I agree with most of what you wrote, and I've said some of it myself before. But I still have a problem.

Having the government force a business to employ two people, one digging holes, and the other following along behind and filling them in, doesn't seem like the right solution to this problem, but that's pretty close to what Oregon sounds like it is doing.

I was raised with a good work ethic, and I find fulfillment and satisfaction in doing a job well, earning a good living wage, and providing for my family. What happens in a world where that's completely unnecessary? We already live in a world where less than 5% of the population can provide all the food the world needs. What happens when we live in a world where less than 1% of the population (and a bunch of automation) can provide *everything* the world needs?

What happens to the unneeded 99% then? Okay, what happens to the unneeded 60% after the riots and class wars kill more than half the world's population? (Too cynical?)

Seriously, I worry about this for my kids. They are going to live through some seriously disruptive times, and I probably won't recognize the world that comes out the other side of that, assuming I live that long.

UBI is someone's hope for a way out of that.I don't have a lot of faith in that solution, but I don't have a better one to offer either.

Company my friend worked for had a similar problem with cheating a standards body. In the end, company was fined and no single person/team was found guilty. Lower level employees were shifting blame one level up, upper level said it wasn't even a decision just a team issued directive to reach a milestone, programmers said it started as a test that never went away, CEO claimed he was under too much pressure from shareholders (to be able to stop it once he learned about it).

Umm... yeah.

At its basic level, a corporation is a legal fiction designed to shield liability. Success!

Next?

It's NOT an issue of bias in only looking at examples where old shit happened to last a long time. That's what the person I replied to claimed. It's horse shit. If that were the case, and new shit lasts just as long or longer than old shit, then the typical experience of someone with long-lived old things would be that the new shit is better. That's not the typical experience. If it were, people wouldn't bitch about new shit not lasting long.

I actually wonder about this a little, but not necessarily from the point of view you might think.

My parents got a washer/dryer set when they got married. The washer lasted about 22 years, the dryer lasted about 31 years. They were Maytags, which, 45 years ago, was a high-quality high-cost American brand. Maytag as a company/brand has been bought and sold about 5 times since then, and they are no longer a high-quality brand, nor are they an American brand any more, really.

I bought a house about 15 years ago, and bought a washer and dryer at the same time. Reasonable mid-range Maytags, actually (even though, even at the time, the brand wasn't what it once was). The dryer got replaced after about 11 years (after the third repair on it for a rusted drum roller, DIY repair cost about $20). Replaced it with an LG. The washer got replaced after 15 years, don't remember what I replaced it with, I think an inexpensive GE. I don't expect to get 15 years from either one.

Yeah, I complain that stuff doesn't last as long as it used to. But...

Part of that, really, is that the market has changed, and there is more low-end short-term crap available. This distorts the market, and makes it harder to be an informed consumer. It is harder to filter out the crap and only buy the high-quality stuff, and, frankly, because it is harder, the sales volumes for the high-quality stuff is lower, and therefore the unit costs go up even more, making the high-quality stuff even more expensive than it otherwise would "need" to be.

How many people are still willing to buy the high-end high-quality high-cost items that should last a long time? Fewer as a percentage of population than 40 years ago? How many of those (like me) are turned off by the high-tech crap that is needlessly added to appliances? (I avoided a washing machine with an LCD touchscreen display, because I don't expect that to work for 10+ years, and, frankly, I want real buttons. That touchscreen model was $300 more than what looked like an equivalent model with buttons. Was there a quality increase included with that $300 that wasn't appearent, that I missed out on becuase I didn't want the touchscreen? I doubt it, but how would I know?)

I do wonder if the problem isn't that good-quality stuff isn't around, it is just that the consumer can't tell the difference with all the identically-marketted cheap crap that floods the shelves and the Amazon pages. Read the user/buyer comments on the pages at Amazon, it helps avoid some of the crap... but not all of it.

I agree that we should end the drug war. It has gone worse than Prohibition.

Prohibition was, at least nominally, a moral stance that alcohol was bad and should be totally banned. The War on Drugs (also called "The War on (Some) Drugs" if you are trying to smear the pharmaceutical industry) was a law enforcement and social control program, really. You can make the argument that it, like criminalization of maurijuana, was to allow the government to lock up black people easier. There's a great conspiracy theory that maurijuana is illegal because FBI Director Hoover wanted to lock up the Black Panthers, and they weren't otherwise actually breaking laws that he could pin on them (not to say they were innocent, just the drug dealing was a lot easier to prove and convict). There's also a great conspiracy theory that maurijuana is illegal because Dow Chemical's new miracle nylon ropes couldn't compete against hemp ropes, so they got maurijuana (and hemp) made illegal.

If we want to stop immigration, we simply need a national employment database and fine the hell out of any employer employing people not approved to work.

Look up the E-Verify system. Employers can already verify citizenship/immigration status, but it is not currently required, and businesses don't want to do it, because it loses them access to cheap labor. It will especially impact small farms, and lots of agricultural and meat processing facilities. Also lawn services, construction, and plenty of other businesses where people work hard physical labor, usually outside. You know, the kind of jobs that most Americans want their kids to get good educations so they won't have to do, but that still need to be done.

But many of the people losing their children are not coming here simply for work. They are facing being murdered in their home country.

This is where I show I don't fit well into either Democrat or Republican columns. Coming to America for a better life, or a life where you can live the way you want with less government control, is a big part of how this country grew over the last 200 years. I'm a big believer in that. And that's what we have our normal legal immigration laws to cover. We also have the asylum immigration laws, and I don't know as much about that as I feel I should, but I've never agreed that "There is a high violent crime rate in my home country" is a good enough reason for an asylum claim. Government persecution, yes, organized crime, maybe, my spouse beats me, no, I don't think that should qualify. Bear in mind, I've always considered "asylum" to really be more about "political asylum" which is obvious in my thinking there, isn't it? Can you tell I don't acutally know the law there?

And Sessions is quoting the bible while ignoring Jesus and all the tales relating to being a good samaritan, kind to strangers, etc. And he's using the same verse used to justify slavery and many other heinous crimes.

If you look at the history for Paul's letters to the Romans, he wrote several of them while IN JAIL. You know, being imprisoned for breaking the law. He was a big believer in obeying a government's laws that represented the will of God, but not so much a government that did not represent God's will.

There's a saying that goes with this... "The Devil quotes scripture too". Simply finding a line in the Bible that seems to support your position is not enough to claim the moral high ground. You still have to make the case that what you are doing is right, and I don't think they've done that successfully yet. Half the Trump administration isn't even trying to do that, because they don't think what they are doing *is* right. They *may* believe it is the least bad of several very bad options, but that is not at all the same statement as "is good and right".

>>> General Flynn was an honorable man. I don't know what he did to make the dark state so angry - but clearly he did *something* to precipitate his purge. I believe he was trying to protect the Republic from its many enemies within.

General Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI regarding his Russian contacts. Drop the conspiracy theories already.

Best I can tell, Flynn's problem was he was too focused on one problem. He was a good example, unfortunately, of a large part of the US military from 2001-2014. Totally and completely focused on international terrorism to the exclusion of all else. He thought the only existential threat to the US was "radical Islamic terrorism" (you can conjure demons with those words, be careful) and that anything in the pursuit of stopping that was good for the country. So he cooperated with the Russians - and probably Turkey - in pursuit of that goal to a degree that crossed legal lines and got himself (and probably his son) into trouble. Then he lied about it. Then (the real problem that made Trump fire him) he admitted to lying about it.

I firmly believe General Flynn is a patriot who loves his country, and he was so focused on one problem facing his country that he ignored the real damage he was doing to his country. If he actually accepts what he did, he probably feels awful about his actions and the damage he has caused.

Of course, if you read the reports about people who worked with him in his 2-3 jobs before he retired from the military, he's also an egotistical ass. The two are not mutually exclusive.

>>Battery tech will improve dramatically,
They've been saying that about smartphones too.. And we're still waiting for a smartphone that can last more then a day of heavy use.

Look at the volume of a battery in an old Nokia candybar phone from 2000. Now look at the volume of the battery on a current-production smartphone. The smartphone battery is less than half the size, and rated for a higher capacity.

Battery tech has improved dramatically, and manufacturers, generally, took those improvements and used them to make smaller batteries with the same capacity, not same-size batteries with larger capacity.

I disagree with that decision, I'd prefer a slightly thicker phone with a 2-day battery, because then 500 charge cycles on the phone means it lasts 3 years. For some reason, they didn't listen to me. Or maybe they did, and made a design choice that forces me to replace a phone more often (or at least the battery). You don't think they'd design things to make you need to buy their product more often, do you?

Hmm

You had me nodding until you got to here:

It is not restricted to guns, though that's certainly what most of the debate revolves around today. It's likely that even when the second amendment was written, it wasn't intended specifically to refer to guns.
[snip]
There's no reason to limit the second amendment to guns.

Remember, the founders had just finished fighting a war. They were pretty familiar with military speech and technology. They debated this stuff a lot. They said "Arms" on purpose. They did not say "Arms and Armaments", and they did not say "Arms and Artillery".

In the military, going back several hundred years before the American war for independence, and continuing to today, "Arms" means pistols, rifles, and such. "Armaments" and "Artillery" is, depending on time period, catapults, trebuchets, cannons, howitzers, mortars, things more in that range.

I think it is completely reasonable to believe many of the Founders would support "the people" as individuals owning full-auto M-16s and AK-47s. I don't think they would support individuals owning an US Army M198 or M777 155mm Howitzer.

Everything above that line I quoted makes sense. Actually, I agree with much of what follows that line, too, but I felt it worth noting one specific thing I did disagree with.

I see the labor force participation rate [bls.gov] climb from 1970 to 1990, flat until 2007, then fall. That decline is a pretty recent thing...

If all you are doing is talking about population distribution in age ranges, you might want to re-think your argument.

In the US we have a nice population spike right at/after WWII, we call that the Baby Boomers. Born between 1940 and 1960, or so. And, hey, now in 2016 those people are between 56 and 76 years old. So your complaint about a falling labor force participation rate starting around 2007 is when the big Baby Boomer spike started hitting 65 years old.

Definition: The civilian labor force participation rate is the number of employed and unemployed but looking for a job as a percentage of the population aged 16 years and over. (definition from http://www.tradingeconomics.co...)

You're complaining that old people are not forced to work until they drop dead on the job.

This is really the argument you want to make?

He donates to his own foundation to get tax breaks

Actually, you are wrong here. There isn't any evidence that he has donated to his foundation for many years. After all, if you don't pay any tax, there is no tax break to be had from donations!

Sort of. What I read with this, is that for several corporate personal appearances, he directed that his appearance fee be donated to his foundation. He did this with (I think) Comedy Central for a $400,000 fee. By the tax code, a directed donation under these circumstances is a donation by *him*, not by Comedy Central. The problem for Trump there, is that for a case like that, while he doesn't owe income tax for that directed donation (assuming the Trump Foundation keeps its tax-exempt status, which is looking less likely), he does owe payroll tax for it, which is about 12%.

So there is tax to be paid, but not income tax. This is part of how Hillary Clinton can (somewhat correctly, speculatively) accuse Trump of not paying any federal income tax for years, and Trump can (honestly) reply that he has paid lots of taxes over the years. She says "federal income tax" and he says "tax", and they aren't talking about the same thing. That's on purpose by both of them.

If they're receiving "free" money or services from the government, then they most certainly ARE taking money from those that are actually working hard and paying into the system

This is a serious question, and a big part of that "protestant work ethic" thing the parent poster complained about. I get a real sense of satisfaction by working to provide for my family. That comes with a certain feeling that other people should have to work like that too, to provide for themselves and their families.

But...

I'd love to live in your hypothetical world where the majority of people can just loaf around because they don't have to really work, yet our economy still won't collapse into the shitter

We really are rapidly moving to the point where 5% of the earth's population can provide *all* the needed goods and services for the world. What happens to the other 95% of people?

180 years ago, in the United States, 90% of the population was involved in food production. Now less than 5% is - I think it's closer to 3%, but I'm not sure of the exact number. The transition was a massive dislocation for all those ex-farmers and ranchers. But they (or their kids, if they couldn't handle the transition) became the workers in American factories, fuelling the industrial revolution in this country. The factory jobs are on the way out, replaced by automation. Most of those people moved to service industry jobs (or, again, their kids), and now those service industry jobs are on the way out.

Where do the people that had those jobs go?

Where do people that only have a high school education go? Not everyone is good college material, so Sanders' solution of free college for all really doesn't fix that. What do we, as a society, do with people that we can't really find a productive use for? My father-in-law says "The world needs ditch diggers" (sarcastically) but really, a back hoe is way better at that than a guy with a shovel.

So do we let them starve? Do we feed, house, and clothe them in some basic way? How? What kind of education do we give their kids, if 90+% of them will grow up just to sit around doing nothing? You want to educate them, because one of them might win the genetic lottery and grow up to make an amazing advancement in physics that will finally get us off this stinking planet in a reasonable way. :)

What do you do with unneeded people?

Since the inception of HT, is there a reason CPU design hasn't advanced to the point of executing 4 threads per core rather then the 2 it always has been?

Workload and system balance, mostly.

If you look back several years (2008? earlier?) you'll see some Sun Sparc designs, and some IBM POWER designs, that supported 4 or 8 threads per core. They worked well for very specific workloads and applications.

The Sun Sparc designs with 8 threads per core were mostly tailored for "simple" highly-scalable web servers, where a thread is blocking on I/O most of its time, and a web server could spawn many many threads to support many simultaneous connections. Worked very well for that purpose.

IBM did stuff like that with their POWER architecture for terminal servers and financial transaction processing, where, again, the thread spends most of its time blocking on I/O.

You don't get that so much for Intel x86/x64 systems, because, on the desktop side, frankly, most users don't use 4 cores well, and the few that do aren't doing I/O-blocking tasks, they are doing CPU-bound tasks, video encoding, stuff that hits the SIMD units hard. HT doesn't benefit nearly as well for CPU-bound tasks, and that market is small enough not to be worth the extra architecture/development time. For x64 servers, there is a bit more of a market there, but Intel would much rather serve that market with their high-end Xeon 4-socket systems. 10 cores per CPU, 4 CPUs, you get 40 cores and 80 threads. Oh, and you pay about $4,000 per CPU that way. That also gets you ridiculous amounts of RAM, and better networking support too. Usually you want both of those on your 80-thread server system, anyway.

So I suppose the answer is, basically, it has, but only where it's worthwhile.

Tim

The problem in the sig
          1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
is really at the step
          1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1

Because that is wrong. The step pretends to be sqrt() on both sides, but that's not what it is, because sqrt() really has 2 answers. sqrt(1) is either +1 or -1, simultaneously. To get the step as shown, what is really happening is abs(sqrt()).

Which obviously yields invalid results. You can't do abs() on both sides of an equal sign and expect to keep a valid equation.

But I agree with you, it looks like it should end "2=0", if you allow the wrong sqrt() step.

But maybe the real root of the problem is, why does the US truly need to 'project force' in a unilateral sense?

Because the 1800's taught us that wars on our own soil are bad. See, for example, the British burning Washington D.C. during the War of 1812 (which actually lasted 1812-14). The reason it is called the WHITE House was a not-so-subtle "Screw You!" to the British when we rebuilt it after they burned it to the ground.

The 1900's taught us that wars "over there" are much better. The US was the major economic and miltary superpower from 1945 to 1990 because our infrastructure wasn't destroyed by a continent-wide war 1939-1945.

A slightly different question is "Do we need to meddle in other people's affairs?" but, as a species, humans aren't good at not poking the bee hive.

If there is evidence that a legislator is guilty of insider trading, or any other crime, they should be tried by their peers in congress, not by the justice dept.

The problem here is that doesn't work in practice. For evidence supporting this statement, I give you every internal police investigation into officer wrong-doing ever. If you haven't found it yourself before, how about this article written by an Air Force colonel whose son was shot in the head by police while hand-cuffed in custody. The officers were cleared of wrong-doing by an internal investigation. I don't expect an unbiased viewpoint from this man, but the stats he found don't make "tried by their peers" sound like anything resembling a workable solution.

People and groups put in charge of writing laws, with a history of making laws that benefit themselves and hold themselves to a lower standard than the rest of the population, need more oversight, not less.

Try again.

Extreme right: Cut spending to equal revenue.
Extreme left: Raise revenue to equal spending.
Center: Continue to give everyone whatever they want, and borrow money from China to pay for it.

Really?

I thought the Extreme Right plan was cut revenue to destroy government, the Extreme Left plan was raise revenue while raising spending more, and the Center just looks left and right with a bewildered expression while muttering "Don't you people have any brains???"

Most Extreme Right seem to want government services without paying for them, and/or want a system that is only good for the rich and lucky. I'm middle class with manageable debt, good job and health insurance, and no real medical problems. That counts as "lucky" in America.

Most Extreme Left seem to want the government to take most of the roles of family, and some of the roles of community (while usually not admitting that community used to equal church).

150 years ago it wasn't that unusual for 3 generations of a family to live in one house. That covered retirement for the old, child care for the young, and consolidated housing expenses that made life possible. We don't do that so much any more, and we are still trying to figure out how to make our new system work.

I admire the problem, but I don't have a good solution that scales to 300 million people.