The out sourcing decisions are often insane and it does not make any sense. Till you take into account possible corruption at the highest levels of IT management in huge companies.

I know an Indian independent contractor who worked on contract for a large electric utility. He managed six warm bodies provided by some Indian company. His contract came from some company that had a contract with another company and the grand parent company was the vendor to the electric utility. Each was padding up his hourly rate. It was rumoured one of the shell companies that did no work other than to shuffle paperwork and skim 10$ an hour from each contractor was owned by a relative of the top IT manager of the electric utility.

There are perverse incentives in the system to roil an smoothly working system, promise heaven and earth using some powerpoint magic, and deliberately trigger a crisis. Crisis means no bid contracts, crazy decisions and highly inflated costs.

The story sounds a little too fishy.

He should have sold the CAD drawings to the guy who 3D printed the handgun. "Print your own aircraft carrier!" Second amendment! woot!

He got his clearance just four months back, so they will say it is routine follow up. But definitely being saudi born played a role. FBI is in tough spot. Imagine they had left this guy alone and he turned out to be a mole or a spy. All the media would be asking "Why fbi did not connect the dots? Why alarm bells did not go off?". Essentially asking FBI why it did not do racial profiling. But if it does racial profiling then it is pilloried for that too.

Or depression, anxiety about future, or a combination.

In the developed world with a very reliable grid, it would take a while for rooftop solar to effect a break through. But where grid electricity is unreliable they will go solar much more voluntarily, even paying premium prices. Already in India almost all the homes have inverters and lead-acid truck batteries. They typically provide 10 hours of juice for one TV, two ceiling fans and two or three fluorescent lamps. Richer folks there routinely run portable gas generators, (that noisy smelly polluting Honda thingie) all night long when there is a power cut. There are folks who drive around the city in their air conditioned cars when there is a powercut. In those places rooftop solar with battery back up will fetch premium prices.

It is very much possible the utility companies may be able to stymie and delay the solar adoption in USA, but rest of the world will pay premium prices, and pay off the installation costs of these factories. So when the dam breaks and they start flooding the market, there is nothing that will save the utilities.

Most people consider 250K as high six figure income. (meaning high income + six figure income). It would not be 1% but still up there with the rest.

The retail sector in India evolved under very severe capital crunch. The retailer was the king in that environment. It was the retailer who takes the risk and orders goods to be sold, put up the money whether it gets sold or not. Unsold retail merchandise is never taken by the manufacturer usually in India. They borrow using a traditional chit fund system. They borrow at 24% to 36% rate of interest. Sometimes even higher than that. They usually operate at 40% margin, not counting the cost of capital. They cooperate (or collude, depending on your POV) and treat both customers and their suppliers with little mercy.

Indian customers are also very class conscious, they would eschew a cheaper product merely because their servant maids can afford them. They are used to hardball by retailer and any naive implementation of US level customer service will be gamed to death within two quarters.

Google will do well to

1 open its own stores,

2 use its strength in access to capital,

3 introduce products with differentiation so that you would not be using the same phone your driver is using,

4 deliver superior customer service to those who play fair

5 undertake price war for the in market above "servant maids and drivers and cooks" sector and below the "MNC executive, people rolling in black money" sector

Once you get to be too big to fail, you also become too big to jail. Banksters like Jamie Dimon would simply call the fed and ask it to call off this investigation or that probe. So it is beyond question lack of moral compass helps the big companies. It is when they are small people are debating about it.

These providers dish out individual streams! They seem to know what I might like and watch next!! Do they need Nielsen? That company's business model has gone kaput. The market has moved on.

This Amygdala

What difference does it make? Instead of pontificating without reading the press summary slashdotters would pontificate without reading the original article. The difference is like that joke about the $unfairly_maligned_ethnic berating his son, "You ran behind the bus all the way home to save the bus fare? Idiot! you could have run behind the taxi and saved taxi fare!"

Most pathologists, surgeons, medical students, anatomists, all of them never find the real amygdala. They find a conveniently and conspicuously presented fake amygdala and stop the search prematurely. All the while the real amygdala is hiding in the background, communicating with the fake amygdala using undetectable chemical signals.

There is only one recorded case of a human being playing possum, tricking a carrion bird into picking him up and then tickled the bird with its own feather when it was near a high way, thus making drop him. Then he hitch hiked back to civilization. I am proud to say he is an alumnus of my alma mater.

That is why you are posting anonymously to slash dot? Can't you at least use your three decade old dorm addresses as your handle so that you could claim, "they can find me if they dig deep enough:.