What should the U.S. focus on right now?

1.     Overhaul the health care system and fix the health care website so that healthy Americans can increase the U.S. economic output and competitiveness and subsequently its exports.

2.     Fix the immigration system so that immigrants who are born in the U.S. have better chances to make it in life and that highly educated individuals from outside America can more easily contribute their expertise to the U.S. economy in order to create jobs and improve competitiveness.

3.     Get people out of jails and provide social help to those who need it so that these people don’t have to commit crimes out of a survival need. Safe money on prisons and spend it on social help. Make America safer and improve living standards for everybody overall. Poor, the middle and the rich. Because money doesn’t help you if you get stabbed walking across the street tomorrow.

4.     Stop collecting information on random people inside and outside of the U.S. Focus instead on America’s strength in the IT sector. Make sure global Internet firms can continue doing business overseas in an environment where people do not have privacy concerns with American companies.

5.     Deal with world leaders on a level of trust. Do not monitor them and focus instead on deals such as the free trade zone with Europe with is supposed to provide three times more growth to the American economy than to the European Union according to WSJ.

Computer-mediated-communication rules

These are 6 rules to manage computer-mediated-communication with smartphone addicts who use their phone sub-consciously more than 7 hours a day (that's when you're an addict by definition):

(1) act extremely extraverted
(2) show low level of involvement and no emotional involvement at all/ short repetitive sentences that are easy to understand and that do not disclose anything personal, what leads to point no. 3
(3) keep self-disclosure low
(4) act dominant and not "warm", use humor rarely
(5) keep conversation flow dynamic but give your responses a touch of "value" to the other party
(6) use linguistic cues to induce personality into your statement such as # or * or ?!

TEXTING alters conversations in four major ways:
 1. Procrastination of reply (not real-time) - People can prepare their answers, it's less intuitive, more strategic
2. Avoidance of confrontation - Confrontation with issues, decision making and subsequent conflict resolution doesn't work through the medium because of limitations in dept and breath of the discussion
3. Emotions (positive and negative) are often perceived as desperate and unnatural  
4. The lack of non-verbal cues such as facial expression makes the conversation less rich and puts more emphasis on linguistic cues.