"Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth."

Anyone who wants to make the claim that technology is net killing jobs has to be prepared to answer the question: why now? Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries. It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

The explanation I gave to my mom:

We want to count all the books in the library. You count up shelf #1, I count up shelf #2. That's map. The more people we get, the faster it goes.

Now we get together and add our individual counts. That's reduce.

[edit: created a blog post containing this explanation. Maybe it will be useful after this HN conversation vanishes. http://crazybear.posterous.com/mapreduce-explained-in-41-wor... ]

We now have a serious challenger in the race to one-up MunchOnMe for most face-palmingly bad start-up name.

"In time...six months; five years, perhaps...a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn't have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he'd now find a brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.

"So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better come up with it.

"Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he'd see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren't directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing."

-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Any device designed to operate in a war zone is an implicit support of the activity. Even life-saving devices. If you made bullet-proof jackets and sold them to the US military, you are supporting the military. You may even be impacting the outcome of an engagement, or influencing the endgame.

If the truck did not exist, 6 US soldiers would likely be dead. The insurgents would probably prefer this. Because the truck existed, the soldiers may now go on to fulfill their missions, which may result in insurgents being killed.

Basically, war is an ugly thing. Don't expect to get involved without getting a little dirty.

P.S. In the interest of transparency, I am an American and a strong supporter of the US military. I have family currently serving, and I'm glad that there was a device like the truck that saved lives.