Did you pay as much for them as you did your Apple laptops?

My experience is that sub-1k laptops are crap no matter who assembles them. I've got a similar story to GP - bought an Inspiron 1520 back in 2007 and it's still going strong. I replaced the harddrive with an SSD and it's now my primary work machine that I carry to the office and on travel.

Why not tie retirement age to life expectancy?

FWIW, life expectancy at 25 has barely budged in the past 50 years, especially among the lower-income brackets.

I bought a Dell Inspiron in 2006 and it still runs great - I use it every day. The only things I've done are upgrade the harddrive to an SSD and upgrade the RAM from 2 to 4GB. Never done anything else, even cleaning.

I am pretty sure the reason most people have problems is how they use it - taking it with them into the bath, running it on the bed, etc. Or they bought a really cheap one.

  I'm no fan of Apple by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm inclined to blame them for this one, but hardware issues happen sometimes to everyone. I believe I've seen reports that put Apple about the middle of the pack. But pay > 1k for your laptop and treat it well and it'll last you. In my experience, most people treat their electronics like crap because they don't really understand them - they abstract away all the internals.

No, because if it really turns out that what set of genitals you have play a major role in such a huge financial decision as what career you choose, even in the absence of outside coercion, then that instantly invalidates any economic theory that assumes people generally make rational (from purely economic perspective) choices - which would be all of them

No, it isn't. Well-known Keynesian Krugman addressed this on his blog last week, so might as well repeat what he said:

So, for example, what do I say when I read something like this from someone who apparently considers himself a bold rebel against orthodoxy?

        "Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising," he says. "Even if we are actually rational, leaving it to the market may produce collectively irrational outcomes. So when a bubble develops it is rational for individuals to keep inflating the bubble, thinking that they can pull out at the last minute and make a lot of money. But collectively speakingâ.â.â.â"

My answer, to put it in technical terms, is "Well, duh." Maybe grad students at some departments, who are several generations into the law of diminishing disciples, really donâ(TM)t know that rational behavior is at best a useful fiction, that markets arenâ(TM)t perfect, etc, etc. But does this come as news to Robert Shiller? To Ben Bernanke? To Janet Yellen? To Larry Summers? Would it have come as news to Irving Fisher or Walter Bagehot?

The question is what you do with this insight.

There is definitely a faction within economics that considers it taboo to introduce anything into its analysis that isnâ(TM)t grounded in rational behavior and market equilibrium. But what I do, and what everyone Iâ(TM)ve just named plus many others does, is a more modest, more eclectic form of analysis. You use maximization and equilibrium where it seems reasonably consistent with reality, because of its clarifying power, but you introduce ad hoc deviations where experience seems to demand them â" downward rigidity of wages, balance-sheet constraints, bubbles (which are hard to predict, but you can say a lot about their consequences).

You may say that what we need is reconstruction from the ground up â" an economics with no vestige of equilibrium analysis. Well, show me some results. As it happens, the hybrid, eclectic approach Iâ(TM)ve just described has done pretty well in this crisis, so you had better show me some really superior results before it gets thrown out the window.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/new-thinking-and-old-books-revisited/

Real-world economists are fully aware that humans are highly irrational creatures and they've adjusted economic models to compensate as well they can. Maybe you've been reading too much Austrian lunacy?

Psssstttt... be careful what you say, they're listening here too.

Governments should fear their people, not vice versa.

Nope, then the title would read: The Pentagon May "Retire" Yoda, Its 92-Year-Old Futurist

It's easy? EASY? Ever heard the saying "as cunning as a shit-house rat"? It wouldn't be easy.

A vaccine that's 60% effective, being reduced by 20% effectiveness, is still a 48% increase in effectiveness overall. You need to re-examine your logic.

A lottery where you have a 60% chance of winning.

Stealth technology merging with home design, lots of curved surfaces and irregular density walls in the ideal home of the future.

Why suppress and classify? Encourage everyone to have one in the home and have a backdoor installed. That would fit with the usual NSA modus operandi.

What about the first few seasons of the rebooted BSG? That was undoubtably an improvement on the original, took a vacuous but fun space opera into new territory as a dark and edgy SF psychodrama. "33" was one of the most sublime SF TV experiences that I've had in my life. Such a pity they ruined it towards the end... actually, that's unfair. They didn't ruin it, but it did drop dramatically in quallity.

Don't worry, ABC is reshowing them all on iView to celebrate the 50th anniversary. You can catch them anytime!

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