VladRussian2

>First, the number of well-paid middle-skill jobs in manufacturing and clerical occupations has decreased substantially since the mid-1980s.

in all these articles/analysis replace the middle-skill jobs in manufacturing with the programming/IT jobs - the middle-skill jobs of today - and you'd hardly find any decline

wrt. 422MJ->3MJ, xenon flash lamp pumping

As it was already mentioned in the threads like this before, the NIF was built using the technology that was available in those years of the past when NIF was planned and started. Flash lamp pumped lasers are bigger, more expensive and much less efficient, i.e. mere few percents efficiency at best vs. tens of percent efficiency of modern laser diode pumped IR lasers. (Even with such improvement though, i still think laser driven fusion is inferior to many other forms of inertial confinement and much less probable to result in system-level break-even. My personal favorite, Sandia Z-machine is on the scale of 15% efficiency of generating X-ray pulse, and schemes like deep plasma focus or polywell by-pass the energy to radiation conversion stage all together and thus avoid related losses.)

> It may in fact not be possible to do better-than-breakeven fusion on a small (relative to a star) scale.

the H-bomb is better-than-breakeven and much smaller than star scale. What you say may be true for Tokamak like confinement schemes whereis H-bomb is inertial confinement, and it works. And it is pretty clear that inertial confinement in several orders of magnitude smaller scale than H-bomb would work too. Look at Sandia Z-machine - an order of magnitude up, and it would get breakeven. Not that anybody really needs it :)

>Companies spend millions in SuperBowl ads, and nobody can click on that,

not that i dream about clicking it, i'm just surprised that they still hasn't implemented it yet as current TVs are really computers sold/packaged as TVs.

>but realize how long it takes for humans to learn to speak/comprehend complete sentences.. heck to be potty trained even.

interesting that a kitten or a puppy gets potty trained much faster than a human child.

>Surely that doesn't mean it's correspondingly illegal to trade RUB for USD within russia, but i'm not sure what the salient difference is

If i remember correctly the other party must be a bank.

the risk isn't the same. Instead of capital gain a capital loss may happen - for example when you own stock, like, in particular, after exercise. Whereis in case of stock options there is no risk of loss before exercise. The stock options may be worth 0 - that is the lowest possible outcome, and you wouldn't be charged a dime if the options are underwater. Just like bonus - company pays to you when things are great, yet you don't pay to company when the things aren't. Thus the same ordinary income tax treatment for stock options exercise profit as for bonus.

there are differences. For example, the profit from the grant date to the date of exercise is ordinary income - taxed at your bracket rate, while any profit coming from holding for longer than 1 year after exercise is at long-term capital gain - 15%.

>I'm surprised the company (not the insurance) had to pay that much for the babies medical bills.

my understanding that AOL self-insures for medical.

the difference is that Eric Holder hasn't yet made a determination that Bitcoin is a currency and thus violates the law (like they did to Liberty Dollar, etc...)

" В соответствии со ст. 27 Федерального закона «О Центральном банке Российской Федерации» «официальной денежной единицей (валютой) Российской Федерации является рубль. Введение на территории России других денежных единиц и выпуск денежных суррогатов запрещается». Получившие определенное распространение анонимные платежные системы и криптовалюты, в том числе наиболее известная из них – Биткойн, являются денежными суррогатами и не могут быть использованы гражданами и юридическими лицами. "

translation:

"According to the title 27 of the Federal Law "On Central Bank of Russian Federation" "the official currency of Russian Federation is rouble. Issue (introduction) of other currencies and currency surrogates on the territory of Russia is prohibited". Anonymous payment systems and cryptocurrencies, including the most popular - Bitcoin, are currency surrogates and can't be used by physical persons and corporations. "

This determination - bitcoin as a currency surrogate - was made by the "expert group" consisting of high level bureaucrats from the enforcement side, ie. Central Bank, FSB, police (police in Russia is one big vertically integrated structure from local to federal level), Attorney General office.

sounds like she was punished for a disruptive innovation - "backdating of stock options exercise". Backdating of grant is cheating at the expense of shareholders whereis backdating of exercise - at the expense of IRS :)

"In my reference checking, at least a dozen investors told me that they made far more money when the numbers disappointed than when the company outperformed, because they trusted Michelle when she said that things were not worse than they appeared and bought on the dips."

anybody sees any wrong here? Beside private hush-hush, there seems to be the same pattern - like with backdating of options - of optimizing interests of some selected "closer than arm reach" group at the expense of general shareholder population of that company.

know places where even poison taking follows strict process.

> If, on the other hand, he were connected to your "corporate peon" role, you could switch him on and off at the... drop of a hat. In fact, he could give you that hat when you get hired, already connected to everyone else in your office. And if you leave that job, you both burn that hat, and he gives one just like it to the next guy.

sounds like good old corporate email/network/IM account.