Add another one to my "things that confuse me" list... Why do average, ordinary people vote for Conservative / Republican / (insert your right-wing party here) politicians? I can see voting for them IF: Your household income is more than $500,000/year You are a majority shareholder in a corporation that employs more than 500 people You are a senior management in a major corporation You have the majority of your net worth invested in energy and "defense" stocks But honestly, unless one or more of the above applies to you, it just doesn't make sense. For the average Joe, voting for Conservative politicians is basically the equivalent to shooting yourself in the foot -- over and over again. Their modis operandi is to systematically underfund and dismantle public institutions, and replace them with private corporations they can profit from. The result is an ever increasing divide between rich and poor, creating a cheap labor force at the bottom (more ...
Climate Change is big news. It's a dividing issue. Us versus Them. Depending on who you believe, it's either a) the most catastrophic event of our time , or... b) completely made up. So -- Is it real? Probably. The underlying principles are well understood. When will it happen? It's likely to have already been happening since we started burning large amounts of fossil fuels. Recent studies indicate that the measurable climate effects could be delayed 30+ years, so we might only be seeing the effects of carbon emissions from the 70s and 80s . That's right, all the emissions from those 1980s big V8 cars haven't even registered yet, never mind the more recent SUVs . What will future effects be? Hard to say. Warmer average temperatures. More storms. "Freak" weather. Rising sea levels, no doubt. Will there be a "tipping point" where the changes start spiraling out of control and threaten human survival? Maybe. But we don't know en...
As I continue to go through my old blog drafts, this is another one from 2010 where I took down some rough notes and never quite put something together. At the time, there was significant press (and a movie ) about how Mark Zuckerberg has "stolen" the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins . I would argue that there was very little original or truly innovative ideas that went into the core functionality of Facebook. On the other hand, it was pretty innovative to build up a huge database of his classmates' information without their permission... ☺ --- I've read Atlas Shrugged cover to cover, and I totally get the theme and the very real problems it discusses. What I don't understand is how anyone thinks that modern intellectual property laws provide any type of solution. If anything, they tend to make matters worse, since people that come up with the most profitable ideas today are usually bound by agreements that automatically assign ...
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