If a statement is not falsifiable then it is not science, and we can claim the universe is a simulation started by his Noodlieness last Thrusday.

Boring.

Here's a bit of a gedankenexperiment. How about if we open the borders to emigration? But with a twist.

For every Cuban who applies to escape the island, Cuba has to find an American who wants to live in the workers paradise. Cuba would get dedicated socialists who would (at least for a while) not complain about the conditions. Free medical, etc. for the taking. And they probably would owe lots of student loans, forgiving those might be the price the US pays (re-instate the loan if the immigrant returns to US).

Cuba would have to forgive the Cuban outbound emigrants their debts to the Cuban society that raised them (a common argument socialist governments give when asked why their borders are closed to emigration).

Allow free tourism between the two countries, anyone who overstays their visa would trigger an opening for someone going the other way.

The US would want to screen potential Cuban immigrants, no repeat of the Mariel boat lift.

Run this as a friendly cooperative experiment - we both might learn something.

Generalization. This American Republican thinks that strong encryption is a right, and that backdoors for anyone's use violate basic principles. There is a reasonably large faction within the MN GOP that certainly agrees with me, but Slashdot might not hear from them.

A simple gedankenexperiment. Would you want your fire extinguisher to have a biometric thumbprint safety switch powered by a battery that you forgot to change? Or that required up to 3 tries before it locked you out for 15 minutes?

I would moderate this up as +insightful

Two important questions must be answered first.

First, we must ask if there is true correlation between the autism spectrum placement and coding skills. If there is, then it may be reasonable to use autism spectrum location as a screening variable when hiring coders (note, correlation is not causation, so be careful here).

Second, is it harder for women to grow into or be born into that pocket of coding creativity? If it is, then we should expect the ratio of successful programmers to be imbalanced, just as there is clear imbalance in the NBA based on height.

It is the worst sort of unicorn-buying for our institutions to try to "correct" such an imbalance without understanding these aspects of the problem.

You have to use a concept from judo, in which you use your opponent's strengths against them. To make this work you have to frame it as a Republican/Libertarian project that uses a universal dividend (not income) to every citizen to eliminate the voter bloc-creating effects of identity and victimhood politics, then appeal to Democrats/Lefts as the party of care-givers and soft hearts to let go of their special interest groups in favor of a fair and equitable basic income. Do NOT apply a means test, let your progressive tax rates take care of that issue. Take away the tax on corporations in exchange for overturning Citizens United, and again, let your progressive tax rates take care of the distributed income (no special category for capital gains).

At this point you have gored enough sacred cows to bring out a tsunami of lawyers and lobbyists to defeat you, but maybe that tsunami itself will be enough of a signal to the taxpayers that they will finally grow up and pay attention.

Poker is 10% luck and 100% reading people. Any other numbers just don't add up.

Alternatively - they are too creative for their own good, and parse BS through their creative filters to turn crap into poetry. As in.

Wholeness -- ooh, ooh. that triggers my whole holistic reaction set (the whole meme)

quiets -- ahhh. Quieting my mental monkees (Buddhism)

infinite -- wowser! There go my favorite metaphysical thoughts, quantum consciousness anyone?

phenomena -- FUBAR! My favorite orgasm trigger other than my SO's lips on mine.

Free people should flood the system with false positives by driving through those neighborhoods regularly.

I remembered high-fiber, low calorie bread ... made with wood fiber. See Wood pulp as fiber in bread

We need an algorithm that can generate good one-time use codes, that can be coded in Excel or other trivial environments and that does not include a backdoor. Once such a simple algorithm is distributed, then we can roll-our-own coded messages, in a massive civil disobedience movement. If such an algorithm already exists, we need to put it on bumper stickers, carve it into bank walls, spread it in flyers in coffee shops and stand back to see what the unintended consequences are.

Forgot the snark tags.

Yeah, when I was in AF ROTC at Mich St Univ in 1969-1973 we were told to carry our ROTC uniforms to class in paper bags so we would not be jumped. The protesters did firebomb the Army ROTC building (1970). I went on to a career in the military bombing babies and holding cities hostage. Eventually I single handedly raped an entire civilization (retroactively, without my consent or knowledge) and established a male patriarchy.