Maybe I'm confusing my history, but I thought Java was basically pre-Linux. Let alone pre-Linux-goes-big-on-the-server-market.

So it makes sense that somebody would want to make an environment that abstracts the machine away and works reliably on every machine. That was the whole point of POSIX, though it didn't go far enough to satisfy everybody. And it makes sense that savvy consumers would want that too, for a variety of reasons: Large market for developers, easy deployment, sunk cost fallacy, less vendor lock-in, etc.

Sports contribute in the same way movies, music, games, and comedy do. They provide entertainment.

Statistically, five meters really isn't much different from ten meters, or twenty meters, or even thirty meters. It's only when you get to about 80 meters or so that we see a statistically-significant deviation from the standard probability distributions.

And you know this because you have the distribution of thicknesses and computed the standard deviation. Right?

Otherwise, you just pulled 80m out of your ass. That must have hurt.

Yes, there's a demand. But the economy of music has apparently reached its saturation point. That is, demand is no longer growing faster than attrition. It will take long-term demographic shifts for growth. There is no room for new players and current players are scaling back their operations to the "essentials" for the business.

Pandora will be fine. Spotify will be fine. But they won't grow or make anybody rich anymore.

International law 101:

It is a sovereign's privilege to not obey other sovereign's laws. That, in effect, is what makes a sovereign a sovereign. If the other sovereign's object, they have to stop the offender.

In this case, that means stopping the intrusions through security or force. Good luck with that.

Correlation + proposed mechanism = scientific theory.

Did you know that a gallon of gasoline is capable of replacing 55 hours of manual labor?

How do you think America managed to make its economic productivity boom? By expanding its constraint horizon with oil.

That's all well and good, but I have a serious problem with people who waste gasoline on things like cars. 55 hours of toil or 20 miles.

There is no physical reason why intelligent life could not expand through space very fast on cosmological timescales, if it wanted to.

Except, you know, the speed of light. And the limits of biology and ecology. And the fact that space is three dimensional on the scales we're talking about (which means that they intelligent species would have to populate at a rate proportional to the distance from the home world cubed in order to meaningfully "populate" the new worlds.

That's nice and all, but... use Bayes theorem. If you get statistically significant results, let us know.

That is, the summary statistics are incomplete for the kind of inference you want to draw.

In particular, the summary statistics you give tell us that having the genetic marker makes a smoker twice as likely to experience psychosis as a smoker who does not have the marker. It does not tell us how much more or less likely psychosis is compared to a non-smoker.

Critical thinking failure.

Like Ayn Rand, right?

All scientific laws are predictions. Or at least abstractions over prediction. "If you drop a ball from a height h, it will accelerate at 9.8 m/s and have a velocity v."

If anything, your point supports the validity of treating Moore's law as testable science instead of delineating between science and non-science.

Bitcoin can work in principle, but then, so can a printed fiat currency. The bitcoin system would have to be very finely tuned to inflate at the rate of "natural" wealth destruction, just like the printed fiat currency. Obviously, measuring "natural" wealth destruction is difficult on econometric grounds, and thus becomes a political issue. This would be true whether bit coin or paper money is floating around.

Here's the thing: if an economy is to remain strong, its outputs must actually be useful. But things break down over time. The rate at which they break down takes value out of the economy, as those things are no longer useful. If the supply of money does not reflect this loss of value, then the holders of money get paid scarcity rent. They would get paid more value (in terms of today's labor) for their dollar than they put in for it. Rents are market distortions!

The problems we face are n-fold. First, the post-War economy was predicated on making "disposable" goods. The value of the outputs of the post-War economy is now zero. Second, the post-War generation is still alive, and its savings are propping up the capital markets. This is a problem, because their dollar does not match up with their contribution to society now. In other words, if a dollar is supposed to be a store of value, backed by the value of their labor, their dollars "should be" worthless. It is as if they are now counterfeiters, since their dollars are backed by now worthless labor.

The result of this situation is inflation in real terms. Their money was sequestered in the capital markets, but is now being set free in the common markets as they retire. And it is a huge chunk of change.

I'm a poor in America. I bought a used 25$ tv about two years. I saved for years to buy a 300$ laptop. I'll have to save for 5 years to finish my BA in math. I haven't spent a single dollar that wasn't for food, housing, or electricity in over a year. I don't have a phone or car or an air conditioner.

The dollars are stretched, and the situation is getting worse.

Bingo!

Reintroducing the gold standard would introduce massive market distortions, due to scarcity rent. This is why the gold standard is a political position, and not an economic one.

That is a prescription for a reversion to nationalist vassalage.

Life was never easy. Globalization has made it easier for billions of people.

I read an interesting paper about gold once. The thesis was that if gold is money as defined by economic theory, then mining gold provides ZERO economic utility in the long term, and negative utility in the short term, since introducing more of the material to the market is inflationary. Of course, the conclusion was that since people mine gold and profit from it, gold is not money.

Also, using gold as money re-introduces the scarcity rent which lead to and sustained feudalism. A re-introduction of the gold standard is just a power grab.