Around the time Dubya took office, we had a surplus and the debt was being repaid and was going down. Then he cut taxes, income taxes, inheritance taxes, all kinds of taxes and promised millions of jobs and prosperity for all. All the money ended up with his cronies, and the economy lost millions of jobs and we came to the brink of total financial collapse. In fact all the trickle down economics and tax-cut politics are simply means to transfer wealth to the rich, keep the middle class despo enough to accept abysmal wages and working conditions. All in the names of "jobs jobs jobs" and "job creators".

All the tax-cuts since the Reagan administration actually creation millions of jobs and explosive economic growth, in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, Indonesia... The rich took all the tax cuts, shafted America and invested them all abroad. All our economic woes can be traced to middle class naively believing the Republicans promises of wealth and prosperity by giving tax cuts to the rich.

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...

Nestle has been bottling the California water, which it takes at some abysmally low cost and ships it out. May be it would be cheaper for California to just buy the entire output of Nestle at market prices than to embark on this desalination process.

The article is written looking at the situation from the POV of an average American. The "grid" is practically non existent in large parts of Africa and South America and lots Asian countries. Even where it exists it is quite unreliable. But in almost all these countries the grid is often a state owned inefficient monopoly. The demand for electricity is high and there are lots of people willing to pay way over what the American utilities charge for power. There was an journalist who recounted rich folks in Karachi, Pakistan, driving around in their air conditioned luxury cars when the grid goes blackout. The counties might be poor, but these rich folks collectively far outnumber the middle class in America. They will provide the market, and the invisible hand will find providers. These folks will underwrite the R&D costs of moving off grid.

Think about it: Half of India does not know when their next meal is going to be. Which means the other half has food security. Still they live in a hand to mouth existence. Half the rest are better off than hand to mouth. Half of the better than hand-to-mouth have decent disposable income. This 1/8 of the population of India is 125 million strong, as big an economy as Japan and bigger than many European countries. Living in a sea of dirt cheap labor, none of the labor saving devices would sell there. But anything not doable by throwing more people in, electric power or cell phone etc will have big markets there. Add Africa and South America, you can bet they will leap frog over the developed countries in off grid power, like India did with cell phones a decade ago.

Many large buildings used to make ice overnight when the electricity rates are low (in some parts) and melt the ice to cool the building during day time reducing the load on the air conditioner. Such techniques would be effective if the electricity rates vary. Like the old long distance plans, having a peak and off-peak pricing alone would encourage the consumers to schedule their washing machines and dishwashers during the off-peak hours.

Number of people needing a machine capable of transcoding 900MB video clips is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of people watching videos. For a long time we made no distinction between content creators and content consumers. The content consumers were buying computers for more powerful than they need, and in that process lowered the cost of computing for content creators.

Now those two groups are moving apart content creators (programmers, video/audio editors, web site creators etc) will have to pay more for their toys. In some remote sense it is returning to the staus quo ante. Content consumers used to watch TV or play back VCR tapes, and content creators worked on special purpose unix workstations or heavy duty analog production facilities. Cost of everything electronic has come down a lot, still powerful machines for content creators is likely to be far more expensive than the ones for content consumers.

Intel USA can sell to Inter-Ireland, which will sell it to China. Probably it is already doing it for double Irish tax dodge. That is probably why Intel did not protest too much and agreed to play along.

The logic seems to be, "we got to do something", "this is stupid", "stupid or not it is something that can be done" "so let us do the stupid thing"

Well, I think I should google for a clinic with anonymous bad reviews in google maps.

Yes, the robots.txt is a good idea. All the good guys who respect robots.txt will stay away. And the Nigerian princes and Bulgarian hackers and the Chinese 413th Cyber Warriors Battalian, and NSA will know which files are sensitive and which are fluff so that they can get the really interesting stuff without having to crawl through the whole backup drive.

The autorickshaw market is brutal, on the customers. It is ripe for taking. The Indian autorickshaw drivers routinely tamper with the meter, haggle with the customer, demand tips on top of the metered rate, refuse to fares etc etc. Most Indians are fed up with them and those who could afford the wait time and money prefer to use "call taxis". But..

It will be a tough market to break into. Most of these autorickshaws are actually owned by the traffic policemen and lower level politicians with strong criminal nexus. The actual driver is usually a hired hand. Some of them rent the vehicle for a flat per-diem rate. The policemen do not enforce the laws on the book for "their" autorickshaws. If they decide to selectively enforce all the law on the book on uber affiliated drivers, Uber will find it difficult to handle.

Unless Uber gets into cahoots with a local politician with enough clout, this won't work for Uber. Even if it works, it won't work for the ordinary Indians. Corruption in USA is distant, does not affect the daily life directly, it is more abstract. In India, it hits you right between the eyes, in every turn. From getting simple driver license renewal to getting the building permits to getting electricity connection to getting a death certificate to legal heir certificate to... every where there is a someone sheepishly grinning with a hand held out, "Saar, take care of the usual saar"

If this theory is right, the process can not be called natural selection. Uniformly distributed affluence, to the extent, height alone determines reproductive success, is very unnatural.

You can't compare a civilized, advanced country like Netherlands with a primitive, brutal, dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all third world country like the USA.

Looks like California is not part of the solar system. It does not seem to be awash in water.

Before we get too far with this thing, what has this guy predicted 5 years ago? How did that turn out? Without some calibration there is no reason to pay attention to his predictions more than the predictions of Satguru Somereallylongnameanandaswami.

How to lie with statistics, trick number one.

95% of the brand A cars build in the last 10 years are still one road, does not mean brand A cars have a 95% chance of lasting 10 years. Only 10% of the cars built over the last 10 years is likely to be 10 years old. So they could be talking of just 50-50 chance of their cars lasting 10 years.