Your comment is insightful only if you're talking about the economy, minus the financial sector. In the rest of the economy, I mainly agree with you. Not in finance, which is what this article was about. In finance, as other posters have noted, there is no real risk for the leaders of the companies. You get to practice what would be considered fraud in any other industry, with the complicity of the federal government (slash Federal Reserve, which can't really be considered part of the gov't). The details of how to collect the money really can be left to idiots when the world's most powerful organizations conspire to prop up your business (e.g. Fed guaranteeing inflation to force people to keep money in banks, regulators allowing the creation of money out of thin air, despite the US constitution clearly putting that power in the hands of congress, propping up of the stock market through multiple members of the "plunge protection team", massive tax incentives that make earning your income off of investing cheaper than having a role in the productive economy, etc, etc).

Nuclear power is nothing but a band-aid. It is not a viable long-term solution. If the world replaced all its coal or oil with nuclear power (as some smaller countries like France have come close to doing), the supply of nuclear fuel would run out even more quickly than the known reserves of oil would.

Do not confuse "non-greenhouse-gas-producing" with "sustainable". Nuclear power doesn't create CO2 as a significant by-product, but it is not sustainable. It can help us generate the energy we need to build sustainable infrastructure, but it is not sustainable itself.

Wind power is sustainable, for as long as we have a sun and an atmosphere. This surge "problem" is a joke, solvable in a handful of different ways. The level of debate is merely indicative of the fact that most slashdotters are not mechanical/civil engineers.

Teaching happens when people are willing to be taught. More or less, school children and college kids are willing to be taught. Adults in the US are not willing to be taught, and any attempt to do so is met with cries of "condescension", "elitism", and other smarty-pants types of accusations.

Scientists and engineers assuming people who don't understand their work are idiots isn't a mistake. You make the mistake of thinking that the lack of public understanding of science is what causes us to think that people are idiots. In reality, it's largely because people are such idiots that they have so little chance of understanding science. In a country where 85% of people believe in a god, I'm afraid there's very little hope for any rational paradigm taking hold.

If you think the majority of non-scientists and engineers in the US are not idiots, then you've got an overly rosy outlook on society.

Seriously. Asserting that the US is falling behind in science due to a lack of job opportunities is to focus on the symptom and miss the cause. Religion is the reason we as a society don't prioritize science in the classroom, or in the economy.

When you believe a magical super-natural being created everything, why learn about evolution, or astronomy, or disease, or electronics? They're all just the way this mythical God choose to present his work. We don't need to solve any of our problems because the bad stuff that happens is just God testing us, or the beginning of a glorious end of the world. We don't need to learn about science, or anything else really, because the only important stuff got nicely written down for us on a stone tablet, and delivered by Moses.

The USA is not a democracy, or a representative republic. It's a theocracy. We are a Christian cult, and that's why there's a science gap. It's the same with Islamic nations ... different mythology ... same suppression of science.

Nice theory, but it's bollocks in practice. Sure, some liquidity is a good thing, but if you're arguing that we need more (or even as much as we have now) machine trading, then you must think more liquidity is beneficial in any quantity. High-frequency automated trading now represents more volume than the rest of the trading on the NYSE.

Take a simple example. Housing is a much less liquid market. There is some speculation in housing, but much less so than the stock market. There are bureaucratic hurdles to purchasing real estate, and holding it has costs (property taxes, upkeep, etc.). Both housing and the stock market have lost about 25% of their value since the peak in the US. However, the change in housing prices have been much more orderly, compared to the vastly more liquid stock market.

Thus, your unfounded assertion that more liquidity produces more stability has been debunked.

Nice rant, free market zealout. I'm always extremely skeptical of fanatics who claim that unless their idealistic system is followed to perfection, it won't work at all, and it's the fault of the people who kept it from being implemented to its maximum possible extent.

Listen, any reasonable person should be able to recognize that Free Market is not a boolean concept. There's a spectrum of "free-ness". Our current system could be freer, but it could also be a lot less so. If you're saying that it has to be purely free, with no constraints, then you're arguing for an impractical solution. A system that can't tolerate some deviations from the ideal is crap.

When I first started hearing about XP (extreme programming), I was confronted with this same nonsense. If you don't follow all Ten Commandments, it won't work, and you can just forget it. That's the first sign of a poorly-conceived system.

This has very little to do with UAVs, or whether old ones have the capability to encrypt, etc.

This has to do with the fact that there are far more receivers in the field than UAVs, or other transmitters. And those receivers cannot decrypt, so everything in the arsenal that wants to transmit to these ROVER portable receiver units has to do it unencrypted.

http://www.defence.pk/forums/military-aviation/41782-insurgents-hack-u-s-drones-3.html

Actually, CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing since before 1950 - it has simply accelerated since 1950. But, nice try showing a graph whose horizontal axis only covers the latter half of the 20th century.

This more recent increase is entirely consistent with the increased pace of industrialization, the fact that warming also causes the release of more CO2 (from oceans), and the fact that we're starting to exhaust some of the natural CO2 sinks (e.g. oceans) that have been helping to mitigate some of our CO2 contributions.

http://radioviceonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/knorr2009_co2_sequestration.pdf

So, regardless of whether many skeptics say it or not, it's wrong, and thus, so is your logic. How does stuff like this get modded up to 5?

Yes, a healthy bit of skepticism is ALWAYS a good thing. Especially when it causes us to sit on our asses while we destroy our own habitat. Wake the hell up!

Can we get past the stupid psychological crap and just focus on some actual data? Instead of rationalizing your sit-on-my-ass attitude by claiming that skepticism is always good, why don't you read through some of the data and propose an alternate conclusion? Otherwise, save the human interpersonal dynamics nonsense for the oprah.com message boards.

Allright, Game Theory Boy. Presumably you know what a Prisoner's Dilemma is. In that scenario, participants can (correctly) pick the strategy that maximizes their outcome, and yet still will achieve a societal result that's suboptimal for the whole system.

The key feature of a prisoner's dilemma is that participants ARE NOT COOPERATING. If they do cooperate, they can pick individual strategies that leaves society in a better position. So, the question is, is the human inhabitability of our planet worth cooperating for, or should we just throw up our hands and say, "let's just keep sinning"?

Whose actions do fill you with confidence? Seriously?

The world is full of douchebags. I think most of us slashdotters think we're the cream of the crop (and we're right, of course!) .... but you can't discredit a major theory simply because everyone associated with the issue isn't saintly. That's simply not logical.

The only relevant question should be whether these scientists fill you with MORE confidence than the energy industry, anything-to-avoid-paying-taxes crowd on the other side of the issue.

Well, what's your answer?

It's worked with cigarettes. I'll take that over your hypothetical internet tax scenario, anyday.

The unions are not responsible for all the workplace protections and benefits in place at non-unionized workplaces. In fact, in my time at a large DJIA company, that had union machinists, and non-union workers of other disciplines, it was most definitely the case that the lazy union bastards were taking compensation from the rest of us. They typically went on strike every time their contracts were up, got cushy packages, and then the rest of us got shafted because the company had nothing left after the union bent them over.

Ralph Nader single-handedly has won the American worker as much as all the major unions combined.

UAW workers make more than their southern counterparts, and ... wait for it ... get more in benefits, too. All told, that's a significant bump in total comp, despite the fact that an auto worker is an auto worker. UAW guys aren't any better at what they do than Toyota's guys. What makes your comment even more ridiculous is that it ignores the fact that those non-union counterparts in the South work for companies WHO ARE KICKING GM, FORD, AND CHRYSLER'S ASSES. Why should employees at underperforming companies make even a single dime more (plus more expensive benefits) than their competitors who are beating them soundly in the marketplace?

Finally, please don't ignore the fact that unions make companies less competitive, which indirectly brings down compensation for everyone at those companies. Don't agree with that statement? Please name for me one company who's leading their field, with a significantly unionized workforce, that competes against competitors who aren't unionized?

My guess is that the rats did ok, because you guys reversed the valve, and were actually pumping the diesel fumes into your lab. Your "vague memory" is probably another side effect of this occupational exposure.

Seriously, is this an Exxon Mobil employee? Go stand next to a diesel bus for 10 seconds, and tell me again how benign diesel exhaust is.

http://diesel.legalview.info/57755/

So, by this rationale, in order to get more top talent in science, we need to let more talent choose other fields, leaving a scarcity of science grads, which will drive up salaries, and lead more top talent back into science? That's kind of like the argument that cold water boils faster than hot water. Of course, lots of people think that's true, too.

Along the same lines, I'd like to hear the author's explanation of why employees in finance continue to get paid more and more, even as more talent floods into that profession.

Not every price is set solely by supply and demand. In this case, I think culture has a lot to do with it, as do negotiating skills (which geeks don't generally have in abundance). Science and math types are still considered dorks, and the leeches who work on Wall St. or Madison Ave are the cool kids. Fewer science students isn't going to change that.