Free up the human capital to do what exactly? I like the Star Trek vision as much as anyone, but it's not like we can go explore the galaxy on star ships because we're freed from working in factories.

I think even Star Trek illustrates that work and even existential struggle is an essential part of our development as humans. Kirk had more than one soliloquy to that effect.

Perhaps we might get farther as a society and an economy if we value work and employees as assets rather than mere costs and liabilities. Would change the focus of what we are making and why we are making them.

Awesome! Let me know when you're ready to work union free on the assembly lines in the widget factories. Or to pick produce. Or do you think you're somehow in the management class?

Your belief is shared by a lot of my republican-voting family members. I'm skeptical this belief is warranted. I never in my wildest dreams thought it possible the unprecedented and permanent changes Trump has made to the character of the institutions of American government over the last 11 months.

Until now presidents respected and upheld the idea that executive institutions were loyal to the constitution and the country and the president's job was to enact policies that would guide them, and make sure Congress' laws were followed. Civil servants would do their best to make these policies a reality, with the constitution being the guiding light. The president never had power to fire mere bureaucrats just because he didn't like them personally---in fact the idea that a president would have a personal interest in any civil servants was absurd. This led to stable institutions that allowed for peaceful transfer of power and made the US very powerful, even if it sometimes seemed schizophrenic to the outside world. This was admired and envied around the world.

Now it's different. These institutions are completely partisan now. They no longer serve the country, but serve the president personally. Can you imagine they will allow a peaceful transition of power and serve the new president as they have the current one? A Democrat would have to completely fire absolutely everyone every time he got in office. We've already seen the chaos this has caused. Imagine every president doing this when he first gets in? What a disaster! And add to that the inevitable temptation to ever increase presidential power. They will do so to "get things done and back to normal."

These are watershed events that we're witnessing play out, and unfortunately just as permanent as brexit.

Unfortunately this lesson is continually lost on many who push for separation and sovereignty of various kinds. For example those calling for western separation in Canada. Canada as a whole is already a very tiny market with minimal world bargaining power. Yet these geniuses think that a small subset of Canada would somehow have more clout in the world than all of Canada does. Because freedom and oil or something. They are completely delusional. Possibly they think they would join the US which is entirely possible, but even that will come at great personal expense. A Faustian bargain if there ever was one. Ironically some of the people who stand to lose the most, such as farmers, tend to be the most supportive of such an idea. The lessons of Brexit are plain to see, but very few see much these days.

1280x800 is noticeably blurry, especially at 10.5" or whatever it was. For 7 or 8" yes it's just fine.

But it's a great song, even if the story line is a big improbable now.

Too bad Rush didn't know that EVs can out-accelerate any ICE sports car of that era by a huge margin despite weighing 50% more, and even out-accelerate any current ICE vehicle quite handily. Outside of maybe super cars, any sports car of that era would feel pretty anemic to modern drivers. Corvette in 1981 could do 0-60 in 8 seconds and for a time was considered America's fastest car. Today my SUV with a Pentastar can do it in about 7.5. California drivers would think anything under 10 seconds is unsafe. The difference is torque, though. My pentastar downshifts at the slightest hint of a hill, whereas the 80s sports car wouldn't even notice.

Absolutely true. And not troll, mods.

By the way I no longer sure how meta moderation is supposed to work. It used to be quite simple but now I'm not quite sure what they want me to do.

I'd say the vast majority of people are in #2, and not because they want to be necessarily. When you're holding down two jobs to feed the family, whatever it takes to get to work trumps the other things you could do to help reduce CO2 emissions.

I used to follow Chris as he does draw attention to things the CCP would rather we didn't know about. But when he started believing Trump will save us from China I was done. Besides that, a lot of talk about China's imminent destruction is wishful thinking and just a touch arrogant. Our own current form of capitalism isn't working so well either anymore. The CCP will fall sooner or later, I have no doubt, and for many of the reasons Chris talks about. But our western socioeconomic systems are just as likely to fail also in that same time frame.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of very smart, hard-working Chinese that are building some pretty good cars, even if they have too many of them. Ford's CEO drove a Chinese EV daily for months and he was impressed and said publicly we're way behind. Of course he only cares about making luxury cars and not affordable cars, so we're screwed either way.

I thought it imploded two days ago. Now Slashdot tells me it's imploding again today? Sounds like they have a real problem on their hands.

Every genre has its formula. For the boy band era, Da Vinci's Notebook satired that formula quite nicely with their song, "Title of the Song." https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Meh. DJs don't even enter into it. Most people turn on spotify these days for background music. It's not a huge jump from Spotify "curating" a bunch of music to a personalized bot that pumps out a steady stream of background noise for your life's soundtrack.

I bought one of these. Horrible low res screens. No auto screen dimming. Slow, older generation processors. Also most of them lie about their specs. 12 gb of RAM! Actually just 4 GB with 8 GB of swap enabled. I bought it because i figure it I can get my software that I'm developing running on it decently with those low specs out should run everywhere. But I wouldn't recommend this tablet to anyone.

To each his own. To me nothing sounds worse than auto-tuned -sounding country music.