The counterargument is that a history of accumulated trade deficits results in a situation like today where large amounts of the US marketable government debt are held by foreign sovereigns, for example China or Saudi Arabia. These holders have a good bit of influence on our governmentâ(TM)s ability to finance itself and can (and have) use it to extract concessions as they see fit.

What is rent seeking about disposing of your personal property as you see fit ? If I own a single family home I expect to be able to do with it whatever I damn please.

So youâ(TM)re advocating people not being âoeallowedâ to leave a city or neighborhood of a city lest their tax money also be gone? So basically any time an above average income person spends more than x days/weeks/months/years in a place then they become prisoners to that place and cannot leave unless they pay some sort of ransom? So the moment someone becomes a little better off they also lose their human rights as well?

I am no Bill Gates fan by any means. I think Microsoft's domination of the PC industry through aggressive business practices set the IT landscape back 10 years. That being said - the money is now his and he can do whatever he wishes with it. The Washington Post is strangely bothered that someone is trying to improve the horrid state of American education - at least in a way that is not simply "more cowbell." "This has raised questions about whether American democracy is well-served by wealthy people pouring so much money into pet education projects — regardless of whether they are grounded in research — that public policy and funding follow." Is our current educational policy eminently "grounded in research" and producing extraordinary outcomes? I think we can agree that is not the case. Furthermore, I think this line of questioning "raises questions" whether the Washington Post has an even rudimentary understanding of the American constitution, or at least of the first few amendments. Mr Bill Gates is free to engage in the pursuit of his happiness as he sees fit. The people and institutions choosing to work with Mr Gates or his charities are equally free to do the same. And we are free to not encourage clickbaity low quality content from the WaPo.

I have deleted my account precisely for this reason. I am now on Voat.

The two body problem has been solved for hundreds of years and it is one of the foundational results in physics. A lack of familiarity with it is damning. Being pedantic and obnoxious while proving you have no idea what you are talking about is unforgivable.

The voice recognition systems employed on the typical automated phone service are horrendous. This quickly leads to frustration.

"Q: Would you like to: pay your bill, check your balance...
A: Pay my bill.
Q: Sorry I did not get that. Would you like to: pay your bill, ...
A: Pay my bill!
A:Sorry, I still did not get that. Let's try something else. Please enter your 27 digit personal code followed by your social security and take a few minutes commenting on modern issues in Middle East politics.
A: #$%^&*( &^ %$% ^&* &^% $# $%^&

Having a 'system' that detects if your voice is getting louder, i.e. more pissed off, is not the answer. The answer is to improve the actual voice recognition algorithms, if possible.

As a proponent, advocate, and consumer of free open source software, I cannot help but wonder what is wrong with the community... I had read some many vitriolic comments about Unity before I ever tried it that I was profoundly skeptical of it and expected a massive failure. The reality has been completely different. If anything the extent of differences is fairly underwhelming, and I generally find it mildly more polished than the previous interface. It's almost the same in many respects, and I could not care less if I run Gnome 2 or 3 or Unity. As long as I can quickly bring up a terminal and they don't crash, they're all interchangeable.

...does a phone really require an OS of that complexity? Don't get me wrong, I have a current generation Android smartphone I bought 2-3 months ago, 4G enabled, it even has an HDMI out, and I completely comprehend that a modern smartphone is essentially a fully fledged computer.

That being said, it's still a phone. And in fact, it's horrible at it. To redial the last number I have to press 3 buttons (1 physical, 2 virtual) and suffer through 3s+ of erratic lag or more. On my 4 year old boring but functional Blackberry, it took under 1s and all I had to do is press the same button twice. Hanging up, redialing, going back to the home screen is slow as molasses. Yes, I can browse the web, access my Google Docs, open PDFs, read books, play chess, watch Youtube HD, etc. etc.

The smart- part of the phone is great and a step forward, however the -phone part of the phone is actually a big step back in my opinion.

I will proactively go out and buy the game. The first Crisis remains the best looking FPS to date, although it was released almost 4 years ago. Computational power has continued to increase. As someone said here a few days ago, with a $150 GPU you can run any game on the market at maximum settings. Think about that! A few years ago that would have been unheard of. Game developers kept pushing the envelope, forcing gamers to constantly stay on top of the hardware arms race. Expensive? You bet. But a recipe for innovation.

There will be a cost. Companies like NVIDIA and ATI may slow their development pace since they can't monetize as well any future advancements. Who is willing to shell out $300 to run MW2 at 90fps vs. 50fps...? Are we done generating real time photo-realistic images? Does this look like a screenshot from an action movie yet? I for one don't think so.

We need the next Crisis. That game that will bring to a halt all but the top 1% of existing PCs on maximum settings. The industry needs it. I need it. You need it too - you just don't know it.

Your comment betrays ignorance I am afraid. More precisely, it is a great example why "research by Wikipedia" does not work when it is not backed by an actual intimate understanding of the subject matter.

Specifically your ill informed comparison with "Romania", that backward, not "actually civilized" banana republic that you use as a boogie man only reveals your ignorance. Yes, Romania is a relatively poor country, the GDP per capita is about $12k/year (compare to $46k/year in the US) as per wikipedia.

However, the level of health services available is not immediately obviously worse than in the US, once adjusted for the purchasing power of the median citizen, and especially the less affluent. People there can have high quality cancer treatments and heart surgery that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in the USand possibly bankrupt them and their families - all paid for by the public health plans. Expensive drugs are often covered. Extended hospital stays - of the orders of weeks or even months - are also very often covered. I have had friends from Europe who had surgery in the US and were shocked to be kicked out of the hospital hours after the doctor sowed the last stitch. That would be unheard of even in a backward place like Romania.

You are guilty of oversimplification. I wish not to make the same error, only with a different sign. I will be the first to remark that, not price adjusted, the quality of Romanian health care is often not great especially for non life threatening diseases. The bureaucracy is often suffocating. Petty bribes are common. I wish not advocate for a "single payer" health care system.

However, people who live in glass houses most definitely should wield their stones carefully.

A bit like WoW mob grinding:

1) Pull aggro

2) Clickfest

3) Pro$it

"It won't be long before video from the Internet is always within reach."

I am so confused. Why is a huge leap in comprehension required to go from a typical computer monitor with a diagonal increases of 17-24'' to a standard TV with a diagonal of 35-50'' or more? It is the same LCD based technology. It is not a different type of tool. It does not require a separate cultural upbringing or years of additional technical training to understand the other once you understand one.

Your college age movie watching experience on a tiny laptop in a cramped dorm room neatly maps onto a more leisurely experience staring at your obscenely large TV from the comfort of your living room couch. You don't like staring at a big black box underneath your precious media center? Fine, then get an HTPC form factor computer, and hide it behind the TV itself. You don't want a keyboard? Then get a bluetooth remote control. All this should be straight forward. You don't need a box with a prominent 'CPO stamp of approval' (Cable Provider Oligopoly) and ridiculous price and limitations. Essentially all you need is a $10 HDMI cable to connect your computer to your TV. How atrophied is the American consumer's capacity to reason and think independently...?

You may well be referring to several categories of Nobel prizes (e.g. peace prize, or economics) which indeed have become (or have always been?) an avenue for the Nobel Committee to make political and cultural statements. That is rather transparent to any reader willing to go beyond CNN's coverage of the matter. However, the hard sciences' Nobel prizes are highly credible and are taken quite seriously. It is reasonable for people to expect a high standard, in my opinion. Factual inaccuracies in rendering the decisions cast an undesirable cloud on the decision making process.