I watched quite a bit of Zeihan over the past couple of years, he does get his point across very efficiently. I'm not speaking at all about whether he is right or not, but I'm not sure I see the name calling just by saying that someone is a loud aggressively patriotic demagogue especially when the only thing the person you are talking about is doing is ... speaking. Zeihan produces ideas and conclusions, he doesn't act. So I see no problem in the possibility of him being all those things.
Demagogue is not an insult, it's a term denoting positions which resort to hypocrisy, rhetoric, emotions, maybe even populism, instead of reason and facts.
So where is the name calling? You might disagree with this characterization but there might be truth in some of that.
I find him "loud" too, a bit too full of himself, looking at everything through the lens of American exceptionalism. So yes, I tend to take what he says, even if interesting with a lot of grains of salt.

They're not saying they're not doing it (anymore).

If the topic is power in media and politics, then it's not about money and poverty. It's a valid discussion, but not the one we usually have about money (distribute more, give it to the poor, pay student loans etc).

And regarding your last statement, about reasons and amounts people start businesses from, I can't speak to that because I would generalize too much. Maybe SOME need to aim for 1 billion (is that unhealthy, from a business drive point of view? Do we all have to have the same reasons? I would argue no.), some for 2, some for 10, some for 100. The amount is not important, and it's, again, a place where personal biases show up.
The discussion should be if accumulating wealth is a reasonable drive to start and maintain a business and do the social advantages of that business overcome the disadvantages, do money really trickle down or not, do they really create jobs or not etc.

And also, does just giving people money fix their problems? Could it be possible that it's not only money some of them lack? It could be education, it could be a strong family, it could be self-confidence, could be certain abilities or traits. Could be a lot of things, because poverty and wealth are complex societal issues that can't be solved as simple math (distribution/division).

All of this is not a numbers problem.

But he's not taking into account inflation, which is an obvious side-effect, he is saying something else: why do you care how many billionaires are there and how many billions they added in their bank accounts this year if more people moved from absolute poverty towards the middle class (yes, they are not there yet, I know it's a continuum and not a discrete class system in reality)?

What TFA doesn't explain or offer is what happened historically between that bottom half and the 10 top percent thy mention. That leaves a not-so-unhealthy 40% of people that are not poor and are not billionaires. I really don't care how much of the global wealth they own (or I should say "I own", because I probably am in those 40%) as long as that 40% slice keeps getting bigger at the expense of either of the other 2 slices (the 50% that own 2% of global wealth and the 10% that own 70% of global weatlh).

br Also, notice how you can play around with these slices based on whatever arbitrary percent of global wealth you want them to cover? How do you make sure your political biases don't come into play when you define them?

People who bring up overnight charging are grossly underestimating the ratio of cars that are parked in the street, shared parking lots or underground parking. How do you charge all of those cars overnight? The grid is idle overnight, but that is TODAY, if everyone charges cars overnight it will be far from idle. In lots of places on the planet the infrastructure built tens of years ago does not support tens or hundreds of cars charging at once on a street.

Isn't this like saying that all it takes for VAG to sell the most electric cars is to get their shit together and Tesla goes poof? The problem with this scenario is that Tesla wouldn't have been here (hype included) if VAG, GM and other others would have been able to get their shit together. They're not, for now (see iD3).

Intel tried low power for mobile stuff, Apple was not impressed.
More than a decade passed and they seem less and less impressed by intel.

"that reacts to the same stimuli as human skin, such as pressure, touch,flogging, beating and temperature" There, since this is from Saudi Arabia, I fixed that.

Have you seen the CPU simulations in Minecraft?

When TJ Holowaychuk announced he is leaving Node behind he said:

And now they're forking Node over this ?
So I'm guessing streams will still be broken and callback will still be not great to work with.

Right, because in 2014 there's NOTHING useful on the internet.

We will continue to have a book-only education FOREVER and we will ALWAYS teach our kids how to write by hand before typing. Because the paradigm never changes.

Believe it or not I have shown them wikipedia, at least the version in my own language, because they are inquisitive. Yes, I could read it to them, I could study it in advance and present the information to them and so on. But to be honest I actually believe the paradigm has shifted and they will live in a different world as my parents did and they will need access to newer tools earlier.

The internet is just a tool. Books can be evil or stupid too.

PS: https://blockly-games.appspot....

Hi have 8 years old twins that are starting to discover both google and youtube and they still ask me for direction (we're from a non-english speaking country) and so I'm able to filter out "bad" stuff from the start but I was actually started to get concerned about how I can make sure they don't end up in those weird corners of the internet.

I'm not worried about sex, as we had various talks on the subject and we're open about that (though after all the talks I actually find concepts like sex stores or sex toys harder to explain than how are babies made), but I am concerned about violence and generally "bad ideas" related content.

Since we're on Ubuntu I was wondering if there's any product similar to netnanny so for now I was relying on using youtube logged out which is/was supposed to ask you to login once you hit stuff that has been marked as inappropriate. Or relying on the Safe Search filter on google.

But this sounds like a better idea, I guess I can create them separate users on my linux machines with specially configured chrome profiles that will stick them to these kids-saf versions. If it all works like they describe it, of course.

Came here to say exactly this.
Whoever uses the phone while driving will try 2-3 times and have his eyes on the phone longer as opposed as having the other side answer and him talking and leat looking in front of him.
Yes, I know the attention span of someone talking on the phone and driving is the same as someone who's drunk, but still it must beat not looking at the road.

You do realize you lost everyone after the first 3 lines of monoblock text and you're talking to your self, don't you?

Of course they need to re-evaluate how our sun was formed. It' 5000 years old!

Bear Grylls would open it with a coconut and a shoelace, pee in it and then survive a week by eating its insides.