Starbuck's CEO Schultz is a smart cookie. He realizes while raising the minimum wage will ameliorate the problem, it is ultimately not a solution. Wages for low-skill jobs are low because of simple supply/demand economics. Too many unskilled workers + not enough jobs for them = low wages for them.

Schultz recognizes that the ultimate solution is to change this supply/demand balance. Technological progress means low-skilled jobs are disappearing, so the only avenue available is to reduce the number of unskilled workers. We need to educate them so that they are no longer unskilled or low-skilled.

So the whole point of this program is to educate people in a medium-skill or high-skill job. That way they are able to get a better, higher-paying job, removing themselves from the supply of unskilled workers, thus helping to naturally increase wages for unskilled workers.

The point of this program is not to let you get a degree in something you think is "fun" or "always wanted to do" with zero regard for its applicability or usefulness to society (the mistake most kids make when their parents are paying for their education). You're supposed to study so you can get a job which takes some skill, but is readily available and useful to society, and hopefully you enjoy doing.

You see, while raising the minimum wage alters the income distribution, it is a zero-sum proposition (possibly even negative-sum, as it eliminates some low-end jobs). It does not increase the net productivity of the population, so it is merely dividing the pie a different way. OTOH, educating people for a higher-skill job increases their productivity - it makes the pie bigger, and is thus the preferable solution.

I've stopped buying consumer electronics that take the markedly ANTI-consumer and needless action of making non-removable batteries.

That was true about 10 years ago, but I don't think it's true anymore.

• 10 years ago, devices typically used the full capacity of the battery and topped off when full. Consequently it would wear out quicker. After a year of use, it would probably only hold half the charge it did new. After 3 years it would probably only last 5-15 minutes. Being able to replace the battery was important then for the longevity of the device. Today most manufacturers do not use the battery's full capacity. They typically allow it to be charged only to 90% of real max capacity (the software just reports this as 100%), and discharged to 10% (reported by the software as 0%). The batteries on all my newer devices which are 3-5 years old are still lasting 70%-90% as long as they did new.
• 10 years ago, laptop batteries in particular would only last 1.5-2.5 hours on a charge. Anything over 3 hours was considered long. Today, 4-5 hours is typical, and many will operate 6-10 hours. So there's less need to have a second spare battery you can swap in.

I empathize with those whose usage patterns fall outside of these cases, and who could really use a second battery to swap in. But in general I think the extra capacity and smaller size that comes from molding the battery to fit in limited space and not having to encase the battery in a protective plastic housing are a worthwhile tradeoff. Bear in mind that when user-replaceable batteries were common, they were substantially overpriced and probably represented the biggest rip-off in the tech market after $100 for an extra 16 GB of flash memory.

In the end, if the game plays out correctly, low income individuals will still payer higher taxes, large companies will pay less taxes, but it will sound a lot like the opposite is occurring. You'll be happy and the economy will be slightly less screwed than if we listened to you and made companies actually pay 30% - 40% of their income directly to the treasury trough.

Taxing corporations doesn't really gain you anything. If you shift 100% of the tax burden to individuals, they give up x% of their money to the government. If you shift 100% of the tax burden to corporations, the people still give up x% of their money to the government, just in the form of higher prices and lower wages. Income (money) is just a representation of productivity, and the only source of productivity is people. Corporations are just organizational groupings of people. Remove the people and the corporation's productivity is zero.

There are good reasons to tax corporations - excise taxes to pay for regulation enforcement, VATs to discourage middlemen, etc., and in this particular case to prevent shifting of tax revenue out of countries where the purchase transactions were actually made. But taxing corporations doesn't magically increase government revenue or the purchasing power of individuals. Corporate taxes are still paid for entirely by you and me - we just pay them indirectly via higher prices and lower wages, instead of directly to the government.

pretty sweet to be in a politically connected union and have no ambitions other than riding your current job into a fully-paid retirement at age 55.

This used to be called "middle class."
You're so far divorced from the way things used to be, that now it's some kind of offense for people to retire while they still have their health.

Not sure where you get that idea. "The way things used to be" when the Social Security Act of 1935 was passed was that you retired at age 60, while life expectancy at birth was about 60.* These figures have now diverged so that the retirement age is 65, but life expectancy is 78. If anything, the fully-paid retirement age should be increased to about 70, not decreased to 55.

* There are all sorts of arguments you can make based on the life expectancy distribution curve not being the same shape then as now. Viewed in terms most favorable to earlier retirement, a male who reached retirement in 1935 could expect to live another 15 years. A male who reaches retirement today can expect to live another 18 years. But even under that best-case viewpoint, the retirement age still has not kept pace with increases in life expectancy.

The only argument for lowering the retirement age to 55 is that productivity gains mean that people have to work less to satisfy their necessities. Unfortunately, most people aren't content with only having their basic necessities met in retirement. They want to buy an RV and go traveling, or vacation in the Bahamas, or watch their big screen HDTV. Things that were absolute luxuries in 1935. Couple that with increased competition for resources (primarily space for housing - the population is 2.5x what it was in 1935), and I suspect the productivity gains since 1935 are spent on increased expectations of what you can do once retired, rather than lowering the retirement age.

Car tires contacting the ground gives you two huge advantages: The car's motion is (assuming no skidding) restricted to a single axis determined by the direction the front wheels are pointing. And the car's orientation is physically coupled to the road (i.e. it more or less points in the direction it's traveling).

Once you start hovering, you lose these two and direction and orientation are no longer coupled to any part of the car. The car no longer moves forward in the direction the wheels are pointed. It's now free to move sideways, and can spin to point in a direction other than where it's moving. Skids are one of the most dangerous events which can happen in a car, and a good portion of design and maintenance is devoted to preventing them. I don't see why you'd want to design a car so that a "skid" becomes the norm instead of the exception.

The only way I can see it working is if the method of levitation somehow locks the car's orientation.

The problem they had to solve was how a weak field could offer so much protection, when numerous studies of long duration spaceflight have shown that only very powerful fields can act like radiation shields. [...] It turns out that this plasma is swept up by a weak magnetic field moving through space, creating a layer of higher density plasma. That's important because the separation of charge within this layer creates an electric field. And it is this field that deflects the high energy particles from the Sun.

Back in the days when they couldn't outfit a plane with hydraulic actuators, they'd use a servo tab instead. Without hydraulics, all the force to move a control surface had to come from the pilot, which became a problem when the larger control surfaces like the elevator required several hundred pounds of force to move it.

The servo tab was a small flap at the end of the control surface (usually the elevator). It would deflect the airflow at the tail end of the elevator, causing the elevator surface to move in the desired direction, causing the elevator to deflect air in the opposite direction of the servo tab, causing the plane to pitch. In effect, the pilot only has to move a small control surface; the effect of the wind on that small surface would move the larger control surface for him. The MD-80 is probably the most common aircraft people are familiar with which uses servo tabs (it uses minimal hydraulics).

Why is a laser better than other forms of EM radiation like radio? Channel capacity depends not just on the frequency-limited bandwidth, but also on the ratio of signal to noise. Increasing signal strength or reducing noise will improve bits per second. (The Nyquist limit of twice the frequency bandwidth only governs frequency modulation, not amplitude modulation.)

Assuming background noise is constant, a laser's (much) better focus means more of the energy pumped into the signal reaches the destination, rather than spreading out and being lost to space. More signal => better signal to noise ratio => higher channel capacity for a given frequency bandwidth.

If the government can claim that it's okay to record people in "public" (pun intended) without any concern for their privacy, so why is it not okay for this woman to record a cop? Such refusal to be video taped insinuates that something fishy was going on. If that cop didn't have anything to hide what's the problem with recording the incident.

While I completely agree that the public has the right to record the police doing their work, the police's motivation for not wanting to be recorded is not completely nefarious as you assume. Just as you probably fear the government selectively editing video to come up with trumped up charges, the police also fear citizens with an axe to grind selectively editing video to distort what happened and cast them in a bad light.

Even when the videographer doesn't have an axe to grind, videos shot by the public tend to be biased against the police. Their job is mostly one of response. Consequently the video rarely captures the incident which sparked the situation, while almost always capturing the cop's response. The Rodney King video is a perfect example. Without getting into whether the cops were lying, it showed the cops beating King, but missed the beginning of the incident where King purportedly refused to listen to their instructions and charged at them despite being tasered. Our minds weigh visual information much more heavily than other info. When you have video of a cop emptying his gun into a car, while the context of why he is doing so is relegated to a text description because it happened before the camera was turned on, it naturally leads people to a biased interpretation of the event - biased against the cop in most cases.

Which in turn naturally leads to cops not wanting to be videotaped. As I said, I absolutely believe the public has the right to video the police. But I can also understand why the police don't like being videotaped. (Off-topic: we need to come up with a new word for this since video is rarely shot on tape anymore.) A solution would seem to be for cops to always record everything they do. Unfortunately the cop is an involved party, while a random passing videographer is assumed to be a neutral third party. This again leads to bias against the police (not entirely unjustified), as people assume they'll just hide or destroy any or their video which does not support their version of events.

Ultimately, the solution is for the public to stop assuming that video tells the whole story. Just like when you see an incredible photo, you usually assume it was photoshopped. Video seems more real than a photo, so it's just taking more time for people to start to automatically question video. 3D CGI in movies is helping, as people learn to be skeptical of any video they see.

So if I claimed a made a reasonable mistake, would the same immunity be granted to me (an unwashed, private citizen)?

Happens all the time. I've been pulled over by the police 8 or 9 times in 30 years of driving for various traffic violations. Some I did nothing wrong, most I did break the law. I've never gotten a ticket. I just explained it honestly to the cop, and they've always let me off with a warning. People aren't infallible - they make mistakes and not all situations are clear-cut. When you enforce zero tolerance, you get the ridiculous situation we have in our schools: where a student gets suspended because she went to pick up a friend at a party that was serving alcohol to minors just as police arrived, or for throwing away a razor blade he found on the ground because he was "in possession" of a blade on school property during its trip from the ground to the garbage can.

Isn't `bring the game into disrepute` a reason? It's their rules...they can have any clause they like.

If you're going to use a nebulous standard like "bringing the game into disrepute," I would argue their actions against Sterling brought more disrepute to the game. We've got two standards here:

• The right for people to be free from discrimination because of their race.
• The right of people to hold their own opinion regardless of what others think.

Obviously there are cases where these standards can come into conflict. The resolution society has come up with for when this happens is that you can hold a discriminatory opinion, but you cannot actually act on it. The anti-discriminatory laws I have to follow as an employer only cover how employees are treated. They say nothing about whether anyone is bigoted; their punishments only kick in when someone acts on that bigotry.

Sterling seems to have been following this resolution society has set when these two standards come into conflict. Was there systematic discrimination among the people hired or promoted within the Clippers organization? Were minorities given lower wages or excluded from bonuses or parties, or their decisions and directives given less weight in the organization's operations? As best as I can tell, Sterling was bigoted and disliked blacks, but he recognized that society has decided it was wrong for him to act on his dislike, so he did not actually do anything that negatively affected any blacks. The nearest he came was telling his presumed-mistress not to bring a black BF to his team's games. Hardly evidence of pervasive discrimination.

The NBA however... The standard is supposed to be, "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Instead they've shifted the line from the act of discrimination being punishable, to the thought of discrimination being punishable. It is no longer safe to hold a minority opinion while abiding by the majority opinion in the NBA. Merely holding the minority opinion is now punishable. I think the world has become a much darker place and more disrepute brought to the game because of what the NBA did, than because of what Sterling did.

The way I see it, the difference between democracy and totalitarianism is tolerance. When there's a difference of opinion in the democracy, people in the democracy vote on it. The loser (minority) agrees to abide by the opinion of the winner (majority). But the majority also agrees not to punish the minority for holding that opinion, they are just prohibited from acting upon it. This is because what is currently a minority opinion may in the future become a majority opinion, and so merely holding that opinion needs to be allowed and protected. In a totalitarian state however, the minority rejects the majority opinion and resorts to physical violence to oppose it. And/or the majority seeks not only to prevent the minority from acting on their opinion, but also to root out and eliminate that minority opinion.

Given the inability to recharge them though, I do think I'd want 2+ batteries in the car, to be drained (and replaced) sequentially. I don't want my "emergency tank" anywhere near empty, but it's wasteful to recycle it while it's still 20% charged.

I think this is a really clever idea. Batteries (even lithium ones) have terrible energy per kg densities. Aluminum is used as rocket fuel because of its high energy per kg density. Combining the two helps offset their disadvantages (weight for batteries, recharging for aluminum).

As for driving around with your aluminum "emergency tank" near empty, there's no reason it has to be a single aluminum "battery". You could break it up into 4 banks which "discharge" sequentially. Every couple months you'd replace a single 25 kg bank which got used every time the lithium battery was discharged. After a weekend trip to Grandma's you'd replace two of them. After a particularly long vacation road trip you'd replace three, and move the half-discharged fourth to the first slot so it'd be emptied first. If the design is really clever you wouldn't have to physically move it to the first slot. A sensor could determine how much pure aluminum was left in each bank, and automatically draw from the most-discharged one first. Heck, if you knew you weren't going to go on a long trip you could remove all but one of the banks to save energy by reducing vehicle weight.

And 25 kg banks are small and light enough that you could manually swap them in as needed. We're not talking about something volatile like sulfuric acid (used in lead acid batteries). It's just a block of aluminum - might be dangerous in an extremely hot fire, but is otherwise inert. If you're planning a 5k cross-country trip, you could just swap out banks at a Pep Boys halfway through your trip. If you're planning a 5k trip to Alaska, you could just pack a few extra banks in your trunk. After you account for efficiencies, aluminum (31 MJ/kg) @ 90% electric motor efficiency has over twice the energy density of gasoline (42.4 MJ/kg) @ 30% ICE efficiency.

Why use them as range extenders. Why not just pack enough in to do a year of driving the recycle the filling and put in new plates? If it costs less than about $1500 to do most people would be fine with it.

I call it the credit card minimum payment syndrome. If you charge people $1500 all at once, they'll freak out over it. But if you spread it out over time to $40/week (e.g. gas for your car), they're ok with it. Even though over a year that ends up being more expensive. It's how the credit card companies make money off of people who don't pay their bill in full every month.

Sprint wasn't allowed to touch Nextel's spectrum, in the 3G days, so they only freed up their big block of 800MHz when LTE was first being deployed. With a little foresight, they could have put 800MHz LTE radios on their towers, and immediately boasted the best LTE coverage.

That's what they're doing. Sprint's LTE bands are 26 (850 MHz - the old Nextel band), 25 (1900 MHz), and 41 (2500 MHz). You're proposing they should've put LTE radio gear on all their towers, then switched it on simultaneously when their Nextel spectrum was freed up? I think Sprint was much smarter doing what they're doing it now - adding the LTE radios tower by tower, testing how well it works, tweaking it, and gradually rolling it out.

Your method is what got Sprint in the poor coverage doghouse in the first place. In the 1990s when they were first rolling out their digital network, they contracted with a bunch of lowest bidders to build out their tower network in many cities. In order to save money, a lot of these contractors spaced the towers out as far as possible according to the transmitter specs. Unfortunately those specs represent ranges under ideal conditions, and when Sprint turned everything on at once like you propose, they found they had a whole bunch of holes in their coverage. The towers had already been located and built so there was no easy way for them to fix it. It's not practical to pick up a tower and move it elsewhere. Putting another tower in between increases radio interference from one tower to its neighbors.

For this reason, a T-Mobile merger could be Sprint's ticket out of the doghouse. After a merger, they could conceivably sift through both T-Mobile's and Sprint's towers, pick ones which allow for better (closer) spacing, move all their transmitter gear to those towers, and sell off the excess towers. Most CDMA phones now also have GSM radios (LTE requires a SIM card, so you just need to add a single TDMA radio and the phone is also GSM-capable), so it's no longer a technical challenge to produce a combination GSM/CDMA phone as it was during the Nextel days.

And heard lots of stories of people running into this issue. The #1 cause is user error - assuming the phone knows if it's in the U.S. or Canada. Your phone does not know which side of the border it's on; or if it does know via GPS, that info is not tied in with the phone's radio. Consequently, if you're on the U.S. side of the border but the Canadian tower has a stronger signal and your phone is set to allow roaming, your phone may roam on the Canadian tower incurring international roaming charges. Lots of people who live on the U.S. side of the border and never crossed into Canada reported this problem. In all likelihood, the 50 MB of international roaming data probably wasn't during the 1 min he saw the phone connected to a Canadian tower - it was in spurts as he drove near the border and the phone hopped between U.S. and Canadian towers.

You have to manually turn off roaming (most phones still have that setting - the carriers have only eliminated the force-roam setting). That guarantees the phone will not hop onto a Canadian tower. Only after you've crossed into Canada and the phone (still not roaming) loses signal do you turn roaming back on. That guarantees you'll be using the U.S. towers for as long as possible.

Generally anybody who regularly crosses into Canada or plans to spend some time there gets a Canadian roaming option. On my carrier 8 years ago (Sprint) it was $5 extra a month, and knocked calls down to $0.25/min and no charge for Canadian roaming data as long as I stayed within my normal roaming limit (less than 20% or so of my total monthly data usage). That actually turned out to be cheaper than getting a second Canadian cell phone (as hard as it is to believe, their carriers are worse than the U.S. carriers). People who live on the U.S. side and never crossed into Canada during the roaming periods used to be able to get the charges removed with a simple call to customer service complaining they were charged for Canadian roaming when they never went to Canada. But a few months before I moved away, I got a letter saying they would be discontinuing this courtesy and I would just have to disable roaming on my phone if I did not want to be charged international roaming, or buy the Canada roaming option (which I already had).

Those are services, but the means to provide them are pretty clear and straightforward. That wasn't the case with Internet service. Nobody was really sure what was the best way to provide Internet: ISDN/DSL over phone lines? Cable modems? Satellite? Fiber?

In cases like this with unclear optimal solutions, the government gets out of the way and lets private industry pick the horses. The government provides the easement for placing the lines, but responsibility for constructing and maintaining the lines rests with the private companies. That way a wide variety of solutions are tried, not on the government's dime, and over time it becomes clear which solutions are superior.

At this point though, it's pretty clear that fiber to the home is the future. There's still some uncertainty about exactly the type of fiber interfaces, but for the most part changing those won't require burying completely new cable. So while I think it was necessary to have the intermediate step where private companies offered different types of Internet service, I can also agree with now having the government provide Internet service over fiber lines. (Well, provide the fiber lines. The service itself along with any peering agreements should be offered by private companies, since it's not at all clear what arrangement of peering agreements is optimal.)

The iPhone because Apple has enough clout to force all carriers to sell the same model phone. (Only the CDMA model is different.) Consequently, that model works around the world. With most other phones, the carriers have the upper hand and get the manufacturer to make a version customized to their frequencies.

The Nexus 5 because Google did the same thing. There are two versions - a North American version which supports CDMA and LTE bands commonly used in the U.S., and a world version which doesn't support CDMA but adds LTE bands more common throughout the world.

Those are the two I know of for sure. There may be some others too. e.g. The newer Samsung models support both GSM and CDMA for voice, but only a limited number of LTE bands. Find the GSM and LTE frequencies used by your U.S. carrier and in the UK/Scotland, then browse the gsmarena website to find phones which work in both.