TL;DR summary: we're not good at educating people, but that doesn't matter because (a) only the top few percent matter, and (b) we can import talent to make up for domestic shortfall.

I don't agree with either of these.

Only the top quartile matter, and therefore the bottom three-fourths can wallow in ignorance and stupidity? We don't have universal healthcare because of this fucking attitude. If you have ignorant people, you end up with an ignorant, fucked-up culture. We pay for the ignorance of average Americans in so many ways that it infuriates me even to get into this discussion.

Secondly, I don't think we can count on being a destination country forever. Our immigration policies are getting worse over time, while European countries and Canada are becoming increasingly attractive. The gap is narrowing. There was a time when the smartest in the world wanted to come to the United States-- not necessarily New York or Silicon Valley, but even central Ohio. Now, they're equally attracted to Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, and even Japan (which is less xenophobic than its reputation would indicate).

I don't think the smartest and hardest-working people come to "America" anymore. They go to star cities, industries, and companies: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and U.S. research academia are top-notch, and happen to be in the U.S. People come to the U.S. because a few currently-leading locations are here, but what does this do for the rest of the country?

Also, New York is arguably the world's best city and Silicon Valley is the world's best suburb, but these places are also ignominously expensive. Living in the star cities, we can easily delude ourselves into believing that we're insulated from the decline in "flyover country", but the bare fact is that we suffer every day (when we pay rent or make mortgage payments, the prices being so high because it's so hard to get a high-paying job outside of a few locations) for what has happened to the rest of the country.

American decline is real, and it's shitty, and it has everything to do with a lack of education and culture. Hours of schooling are just a proxy measure and not a very good one, but the lack of attention paid to education in this country is a big fucking deal.

This is Luke Zimmermann from VOX Media, the parent company of The Verge and SB Nation. We've requested a formal review with Google after going to extreme steps to pull our advertising content to both do a thorough review and error on the side of caution that there wasn't anything malicious being inadvertently served up. At this time we're doing everything we can to get this on Google's radar and get it sorted out. We're continuing to monitor the situation as well and do everything in our power to make sure none of our readers and users are at any risk.

Here, the government is pursuing criminal charges for someone who has taken research papers (funded, by and large, through public research grants) to presumably make them available to the public.

In doing so, he wronged various publishers, who have not financially supported any research, who have not financially supported the scientific review of said research, who have financially gained by (likely) not only charging the original author for the submission but also the universities which provided the infrastructure critical to the majority of research.

Spearheading this noble effort to right the wrong and restore law and order is US attorney Carmen Ortiz, who is cited for the wise words: "Stealing is stealing".

Lets be reasonable here: a decently sized server farm could probably keep the entirety of documents hosted on JSTOR in RAM. Today alone, imgur burned through 50TB of traffic; it delivers a petabyte a week. I'm not going to believe a sob story about how distributing 100KiB PDFs to someone running 'wget -r' is DoSing their systems.