jtzhou's comments

The natural solution to this would be more rail to allow people to have reasonable commutes into the city. But some critics think rail encourages sprawl and the only answer is more skyscrapers and density.

And on the other side, NIMBY's in low-density areas like Menlo Park and Atherton killed the restoration of the Dumbarton Bridge Rail (also victim of a mysterious arson recently) and are delaying electrification of the Caltrain. The Dumbarton Bridge, for example, would allow people to live on the East Bay and take direct rail into Palo Alto, Redwood City or Menlo Park, and up and down the corridor.

Yes, living up to someone else's expectations is a difficult challenge. It becomes more acute when you are a single child, or come from an immigrant family who sacrificed a lot for you to be there, because you have to live up to both of your parents expectations and carry on the family lineage. Simply going to Davis and becoming a nurse or teacher in Fremont, while your friends are celebrating at frat parties at Princeton or Yale, feels like you are letting people down.

According to QS World University Rankings, countries such as UK, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Singapore, which do offer parental benefits and are a fraction of the population of the United States, all place well in the rankings.

Also, the USA is a very large market which is why a lot of pure software companies are headquartered there. Specialization is inherent in larger markets. A lot of other large vertically-aligned technology companies are headquartered around the world, such as Volkswagen, Samsung and Alibaba.

The lionization of specific billionaire entrepreneurs is more due to abnormally low tax rates (by Western standards) on extremely high incomes.

> Yes, but who's leading the world in technological growth?

Actually, China, Mongolia and India are leading the world in GDP per capita growth. If by "technological growth" you mean labor productivity growth, other countries with parental benefits, such as Denmark and Sweden, are doing fine. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDYGTH

It's not impossible to grow while supporting enjoyable lives for your citizens. In fact, as median wealth and median income increases, automation and broader technological advancement become more worthwhile.

Perhaps, but China has also made great strides in the preservation of animal species, like the giant panda and golden monkey. True, there are still some small segment of the population, mostly in villages, which desire rare animal parts. However, these are the exception in China and the preservation of these animals contribute greatly to tourism.

If Japan accumulated a sovereign wealth fund during the "boom" times, they could draw upon this fund during the absence of exports due to aging workers. The problem is in the current pay-as-you-go social security system.

If Japan and other aging countries created a sovereign wealth fund funded by taxes during "boom" times, like Norway has done, then it wouldn't be as dependent on a pay-as-you-go system. This fund would be held in other currencies and could be drawn down as necessary to keep the local currency stable in the absence of exports.

True, much of the domestic economy would be providing care to older people (and few tangible exports) but distributions from the sovereign wealth fund would ensure the Japanese still have a high standard of living.

Pay-as-you-go social security systems are the real problem, not low birth rates.

For public high schools with a GreatSchools' score of 9 or 10, there are $1.5m 3BR home in places like in Fremont, Dublin or Campbell, but would be a bit of a commute to places like SF, Palo Alto or Mountain View where a high concentration of $250k+ per year jobs are.

http://www.greatschools.org/search/search.page?distance=30&g...

A decent home in a good school district is around $2.5m in the Bay Area, so $250k before taxes might get you qualified for a mortgage (provided you saved $500k for a down payment). $100k, while above U.S. median household income, would not go very far in the Bay Area.

Even in Eastern Europe, there are places with very high standards of living for talented developers, such as Prague or Warsaw. With the EU, Berlin, Vienna and Munich are now possible as well and have a very high standard of living.

Indeed, and posting to web forums, especially with connections to mainland China, can be risky due to the traceback of IP addresses, collected or "procured" by Chinese authorities. This happened even through the cooperation of Yahoo in Hunan Province.

I highly recommend using the Tor network for political discussions.

This is very unclear: "Once the album has been removed from your account, it will no longer be available for you to redownload as a previous purchase. If you later decide you want the album, you will need to get it again."

Huh, so if I remove it from my account, it will be no longer available for a "redownload" but then I can just "get it again"? Lots of vague sentences here.

These too are changing. In China, the highly educated are becoming involved in social advocacy for the environment and starting to avoid smoking. Smoking is still very common in Europe and increasing in France, despite the public health initiatives, high taxes, bans and public knowledge. Unfortunately, if these issues are seen as "status symbols" in China, we may see the populist backlash that we see in some countries such as the US where it is seen as "American" to drive SUVs, live in large, energy-consuming houses, and ignore climate change -- which is destroying a lot of wildlife.

She writes for anyone who is willing to pay her $400 per essay. It is not just for the children of wealthy Chinese, and many Chinese people choose to write their own.

The system is broken if it cannot distinguish between a fraudulent essay and real one and is using that measure as integral for admissions. Many universities have specialized questions (almost as a CAPTCHA) to make sure students are serious about applying there. Test scores, teacher evaluations, and an applicant's résumé are often much more important criteria.

Many affluent Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, etc) still do not allow any immigrants to settle. Those that do are often the "well-cultured" Southeast Asian brides from Vietnam and Thailand.

There are two big trends:

- External immigration to large population centers in New York, California, Washington state, the Washington DC area and Illinois.

- Inward migration of Americans leaving those denser areas to states such as TX, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, etc. where land is cheaper and the standard of living is higher for the middle class. This is not represented in the graph because it only shows the origin of state residents. http://www.governing.com/gov-data/census/2010-census-state-m...

There are plenty more hard-working, tax-paying Chinese engineers and high skilled workers making up for the occasional spying incident. And the high-earning engineers pay much more in taxes to help fund the American counterespionage programs. It seems a worthy trade for US businesses.

Primary sources are always useful, but so is some context from the writer. Reading the patent and the recent SCOTUS opinion, Alice v Cls Bank, it definitely looks to be invalid in the context of software implementation. I wouldn't call the writer "disingenuous." It would be difficult to argue for fee shifting as an exceptional case, because there has been only a few recent decisions and not consistent precedent yet.

Actually, American Indian culture had developed a way of life that preserved a beautiful land in a sustainable manner, while much of the world was embroiled in war, feudalism and disease. True, there were inter-tribe rivalries as well, but the land was relatively peaceful and undeveloped compared to what Europe was experiencing with the Seven Years War, Protestant-Catholic Wars and massive civil wars at the time. I don't think the early Europeans necessarily understood Amerindian culture, but they were definitely the beneficiaries of it. If American Indians had executed a more cogent immigration policy, the transition to a modern economy would probably have been easier for the natives.

Of course, much has changed since then -- with finite resources like fresh water and land in good climates being consumed in many attractive countries.

Immigration is very important for all countries, but assimilation takes time. (If you believe in the country enough to want to immigrate there, then the existing culture must have some value.)

Ask Syria, Iraq or South Sudan, how they are enjoying their open borders. Meanwhile, Iceland, Japan and other countries are doing fine. Arguably, they could be richer if they allowed in more immigrants, but I'll take the rule of law over the chaos of uncontrolled borders.

Great idea but hard to enforce, unless the country is Israel or an island. It's amazing how many migrants are trying to get illegally across the English Channel from France to the UK because of better benefits and jobs.

Meanwhile, Yazidi and Syrian refugees will have to pay thousands to smugglers or scale barbed wire fences to enter a safe country.