ahomescu1

> The big difference is that in much of Western Europe, the combination of social security, healthcare, pensions, social housing, eduction costs, public transport etcetera means you don't rapidly fall out of the middle class even if you lose your job.

All those things depend heavily on a solid government budget, with solid income from taxing a strong economy. As we're now seeing with Greece, they're not sustainable if the government "coffers" are emptying up or if the economy is weakening.

> It is economically speaking rational, to automate the bulk of the (middle income) jobs, as there lie the most potential savings. So without regulation this trend will continue (it will on the other hand continue even with regulation, I believe).

Is it automation, or is it more competition from other humans? In 50 years, the population of the US almost doubled. In addition, many workers (in most countries, not just the US) now have to compete globally (indirectly, if not directly) with equivalent people from other countries with lower standards of living. Both these phenomena can have negative effects on employment and salaries, IMHO.

I don't know, but they are competitors in one huge market: desktop computers (sort of) and operating systems. If there's one company that's successfully taking down Windows, that's Apple (with Mac OS X).

> I would love it if most liberal arts institutions "fostered a broad set of knowledge and skills whose value is not always immediately apparent." But they generally don't, at least not anymore.

As I briefly mentioned in a lower comment, why can't high school be for "breadth", while university is for "depth"? More people would benefit from this, since most people go to HS, and it would also be cheaper on both individuals and society.

History, logic, basic mathematics, languages (both native and foreign), geography, and many more are covered by high schools curricula all over the world.

Edit: I think this idea that college needs to be "broad" also creates further craziness in how some of the "deep" education is structured: you go to law or medical school after 4 years of college. In other countries, law and medicine are university specialties (in my country, for example, medical school takes 6 years of university education; in the US, first you get 4 years of college, then 4 more years of medical school).

I'd throw Apple in there and call it a "hate triangle": MS hates Apple and Google, Apple hates MS and Google, while Google... I don't really know.

From the FAQ at http://www.whatsim.com/en/faq:

  Can I make calls, send text messages or surf the Internet?

  No, WhatSim only allows you to chat with WhatsApp.

> art of listening to music (that was an awesome class!)

So you spent several hundreds/thousands of either your own or the state's money to learn the "art of listening to music". Would you say you got your/their money's worth?

> have an intelligent conversation about many aspects of world history and culture

In other countries, that purpose is served by high school (I think the US might be better off fixing high school, instead of pushing everyone thru CC).

> Which is my whole damn point: naturalness is irrelevant.

I disagree. Man-made phenomena can all be fought and reversed (so it's worth trying), but not all natural ones can (so it can be worth trying to fight them, but one must also know when to give up).

This started with the statement "Social inequality without serving a conscious purpose", which implies (or at least that's how I interpreted it) that social inequality is some man-made phenomenon, and we'd all be equal if not for some evil overlords "keeping us down". I disagree with this theory.

Just because there are some things that can be fought doesn't mean that all things you/we deem "unacceptable" can be eliminated. Some things always exist, like the first law of thermodynamics (one example) and drug use (people deemed drug use "unacceptable" and initiated the "War on Drugs", and look how well that turned out).

Not everything in life is under our control.

The first law of thermodynamics is not acceptable to me, yet it is natural and there's nothing I can do to change or ignore it (I was going to also give gravity as an example, but that one is more complicated).

I think the fundamental question here is: what is the natural state, equality or inequality? If inequality is the natural state (which I think it is), it can't be a "purpose", it just exists.

> Despite the fact that A needs a website and B needs an oil change, A and B will likely end up performing the work themselves, not because they enjoy it, but because they can't afford to pay each other.

If they don't have dollars, they can pay each other in IOUs (which aren't divisible, but otherwise would work fine).

> I find it interesting in that it's a useful argument, but only at a communal level - if the entire community hates the direction of a project (e.g. OpenOffice), they can fork it and take it in a different direction.

You can take leadership of the community and lead by example: fork it yourself and start hacking, then try to get more people to join.

> I think stegosaurus's idea is that a sufficiently motivated government or billionaire could make that land attractive to urbanites.

I don't think they can. China tried: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/marketplace-25/china...

> Cars are not required to look out for people, people have to look out for cars.

It's not always sufficient to just "look out for people". It is quite possible that the driver, at the speed they're driving at, does not have the reflexes or braking distance to safely stop when encountering a "jaywalker".

The alternative that many people propose is to reduce driving speed to "safe" values, which I always thought naive. Even if you make everyone drive at 20MPH inside cities, you'll still have people exceeding that limit and getting into accidents. IMHO, it's just safer to keep pedestrians away from cars.

Slightly off-topic, your questions remind me of this satire: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertaria... (never fails to make me laugh)

> Why is education for the citizens of a country considered something that a countries government should have no part in in the US?

10th Amendment says:

  The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If you follow this Amendment, the States are free to educate their citizens any way they want, it's just that the Federal government isn't allowed to (a good restriction, in my opinion, since competition usually increases quality).

> It's a fascinating philosophy that, in my opinion, severely underestimates the human affinity for greed and manipulation.

Ironically, exactly the same can be said of Communism.

> North Korea is basically a monarchist personality cult rather than anything resembling the Soviet Union.

Unlike the Soviet Union, where no personality cult of Stalin and Lenin existed. </sarcasm>

North Korea is as good an example of a totalitarian dictatorship as any Communist country (including my own).

I doubt a gamer would buy a Mac Pro for a gaming rig.

We can do a present day apples-to-apples comparison: how does the life of a North Korean scientist compare to that of their Southern counterpart? I think the latter is probably better off overall.

> Well, some things people should remember - how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, or who the parties were in WW2, or what makes a metaphor different from a simile.

This line of thinking is IMHO a lot of what's wrong with modern education: none of that stuff matters if you don't understand what's behind it (how you get to the formula of calculating the hypothenuse and why people fought WW2). To use the WW2 example, the answer to "who" is "Germany&allies vs Russia&allies" (an oversimplification), but it's far more important to know why they were fighting (a fight between different political ideologies, including Nazism and Communism). Education focuses too much on (possibly useless) facts, and far too little on the logic behind them, or why they matter.

I'm surprised to see on that list some sequels to flops, Pacific Rim being the perfect example. Why would anyone go watch Pacific Rim 2, or London Has Fallen (which I assume is a sequel to Olympus Has Fallen)?

Not sure that would be an improvement. If funding gets tighter and more selective, their selection criteria might become pedigree and connections instead of who has the better idea and team.

Minor nitpick: his name is spelled "Elon".

> A great idea, powerful work ethic and good design are rarely sufficient on their own.

This seems too pessimistic about Silicon Valley. Plenty of well-executed great ideas succeed, and plenty of bad ones fail.

Title should probably mention that this is about rump kernels for NetBSD/xen.

GP: compared to most other large (>25M) countries.

Scandinavian countries aren't >25M, neither are they "most [...] countries".

EDIT: I started thinking there's more to this argument. Scandinavian countries are more the size of the average US state, than the size of the US itself. Comparing Sweden to Michigan makes more sense to me than comparing Sweden to the US (also makes sense from a GDP perspective: Sweden had a 2012 GDP of $523 billion, while Michigan had a GDP of $408 billion; they're close in both population and wealth).

The GP's point was that the US is rich for its size, which IMHO is testament to the effectiveness of good federalization (the US being a federation of 50 semi-self-governing states). IMHO size does matter, and it's really hard to govern huge countries.

> They'll get funding, but the models will change and adapt. Ie. Spotify and Netflix are early carnations of what what could come.

Minor nitpick: "carnation" is a flower; I think you mean "incarnation".

> McDonald’s CEO, James Skinner, is interesting. I like their chicken mcNuggets, but I am always aware that their CEO is US-Navy trained, and maintains a good relation with armed forces.

I think that's a different discussion. I can't imagine any way that McD's would spy on/hurt us thru McNuggets (except maybe food poisoning), whereas they can thru software/Internet companies.