agent00f

All true, but the main point is that the subject of BBT isn't "geeks", which explains the misguided haterade. For example, Raj seeking research/grant funding from Sheldon and their university office sharing hijinx hits home for a segment of nerds who aren't the type to frequent reddit or HN where the "laugh at geeks" narrative became popular.

This is esp. cogent if Community is supposed to be a "proper" nerdy show. The reality is a single-camera format is more conducive to a more subtle script (eg 30 rock, which geeks similarly like) than a cheap/quick multi-cam sitcom. The love seems to stem from the nature of the material, which is conflated with the material itself.

> Big Bang Theory isn't made for geeks; it's made for people who want to laugh at geeks.

It's important to note that BBT's jokes are largely predicated on academia and NOT tech culture since their inside consultant is a physics prof. It's amusing when the "geeks" complain how the show portrays them, when they don't just get the humor having never shared the experiences of the academics on the show.

That said, the volume of nuanced yet poignant physics jokes has dropped since season 1. Still not bad though, and enjoyed by those without the misplaced egos.

> What Mercedes' has done isn't so much about the innovative layout, it's that they've made it work without turbo lag.

The innovative layout is what enables the reduction in turbo lag. The latter is entirely predicated on the physical positions of the turbine relative to the compressor.

This whole phenomenon is actually much simpler than this whole thread makes it out to be. "bro" is used here as an ironic joke and with zero intent to be harmful. The counterargument is that intent doesn't matter, only effect. Well, who is being negatively effected by ironic jokes? Certainly not the people who see much beyond the surface imagery of words; IOW, the superficial. It's basically making something about you that isn't about you at all: trite people drama exemplar.

Then the question becomes whether the opinions of the superficial (masses) matters. Yes and no. For a mass market product intended for their consumption it's a bad idea to induce even righteously indignant offense, no matter how contrite. No in the more rational existential sense because it's pointless to pander to the bottomless pit of human stupidity. Que example of watering down science just because the anti-science crowd will never get it.

There are generally two types of "editors" on wiki. The talent who contribute content, and the bureaucrats who do administration. Some of first type are intellectuals, and most all the latter are anything but.

Much of the internal conflict within wiki exist because the power rests with the bureaucrats but they often lack the domain expertise to appreciate much less write the material people come to the site for. So whenever there's contention over content, it quickly turns into contention over people, and it's not hard to figure out who wins in such a conflict.

This mirrors my own experience on Wiki, which dragged on for months after admins were caught removing content for internal political purposes and alienating tens of thousands (according to objective metric) who used those pages. Conflict resolution there is centered almost entirely on people-drama and almost never on content or _anything_ of substance which is rather the point of an encyclopedia. This is plainly evident from reading any of their notice/resolution boards which are often little but favor-currying.

Wiki-lawyering (citing policies in purposefully cryptic and usually erroneous ways) is rampant, and all these problems exists because admins aren't appointed due to domain expertise (or any sort of expertise for that matter) but being in the good graces of other admins. This conflicts with most wiki content editors, who are often domain experts rather than bureaucrats/politicians. I ended up being banned for doing a reasonably popular reddit AMA about all this, and apparently violating the rule to never talk about wiki administrating outside of wiki.

In sum, the system only works because talented and intelligent people want to create encyclopedic material, and there generally aren't enough admins to stymy this.

> Government leaving R&D to private sector(which is major source of funding even now, at least in the USA) would be the great decision.

The only people who claim this are those who have no idea what constitutes anything near blue skies research. Anything worth looking into for the mid to long term is going to have questionable profit potential and therefore not conducive to profit seeking.

There's a reason why most research uni's are public and the results are dumped out for industry to exploit, and it's not because it steals the talent by paying so well.

> You view them as undesirable, but your solution is even more government. However, the logical solution would be abolishing patents.

So your plan is to incentivize private R&D by abolishing IP. Hahahahahaha.

To be fair, a "market" is by definition trade under ENFORCED circumstances. Therefore a "free market" is in theory possible if the statutes of such a thing are the terms of governance.

Of course, there's no reason to believe the consequences of this are optimal or even desirable, though they're not necessarily worse than what exists now.

Price transparency will NEVER happen in the US market. The insurers all negotiate individual deals with providers, and it's a losing tactic for any one of them to divulge the details of their contracts.

Is the alternative implied here to acquiesce instead?

I don't think this comment deserves to be downvoted (it's currently grey, this isn't reddit).

It's entirely a valid point to be likewise concerned if newegg investors have their fiduciary interests served by an expensive fight against injustice. This is a more general concern of tragedy of the commons where it's not in any one retailer's selfish interest to battle it out, but it's in their collective interest to solve the systemic problem.

Newegg might be heroic here in the grand scheme of things, but not necessarily for its shareholders.

IMO people are too caught up with the ideal of personal ownership, and this likely stems from being constantly bombarded with an individual culture of consumption. "Communism" doesn't mean there's no "ownership" all, only that ownership/possession is determined by society at large, not unlike democracy for political decision making. For example, if a few friends pool money to buy something none can afford on their own and find some equitable way to allocate possession -- or similarly the instinct to share is already quite strong with close tribe members (family, BFFs). Likewise, sharing the burden of work is also fairly natural, eg roommates and chore schedule. Note the similarities to the democratic goal of sharing (political) power, where potential fear of giving up "ownership" of personal determination (ie having to follow everyone's rules) isn't realized as long as implementation of election/leadership is reasonably fair.

Frankly you already seem like a libertarian in the classical sustainable sense, and not the american "free market" bastardization built only to protect the upper crust with the language of "freedom" (from taxation). A parting point worth mentioning in that vein is the "free market" and all its siblings are entirely artificial constructs of our mutually agreed rules. For instance, if you desired to trade your wool for my corn, the only incentive I have to leave with only the wool instead of the corn, the wool, and a slave is the social consequence of break the rules. Everyday we already implicitly follow hundreds/thousands of rule of conduct, so I have little reason to doubt that people can live perfectly fine with more equitable rulesets of conducting economics just as they have for politics.

I sympathize with your sentiments because it's very difficult to break out of the "conventional wisdom" of the zeitgeist.

If it helps, consider that the idea of democracy was very radical to the age when conventional wisdom said only property owners deserved political power. After all, the country does belong to them. In comparison, the idea that everyone had equal say was basically inconceivable, and function infeasible with lack of ballot technology anyway.

Now substitute the word economic for political, it's similar to how capitalism works today. The factory owner gets to tell you what do because he owns the place. "Communism" as an idea wasn't any sort of immaculate conception, but the simple application of democracy to the economic realm. Socialism was just an intermediate step from capitalism (ie aristocracy) whereby only the factory employees (the stakeholders) are given input rather than everyone.

As to the "impractical" argument, as mentioned folks must've had the same reservations before all the implementation details of democracy (eg republics, parliament, congress, etc) were hashed out. For example, in your computer case, it might be simply recognized that sharing some things is not practical and thus some system of reservations/allocation is devised, just as we figured out who gets to write laws when it's clear not everyone can it simultaneously (or otherwise it becomes a mess).

> conventional Libertarian

Given that 'Murican "libertarian" is entirely different that what it means anywhere else in the world, it's inaccurate to call it conventional.

Most self-proclaimed "game changing" technologies don't end up changing anything.

As I mentioned to a similar comment, powerpoint has become the ubiquitous hammer of the business presentation which has everyone searching for nails.

There is a time and place for slides with a few talking points per, but in many ways it's contorted most all meetings into PR events even when there's nothing to sell.

I was remarking on this point:

>In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster.

I'm sure less info makes decisions faster, but this seems rather the opposite of a virtue. Eg. GWB "the decider".

This is a witty point, but OTOH powerpoint has become the ubiquitous hammer of the business presentation which has everyone searching for nails.

There is a time and place for slides with a few talking points per, but in many ways it's contorted most all meetings into PR events even when there's nothing to sell.

While it is a valid goal to cut down on irrelevancies (like empty lingo), it's the exact the wrong mentality to consider detail the enemy of good decisions.

Good decision making stems from understanding a problem comprehensively, not via often misleading generalities. I would even question whether it's possible to accurately summarize anything more trivial problems in a single page; the sort of menial issue that doesn't warrant a widely-distributed memo in the first place.

It's unclear the reasoning behind this assertion that a CEO needs stock compensation to do good work.

Frankly if someone isn't professional enough to do their job without some cartoon carrot hanging in their face, I'm not sure how they would be suitable for a top position in the first place over those who apparently are. -- It's also worth mentioning that there's little contention over the fact that salaries and wealth at the top of the pyramid are rising faster than the norm. The majority of GDP growth for quite a while has been going to the upper crust. I suggest reading the following if this isn't yet evident:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html