Goodness me, two posts and both of you show tremendous lack of knowledge of how evolution works. This is why we have to teach evolution in school!

To the first poster, evolution only happens when there's selection pressure, i.e. large portion of the population is dying in their reproductive ages from something. If you're assuming that movement in the parking lots creates any sort of selection pressure and thus helps evolution, then it must resemble a scene from MW2.

Second poster, helping evolution does not mean reducing gene pool. The genes for inheritable diseases are usually recessive and when paired with a dominant one, it can be actually better than having two dominant ones. Like sickle cell anemia and malaria. Anyway, in times when there's no selection pressure, we should be maintaining as much a genetic diversity and as deep a gene pool as possible because when that selection pressure comes along, we don't know which gene in the gene pool is going to be the ones that takes us to the next step in the path of evolution.

In conclusion, you both misunderstand evolution.

I walk around a good portion of my day talking to users and seeing how things are going. I am the opposite of aloof and quite approachable. However, I have been told on many occasions, "Why do you have to make things so complicated?". Drives me nuts.

As a programmer, even I say the same thing to the IT people. Not that computers are complicated, it's the labyrinthine policies and the circuitous explanations about why something cannot be done. IT people guard everything so you can't do anything yourself, obscure information so you can't show how simple what you want done is and make simple communications extremely difficult so you can't just talk them into doing something.

Working on your "career" is a very sad and lonely life, only fools chase that rabbit.

What you're defining as career is very nebulous. For a lot of people, career means being very good in what they do and creating something of really high quality or achieving something really great. This may give the person as much joy as you got from rebuilding cars and traveling. For some people, career means being a workaholic and just staying in the office and working while ignoring many aspects of life. I think everyone will agree that this is not desirable. I really can't tell if you're just against the second kind of career or all forms of career that results in income.

The other thing you're not considering is that careers can be built in 5 years or so. I'm not saying that careers last 5 years but you can start from nothing and become good in your career within 5 years. Once their careers are built then they can work 30 hours per week and enjoy life. Lots of people start from being only able to do minimum wage jobs and work very hard to acquire the skill-sets so that working 30 hours a week will be enough to buy a house and a car. Once you climb up high enough the corporate ladder, you don't have to work as hard. Once you become a partner in a firm, you don't have to work as hard. So, the people who are working so hard for the career are doing so in a plan that they don't have to work so hard in the future.

However, I do agree with you basic point that you have to do what makes us happy. Sometimes people are duped into chasing the rabbit and sometimes they're not really chasing the rabbit but trying to figure out life. Sometimes people can't see a way out by things like debt, or lack of information or bad habits. People want to be skilled, build beautiful things and want to be paid well for what they do. I doubt anyone wants to just work and spend the money and work and spend the money in an cycle of unhappiness. Look at people who are obese, can you honestly say they're enjoying overeating? So, my point is that this kind of workaholic chase of career is pathology and not a choice.

If you want lots of high-paying jobs in the US and EU, kill every single guest worker program (fraud-ridden at any level), get rid of the ability to use length of unemployment (or employment) as a direct or indirect means of discriminating against the unemployed, and get rid of the tax and benefit dodges with second-class forms of labor (e.g. contractors, consultants). Finally, make it harder to not hire US citizens, within the US by making any tax cut follow the worker and is dependent on the length of time.

The US benefits considerably from the guest worker program at the cost to China, India and other foreign countries. The US is basically able to hand-pick the best and brightest from around the world and have them come to the US through the guest worker program (the largest being H1-B). A lot of countries, especially India and China, lose their best emerging scientists and engineers to either graduate schools in the US or to large multinational firms in the US. Ending the guest worker programs would divert those talent to a different country who would then work for companies and start companies and compete against the US. Guest worker programs are immensely beneficial to the US and ending would it would be harmful to the US.

On the other hand, I understand your disagreement for the guest worker program as you feel it directly or indirectly depresses wages in the field you are employed in. If there were no guest workers, then companies would be forced to find local workers and local workers would be in higher demand and thus higher wages. The guest workers who were employed because of some shortage would soon become permanent residents and then citizens of the US, and then directly compete in the marketplace in your field. Yes, it is completely reasonable and rational to be against a policy that depresses the wages in your field.

To a certain extent, the furor over H1B did get is severely restricted but the consequences weren't what you thought it would be, it wasn't high-paying jobs, the consequence was outsourcing. In the middle 00s, the H1b caps were severely restricted and getting H1Bs for a foreign worker became considerably harder. The consequence became that foreign companies used the situation to offer outsourcing services where work could now be shifted from the US soil to foreign soil. If foreign workers couldn't be brought to the US, then the work would go out of the country to the foreign workers. Attacking the H1B did nothing for the American worker, it actually made the situation worse through outsourcing.

Your final point is that it is fraught with fraud which I don't have enough experience to comment on but as someone who has worked with H1B holders, there is a lot of regulation in H1Bs. H1Bs can only be issued if a local worker was not found after the position was advertised. The foreign worker must be paid prevailing wages and the qualifications and salary for the position must be posted in public at the workplace. An American worker can at any time demand an H1B worker's position if he or she meets the requirements of the qualifications required to do the job. In most cases, hiring foreign workers on H1B is costs more money and is a bigger headache than hiring a local worker. I suppose fraud is possible but from my limited experience with H1Bs, most H1B are under so much scrutiny and regulations that companies would be exposing themselves to severe criminal fraud to defraud the H1B system.

Lastly, I have known and worked with and for many admirable people who are US citizens but were previously H1B holders. One of my bosses in a small startup was such a person and a few researchers I've worked with as well. I think the US is much richer and better place for them to be here in the US and I think everyone has directly or indirectly benefited from their presence here.

Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.

I know you meant this as a quip but accuracy isn’t as important as people make it out to be. If you watch TV shows and movies, there are so many inaccurate and misleading interpretations of technologies or scientific laws to enable the story. The purpose of news and literature is in many cases entertainment and if it serves that purpose, it does not need to be fully accurate. In mathematics or computer programming, inaccuracy can mean the theorem is wrong or that the program will not function correctly. However, for other fields, there is no need for absolute accuracy and if the gist of it is accurate, then it should good enough.

In human communications, sometimes inaccuracy can actually be beneficial. There have been many scientific breakthroughs because the scientist was working under a faulty assumption and came up with something totally new because of it. One such example is the Bose-Einstein statistics. I can venture to guess that sometimes inaccuracies in news could be beneficial because it would color the news story in a different shade and have people thinking a different way. I know we stride for perfect accuracy but an inaccuracy could mean a new viewpoint or a new idea that could lead to a new story or a scientific breakthrough.

The increase in the percentage of spelling errors is an artifact of his experimental procedure. He randomly takes a Wikipedia article instead of analyzing the most popular ones. As Wikipedia has become larger, it has attracted more fringe topics, probably from authors in different countries in the world where English is not their first language. Wikipedia now probably has more articles that aren’t viewed and revised as much. Thus, randomly sampling has now higher chances of selecting such articles and thus, higher spelling mistakes.

He should change his experiment so that he analyzes the spelling mistakes on the most accessed and modified pages in Wikipedia or discard articles where the activity on the article is below a certain threshold.