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"Our country's best performing schools (all of them private) have non-unionized teaching staffs" - All our best schools are private? Depressing to hear since private schools cost a ton of money - Bindu Reddy

"eliminate the requirement to use union labor on public works projects; it shouldn't cost the taxpayers more to build a structure than it would cost Microsoft or Google" -- no kidding - Craig Eddy

The U.S. needs to drastically reduce social and entitlement spending. That is what is out of control. - Spencer

And the sad part, Spencer, is that the majority of that spending is off-book and rarely reported. - Craig Eddy

Hasn't the cut-taxes-and-let-business-prosperity-grow model been discredited already? This is like describing Communism as the solution to the world's problems in 1989. - ⓞnor

Cutting taxes does spur business, the problem is the government just keeps spending more. The government took in more money after the tax cuts, but it doesn't matter if out of control spending blows it. - Spencer

@nor...no, it hasn't been discredited. Economies are cyclical by nature. - Craig Eddy

Well, Spencer & other pro-corporate Reaganomics fans, do you have evidence from history that cutting taxes, services, and regulation helps pull economies out of depression? It's sort of a lot to take on faith. Certainly what seems to have pulled the US out of the Great Depression was the almost unthinkably massive increase in spending and government debt during WWII. - ⓞnor

Well if a huge increase in government spending and debt helped in the Great Depression, then we wouldn't be in the situation we are in now. I don't know why you are labeling someone as "pro-corporate" just because they favor lower taxes. High taxes does not create nor encourage business. - Spencer

@nor, Right now cutting taxes may be a mistake as the last stimulus package did not stimulate the economy much. Resulted in more saving by consumers. At the moment, the Government needs to spend to create jobs... However we should spend it on stuff like education and non-union labor as the author suggests. In the long run however, most of what the author suggests, esp around benefits etc, seems to make a lot of fiscal sense - Bindu Reddy

Spending is not the way out of a recession/depression. This was already shown in the Great Depression. - Gavin

Sorry, what do you think *did* end the Great Depression, if it wasn't government-funded economic activity during WW2? I'm describing your position as "pro-corporate" because the goal of your proposal seems to be to promote corporate business growth, which you feel in turn will rescue the economy -- am I wrong? - ⓞnor

Who here thinks that the best way for you, personally, to eliminate your own household debt is by taking on more debt? Why then do you think it will work for the country? - MVB (Grinch of FF)

If the goal is to eliminate debt, then taking on more debt is bad. If the goal is to fix a roof that sprung a leak that's rotting everything under it, then some debt might not be the worst thing. If I'm spending a huge amount every month on heating bills, getting some insulation installed could be really great, even if I have to do buy the insulation with a credit card. But again: what ended the Depression, if not government spending in WW2? - ⓞnor

Economists of all stripes agree that stimulus is the way to get us out of the current recession (or whatever we're calling it). And it was much the same with he great depression: as ⓞnor says, it was the massive direct creation of jobs by the gov't that did it. Notably, an attempt to balance the budget in 1937 prolonged The Great Depression. - j1m

Loved the photo :) Is it Cuba? - andrei_c

"immigration that encourages high earners".. It kills me that people talk about building a fence on the Mexican border without talking about sucking up every ambitious Asian we can attract. - Clare Dibble

But on another matter, note that union busting is actually not particularly useful. In fact, back in the day when the median income still grew, union membership was growing too. In the end, unions are good for America. - j1m

Monopolies are rarely known for efficiency and hard work. I don't know why unions would be any different. The incentives are just too broken. - Paul Buchheit

Union members still have bosses and can get fired (or not promoted, or not hired) and so on. Whereas monopoly customers really have no such choice -- if I don't like my cable installer's habit of not showing up, I can't fire him and ask for a new one. - ⓞnor

I don't think 'reduced taxes for cashflow-negative businesses' is such a great idea. It actually reduces management motivation and helps non-profitable businesses to linger longer before dying off, and decreases economy efficiency as whole. At least, it will be the case with old businesses that became non-profitable due to poor management or market shifts. - andrei_c

For further reading: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArti... - Craig Eddy

The rules for depreciation are really dumb. The point is to enable long term investment andrei. Purely non-viable businesses already don't pay taxes, but the ones that are cash-flow negative due to long term investments do, which discourages those investments. - Paul Buchheit

@Paul, thanks for the clarification, it really makes sense then, provided there's no loopholes big enough to sneak entire Detroit in. - andrei_c

Curiously , this discussion has a pic that is obviously from an Indian city showing the dinosaur Indian car, the Ambassador, which if I am not mistaken is based on the Morris design and dates back to the 60's ! Wonder why ? - viki saigal

ⓞnor, The auto manufactures do not have a choice regarding the UAW. If the auto manufactures don't like the deal with the UAW, they cannot fire the UAW and ask for a new union. - Gary Burd

Yeah, I too see unions as functioning in a way analogous to a monopoly, and this seems unfortunate in roughly the way actual monopolies are. otoh, it's helped a lot of people get offered jobs that pay a living wage, as it were. - j1m

If you know C, you may want to check out Perl (perl.com, by O'Reilly. Great books. perlmonks.org is also good). The newer scripting languages, like Ruby, PHP, etc., may be easier to learn; I don't know. But you can do a ton of stuff with Perl. - Larry Huffman

Python is having a lot of buzz lately and it's a great language to get started. Both http://docs.python.org/tut/ and http://www.ibiblio.org/g2swap... are great resources to start. - Jeduan Cornejo

PHP is super easy and basically C-like. http://www.php.net/manual/en/ - Kevin L

PHP is probably easiest to get started with, since it comes default with most cheap hosting accounts. Python and Ruby are a *lot* more fun, but there's more infrastructure required -- it's not too bad, but it definitely adds to the learning curve. - Peat Bakke from Alert Thingy

Ben, in your case PHP would be easier compared to Python. PHP syntax is similar to C while Python syntax is very different and has a steep learning curve. - Rameez Nooruddin

PHP is super easy to learn from a C background, and it's easy to find/set up a server that will run it. Try http://www.php.net/manual... for some tips to get going - Kevin L

Can't open the Link. Just main interface... - Ansgar Wollnik

Holy Cow....it is bigger than flikr.....scarry - Matt from twhirl

540 terabytes doesn't seem all that big. - Louis Gray

It may be bigger than flickr but the pictures are actually used on flickr rather than being locked up to a profile and a few hundred friends. - Rahul Das

it's a lot, especially considering they downsample images. i.e. your 1.2mb jpg gets reduced to 128kb on FB. The original resolution is lost. So 540 TB is a lot of downsampled images! - Mark J. Feldman

AFAIK photos on Facebook can be seen by anybody - http://radio.weblogs.com/0127028... - Brian Sullivan

Flickr has about 2.5 billion images. - Ole Begemann

I suspect that Gmail has both more images, and more image data. Email is still what many "regular" people use for photo sharing, amazingly. - Paul Buchheit

540TB is puny for 30B images. 19.3KB/photo average. SmugMug has more storage and only ~325M photos. - Don MacAskill

Facebook limits photos to 5Mb each and 50 photos per album, though. - Prolific Programmer

again, I'll pay my yearly fee for Flickr. sorry Facebook. - Andrew Feinberg

Is that photos or images in total? Could be lots of 1-20K png and gifs for apps - Cris Pearson from twhirl

The ratio on comments on my Facebook photos to comments on my Flickr photos is probably about 20:1, despite the ratio of number of Facebook photos to number of Flickr photos being about 1:10. Comments are nice, especially for hacks like me that aren't going to get any attention -- deservedly so -- from the folks on Flickr. - Kirk Kittell

But do you trust Facebook? - Andrew Feinberg

@Andrew: Do I trust them to host my photos? Is that what you mean? Or is that a more general question? - Kirk Kittell

I mean do you trust them to host your photos and not use them without your permission? Their TOS lets them use your information for promotional purposes and sell to advertisers. Flickr lets you choose how your photos are licensed. Think about it. - Andrew Feinberg

I use a non-commercial license on Flickr. However, it's a minor issue to me how Facebook handles the photos. The primary reason I use Facebook to share photos is because I will get some reaction from my contacts. I'd trade that aspect for losing control of a few photos any day. If I wasn't a hack, I might change my stance. But I'm a hack. If I don't share on Facebook, I have no reason to think anyone sees my photos, and that's a loss, I think. - Kirk Kittell

@Andrew Feinberg: I think that's an excellent point, but I think you'd be shocked at how many people just don't care. First, the re-use of their photos isn't important to them, second, they think their photos aren't worth re-using, and third, they think of it as a cost to pay for the free service. I don't get it, but tons of people think that way. - Don MacAskill

Photography for me is a hobby, so I don't care what anyone does with my pictures. Indeed, all on flickr are CC-licensed. - Prolific Programmer

Mine are CC also and have been used by some high-traffic blogs and others. But, the choice to allow that is mine alone. Facebook has enough money and user data, they don't need anything else from me. - Andrew Feinberg

@Andrew - I'd trust Facebook over Flickr, since it's not Flickr's policies you should be worrying about, it's Yahoo's - and they definitely have not been playing nice with Flickr users since they took over ... - cerement

@Prolific Programmer The limit for photo's is 60, 3 pages of 20! - Joe Dawson

LOL - K.D.

Reminds me of that line in Snatch when someone went missing,"Not like it's a set of car keys or pack of cigarettes. What do you mean it's missing?" - Mark Forman

Where in the world is the Twitter database? Is there a reward for it's return? - Michael McGimpsey from twhirl

@MM yeah the reward is good karma at Plurk :D - Mark Forman

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc... - Brandon

@Mark Indeed. Karma is good. I need good Karma. - Michael McGimpsey

Plurk stole it. - Mark Frost

usual-swap copy ready to go. - marty nickel from twhirl

twitter = killer concept, stinky execution - marty nickel from twhirl

I think I saw it floating down the street here in Minnesota. Oh Wait that was my server I'm being told. Hey wait come back here I didn't say you could float away server. - David Newberger from twhirl

OUCH! - Susan Beebe

I think it might be over here? --> http://Twoorl.com - Susan Beebe

Scoble, you're relentless. Not saying you're entirely wrong, but ease up on these guys already. ;) - Greg

more like Plurk destroyed it and have a much better one. - SolidSmack from twhirl

ROFL - Mitchell Tsai

If they can keep track of their things, they don't deserve to have any. ;) - Steven Van Tilburg from twhirl

somebody pass the bong - Duncan Riley

I think I saw it show up on Craigslist... - felix

+1 Like for Duncan's comment - Hutch Carpenter

giggles...somebody load the next cone "with the database"...giggles - martin ollman

Could you describe the database, sir? - Tim Hoeck

Tower? Rackmount? Blade? Dell? Hp? Sun? You gotta give us somthing to look for. - Roberto Bonini

@martin so smoking hash tables is legal in California? - Karim

Do a post on Twitter Whale Fail http://tinyurl.com/6nwaq3 Dead Fish Floating upside down in the water! - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

pass them a bowl! or better yet tese them with one see if they get it done faster - Charles Rice from twhirl

Captain Ahab, there she blows! The Sinking Twitter Whale! Get you Harpoon ready and strike! I beg you Strike! - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Oh! I just gave it to a kid to normalize it.. let me see if he is still around! - Jigar Mehta

LOL - Marcello Del Bono

Lets see.. 100th Normal Form??? - Roberto Bonini

Twitter's down? really? I'm shocked... - Michael Gartenberg