Another piece said he was arrested at the airport, and laws regarding jurisdiction get even stranger there.

For most people in NYC, the alternative to a taxi is walking or public transportation, not taking their own car.

On the other hand, those rules reduced the number of taxis and congestion in NYC. There is a real game theory problem here in that any one company wants as many of its own cars in the field as possible, but if every company is doing that the roads get worse then they are. Uber is not feeling this too much since they are still pretty small, but the original problem is still there. Too dense a population, not enough road, and too much individual profit to be made.

I think if nothing else this raises questions about where the arrest actually happened. Russian media, esp when high ranking party members are involved, is not exactly known for being accurate in its reporting.

Setting that aside, this does cut into the larger modern question of how to deal with cyber criminals who are based out of countries hostile to the US. There has always been the question about what to do with people who commit crimes in a country then flee to one without an extradition treaty, but increasingly we are having to deal with cases where the individual is actively committing crimes against the citizens of one country while being physically located in another.

Though that gets into some interesting and sticky territory when it comes to transnational companies and the horrors they have committed around the world... or at least it SHOULD be sticky.

Yeah, it is easy to offer lower prices when you get to skip over the costs other people pay. It is the same reason child and slave labor are still popular.

Yeah, but a good number of people have this idea that if the private sector gets involved (as if it somehow has not been involved all these years already) the cost will magically come down to something plucky captains of industry can afford with private funds. Thus they assume that huge price tag is a NASA problem as opposed to rooted in actual expenses.

"adrift" is not actually a bad thing in this case. NASA was originally hyper-focused on a coherent goal and while that was ok for a while it ends up putting ALL the focus on a single expensive project that serves mostly a status symbol or propaganda/marketing tool. A Mars mission has a lot of marquee value, it is a romantic project, but for the price a lot of real science off in many directions can be done.

NASA's lack of focus is a good thing since it is in all those little projects that we actually learn things.

Ahm, currently there are no good candidates for such research. There would be no where for the 'investment' to go and I suspect if someone did come up with something that had even a good possibly of demonstrating FTL in a lab it would get a great deal of attention and resources.

Strong government is how you counter strong corporations. It is not a case of either being noble, but of needing balance between two types of institutions.

*nod* one of the issues is that buildings on the east coast are not built with earthquakes in mind like west coast ones, so it takes much smaller quakes to do economic damage. And once you start to see damage (and the economic impact of repairs) you get into the classic sore point of 3rd parties paying a price for industry profits, which pisses people off.

Well yes, of course they are going to change over time. Even if we are just going to look at historical Buddhism there are many branches and philosophies within the practice with a variety of mechanics and goals. Some forms focused on purely looking inward and ignoring stimuli, others focused on awareness of stimuli without additional thought.

One does not have to be doing something external in order to be 'doing something'. I have known plenty of people who sit and design stuff in their head for instance, or work on storylines, or rehearse talks they are planning to give, etc.

If they found it to be consistent between 18 and 77, that is not really 'today's society'.

Extroverts are 'people', introverts are abnormal. When studies discover behavior closely tied to extroverted personalty types it is considered something about 'people' in general, while studies discovering behaviors related to introverts tend to be labeled as being about introverts.

It is the classic normal/default/otherness problem, in the same basic category as when you draw a simple stick figure people think it is male unless you add something gender marking, male unless otherwise specified. In this case, extrovert unless otherwise specified.

In their training material that new employees go through, they make a big hairy deal out of not doing exactly these types of things.