You can easily have an abundance of STEM people overall, and yet have a shortage of people in specific fields. The shortage is of course most likely in new and in growing fields, while surpluses are most likely in old and settled, or declining areas.

So, mismatch can easily explain the discrepancy without ascribing malicious intent to anybody (which is not to say there is none). Instead the problem really is the tension between learning a field and training for a specific job.

Seems US and European corporations are more and more insistent on finding workers that fit right into a specific job with little to no training*. Which seems good in the short term, but people with mostly job-specific training will have a much harder time retraining for a different kind of job when the winds inevitably change. They'll act as anchors for their employers, and collectively reduce the pool of qualified replacements if or when their employers decide to kick them to the curb.

I suspect that this practice is in fact bad in the short term as well; but since the effects across the life cycle of an employee are felt in very different parts of an organization it's not a waste that any one person will normally notice.

* Japanese corporations, on the other hand, go overboard in the other direction. They hire mostly or only new graduates for any career jobs, and you - and the company - generally don't even know what you will actually be doing once you start. They want to hire blank slates they can train and mold as they see fit.

Who on Earth could make enough gin to balance out that much ice?

Before you ask, my hands on IT job prevents me from working from home. No matter how hard you try you can't rack a server from your house...

But a maintenance robot could do it for you. That kind of light industrial environment is probably among the first to become robot-equipped. You have excellent control over the area and can adapt it as needed. The people you replace are skilled and well-paid. Unlike semi-public places such as hospitals there's (or will be) few to no humans, and especially no unauthorized humans, around. And unlike heavy industries, making errors won't lead to catastrophe.

Would that replace all admins? Of course not. But how many fewer admins would you need if people mostly didn't need to be on-site for each and every data center? You could concentrate most admin work for lots of data centers to a single site, with perhaps one or two roaming admins to go on-site when needed.

This year I accidentally arranged 100,000ish logic gates into a functioning circuit for use in microprocessor products made by my employer, by using the design tools and design processes available to me.

> It was discovered by accident as scientists researching climate change mapped Greenland's bedrock by radar.

If you discover a canyon while scanning the bedrock with radar, that isn't an 'accidental' discovery. An accidental discovery is when you're looking for a dropped contact lens and come across a canyon instead.

If a court got a conviction on that basis, it would be because they chose to do so, but not because they had any proof. Thus an injustice is done and the judge in question is moving the legal system one step closer to that injustice.

Maybe Nokia was always supposed to be Elop's training company? You know, a company he can try stuff at and drive it into the ground before he gets his hands on the real thing? Maybe he was even supposed to run it into the ground the ground, kind of like Brewster's Millions but with a company?

The problem is that there is a judge out there creating on-the-record legal opinion that maybe you can, when obviously you can't, so someone, somewhere, down the road, is going to get screwed by this, because that is how the legal system works.
 

Yes and yes.

Nintendo need to understand that they aren't selling to the children that use their products, they are selling to the parents that buy them.

You send a text because you know someone is driving, so they can pick it up later rather than answering a voice call.

That would piss me off as a user. I find 'Classic Shell' on windows 8 to be better than any of the default start menus of any windows version. I don't want it to be rendered inoperable by a single point OS update.

There's absolutely a lot of places where changing the lighting in sensible ways would make a major difference. Just having street lights and others shining downwards only can have a large impact, and save energy and money in the process.

But in large cities this particular battle is lost. Dense urban areas will be too bright no matter what you do, short of a war-like imposed blackout. Have street lights point downwards and there's still enough street area to lighten up any dust or particles in the air (and all that activity makes sure there's plenty of dust and stuff to reflect off as well).

Where I live (central Osaka), I can usually see a few of the brightest stars at night from our balcony, but it's a close thing. A long-exposure shot of the sky will pick up a sprinkling of bright stars, but the sky itself is bright enogh that it drowns out anything else.

No one believes that emissions can actually be curbed, but no one cares because no one (or hardly anyone) is actually interested in solving the problem. They are far more interested in using the problem as a justification for controlling other people, in exactly the same way that anti-abortion crusaders don't care about reducing unwanted pregnancy and anti-drug crusaders don't care about reducing drug addiction (not use, addiction and abuse... you know, the things that actually cause the vast majority of drug-related problems.)

We know that prohibitionists of all kinds don't care about the problems they claim to be solving, because prohibition is always a lousy solution. We've known that about drugs for decades. We've known abstinence-only sex education and restricting access to contraceptives increases teen pregnancy. But the people who advocate those things don't care about teen pregnancy: they care about controlling people. Same with drug warriors.

And it's the same with abstinence-only GHG opponents. If they cared about the problem they would be massively pro-nuclear (some are) and more than willing to explore geo-engineering possibilities, however unlikely.

Think about it: there is a class of person who claims that anthoropogenic climate change is likely to produce a civilization-ending event, but are adamantly opposed to even researching any potential solution that doesn't fit into their bizarrely Puritan moral universe.

As do I.

You do not burn 400 calories in 15 minutes. You might burn 400 in an hour depending on speed and resistance, and if you're using the cross trainer an hour a day you might not be getting much less exercise than an amateur marathon runner.

He's clearly projecting.