*nerd alert*

The original script had The Matrix running in parallel on all the human brains.

Studio execs said that was too confusing and that they should be batteries.

Also Neo is seen on the Nebuchadnezzar with hundreds of acupuncture-looking needles with wires to get his muscles working while he's in a coma.

Writers should have been left alone (a story old as time).

I guess I should clarify. In addition to "just the W2" there's also a monthly, quarterly, or yearly payroll tax report that goes to the IRS, along with a whopping large check for the withholding, as part of normal payroll processing. Different companies do different reporting standards, of course. But they're getting the data a lot more often than you think, just from the money paid in *during* the year, before the return is filed for.

The Earth has frequently been much warmer than it is today and coral reefs grew much faster then.

Perhaps they have a fine point to make but the implications fly in the face of established evidence.

And not shaky evidence - you can go vacation on huge islands made of these old reefs, from when the oceans were higher.

You can go visit Chazy Fossil Reef today and see coral fossils 480 million years old, from when Northern Vermont was a tropical marine environment.

These data aren't disputed in the field.

Throw up a cursive CAPTCHA.

#2 is already happening, that's what the Internal Revenue Service *does*.

50% revision from a survey is not consistent or predictable.

But we do know the answers- just use the information reported to the IRS from every employer doing business in the United States instead.

Maybe we shouldn't need to report the same data to multiple agencies? Estimated taxes, 1099s, and W2 information is already available from the IRS. You don't need to "survey" anybody, you can get down to the penny reads on the entire economy.

We can have shorter work weeks right now. Technological advances have enabled that long ago. The reason we don't have shortened workweeks has absolutely nothing to do with how productive tech has made workers, and everything to do with employers wanting long workweeks.

To most employers, the phrase "short workweek" means "I pay the same but get less out of my people, meanwhile my competitors pay the same but get more from their people." It is simply not rational for them to go for that.

If we want shorter workweeks in America, the means to obtain it is not new tech, but new legislation.

I was 100% C=64 before I transitioned to Apple ][ before I went IBM-PC DOS, briefly Windows/OS2 Warp, then MacOS, then 100% linux, and added Android later.

(sprinkle in some brief CP/M, BeOS, and NetBSD sidequests)

I'll deal with the shift to the next phone platform OK, I think.

I should probably dust off my Pine64 and try the latest builds again. It's been a few years since they were unusable as a daily driver.

Folks, this might be a huge opportunity if you correctly pick the successor and are the first developers.

Corporations: We can afford to pay you much more, but we don't want to. We want to keep that money for ourselves. So, we will pay you only what you could get somewhere else, thus keeping your incentive to leave nice and low while saving money.

On the other hand, our rate of population growth has been dropping so quickly that many people are alarmed. So, the "there aren't enough jobs" problem and the "there aren't enough people" problem seem primed to cancel each other out.

I am sure it won't play out as neatly as that makes it sound. It never does. But after a generation of suffering it looks like it will balance itself out.

Though the "nobody wants to breed anymore" problem is likely to continue and get worse, since none of the root causes are being addressed (nor even admitted-to). So it may eventually overpower the "too many jobs are being automated-away" problem and leave us in dire straits. Hopefully by then the singularity will have happened and our enlightened future borg selves can solve the problem easily.

I love these retro stories from 2012.

What a blast from the past!

This is a retro story from 2012, right?

If I knew that, I'd be a tech billionaire inventing them.

The best part of innovations is that they are NOT obvious, but once they are in the world, you can't do without.

> Python isn't perfect with its syntactically meaningful whitespace nonsense

I know a programmer with a visiospatial disability.

Braces are fine. Python is literally impossible.

I looked at a few 'Python with braces' preprocessors for her but they all seemed to be half-done and not really usable.

I'm not quite sure why.

It's a dumb reason to shut someone out of an entire software ecosystem. Almost every other language is accessible to her.