That's not what I said.

So? When THIS is what capitalism gets us, I guess socialism can't be so bad.

Agreed. For more than one reason, and from personal experience. I've had both, a crew of code monkeys and a small but incredibly efficient team of well paid but also very good programmers. To say that the latter were vastly outperforming the former (for less money in total, too) is an understatement.

Two people doing each 50% of work will not compensate for one person who could do 100%. Simply due to a lack of information. One person has, by design, all the information that person has. This is not true for two people who should do this one person's work instead. They have to synchronize and exchange information, and that invariably fails at some level as we all know, where you either lose efficiency by having to design an interface between these people or, lacking this, lose even more efficiency when their interface just doesn't work out.

In the end, you're better off with FEWER, but BETTER people than you could ever be with a truckload of code monkeys. Yes, even if they cost a multiple of the monkeys. A billion code monkeys with keyboards will never write the better OS.

And that's what's wrong with the USA today. Working simply doesn't pay anymore. Not working and having others work for you does.

In earlier days, we called them spongers and leeches, but in today's world where everyone needs a title, it's CEO.

>We, europeans see you like living in a police state

Do you live in the UK? I'd love for you to be from the UK, as that would be really rich. I'm surprised the UK hasn't mandated cameras strapped to the head of every citizen yet.

>Life in America is much worse nowadays than most of the rest of the world.

Bullfuckingshit. I've travelled the world. There's only a few places I'd love to live more than America, and those places aren't very practical places to live.

LOL. No working around it. It's like when you go to a scientist or a mathematician with a question expecting a clear "yes" or "no" answer and they start: "Well, it depends..." ;)

Here's another one for your collection then. I read once an esoteric buddhist answer it thus: "No, gods are irreal, a figment of imagination. But you are too."

A Buddhist here. What happens is that Buddhism doesn't care. If gods don't exist, that's fine. If they do, they don't matter. So, why bother? Consequently, you'll find Buddhists who do believe in gods and somehow insert them into their practice because "why not?"; others who do but don't because "they're not important"; others who don't and don't because "meh"; and still others who don't and do, because "why not?" (more or less my case, as I think the concept of gods useful in an abstract, poetic kind of way). In any case it doesn't make the person to be more or less of a Buddhist.

I guess a way to better picture it then would be by making a comparison with politics. If atheism were to be the "extreme left" of the line, and theism its "extreme right", with agnosticism as middle left, Buddhism would be a bubble in the middle spreading into both directions, covering the center-left to center-right range and touching both agnosticism on the left side and, well, whatever agnosticism's mirror image is on the right one.

That image fits well with Buddhism's self description as (and preaching of) a middle path, as whenever you posit some radical dichotomy to a Buddhist, no matter the subject, he'll usually answer with something akin to "both", "neither" or, if your question happens to include these two additional options, with "none of the above". It's just how Buddhism works. :-)

That is my first concern. If they eat wood, its bad news... really bad news. If they eat other bugs, I am gonna leave them alone.

If they like termites, where can I get some?

Over 100 posts and not a single Super Mario reference...

I haven't seen Into Darkness but a lot of this review covered what was painfully realized in the first movie: no longer is Trek about philosophy, ethics, tolerance, gray areas and real world problems. It's mostly absolute good versus absolute evil. I think the driving force behind the bad guy in the first movie was largely a misunderstanding ... which is incredibly boring. His motivation was confusingly laughable.

Unsurprisingly I'm pretty sure I heard JJ Abrams tell Jon Stewart that "he never liked Star Trek" on The Daily Show. Well, now he's had a chance to kill it by turning it 100% into a modern day blockbuster action flick and shirking any attempt to tackle an interesting philosophical or ethical dilemma as the main plot. As the modern reemergence of comic book and super hero movies have shown, those films are a dime a dozen that anyone can do. Tackling something deeper while still holding our attention is the hard part. The Watchmen was a good candidate for it but fell short. I'm sure JJ Abrams would rather cover up the complicated parts that question good versus evil with another lens flare.

Yep. I made the mistake of watching the 2009 Star Trek. It was a disaster of a movie. A lot of people have told me they think it's a good movie, just not a good Trek movie, but I don't think it's even a very good movie on its own rights. Horrible plot. Horrible characterization. Horrible product placement.

Again, simple job creation isn't going to cut it, but there are quite a few things that could be improved in the country that requires workforce AND would improve the infrastructure and standard of living of many people.

So do I, and I was appalled when I went to the US for a few months. This was the big role model for economy, of growth and progress? The electric infrastructure (in California, not backwater hicksville) reminded me of our countryside in the late 1960s, and I found hemp isolation on the wires in the buildings. I was kinda wary to use the tap water for anything but washing hands, I didn't consider it impossible that they used lead pipes, too.

Fuck, I've seen better infrastructure in the former East Bloc, and those of you who've been to countryside Romania know what THAT means!

It's more likely to be invested somewhere, somehow. But that doesn't solve the economy problem, it adds to it. We don't need money on the supply side, we need money on the demand side of economy. That's the problem our economy is facing, a lack of demand. Look around you, does it seem like there is any shortage of any goods? Or any kind of service? The problem is that the stockpiles are full but there's nobody who could still buy the crap we produce, or request and pay for the service offered. That is the economy problem today.

We don't need more investment money. We need more spending money. Our economy needs consumers who want to and who can consume. That's a given. Now, our products are good enough that the consumers would want to consume, what's lacking is their ability to do it.

We need money on the demand side to restart our economy into its former strength. We need to SELL, people!

The idea itself is correct, though. It worked in the 30s with the Hoover Dam, which was of course a project to produce electricity and regulate the Colorado to avoid droughts and floods, but it also created an incredible amount of jobs during a time when jobs were sorely needed. Pretty much like today.

I could well see another, similar project, maybe in the south east of the US to protect it from Hurricane floods. There are many projects you could create that don't lead to an overabundance of certain infrastructural systems that lead to more problems. We could actually use that time (and money) to solve problems we have, create jobs at the same time and in the end create better living conditions in the long run.

Punishing "not spending" sounds about right in this economy where our problem is pretty much that people stopped spending.