First Person to find the backdoor for the Chinese goverment to allow personalized moveable home spying gets a free mousepad!

The poor medical environment in the U.S. is caused by these poitica and economic factors: 1) Extensive defensive medicine practiced means 90% of the time doctors send patients for improper, expensive testing that wastes time knowngly, because for the sake of their malpractice liability insurance, they test for the 1% probable scenario with a high lawsuit ouctome (death) rather than the 65% likely outcome with no expensive lawsuit outcome. When President Obama and the Republicans sat down at the table to discuss the upcoming healthcare law, he immediately declared efforts to reform that probem 'off the table' as it threatened the Trial Lawyers Association, a major Democrat party backer (see: Howard Dean's speech the next day).

2) The wide usage of insurance shifts the bulk of the medical market into an insurance focused market, Rather than having an interest in having a patient with a positive and improved outcome, the physician has the two incentives of 1) not being sued (see above) and 2) placating the beancounters at the insurance company. The actual happiness of the patient ranks a distant third.

The focus on the ACA and the nominal dollars being thrown around is one of the examples of mass naivete that harm most Americans medically. see: http://sti2.blogspot.com/

The problem with Math classes like Algebra is not that they are useless, but that they are presented by Math Teachers as Gateways that the 'Less Smart' need to be kept behind; if Math, including Algebra and Calculus, and the prior Math Classes are properly taught, they are viewed as a useful tool and knowledge for all, and not just a mechanism for limiting access to higher studies to the lucky few who make the cut (and probably have the right parental resources to succeed).

If Twitter were taken down where would all the people incapable of processing thoughts longer than 140 characters in length find their intellectual direction?

Ironically, only a month earlier someone who had an unlicensed car murdered an innocent woman only a few miles away from the shooting: http://www.mlive.com/news/kala...

This should be good for test animals; when I worked in a lab that inserted electrodes in animal brains obviously after the experimental run was over there was no recuperation for the animal (implanted silver coated electrodes do not come out easily)... this could help those animal test subjects have a less unpleasant experience.

Those pesky 1%ers

It is a pandimensional object transiting our 3d slice.

It has a large evil neighbor in comparison to which it seems weak

Target Inflation effectively keeps people workng. If our government did not artificially maintain a target inflation then people would be happy working fewer hours. Target inflation means that costs keep going up for things and the peons have to keep working. The economists could not look good unless people are working 40 hours a week.

You should get off your couch, away from your online porn and put the chips aside, because half the world is shlepping around buckets of water to boil so they don't go thirsty; how can you hipster tools of the failed Soviet States possibly hope to fit in with those world masses? Give it up, grab a bucket, and shlep water like the rest;

Try a relatively consistent environment -> life -> multicellular life -> macroscopic organisms -> pan-organism abstract communication -> humans -> the technology to resist or minimize inconsistent environment (fire, clothing) -> religion (abstract organization) -> abstract information transfer (writing) -> the development of the individual protecting institution (government) -> the development of the government protecting the indvidual rights of property (intellectual parallelism) -> technology revolution Metal refining, industrial revolution are not a function of discovery of coal seams, as otherwise North Korea would be curently reaching for the stars (has coal seams, nation state, farming, metal refining, and even factories and electronics), but would be invisible to us if in another solar system nearby.

Steel is nice and soft ... until it is arranged in a serated pattern along an edge, then it becomes a knife that can slice through a tin can - the GINSU Knife! The arrangement of energy (digital or analog) has _no_ effect on the poor delicate organic systems, any more than a few piddly molecules of iron might...

And when the government said 'butter is bad, margarine is good, because science says so' - the gullible masses argued? And now that the government says 'margarine is bad, butter is good, because science says so' - the gullible masses should argue? And when the government says things like 'income tax is good', 'the minimum wage is good', at what point are people supposed to throw on their blinders?

I never said that the Big Mac Index was the be-all end-all of indices; however, it is obvious then that the metrics in the index are important, and assuming Big Brother (the government) knows or cares best is an example of passive gullibility. The Big Mac Index was much more conformant to the 'official' inflation index over five years prior -- only in the last five years has the Big Mac Index diverged so significantly; perhaps as you indicate the iPad 1 is an important part of their metric that helps them paint a rosey picture of inflation?