delucain

The game mentions that and says something like, "Deal with it. This is a game."

Taking a subset of statistical average income is not the proper way to define the "Middle Class." It's better defined by what you can achieve with a specific income. Can you afford higher education both for you and your offspring? Can you afford to own your home? Can you afford reasonable and convenient means of transportation for your area (multiple family cars in rural areas, but maybe one or even none in urban ones)? Can you afford occasional leisure activities? Can you afford to have a savings and retirement account? Do medical expenses not worry you?

Meeting most or all of these requirements is what sets people into the middle class. I agree with the article that this number is different as you need to take into account local cost of living, but a lot of these requirements are not tied to local costs. I also think this probably puts this number at a higher point than many people think. I have many friends that think, "Oh, I make $20/hr. I'm middle class now!" And I don't agree. You're still going to struggle with bills at that level of income. Middle class is about being above that struggle most of the time. There's a freedom that comes with not having a loan for your education, vehicles, emergency spending (credit cards), etc. And a middle class family should have that freedom.

I don't know that I can see $250k being middle class still, but I do think in the SF Bay area, a family making $150k is quite reasonably still middle class. The upper bound of the middle class is I think harder to define than the lower bound. Once you always have the option of not working for long stretches of time (more than several months) that might be a good indicator of upper class.

I think throughout the last 40 years or so we've gradually become so accustomed to the diminishing size of the middle class. We don't realize what it used to mean. We forget that a time existed where a family with a good budget could live on one income and still afford a house, two cars, college funds for the kids, vacations, and savings.

They're on my list for sure.

Black's opened a second location in Austin on Guadalupe near the University of Texas. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm curious.

I'm not an expert, but I've had both (and dozens of others), I smoke my own brisket, and I feel like I have a decent understanding of it. Salt Lick mops their brisket with a mustard based sauce. They smoke their meats indoors over a direct heat, open pit. Franklin uses a "domino rub" of just salt and pepper (for brisket). They're dry smoked (no sauce) in closed, indirect heat, offset smokers (the wood is in a chamber to the side of the grills). Franklin can control the temperatures of his smokers MUCH better than Salt Lick can. You can taste the meat and smoke better on a Franklin brisket. Salt Lick has a lot more sauce flavor though, and the mopping does add moisture but not tenderness. I have a very strong preference to Franklin's. I think his is the best brisket I've ever had, but that being said, it's not so much better that I want to wait in line for 4 hours (It's a guaranteed wait of 4 hours whether you show up at 7AM or 10AM, but show up after 1, and they're sold out) more than once a year or so.

I bet you're looking forward to the last episode of HPMOR on Saturday.

From what the article says, the city fears losing control over its local government because Google employees would outnumber the rest of the voting citizenship. They seem to want to handle this addition of houses and infrastructure slowly, but if Google employees have a majority in the vote for local issues, they could move ahead as fast as Google wants, since it's in their best interest to keep their employer growing.

My understanding is that the densely populated cities are the most sustainable form of living we do. It reduces carbon emissions because we need don't have to drive so far to get to the shops or work, and we can use public transportation, further reducing the carbon emissions. The housing gets expensive, because of demand, but it reduces destruction of wildlife habitat. http://www.citylab.com/work/2012/04/why-bigger-cities-are-gr...

In Austin AT&T and Grande (Local ISP) both started offering Gigabit shortly after the time Google announced Austin as a fiber city. It's working.

Does this mean that one neuron can carry a signal that is more dense in data than a 0/1 binary spiking signal? Like a single neuron can transmit a complex feeling instead of just if it's touching something or not?

But, have we (the US)? We're a good solid decade or two into the age of free-flowing information, and we are trending the other direction in a frighteningly fast pace. The middle class is gone. More wealth is getting concentrated to the top than ever before in our country's history. And all the while, we have the least productive congress in history whose re-election is entirely dependent on the handouts given by those corporations that Abraham Lincoln warned us about. The few bills that are being passed are often written by those very corporations. We've lost the representation in our government. The Republic is no longer for the people by the people. The Republic is lost.

I think you've hit it right on this. I'd also add that the cost variations probably do play a big factor into what piracy does exist. I'm a lot more likely to take a shot in the dark on a $7 indie game or even a $30 indie "blockbuster" than I am a $60 AAA game (where half the cost is marketing anyway). Piracy probably just appeals more at the higher price points.

Sure, it's a VERY extreme example of "First World Problems" or whatever the meme is, but do you want a job when the offer is a con from the start? What kind of relationship with your employer does that create?

Journalistic flair?

From around the same time period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilton_Palacio_del_Rio

They still only came under budget by half a MB. That stress they put into reducing it was very likely still entirely justified. It's like setting your alarm clock 10 minutes fast to hurry you out the door in the morning.

Taking credit for the last 2MB is a dick move for sure though.

Ever since I heard about Betteridge's Law of Headlines, I can't stop applying it. It basically says the answer to any headline that is a question will be "no," because otherwise a demonstrative statement would sell better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Currently, they certainly are not. Our education systems (non-higher education) are largely designed to produce good workers for a manufacturing/labor economy that we're (relatively) quickly automating out of existence. And our higher education systems are being "dumbed down" to handle the influx of students not capable of handling the old curriculum.

Anecdotally, most of my extended family couldn't write a line of code if their lives depended on it; nor could they design a serious science experiment or write a novel. They aren't trained for those things, and that training has to start young or come with serious motivation, time, and effort. Not one of those people have any interest in learning those things.

I think it's possible to have a knowledge based economy, but we would have to drastically redesign our education systems and our culture in ways that I find it hard to even imagine how we would do so.

But, I think it's only a matter of time before we gain more skill in writing programs that automate out even the most complex knowledge based jobs. Watson is already showing the potential to be a better doctor than any human. The program named "Emily Howell" can already write symphonies that pass whatever the musical version of the Turing Test is. How long before we apply those things to all the other knowledge based jobs? What'll be left? More automation and maintenance programmers? How many of those will we even need?

That was a really great read.

I too often find myself wondering this same thing. Anyone have any insight?

Chrome's incognito mode is a good solution for this too.

They seemed to come to this decision only when it was realized that they had no way of winning the fight. Hardly worth congratulating for.

I would hardly say it's dead. It's just dead domestically for Germany. Germany imports a large quantity of power from France (which relies almost entirely a nuclear for production).

Also, consider your local hackerspaces, co-op workshops, and community centers. Often a reasonable membership will get you access to some equipment that you'd never be able to afford (or at least justify buying) on your own.

I've been a member of the Austin Hackerspace (http://atxhs.org) for a while, and it's paid dividends in saved expense on tools. Plus the community of experts it has attracted has allowed me to quickly finish projects that would take months of research on my own.

I don't understand it. Who are the police so afraid of that they need armored vehicles, assault rifles, and snipers? I can see a SWAT response for a hostage situation or a large scale gang arrest. In what rational world is it necessary to deal with protesters?

Armored vests, plexiglass riot shields, helmets, and less-than-lethal armaments I understand. They have to protect themselves, but these levels of deadly equipment are surely only necessary in war. Are they just going to start gunning down the crowd? Does no one in charge not see the absurdity of all this?

Yeah, I don't think they replace drives in pods until they fail. Even if they're old 1TB models. The drive costs just outstrip their infrastructure costs by so much that 4 racks of 1TB drives is still cheaper than retrofitting even 1 rack with new 4TB drives.

I agree. What they're currently doing with the data doesn't even approach the totalitarian system from 1984, but the amount of data they are collecting on us (and the amount of data there is to collect) is magnitudes greater than Orwell could have predicted.

Basically, the framework is there. All it will take is one overzealous nationalist, one religious extremist, or one extremely greedy, immoral, charismatic corporate puppet and their resources for evil are bigger than at any other time in history. Look at how well Hitler tracked Jews with basic 1940's punch card technology. Imagine if he had had access to the NSA databases of today. I apologize for going all Godwin's Law here, but it seems relevant.

What truly amazes me is how complacent we are about it as a society. 1984 was obviously popular for a reason, but when the set up for that book is staring us in the face, we don't even seem to blink. Maybe we'll be different when (not if) the abuses of this kind of power start happening...

But this isn't watching them going in and out of a crack house. This is watching all their movements after going in and out of a crack house. Still debatable, but I think your analogy didn't show how broad the scope of this would be.

The end of the article says: "[Roscosmos] will have to wait until the satellite falls to Earth to know [what caused the communications interruption]." That sounds like they intend to de-orbit and recover the satellite to me. The real question is whether the geckos could survive re-entry. My guess is no.

This is anecdotal and not the hard figures you're asking for, but I know in Austin both Grande and AT&T (two of the three ISPs in town) started offering gigabit packages. In almost all neighborhoods AT&T beat Google in getting fiber to people's doors. This went from being something they weren't even hinting at to being a reality within a year of Google announcing their intentions to provide fiber in Austin. And while Grande is still only offering fiber in high end neighborhoods, AT&T has pretty good coverage with it.