Agreed.

The original title as a serial in Astounding wasn't bad, either: "The Fisherman" (you have to like biblical references, though).

"Time is the Simplest Thing" is a good example of a book that works really well as SF-- it *feels* like an SF novel, not Fantasy-- without having much in the way of a hard scientific or technical basis.

We're talking about Forbes, here you know?

The East Coast financial world lives in terror that some punk in a hoodie is going to yank the rug out from under them. They love the "techies needs suits" narrative, and go for it whenever they can.

The irrelevant snipe about Greece and Spain is just Forbes waving their flag as "Austerions". Actually the troubles in Greece and Spain result from them not having they're own currency, not with their debt level, but it's very, very important to worry about government debt or some crazies might suggest doing something about 8% unemployment... like taxing the rich to hire teachers.

By the way, if you took Forbes seriously when looking for investment advice, you would almost certainly lose a lot of money: http://www.forbes.com/sites/charleskadlec/2011/02/22/higher-inflation-is-on-the-way/

So calm down, yes this is ridiculous, but it's just Forbes. Tribal loyalty is more important than being right.

I think it takes a special kind of naivite to think that with an annual national deficit of $1.3 trillion dollars and a national debt of $15 trillion, we are "hoarding money". The economy, taken as a whole, is indeed "hoarding money": businesses are sitting on cash rather than put it to work, because they don't see any new orders out there to justify it.

And Krugman's opposition are indeed people who claim that when there's an economic downturn, the only Serious solution is to engage in fiscal austerity, which is to say, to hoard money even more.

The point that Krugman and his fellow Keynesians make is that this is a self-defeating formula, because letting the economy sit still in a depression for ten years also cripples government revenues, and is poor way to actually get the government budget under control, and as a side-effect is likely to cripple the careers of a generation of young college graduates.

On the other hand, since interest rates are down at nothing, if there's anything at all you can conceive of that the government can spend money on that you would approve of, now is a great time to do it -- repair potholes, beef-up public transit, re-hire teachers and cops, etc. And, as a side-effect, you have a shot at cutting the depression short, so it's pretty much win-win. The price you pay is a larger, but manageable, debt load, but then you also get more resources to manage the debt.

But sorry, I forgot. "Other peoples money! Taxes bad! Liberals bad! Keynes, spit, keynes!" Let's just keep going with the Very Serious people preaching austerity. It's been disastrous everywhere else, but you never know, it might work here.

And feel free to recite some more big numbers, those are really scary. (Trillions!).

As long as there are money to spend, Krugman is always on top of it, guaranteed !

Silly Krugman. Everyone knows that hoarding money is the best way to grow an economy.

And as we all know, those Republicans would never consider spending other people's money on anything.

So the US is at war with North Korea then? Bush Jr. called them a member of the "Axis of Evil".

Please work on the "sticks & stones" vs. name-calling distinction. Thanks.

I just listened to Philip Zimbardo's TED talk... he doesn't appear to have any data to speak of. Early on he buzzes through some measures where guys are doing worse than girls, but doesn't discuss absolute numbers-- then he jumps to implying that all guys are fucked (because they're not getting fucked).

He also, needless to say, doesn't have any proof that it's all the internet's fault, and not, say pollution by hormone-like chemicals, or-- a theory I've seen pushed persuasively-- the economy, stupid (roughly: guys don't bother to "grow up" because there's no where to grow to).

How do fast talking con-artists like this get to do TED talks?

(Note: Nick Hanauer, an early Amazon investor, had a TED talk censored for being a little too, shall-we say, "reality based".)

"My belief is that the value of the dollar has been dropped deliberately"

My belief is that you're both out-to-lunch. Inflation has been fluttering around down near zero for years now.

Try worrying about unemployment.

Okay, well here is where I'm going to attach my comments, since you guys are at least getting close to my angle on these things:

An automated car would indeed be more fuel efficient than a human-driven one, largely because human beings are really stupid at driving: they constantly try to push the car faster than the average speed of traffic, and hence do a lot of standing on the gas and the brake.

(There's another big potential advantage to automated cars, but I bet they're keeping quiet about it in order to keep from scaring people: tailgaiting. If all the cars are computer controlled, they can all brake simultaneously, so there's much less need for big following distances, and hence they can all "draft" each other. Wind resistance is what kills fuel efficiency at highway speeds.)

By fixing a lot of the frustrations with using a private car, these systems are going to encourage using them in preference to other strategies, there's a potential for huge perverse effects: ultimately this isn't a "green" technology, it's a distraction technology that's going to keep people from working on the real problems. (Note: you can say similar things for electric cars-- in the US half our electricity is generated by coal burning, if your electricity is coal-in-disguise it's cleaner to burn gasoline).

Just to pick one problem: if you make it easier for people to live with a 2 or 3 hour commute each way, many more people will do that. Even if you double the energy efficiency, if you double the miles they're willing to drive, that would be a wash.

Another, related angle: one of the big problems the US faces is that after WWII massive amounts of construction was rolled out around the idea that everyone would be driving cars everywhere: the low-density "sprawl" is nearly impossible to retrofit with workable public transit. Does a driverless car sound like a "green-fix" to you? To me it sounds like a "sprawl enabler".

Energy efficiency and environmental pollution isn't everything, there are multiple other problems associated with a car-centered lifestyle from social isolation to gasoline guts. (Oh boy, door-to-door service! I'll never have to walk *anywhere*! I'll never have to sit near anyone with a different ethnic background! Heaven!)

(Brad Templeton's energy numbers on transit are interesting, but limited in a number of ways, largely because he's working solely "per mile": if you take a more whole-system view, a city where people are using relatively dirty buses and trains for short-hops is likely to be better off compared to a sprawl where people are using cleanish-cars to drive 20 miles to buy a gallon of milk.)

The cities are full, we like trees, air, fresh water,

So you started driving cars everywhere to try to destroy as much of that as possible.

jobs were more readily available in less urban areas,

Completely ridiculous. The original suburban dwellers expected to have to commute back into the core. Jobs out in the sprawl are a new phenomena.

and much more.

Oh, you mean they were trying to run away from black people? Why didn't you say so. (Too bad about those Salvadoran immigrants next door, eh?)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/847271320/ogre-designers-edition

Funny, I hadn't heard of that one. I once drew a G.E.V. board with hexes on that scale myself, but I did it so I could use the original small size pieces without stacking them. Can't say I see the point of the larger pieces... except that we're all geezers now who can't read the print on the original pieces.

After spending 12 hours at 4500F

You've got a lot of wood in your house. And one lame-ass fire department.

I'm still stuck using search but I can live with that for now.

You don't need to use google to do web searches. I've been using blekko.com as my main search for some time.

Of course, if you want to watch silly flash videos it's hard to get away from youtube, but at least there's other sites you can post them, if that's what you're into. Whether other people will see them now that google has changed it's "video" search to a "youtube" search it's debatable whether someone else can find them...

(Google, playing lock-in games? But that would be evil.)

B&N did themselves in. They bet the company on the Nook, and started reducing inventory in their stores 2-3 years ago. They trained people who wanted books to not bother going to a B&N store because the book likely wouldn't be there.

Part of their schtick is that while you're on the premises of a B&N, your Nook automatically has access to their entire stock, but you need to buy it to access it when you're not on the premises. This may or may not work, but doesn't strike me as being such a dumb idea... I have a feeling they haven't done a great job of explaining that part of the deal.

Myself, I'm happy with my Nook, but primarily use it to read Epubs from the Gutenberg press. If they dropped DRM *and* dropped the price of new ebooks, I'd think about stocking up on them... as it stands I'll stick to paper for awhile longer.

(No ipad, no iphone, no "standard" kindle format books... sometimes I wonder how I manage to live.)