When you were an owner/manager I think you could be pretty productive, it's just that your productivity was expressed through the people below you. I've had bad management before and the result was despite doing a lot of work I wasn't really productive because the work was worthless.

When I talk about unproductive rich people I'm not talking about owners or managers from your position. I mean the people like George Bush, I'm not trying to be partisan but his legacy as a businessman was losing a lot of money, he didn't start and run companies because he was good at it, he did it because he had family connections. I think there's a lot of this going on, an upper class that have excellent high level jobs essentially handed to them that they're not really qualified for and where it's kinda hard to evaluate their value.

There's a whole other potion of the economy tied up in investment and financial services that has some productive value in directing capital to good companies that need it, but because they're so good at directing money they'd managed to direct much more of the economy than is required into their own sector. There's a lot of people making a lot of money gaming the system instead of actually helping organize the economy.

That's what I think of when I think of the unproductive rich, not the managers or owners who got their on their own work and talent, but the people who have learned to manipulate the economy to get rich without really adding anything in return.

I don't believe that's Keynesian economics you're describing.

IANAE (I am not an economist) but Keynesians basically believe that recession are a result of a drop in Aggregate Demand (AD), the total amount of spending. Basically because the economy sucks no one has extra money to spend, so no one is employed to make and sell things, so no one has extra money to spend...

So Keynesians say that during a recession when AD from the private sector drops the government should replace all the lost spending from the private sector with new spending from the government. Basically use fiscal policy and ramp up massive deficits during a recession, then when the economy recovers government spending should drop and you pay off the deficits. I think the 2008 recession would be predicted fairly well by Keynesian economics and the period of high spending prior to '08 was very much against Keynesian thinking.

There's another school of economists known as monetarists who agree about a drop in AD causing recessions, but like using monetary policy instead of fiscal policy, basically they print a bunch of new money, inject it into the economy, and hope it stimulates new activity. I think this is what you meant by "Keynesian monetary policy, printing money, inflation".

But in both cases you're talking about things like taxes and government loans that exited long before the recession, so they don't really have anything to do with Keynesians or monetarists.

You sound a bit like the Austrian school of economics, I don't know it that well but I think it basically believes that recessions are the results of government meddling in the economy, they don't really try to fix recessions, but seem to believe recessions wouldn't happen under their system. I think the modern version of this is the Chicago school who are very libertarian but are also monetarists in the case of a recession.

I don't necessarily agree, Star Wars has a very rich universe which gives a new movie the advantage of ditching some exposition and working in a universe the viewer has an emotional connection with.

Of course that only works if they recapture the vision and adventure of the original trilogy, I think it's possible (particularly if you pull in some of the old cast) but if they can't make it work it's probably better to leave it alone.

Here's what we do know.

Martin was walking home in a way that made Zimmerman suspicious. Zimmerman then started following him and called the police, at the same time Martin called his friend and apparently told her about the guy that was following him.

The next thing we know is there was a fight that Martin was probably winning until Zimmerman drew his gun and shot Martin.

Zimmerman's attempt to fill in the blanks has Zimmerman walking back to his car, Martin coming up from behind, confront him, punching him (breaking his nose), knocking him down and bashing his head against the side walk, seeing the gun and saying either "You're gonna die now" or "You're gonna die tonight", at which point Zimmerman drew his gun and fired.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that story has a lot of BS.

Maybe the confrontation happened when ZImmerman was going back to the car, or while he was continuing to follow. But there was probably some sort of escalating discussion before it turned into a fight, Martin certainly gave a good shot to the nose but the marks on the head could just be scuff marks from struggling on the sidewalk. And Martin seeing the other guy has a gun, and responding with "You're gonna die now" or "You're gonna die tonight" is frankly a bit over the top.

Now I don't know what actually happened, and the true story might still be valid self defense, but I'm sure there's some embellishment since Zimmerman's current tale basically has Martin going nuts for no reason while he's a saint. And we know Zimmerman lied, he clearly told Hannity that he never ever heard of stand your ground, while this witness said he taught Zimmerman in a course where stand your ground was a main topic.

Even if Martin did start the fight if Zimmerman was winning the fight (and it was Martin who was yelling for Zimmerman to get off of him) wouldn't that also negate the self-defense plea?

c) Female geeks at tech conferences.

To anyone still wondering why there's so few women in IT I'd like to offer this thread as evidence.

It's about respect, imagine you were at a conference, and because some management type decided geeks are too unappealing they hired bodybuilders and male models to stand out in front of the booths. Wouldn't you find that a little insulting, that despite all your knowledge and experience some dude with a six pack is more welcome at a tech conference than you?

Well judging by the lack of comments here and my own lack of knowledge he wasn't that well known among scifi geeks either.

Looking at his work he might have simply been a outside the main part of the genre, he obviously had some very major successes but never won any Hugos or Nebulas which tend to be fairly common among the top SF authors. He did good work but ended up in a small niche.

I'd really like you to back up that "19th century approaches" claim.

You obviously shouldn't get emotionally attached to lab animals for a variety of reasons (not all bad ones). But people are good at compartmentalizing. As for your accusations about clinical detachment do you have any evidence for these claims?

Again all you've done is speculate, you've shown absolutely no evidence for psychological damage among researchers, you haven't even found an anecdote of some spree shooter being a biologist. People can eat meat without being sociopaths, they can look at cows in a field without being sociopaths, why are you assuming they can't deal with lab animals and avoid emotional attachment without incurring a mental illness?

No right is absolute, rights are an emergent property of our society, they're something we agreed on to help each other get along.

Individual rights are the most basic and the most important of these, but they' re not the only ones. Civil rights are an important infringement on individual rights if we want to live in a civil society. The loss of individual liberty suffered from a civil right is minimal (you can't fire that guy because he's gay), but the amount of welfare gained is huge (the gay guy doesn't have to lie).

My reading is that most of the research on chimps is either some kind of basic research or direct efforts to improve human health. This is the research this rule would eliminate.

But if some disease starts wiping out wild chimpanzee populations the researchers are still allowed to experiment on them to save other chimps.

I don't know much about the people doing research on chimps (though found it fascinating that you couldn't resist essentially calling them sociopaths) but I do a little computational neuroscience. MRI has some serious limitations, and our simulations aren't anywhere close to replacing the need for live subjects and they probably won't be until we're post-singularity.

If you want to argue that the science isn't worth the cost then make that argument, but don't claim the same science can be done without the cost.

I'm sure a lot of pirated dev kits are floating around already, as for the source code, who cares? Another game company isn't going to go near it, I guess in the worst case if everything is there a bunch of devs could get together, strip out all the drm, and release a really good pirated version, but I just don't see this being a big risk for the game companies.

Oh yeah,

Recently, Kotaku reported that SuperDaE, a 17 year-old minor, was facing an array of eight legal charges, including "possession of cannabis and drug paraphernalia", "possession of a prohibited weapon", "possession of identification material with intent to commit an offence", and "possessing and copying an indecent or obscene article, possession of child exploitation material".

So an Australian, being charged by Australian police for crimes that have nothing to do with computers, apparently thinks a bunch of American and Japanese game companies can protect him if he blackmails them?

Good luck with that...

I don't see why he'd get disappeared, it doesn't matter how ruthless the NSA is killing him has no upside. If anyone ever found out it would be a major black eye for the NSA, and it can't be a deterrent since nobody knows they got him! It would be brutal optics since all the outside world would see is that the leaker got away!

Best case for them is to catch him, discredit him, and put him in jail for a long time as a warning to anyone else.

If they got close Edward Snowden outting himself is a brilliant more, he has the first chance to write the narrative and take the moral highground.

He's just gone from a hidden figure being hunted by law enforcement to a concerned citizen giving public interviews and ready to face the music, he's framing the discussion as a political one instead of a criminal one. He's made it a lot harder politically for the Feds to throw the book at him.

Has anyone actually ever used the functionality? I haven't and I can't see myself changing. It could be they removed it with some malicious intent, or it could be someone said 'why are we supporting feature X that no body ever uses'. If I posted a lot I could see myself downloading an archive and doing some analysis of the content for fun, but for the most part the only people I see wanting an archive is people who use it as a micro-blogging service. On principal I like the idea of having it, I'm just curious if anyone here has ever used it.