A lot herbal remedies are actually working well. Valerian root is a great anxiolytic, st. Johns worth is a weak antidepressant etc. Yes, homeopathy section is indeed questionable, but I do not see a reason to claim that Whole Foods is all pseudoscience.
Chomsky's interview kind of repeats Searle's (Chinese Room) argument.
To reproduce a system someone has to understand how it works, otherwise we doomed to make something, similar to infamous Cargo Cult. Meanwhile, our brains are limited in size, just 3 lb of matter and certainly have limited capacities to understand things. It is perfectly possible that complexity of human mind is too big to be comprehensible and therefore artificial intelligence is not achievable. However it is also possible we can understand the way brain/mind works and will eventually create artificial minds. It is unclear right now.
Returning back to Searle's argument, the idea that simulation of mind is actually the same thing as mind is possibly very flawed: mind can turn out to be rigid physical phenomena of this particular physical world and not reproducible in any other media than ionic neurodevice it is.
Yes, but the difference is transferred back to you when you are laid off because you are too expensive, you are not being hired because you are aqskink too much, and when hired you have to deal with lower wage.
Do not agree on anything below 90k in SV. Factor in some other types of compensation (food, insurance etc.) into complete picture of the total income you'll have. Other than that +-10K does not matter much if you get experience you like.
Why US educational system is so broken? Look at Canada - does not seem to have charters, yet outcome is better. Why? From what I heard, better more tight regulation on provincial level - single curriculum, so on.
Besides, there are many excellent public schools, with unionized teachers, in not so good areas etc.
Besides, charter schools are not the solution: among them, for some mysterious reasons there is a plenty of really bad ones. Check greatschools or similar web site - many, many bad charters.
I would recommend to leave schools government run, but absolutely remove school districts law. If a child from Bronx wants to study somewhere in New Jersey - allow him, if there are places in the school left. Let the word spread which schools are good and which are not. If a school is bad - make investigation why, if not fixable - close down.