People like Zuckerburg use to found colleges and universities in the US. Now they squabble with Congress for cheap imports.

Can't be. Those are the jobs we're keeping here in the US because we all have $75k degrees. The low skill jerbs go to Asia and we keep all the high paying jobs because the Chinese are magically incapable of EE.

Right?

Remember: Education. It's the future.

Shutting down White House tours is the same brand of statist petulance.

BTW, ordinarily around here the Blue Angles and their ilk are just jingoistic manifestations of the US Military Industrial Complex's hegemony over the victims of global capitalism, and stuff. We're supposed to believe you people suddenly give a damn about these airshow cowboys?

LOL

There are a lot of malcontents around here. Not all of us, however.

There is plenty of room for a good systems programming language. No, we probably don't need another managed, exclusively garbage collected, JIT compiled, VM hosted, 'dynamic' application language. And we've certainly collected enough Javascript front-end languages recently. That's not the intent of Rust.

Prosperity. Economic growth. Energy is the ultimate raw material necessary for these things.

Don't assume everyone shares the premise that we need cheap, abundant and clean energy. You could live out your life inside a three mile radius of your yurt nursing a solar panel. Putting you there is an ideal to which many aspire.

To be clear, I am not among them. I've just shed any illusions about whom I'm dealing with. They've either got theirs or they don't want it (the former being the vastly larger group) and job #1 is stopping you.

Investigating, arresting and prosecuting people for violating these kinds of laws is unbelievably difficult and expensive and rarely nets more than wrist-slaps. Cases take years, litigators cost millions and there is and endless supply of replacement spammers to replace the prosecuted. Governments executives and their staffs know this and have better things to do.

Finding the least statist solution is my preferred remedy in any case; make the practice economically infeasible by creating a generic regulatory mechanism (white/black lists based on working caller ID and enforced by the network operator, perhaps) and leave the cops/prosecutors/courts/prisons out of it.

The carriers are a part of this as well. They facilitate spammers by deliberately not making caller ID work end-to-end in all cases like it should, streamlining mass account provisioning, etc. They get revenue from calls, spam or otherwise. Even your legislators are part of it; they exempt themselves from robocall laws and email spam laws creating all sorts of loop holes and special exceptions in the system that carriers can and do use to deflect blame.

I keep reading about $600 smart phones in stories on this T-Mobile no-contract scheme. You can have an amazing unlocked no-contract quad-core Nexus 4 for $299-349 here. It's HSPA+ which is all you'll get with T-Mobile in most markets anyhow.

If the best argument against this deal is that unlocked iPhones cost too much then sign me up. Data coverage is the real problem with T-Mobile... but perhaps they're really solving that now.

There is no right to be employed either.

I am for freedom. Including the freedom to fire whatever at-will employed asshole I chose for whatever reason I care to indulge. Stop conflating rights as a citizen with employment. You can stand on a corner and voice as many double entendres as you want. You can even earn a living doing that if you're any good. That doesn't mean I have to employ you.

This is factually incorrect. Coal used for power generation is called `steam coal' and the recent growth of US coal exports is due to steam coal.

You may expect all of this to accelerate rapidly. As the story points out, met coal is going to China from the East coast the hard way; via the Atlantic, Cape of Good Hope, etc. Our pollution outsourcing and de-industrialization needs are so great that the Panama Canal is being expanded to accommodate much larger ships. Simultaneously we're waving environmental regs right and left to dredge up East coast bays for those ships.

This will all be up and running in 2015.

Once "Super-Post-Panamax" shipping can haul coal from the East Coast to China via the Pacific we'll see huge growth in coal exports and more de-industrialization. Coal going that way and finished goods coming back.

I noticed this behavior a few years ago when the Apple+Foxconn stories started to appear. After hunting through the comments of a few of those stories I came up with a comprehensive list of rationalizations.

We are comfortable office people steeped in self-loathing. We can equivocate any evil by dismissing criticism as hypocrisy. The fact that in the case of Chinese industry these arguments happen to align with the desire for low cost products produced well outside "the environment" is purely coincidental...

The summary is a troll. Attributing the 'free market' to nuclear power indicates either ignorance or deceit and we're left to ponder which is worse.

Nuclear reactors represent astonishing amounts of wealth and coordination. It is a hallmark of advanced nations that such things are created. For a reactor to exist in the US it must have the blessing of all levels of government. Financing is often backed by one or more government entities. Federal and state governments must actively regulate it. First responders at each level are prepared for emergencies. Rate payers are involved in voting on proposals prior to construction and regulating on-going rates. The timeline (in contemporary Western nations and certain Asian nations) is at least a decade for construction and licensing is a matter of fractions of a century. People are sourced from rarified cohorts such as military navel reactor operators.

In the end the actual operator is a small and even negligible part of the equation. Invoking the 'free market' mantra when dealing with the troubles of nuclear power is a cop out.

I'm cute and I've probably forgotten more about the HTS and US trade than you'll ever know.

The HTS is a fascinating bit of work. For people that don't know, the Harmonized Tariff Schedule is a US government published document that classifies just about every conceivable good and assigns tariffs, duties, etc. It is huge and is now only published in electronic form.

As the parent wrote, most finished goods in the HTS are 0% tariff. There are many things in the HTS with tariffs, but if it's a finished good it is usually exempt from any cost whatsoever. Some exceptions include small arms and autos; the UAW negotiated a 25% domestic value-add requirement in the '80s if foreign manufacturers wish to avoid tariffs. That one requirement is the sole reason that all auto manufacturing hasn't evacuated the US. Today there are dozens of foreign owned auto plants in the southern US writing paychecks to thousands of US workers because of that law.

No other nation is as import friendly as the US. Unless your nation has imams and muftis actively operating uranium isotope centrifuges in a bunker somewhere then you too can export to the US tariff free. You can wreck the environment to whatever degree you wish, abuse, neglect or contaminate however many people you want and it won't even slow down your goods as they get whisked into the US.

That's what domestic manufacturers and the US working class have to compete with for 80% of all finished goods in the US.

We import many, many foreign guns. There are limits, however. The US doesn't allow Norico (the largest small arms manufacturer on Earth, a Chinese company) to import. Also, foreign small arms must get through the ATF points system which limits what can be imported. Also, there are tariffs. Most other imported finished goods have no tariffs.

The result is that although there are large numbers of imported small arms, the limitations and extra costs to importers allow domestic manufacturing to be viable. Thus, we have companies like Ruger and Smith and Wesson; big, successful manufacturers that build most or all of their products in the US. There are also a plethora of small manufacturers.

Domestic small arms manufacturing is among the best evidence that applying some resistance to imports allows domestic manufacturing to thrive.

It's not about logic. It's about comfort. During a phone call there is a noise most people don't typically notice. It's called sidetone (comfort noise, in some cases) and the effect of it is to convey a feeling that the connection is 'working.' When that noise is absent the operator perceives that the connection is 'dead.' The phone doesn't sound 'live' somehow.

Logic would dictate that such subtleties are unnecessary. That pesky old Real World thinks otherwise, however, and expends extraordinary effort to perpetuate these irrationalities on nearly all audio systems including land lines, cells networks, radio, voip, etc.

Progress bars the are visual analog to comfort noise. When there is no progress bar, accurate or otherwise, the system appears dead and people become anxious. The progress bar limits that anxiety to mere impatience.

So 'logic' 'dictates' nothing here. It's about keeping people from pulling their hair out.

As to the original question, why is it so hard to make accurate progress bars, the answer is simple; the problem is exactly as hard as creating a time machine. The exact length of any non-trivial operation is unknown until after the operation is complete. When predicting the future becomes easy progress bars will become accurate.

Even the most basic understanding of mechanics and computing should make the answer obvious. I am genuinely astonished that anyone involved with operating a computer would wonder about it.