Actually, a lot (maybe most) hardware is not a commodity. We still build a lot of hardware here in the U.S. All kinds of embedded gadgets get designed here and a good number of them are manufactured here. They are quite profitable. A lot of supercomputing hardware is still built here and almost all of it is designed here.

While I agree that software is important (and lucrative) we can't just give up on building hardware. At the very least, doing so has a bunch of national security implications.

The core cities were in no way "shut down" during or after any storm last year. Frankly, I was amazed how well the city crews did given the parking challenges they face that suburban municipalities generally don't. I live in Minneapolis very close to downtown. We were fully functional throughout the winter.

Minnetonka is a big city, geographically. While you're right that not all of it is super-wealthy, almost all of it is wealthy. And while the eastern border is about a 20 minute drive from Minneapolis, reaching the lake takes at least 40 minutes from Minneapolis without traffic so it's not exactly close.

This is a data center. There is absolutely no reason it needs to be physically close to its customers. I don't think there are many large corporate headquarters near where this thing would be. The Golden Triangle in Eden Prairie is possibly the closest, or perhaps the Carlson Towers area. I totally believe the tax writeoff scam explanation. It's clearly a way to rig the system to suck even more money out of the general welfare.

You misunderstand the problem. Antibiotics are not the problem. The overuse of antibiotics is the problem. I hear about this every single week from my wife, who is a provider. She constantly gets pressured by patients to prescribe antibiotics when they are clearly not necessary or justified. We have to change the culture of medical care here in the U.S.

I do this all the time. I always buy as locally as I can both to support local businesses and to ensure that the public interest is served with the tax money I owe. Amazon does provide a nice review service, though I usually look other places first. That said, I will buy from an online retailer if I can't find the item anywhere else, which is distressingly more and more common.

I don't buy the "Amazon has no presence and thus no responsibility" argument. Amazon benefits hugely from local investments, from schools to roads (not fully paid for by the shippers, BTW), to public internet infrastructure. They have a responsibility to collect the taxes that contribute to upkeep of local infrastructure.

This is really overdue. Not only does sales tax exemption create an unfair advantage for out-of-state retailers (which is bad for the local and thus national economy), it depletes funding for civilization. And yes, Amazon does use public infrastructure to operate its business and no, shippers do not pay the Amazon's share of that infrastructure. Amazon uses all sorts of local services. Amazon operates as part of our civilization and thus should be contributing to its upkeep.

Perhaps it has something to do with the federal highway trust fund being bankrupt. Because...(wait for it)...gas taxes are too low!

That's fine, you need a car for your job. But that doesn't mean everyone or even most people do. Most of us could really make good use of a convenient transit system. Just because one solution doesn't work for everyone doesn't mean you give up on providing it. We're in serious need of multi-modal transportation in this country. We're literally destroying our economy with our dependence on oil and the automobile.

Spare me the disingenuous reply. I've got news for you: the poor already can't afford a car given the maintenance cost. If we had proper investment in public transit we'd have a lot fewer people dependent on cars. But no, shifting just a bit of money from roads to transit is anathema in this country.

I care. Not about the time specifically but the tremendous amount of money we waste building and maintaining multi-lane freeways to places 70 miles away from the urban core. It's a gigantic waste of resources that could be put to much better use elsewhere.

Have you even spent any length of time in Chicago. No, I know you haven't given your completely ignorant statement. And no, Detroit is not a hell-hole either.

What, the last 30 years and its record levels of economic disparity don't count?

Can anyone explain this design decision? It makes no sense to me. What they really want is function overloading. It reminds me of Fortran 2003 and its dumb, dumb, dumb implementation of polymorphism.

So there are some interesting arguments in your comment that I'd like to address.

That's true for some (perhaps many) languages. Data models are often difficult to translate. That doesn't invalidate the statement that your use of "always" is simply incorrect. Perhaps my use of "usually" was a bit strong. I was thinking in terms of mainstream languages. They mostly all look similar to each other. Common implementation of C++ inheritance is "only" structs and arrays of function pointers. It's not great semantics for the compiler but projects like Self show that you can get good performance if you're willing to put in the resources to get there. Often it's not worth it and current implementations are "good enough."

Itanium is a really interesting case study. I remember reading and discussing the original IMPACT papers. We quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn't going to work, long before Intel ever shipped an Itanium. Why? Because it required deep dependence analysis on codes primarily written in languages that don't support that (C). The IA64 ISA is a house of cards. If you can't do all of the required static speculation, it falls apart. With enough analysis, profile feedback ,etc. I'm sure one can do it. But it's not worth the effort where the powerful hardware of x86 is so cheap and easy to use. So yes, language semantics matters a lot and hardware engineers need to be aware of the issues. I don't think I've ever claimed otherwise.