Thanks for explaining why those billionaires are so dumb.

Exactly. Sure, companies like Google have made a few hundred billion dollars with targeted ads, but, hey, what do they know?

It's amazing how quickly that happens. I work in an industry where we have a very cyclical business climate, so we have frequent layoffs. It usually keeps the engineering staff pretty top-notch. We haven't had a down cycle since the 2008 crash, so the cruft has certainly built up. I can only imagine what happens at a place like Google where the only turnover is people quitting!

I feel the need to plug the Pandas module for Python. It does a lot of R-like operations on huge datasets. It takes care of time-series alignment and has many other nicey-nices. Basically almost everything you think you need to invent to manipulate your dataset is probably already implemented in Pandas.

Or a gigantic application, like Photoshop or MATLAB, that sits in your "Applications" folder. Have you guys never heard of the term "killer app"??? Am I that old?

I think "app" came naturally to long-time Mac people, since there has long been an "Applications" folder which a lot of (most?) people just called the "Apps" folder. This lingo followed the jump to mobile on the iPhone and Windows people were introduced to the term for the first time. MATLAB has long been an "app" for Mac folks.

It was a segue between the claim that we need to do things "smartly", and the inane Pollyanna gibberish that followed.

It means the American voters, because many Americans think that only America matters. Fission reactors are unpopular in America. They are also unpopular in Japan, Germany, Britain, and other countries. But there are also plenty of countries where nukes have public support, including France, China, India, Russia, etc. Fission power is far from dead.

"Per-capita use" is a poor way to estimate the crime generated by a drug. You also have to consider the price of the drug, and today heroin is very cheap. So junkies don't have to commit many crimes to support their habit. The reason for the drop in heroin prices was the US invasion of Afghanistan, which ended the Taliban's efforts to suppress production of the drug, which they considered un-Islamic.

Cars don't last like they used to. I have seen several 100 year old Ford Model-Ts. I have never seen a 100 year old Tesla.

Indeed. Crime rates fell in states that implemented harsh prison sentences, but it also fell in states that did not. It fell slightly more in the "lock-em-up" states, but not near enough to justify the costs.

Other factors:
1. Reduction of environmental lead. This is more strongly correlated with falling crime than any other factor.
2. Abortion. The case for this was laid out well in Freakonomics.
3. Better security, and less stuff to steal. Today, cameras are everywhere, alarm systems are much more common, and most people don't have as much to steal. People carry credit cards instead of cash, modern electronics has very little resale value, and nobody uses real silver silverware anymore.
4. Video games. Young men in their prime crime years spend billions of hours playing video games, leaving far less time on the street getting in trouble.

I actually agree on the "old style" Thinkpads, but recent models look more and more like Lenovo's other stuff so I don't know how confidant I am. We all have Thinkpads at work and even the last generation was uneven, with the cheaper models acting... well, cheap. The old-school stuff was very high-quality.

Punishments have not gotten weaker, instead there are fewer crimes being committed. I'm sure people will make all sorts of claims why... the Freakonomics guys claim it was abortion, others say the end of the crack epidemic, and others point to the crackdown on crime and harsh sentences enacted during the late 80s and 90s. Whatever the reasons, the jails are not filling up because there are fewer criminals - not because we've changed attitudes.

With some simple reforms, the delays and costs could be massively reduced. Some of the testing phases could be combined or eliminated. Computer simulations could be used for some early phases. The US could accept more testing done overseas, as long as appropriate protocols are followed. And there could be harsh financial sanctions on bureaucrats that let applications sit in their inbox while patients are dying.

Those are not mutually exclusive. If innovation enables you to extract rents, then of course that will encourage innovation.