Yeah, if you manage to build a few thousand new reactors that might work but I have a feeling that's not realistic.

Lets run the numbers. US-version. Google states about 8 x 10^19 joules for total energy consumption. A 1 GW nuclear reactor running 24 x 365 is about 3 x 10^16 joules. So roughly 2,700 nuclear reactors.

We may need a long-term plan. ;)

this is what works for me: hideously ugly and decrepit luggage. Since 1992. Never failed once.

FYI: This can often be found at your local thrift store for a very reasonable price.

"Crime rate", yes. But the presence of guns determines the murder rate.

It isn't that simplistic. Else states like Iowa, which have a sizable percentage of households with guns, wouldn't have a lower murder rate than some European nations with strict gun control laws.

Dwarf Fortress would be better then SimCity. While it allows you the overall control and planning element (managing many little minions who do all the work), it still offers you a great amount of creativity (which all variants of SimCity lack). What Simcity does better, Dwarf Fortress does even better.

DF teaches you that the people need alcohol. ;)

Having a Samsung phone is like having a nametag that says "hello, i'm a cheap fucker" on it.

No, my phone says "hey, I'm cheap". It's an old LG dumbphone on a very low-cost plan.

Sooner or later you'll hopefully grow up and realize that some people use a phone as a phone, and some people are willing to pay for a high tech phone with all the bells and whistles. Neither are necessarily bad, but if you're running around judging people on a phone, you're pretty dumb. It's like judging people based on the computer they have or the car they drive or where they live.

One day you may have the maturity to realize items you purchase should serve you, and not the other way around. That includes the cost of obtaining and maintaining those items. I've splurged before and I'll splurge again when it comes to buying stuff that's important to me. But I'm not going to sink money into a phone just to raise myself a notch or two on the public coolness meter.

For some people, they find a high-tech smartphone useful enough or desirable enough to justify the cost. More power to them. I'd rather spend my money on something else, or save it in a bank.

I know which cars in my own neighborhood belong to residents, because I live here and have a set of eyes that let me learn shit like that. I assume the person you are responding to has a set of eyes as well.

In the US at least, some apartment complexes have a mixture of subsidized and unsubsidized apartments.

A previous coworker of mine lived in one, and while he wasn't on federal assistance, he did buy a nicer BMW. I used to joke that when people saw his car pull into his apartment building, they'd bitch and moan about welfare leaches.

It was not anger that resulted in the ambassador's murder in Libya. It was an organized terrorist attack, timed to occur on 9/11.

Why are you assuming that anger and terrorism are exclusive?

I'm guessing that angry people are more likely to become terrorists and support terrorism than happy people.

Usually with these mining scenarios, you go from super high grade (ore) scenarios to poorer and poorer ones

Not always the case. Up by the small mining town of Tower, Minnesota, is a mine. To science geeks, the mine is notable for detecting neutrinos fired from Fermilab (near Chicago) in a long-running physics experiment.

It's rather rich in hematite, with high grade ore, some so high grade a magnet will stick to it.

The mine closed down decades ago. Ores nearer to the surface, even low grade ores such as taconite, were preferred due to lower costs to extract. Open pits are cheaper than deep mines.

Economics leads to some "weird" solutions. Some ores aren't considered viable, even if they are high grade, because other ores are cheaper. The reverse is also true - oil sands and shale are now viable because the cost of oil has risen, even though oil sands/shale are poorer producers.

47 million on food stamps, average welfare spending per poor household is HIGHER than median income

Lets do a back of the napkin check for that.

Median household income is $50k (roughly) in the US. Assume all 47 million on food stamps are poor. (Seems fair enough). Assume average household size in the US is 2.6, and that poor people are similar (some poor with kids, some elderly single poor, should average out.)

So that's 18 million households in poverty. At $50k per household, that's 18 * 50 billion in spending. Or .9 trillion.

Seems doable. So I dug up what appears to be your source of the information, and find it's roughly $60k of spending per poor household, and a hair over a trillion total spent.

[Just an aside - this is why back of the napkin estimates can be pretty accurate - I probably screwed up on some of the estimates, but it's close enough that the errors somewhat balance out.]

To break down the spending, a third of that is healthcare. The elderly poor are probably eating up a big chunk of that, as well as poor kids. About a quarter of that is "state contributions to federal welfare", which I assume is the state's share of the cost of federal welfare programs. (Not sure how the state contribution works - is it mostly medicare/caid, or SNAP, or housing assistance, etc?). $245 billion goes to direct cash aid and foodstamps, or roughly $13,600 per household. Another $90 billion, or $5,000 per household, goes to housing programs. $70 billion is other social programs, which seems vague (are Pell grants counted, even if they don't go to the poor? Does it count unemployment payments?).

To put it politely, the quality of USB chargers and powered hub wall warts is excitingly variable. If you are trying to run an ARM SoC, a USB ethernet controller, and possibly a couple of other downstream devices, all with just a +5 rail of potentially erratic specs, that isn't good for reliability. By going with the USB socket, they opened the field to every last dollar-store iCharger knockoff and its creative interpretation of what +5vDC looks like...

Agreed. I picked up a microUSB "travel charger" for my Pi. Claims 1000 ma. It doesn't give the USB enough power to find a network with a wireless dongle.

A kindle keyboard charger at 850 ma powers up the network every time. So does feeding the Pi off a USB hub.

So, lesson learned. Weird issues -> check the power adapter.

What? You dont get them for the articles?

You can get compilations of the Playboy Interviews in book form.

They are worth the read.

Ironically, for all the jokes about getting those types of magazines for the articles, some of them had really decent articles and short fiction.

From Wikipedia: On returning to the house after the fire in the company of fireman Ron Franks, Willingham said that he had been over earlier and poured flammable British Sterling cologne in the hallway from the bathroom to the bedroom in which the twins had died, because they had loved its smell when they were alive.[9]

You would have found him guilty because he poured cologne on the remains of the house after the fire?

No, what is needed are not cameras. What is needed are some combination of:

One thing you missed: Better traffic lights.

Traffic lights do contribute to delays of traffic flow. They slow down traffic, and the contribute to useless delays, as anyone who has sat at a long red light, waiting for cross traffic that doesn't exist.

I'd argue that any large country (I'm looking at you, US) has an incentive to improve traffic light. Right now, the most common intelligent traffic light has ground loops to detect when cars are at the intersection. In this day and age, couldn't we do better?

Imagine a traffic light that could "see" traffic approaching from a distance. It could also see traffic backed up to the light. Instead of turning red when a car or two is approaching and the cross traffic is non-existent, it could remain green. Instead of turning green when traffic is backed up to the light, it could let other traffic, which is clear to continue, go.

Just imagine the time and fuel savings!

And finally, I'd have to say, in this day and age, sometimes intelligence is overrated (even though this negates the above). As a young adult, the traffic lights in my town sensibly shifted to blinking yellow and red at late hours when the traffic was light. The most common through traffic would get blinking yellows. The underused cross streets would get a blinking red. Then, years later, they replaced the traffic lights with a more modern type that would detect when a car was waiting and change the light. This was useless in a small town - approaching from a cross street would result in a longer delay (as the other light would go through a yellow/red change), and if you were on the main street when a car had to cross, you'd have to wait for the red/green change for just one vehicle.

Really, considering how much time Americans spend on the road, and how much time is lost, small improvements result in a big gain in time not lost and gas not burned.