The EU isn't a rival. European companies might be rivals of American companies, and vice versa. Economically speaking, that's no different from competing with domestic companies.

That's another goofy thing about contemporary economic and political reporting. Countries don't trade and don't compete economically. People do. Talking about a country doing this or that economically is just shorthand for saying some of the people in the country did this or that.

We've been over this a dozen times. No doubt we'll be over this a dozen more.

What's goofy about this mindset is the middle class today is way, way better off than the middle class in 1960. Houses are larger and more luxurious, cars are safer, food is more abundant, healthy, and inexpensive, travel is cheap, education is more widespread, entertainment is more varied and better (except rock and roll, that peaked about 1972). No one can look at our material standard of living now and honestly say they think things were better in the past.

(Here's an example: within arms reach I have at least five computers, two laptops, two phones, and a tablet, any one of which might be more powerful that all the computers on Earth in 1960 combined.)

There are any number of charts available showing that the middle class (by income deciles) is smaller than it was in real terms because we're mostly in higher income brackets. The middle class shrank because they became wealthy, not because they became poor. And they became wealthy because they moved en masse to jobs more productive than turning a bolt in a Chevy factory.

I don't understand the fixation on manufacturing. It's as if people think that's the only way to create value. There are lots of other ways, as witnessed by 80% of the US economy being services (e.g. banking, insurance, health care, education, professional services, entertainment, and my industry, software development).

We decreased our manufacturing jobs because we had other, more productive, things for Americans to do. Or to put it another way, our comparative advantage is in services, not manufacturing.

Successful companies produce great products at prices people are happy to pay, making everyone involved better off. How's that not being socially responsible?

That was the essence of Friedman's point, that serving customers is and ought to be the only goal for a company. You tell you're doing that well by measuring your profit.

I read a great report by the Rocky Mountain Institute around 2000. They went through all the math of various hydrogen solutions, taking into account all the various efficiencies. It would be fun to see an update.

As I wrote, suppose you have a spare kWh of electric power. What do you do with it? There's lots of choices, including just "venting" it if it turns out none of the storage solutions are cheaper than just burning a cubic foot of natural gas. The good news is we seem to have lots of people trying various things. If we're open minded about which solutions work, and follow the data even when it doesn't support our favored solutions, we'll eventually find what works best.

Right. And that's the interesting question, what's the best way to store surplus solar/wind electricity? Batteries? Hydrogen (to be burned or to run a fuel cell)? Sold to other grids who need it and bought back when they have a surplus? As hot sand?

I wouldn't jump to the assumption that generating, storing, and burning hydrogen is obviously best. It does have the nice benefit that one might generate it on-site (you've got the high capacity tie to the grid just sitting there, right?) and you're using a very efficient turbine/generator, which apparently we already intended to buy.

Sure but means (a) you may get fewer loads done in a given evening and (b) you're more likely to be tying up a dryer someone else wants to use and (c) more likely to find someone put your clean dry undies in an untidy pile somewhere.

My oven is wifi-conected. In theory, when the timer goes off, I can turn the oven off. But I have to wander into the kitchen anyway to take the food out so I've always been a little puzzled why this is a win. Until the oven comes with robot arms, it's an incomplete solution.

OTOH, being able to check the state of my garage doors, irrigation, and pool gear is often handy. I wouldn't ditch the dedicated controls for a phone app but they're nice complements.

I can also imagine that for new construction, I might want to disassociate switches from outlets. It would be nice to change what each switch does if needed. For the most part everything wired when the house was built is great. When I add switches or outlets, it would be nice to be able to program things. I'm not going to renovate my entire house around this, mind you.

The biggest issue I see is technical obsolescence. The gizmos I bought 10 years ago are at end-of-life and I don't want to keep replacing all my outlets every decade or so. When standards settle down and interoperability is a thing, maybe I'll rethink it.

Which is actually the best argument for twice annual clock changes. That's a good compromise between everyone getting up at the same(ish) time relative to sunrise while also letting us use published and well-know schedules ("the store opens at 9 AM").

I used to think we should just leave the clocks alone and if you wanted more evening light, start your day earlier. But think of the confusion that causes. Every store, office, and human interaction would be in flux all the time. "Oh, I forgot, your office opens at 7 AM May through September and 8 AM the rest of the year; ours opens at 7 AM April through October, because we're further north than you."

I'm starting to think that changing clocks stinks but is less bad than the alternatives.

I agree. Bluetooth connectivity is the biggest headache tethering my phone. You'd think we'd know how to do this by now. Alas, no.

Google and the app vendors also handle the app GUI tech. That's hugely important. I find Google Maps much more usable than the map app built into my car.

To your point, however, I'd prefer GM spent their clever beans on improving the connection experience, building better physical controls (I love, love, love the physical controls in my car), and integrating a better screen.

There's actually more. Android Auto doesn't just show up on the rectangular screen in the middle of the dash. In my vehicle, the turn by turn nav also shows up in the middle of the (glass) instrument cluster and on a HUD. That's not all Google's doing, someone at the manufacturer put effort into that. All in all, the integrated experience is fantastic.

You misunderstand me. I think nuclear could be great. It's politically and economically challenging now but I expect in 100 years, we'll have a lot of nuke plants. Let's get started on that now.

While we're at that, if you wanted to have a positive impact sooner, you could convert a coal plant to natural gas. You wouldn't have even finished the first draft of the nuclear plant's environmental impact statement by the time the conversion would be done. In fact, by the time the nuke plan is on-line, it'll be time to retire the gas plant. Win-win!

Ah. I'm seeing it now. Yes, FP boundary conditions and weird interactions between word sizes and bitwise operations, yeah, those could bite you in the a$$. We've been trying to tightly bound the defined and undefined behaviors for years, and warn about undefined and thus undependable behavior to no avail.

Interesting. Except in a few cases (e.g. I worked on a storage system which experimented with hardware-accelerated compression and encryption), I don't think I've ever worked on a piece of code which hardware crypto or vectors. If they did, for the most part the hardware-specific stuff was in a library you could, in theory, swap out.

Either that or I was working on an embedded systems which was so completely tied to the CPU, memory, busses, and I/O that porting it to some other platform was essentially a re-write.

Sure, but it's not like we ask coal mines to indemnify people in their surroundings, or coal plants to make whole people who get doused in radioactive soot. Nor do we make solar panel farms compensate anyone for the mine tailings from rare earth mines.

In theory, yes, we should strive to internalize externalities. In practice, it's often quite difficult. Historically we haven't done so.