed out already Germany is paying off its debts, it has a real budget surplus. Other EU countries have low interest rates because the ECB is more or less outright funding them at this point: it's not a real market when one of the biggest players can create their own money.

Not really. Spoken like somebody who had crap teachers. Back in times of yore when people were still using the transmission model that might have been workable. But, it's a good example of being penny wise and pound foolish.

What kind of utopia did you grow up in? I'm 31 and 90% of my teaching at high school and university could best be described as "transmission". Long lessons full of note taking, reading the textbooks, and then if we got lucky we'd get to duplicate some practical work the teacher just showed us. Yes, sometimes you got individual assistance if you were falling behind. And sometimes you didn't. It was ridiculously high stress and a generally crappy way to teach people. That was in the UK. University was even worse: same style of teaching, minus the actual love of it that many of my high school teachers did at least have.

I do not believe schools have changed significantly in the last 15 years. Vast majority of the work teachers were doing could be replaced by high quality optimised lectures a la Khan Academy, automated question setting/marking, plus in-class supervisors (basically the nannys OP mentioned), plus on demand assistance from pools of remote teachers in cheaper countries.

Not this again. The truth is there has been NO ADVANCES in AI since the 1970's. NONE.

lol. Google disagrees with you. They saw the word error rate on their voice recognition drop to near-human levels of accuracy due to the deployment of deep neural nets. DNNs were NOT available in the 1970's by the way. The concept of a neural net was, but nobody knew how to build one that worked like they do today. Obviously "learning how to build something that was previously impossible" is an advance under any reasonable definition.

In real life, as opposed to in your head, evidence suggests that to the contrary, what is better for everyone is a rather expansive state. To wit, in most indicators, including wealth, large state countries such as western Europe, Canada and Japan are at least comparable and often better than the USA, while small state countries such as Somalia or Haiti are much below

By that logic Greece should be paradise.

Right now most big, rich, western countries with high quality of life are supporting themselves either via oil or via debt. That is not sustainable, which is why many European countries are either significantly cutting back the state or being told they really need to by various creditors. Balanced budgets as in Germany are sustainable, but Germany is also a fair bit poorer than people realise: wages have hardly gone up there for many years.

If you're the sort of person who believes any and all business is merely a way to make profit and nobody who creates a company ever actually cares about the task they perform, then sure. Reality is more complex than that.

Re: China. iOS is in the minority in China. Even at the time of the iPhone 6 launch iOS market share was only 20%, but iOS market share always spikes around the time of a new iPhone launch, then falls back down in the other quarters. And China is a special case - Google isn't willing to play ball with the communist government so the services that make Android most useful are all blocked there. Apple cooperates so they can sell iOS as is, getting a built-in advantage. Despite this, Android still dominates.

From their perspective it'd be much worse than higher search rev shares. If Android did not exist, Google Maps would have been wiped out overnight on mobile when Apple decided to go it alone (against the wishes of their own userbase, no less). Android was never about making direct profit, it was always about ensuring Google was able to deliver their services directly to users. They were quite open about this from the start. And judged by this standard it has been an incredible, epic success.

iOS is on the way down anyway. Outside of English speaking countries and Japan it's in the minority everywhere. In some countries, especially European countries like Germany and Spain, the iPhone has been crushed.

These career govt employees feed info to the pres, make recommendations, and fight for their interests. Even if a new pres wants to turn on a dime, Washington DC is a large ship that turns slowly.

Bingo. The old UK comedy "Yes Prime Minister" was a rather cutting illustration of this phenomenon at work.

What happens to someone when they become the prez? Enormous numbers of apparently experienced people begin telling you all kinds of secret things. They stress the importance of secrecy. They tell you about this plot or that plot. They say it's vital they get new powers and they not-so-subtly imply that if you don't help them Women And Children will DIE! And although it's left unstated you know perfectly well that if you don't give them what they want, you will see leaks in the press from anonymous officials that paint you as a prevaricator, as weak, as unconcerned for the lives of Patriotic Heroes And Their Women And Children.

The problem any US President has, and I daresay many other countries presidents, is that they are immediately submerged into a fantasy world woven from the agendas of the people around them mixed with their own pre-existing views, and those people are themselves also in a slightly less extreme form of a personal fantasy world and so on all the way down. A toxic brew of patriotism, belief in American exceptionalism, militarism and most of all pervasive classification means that it's impossible for a prez to penetrate the fog of misinformation that surrounds them. They can be manipulated into believing nearly anything because it would take an incredibly strong willed personality to say directly to the senior bureaucrats feeding them classified intelligence, "I think you are bullshitting me and I am going to personally audit your shit and prosecute you if you're lying to me".

Obama is very much NOT a strong willed personality. He sees himself primarily as a reasonable man who finds compromise between different factions. This makes him easily manipulated: all it takes is for people who agree to present him two apparently opposed positions - one extreme and one very extreme - and Obama will reliably pick something that is quite extreme. And the officials around him know that.

In hindsight it should have been obvious. Obama has no real track record of achievement in politics. He supported no particularly controversial positions, or showed any particularly clear thinking. Compared to Bush he seemed like a genius of course but Bush was a fucking man child, so that wasn't hard.

For that reason, Rand Paul fans might be disappointed if he won. I don't expect he would be able to accomplish as much change as people would like.

Almost certainly not. But it looks like Rand Paul is made of stronger stuff than Obama. Paul consistently argues for positions that piss off most of his party. He seems able to come to conclusions about things himself regardless of what other people believe. He seems to have fairly strong principles. He doesn't come across as the sort of wishy-washy people person that Obama is. If there's any US politician that actually might tell the people in his secret briefings "stop bullshitting me or I fire you", it's probably Rand Paul.

That sort of logic holds true when moving between languages that are very similar. The transition between Python and Ruby or Java and C# spring to mind.

However if I need a C++ programmer and need one pronto, I'm not gonna hire a guy who has only JavaScript on his CV no matter what. Learning C++ is not merely learning a different way to create an array or slightly different syntax. To be effective in C++ you need to know how to do manual memory management and do it reliably, which takes not only domain knowledge but more importantly: practice and experience. You need to understand what inlining is. You very likely need to understand multi-threading and do it reliably, which takes practice and experience a pure JS guy is unlikely to have. You need to be comfortable with native toolchains and build systems: when the rtld craps its pants and prints a screenful of mangled symbols you need to be able to understand that you have an ABI mismatch, what that means and how to deal with it. Unfortunately that is mostly a matter of practice and experience. You might need to understand direct manipulation of binary data. There's just a ton of stuff beyond the minor details of the language.

Could the pure JS guy learn all this stuff? Of course! Will they do it quickly? No.

Yeah, I agree with the growing sentiment that whilst Ive is a talented hardware designer, he is also seriously overhyped (by Apple, not himself).

Case in point: how long did it take for Apple to make a larger iPhone? A long time. I read a story about Ive in a magazine. It described the process of them deciding to make a bigger screened iPhone. The design team milled dummies of a bazillion different sizes and carried them around to try and figure out the perfect larger size. They spent ages on it. They tried literally every size. Eventually they produced something ..... just like their competitors. You know what? Apple ignored the trend for years. Then they procrastinated because their holy design team can't do anything fast. They could just have looked at what was selling well - it's not always a good idea but it's not always a bad idea either. But they made a mountain out of it.

Why do Apple's products have almost no customisability? Why did it take YEARS for them to even support setting a wallpaper image in iOS? Well, probably because:

Ive’s decision to offer choice was a challenge to Apple’s recurring theme of design inevitability. In one of our conversations, Ive was scathing about a rival’s product, after asking me not to name it: “Their value proposition was ‘Make it whatever you want. You can choose whatever color you want.’ And I believe that’s abdicating your responsibility as a designer.”

He was probably talking about a Motorola phone. But I guess that's why everything Apple makes is white. You wouldn't want to "abdicate your responsibility" by letting people choose colours! Well, unless it's a watch, of course.

If you read the whole New Yorker article you'll get an overwhelming sense that the design team there live in a bubble where they feel it's OK to spend months on a trivial detail and then produce something almost exactly the same as what their competitors did in a week. Apple has been consistently behind the Android market for years now when it comes to features and even new design ideas, and reading the article will reveal why.

Nope. The taxi drivers would compete for too few passengers by trying to undercut each other, skimming on costs thus reducing the safety for passengers etc.

Except that taxi prices are controlled, either by the state (yellow cabs) or by Uber. Taxi drivers don't dynamically adjust prices on an hourly basis by themselves.

Your desire to have the mythical unicorn of the free market still doesn't change the reality that those laws exist, they exist for a reason, and it's not up to Uber to decide what the law is.

Markets are hardly mythical. They're rather common.

Anyway you're arguing with things he never said. Obviously the laws exist. Obviously Uber cannot decide what the laws are. The only part you're disagreeing with him on is "they exist for a reason", but that's the crux of the issue - some people believe that reason is bogus. Limiting the numbers of cabs specifically to fight congestion is so indirect it practically screams corruption. You solve congestion with congestion charges, that apply to all vehicles equally.

Uber wants to run a illegal cabs, contrary to the law. The problem isn't the existence of the law. it's that Uber are a bunch of whiny self-entitled douchbags whose business model relies on running illegal cabs and playing the victim card.

Given that your post criticises Uber for "throwing a tantrum" your own writing comes across as extremely shrill. The problem is the existence of the law. You seem to think that all laws must be righteous and good and no organised group of people who give themselves a name and a logo should ever object to a law or try to get it changed (and good luck getting taxi laws changed agains the incumbents without a large large consumer group to back you up). That's an increasingly non-viable position in our world: governments create laws at prodigious rates and the effort needed to get them overturned is too large for individuals to take on.

LOL

Okay, you raging sexist. Let's take it down a notch for a second here ......... [short time later] ....... It still blows my mind that every time this comes up, almost nobody talks about the elephant in the room: Women are smarter and value their time better than men in general.

Plank in your eye before speck in your brothers, etc.

Yeah yeah yeah. It's so tough being a programmer.

Reality check: many, many other jobs are doing worse. You may think that programming is going down hill as a career* but would mothers rather that their daughters study Eng Lit and then become a Starbucks barista when making it as a journalist doesn't quite work out for them?

*though I don't see that, heck on the front page is a story about how much money is flooding into the industry from VC's right now

lol :-)

Um, yes.

How exactly do you intend to prove that something is safe? There have been cases in the past where chemicals were thought to be safe, and then found that they cause a higher risk of common disease but only after many decades (smoking is one obvious example of that).

How do you even discover that without large scale usage by humans? How would anything ever get approved? What if the drugs are believed to save lives, but it can't be proved that they're always side effect free? What then?

IMO, this shouldn't be up to governments. They should act as a source of trusted advice, at best. The idea that the FDA might have killed more people than it's saved (by delaying the use of medicines that were later found to be safe and effective) is an interesting one, though I can't remember if it's ever actually been proven or is just some libertarian meme.