? Are you 16 years old? No offense, I'm just curious. This sounds like a nice daydream, and then reality hits and you realize it's about as dumb as using water balloons and a water gun to deter an angry man who is running right at you. Believe me, a friend of mine and I tried it when we were 16 years old; my friend ended up punched, laid out on the floor.

In your case, what would happen is the perp would break into your car to grab the fake laptop, discover it's a fake laptop, and then he'd notice the black cloth and you would be out the real laptop. :)

Jason

Nature needs us. Nature wants to survive, and yet it would end around 600 million - 1200 million years from now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth), unaided.

Humans are capable of extending life on Earth. Also, we are capable of space flight. So, that is two ways humans could help nature survive longer :)

Phos

It looks like you are talking about Easter Island. It doesn't look like they went extinct, just had serious population loss. Your point is very well taken though, the same can and likely will happen to the Earth :)

Phos

Yeah, I've been thinking that "we're screwed" as well. I keep hanging on to some hope that the Earth will deal with it a little better than feared, and that Fossil fuels will become scarcer much faster, but I think it may be a false hope.

Still, no matter how bad it gets, I still am hopeful that the carrying capacity of Earth won't drop to 0. In other words, I have high hopes that the human race will survive. I don't guess we'll see, since we'll almost certainly be dead by 100 years old, but I guess you just gotta ride the wave as long as you can :)

Great post. I particularly enjoyed your point that speculators provide feedback and, in other words, early warning signs. When you take away the incentive for speculators, then you lose this benefit. Let the markets be! Regulate pollution and other problems, but not the markets...

The Tobin tax as it was originally conceived is a knee-jerk reaction to the problem of speculation. It will harm all market participants, both speculators and non-speculators, because both will take actions to avoid the tax. The transactions cost incurred for avoiding the tax, coupled with the tax itself, are harmful to the market.

The problem is speculation, and I don't claim to have a full-on solution, but see the * below for a solution idea that may be a bit of a tangent.

Even so, I do aplaud Bill Gates and other leaders for discussing things. There may be some good to come out of all of this discussion, but I don't think the Tobin tax or any similar tax is one of them.

*Permit currency creation: For instance, permit corporations and persons to create their own "currencies", backed by whatever they see fit (oil, gold, silver, other commodities, a basket of Government currencies, their own bartered labor, etc.). I don't have the entire solution here, the idea would need to be refined, but it could bring a significant net gain to the currency problem. I mean, we all know and expect the dollar will "die" some day - in the end it is only a piece of paper or a bank balance - and so this could replace it...

Spot on sir!

I have a feeling it wouldn't have gotten towed too many times, if any, before the tow company/police wizened up and stopped towing his car. He may have been an asshole, but he was a famous, rich, highly gifted one.

Well put, the part about "if you're interested in increasing the liberty of individuals." I've come to some of the same conclusions myself; that I'm largely against big Government and Government processes because they take away man's freedoms, yet Government is necessary in order to ensure man's freedoms.

Well, the guy has a point that the chatbot blows. I tried it out too, and after about 6 or 7 messages it threw me the dilemma thing too.

And you have a point that AI is definitely improving :) Btw, when are we getting together again, we should do at least once a month no?

Phos

At my house of 3 (7 year old plus Mom and Dad), we love Netflix. I do have some ideas to make it better, but I'll get to those in a minute. Here is what we love:

- The ability to pause or stop a movie/show, and then restart hours, days or even weeks later from the same spot. With Hulu through my Blu-Ray Player, we don't have this, and it is sorely missed.
- Instant Queue concept (Again, not nearly as intuitive on the Blu-Ray with Hulu)
- The ability to choose what we want to watch, on demand.
- The selection of older shows and movies is decent, passable.
- No advertisements

Here is what we don't like:
- Having to use Hulu. Just give me the Hulu shows on Netflix with advertisements. I like Netflix better, i.e. the ability to pause and restart.
- Having to use Redbox. Again, just give me the movies on Netflix. It's OK if we have to pay per movie for this!

Cheers,

Jason