That is indisputable, and should Chernobyl had a secondary containment, it would have been an accident a little worse than Three Mile Island

Oh yes it most certainly is disputable - the steam explosion was huge and it's almost certain that a containment vessel similar to the one at TMI would have been destroyed.

or did you just shift the goalposts to try to win some silly little mass debate game?

Actually a DS is much more powerful than my example, and has dedicated sound hardware as well. If implemented well and it's not doing anything else those "50 things" may well be within it's reach. There's an emulator of a real multitrack synth that runs on the DS which has got to be more complex than native decoding and playing a few tracks. "50 things"? Let's get to that.
I think that this stuff must be modelled very badly in the first place if your "50 things" are happening and implemented very badly if close to cutting edge hardware can't do however many things the real task, and not imaginary "50 things" task, involves.

These things do not model walking through an orchestra pit in exacting detail.

I'm not looking at highest overall pay, but highest incremental pay, vs. if you self-taught that field. CS degrees pay a lot, but their incremental value is not nearly as high, b/c self-taught programmers also get good salaries. Therefore, if you are going to do CS, the incremental value of getting a degree in it vs. just self-teaching is not that high.

Now compare people with liberal-arts degrees to people who are looking for liberal-arts jobs without having a degree. Now here you see a big differential: people looking for liberal arts jobs with no college degree don't have many offers coming.

In yet other news ... here's an idea! If you are concerned about propaganda causing your citizens to become "radicalized", why not take the most effective steps possible to prevent that? Create the most sane, free, reasonably run society in which civil rights are sacrosanct, all of the laws are sensible, and all of the laws are equally enforced.

You'll find that far fewer of the citizens would ever want to do anything to oppose that. It's more effective than playing whack-a-mole with an ever-growing list of terrorists.

Bill Gates himself even says that he's a dumb example of a college dropout. Not only because the odds of following his trajectory are small, but because he was basically at the point of graduating when Microsoft blew up. Had Microsoft gotten its big break 6 months later, he would've graduated, but it got big and he ran with it. He didn't drop out and then roll the dice.

I seem to recall some numbers that the differential value of a college degree is actually highest outside of STEM. Can't seem to find them again, but would be interesting to look at.

It makes sense if you think of it from the "negative" side: how do you fare looking for a job without a degree? If you are looking for tech jobs, a degree is valuable but you can still get a good job without one: CS degrees are not required for all tech jobs, not even all six-figure tech jobs. The incremental value of being a programmer vs. being a programmer with a degree is positive but modest.

But if you are looking for non-tech jobs without even having a liberal-arts degree, then you are effectively hosed. All those mid-five-figure white-collar administrative jobs in a typical Fortune 500 company are filled by people with liberal-arts degrees. Why? Because companies find it a useful filter. Not perfect, but better than nothing: if you want to select for "likely to be a decent employee, show up on time, follow directions, write English sentences coherently", and you have 50 applicants with degrees and 50 without, you just pick someone out of the 50 who have a degree.

That's a software issue. The last time I had trouble getting enough processing power to decode mp3 files it was because I was using a 586 - I was too much of a cheapskate to get an Intel Pentium 60 to do that task. Even then it was fine in mono.

That wasn't in 1986 was it?

There's some impressive micro casting stuff being worked on - but like the full sized stuff you need the right sort of dirt prepared very carefully :)
Also stuff capable of reducing handfuls of a wide range of oxides to metals in a nice compact backyard form could leave a nice little crater if that energy is released in the wrong way. Hot hydrogen gas is probably one of the least dangerous on the list.

Excellent Smithers!
It appears that the education cuts under Reagan have worked with this one.

I would truly love to see some Libertarians create a precise quantitative model of how they think societies and economies work for the rest of us to examine and critique

By asking them to think in detail about their suggestions you are telling them to stop being Libertarians!


OK, so that's both cruel and not entirely accurate since the only thing the extremes of that bunch have in common is they like the word liberty - but it does apply to some of the more noisy ones.

However being resource rich doesn't matter much when all the manufacturing jobs are being done by people in other places.

I really don't get why people think 100% of either was a good thing in the first place. Even Rupert Murdoch is big on state funded education (so long as someone else's taxes are paying for it).

The sad thing about that series is the readers could predict who the mule was but not the characters. Maybe that was deliberate but it still annoyed me a bit.