Inflation is here, inflation is real, you have your eyes and ears closed in wilful ignorance of facts. The prices are rising, and while at first the money printing was mostly pushing asset prices, for the last few years actually consumer prices have been going up quite a bit faster (actually more like an order of magnitude faster) than the nonsensical government numbers.

Again, there is only conspiracy of ignorance on your part, obviously you are in fact not paying any attention whatsoever to the gradual changes that government introduces into the calculations of inflation and the GDP. As one tiny example last year the GDP calculations started double counting salaries that people are getting in creative fields, like production of movies, authoring books, creating music and such. These are now not only counted as salaries but also double counted as 'investments'. If a business was doing what government is doing in accounting and finances, the business owners would have been investigated for a massive fraud. Since you are not paying any attention, you are not noticing or pretending not to notice of such gradual changes, that's conspiracy of ignorance.

You are clearly not paying attention to the rising prices in everything, from education to health care and insurance, to energy, to food. You are probably celebrating the rising stock market and housing prices as something 'good', while in reality in a growing economy prices would have been falling due to increases in efficiencies and actual productivity.

As is, productivity is falling, not gaining, there are no increases. You are probably a somewhat rational person in other areas of life (you probably wouldn't stick your finger into fire for example, at least not more than once), however you are absolutely willing to cheer for yet another growing bubble in assets, real estate and bonds that the Fed is inflating even though the negative results of the last bubbles haven't even been fixed and will not be fixed because the fixes are not allowed.

All this money printing inflates larger and larger bubbles, they implode and then instead of allowing the economy to work through all the resource misallocations and incorrect pricing information, the government tries to avoid the pain associated with the recession (which is the actual fix to the problem) by printing and throwing even more money into the system. They can do that for a while, but that is coming to an inevitable end.

When I started talking about the inflation problems (more than 5 years ago, by the way), I already saw inflation, which you simply denied existed because you are participating in this wilful 'conspiracy', conspiracy of ignorance. Inflation was here, the inflating money supply was causing rise in the asset markets, now it is also in the bond market. Now inflation finally worked its way through to the consumer market, you can deny its existence as well, and again, AFAIC this is wilful ignorance. If you turn on any radio show where people call in, if you look at all the news, you would not be able to escape all the stories about people not being able to afford things due to rising prices. There is double digit inflation, no less. 8-10% increases in consumer prices (not in the electronics field, here the efficiencies in the free market are so huge, that they negate large amount of inflation), food, energy, utilities, health care, education, basically the items and services that people cannot go without are going up all the time.

Manufacturers do what they can, but you can only reduce quality and quantity inside a package so much, at some point you have to just increase prices, you can't sell 1 sheet of toilet paper at the price of a roll, you can only make that paper thinner up to a point, at some point you have to raise prices, which is what everybody is observing. While those, who run businesses see it much more clearly (after all, they have to know what they are buying and what they are paying in a more precise way), the general public is also concerned about inflation more than about anything else, people are paying more for less and they know it.

The Fed and government can pretend that there is no inflation and in the same breath they can also state that there are 'good news', prices going up in asset markets, in housing markets, etc. They can downplay energy prices rising, they can pretend that food and energy and other costs are irrelevant and they can pretend that rising consumer prices are good for the economy all they like and it is your prerogative to keep yourself in wilful ignorance, listening and agreeing with these people.

I will not stop talking about inflation, it was a problem 10 years ago and it is a much bigger problem today and while 5 years ago I wasn't certain whether USD will be eventually hyperinflated, at this point I have no doubt that it will. The fact that it takes years for this to happen is not at all surprising.

Cancer doesn't kill person in one day, inflation doesn't destroy economy in one decade, both are long term problems and both lead to destruction. In 2007 people were still jubilant about the housing market even though many predicted the bubble will implode since about 2003. So it took 5 years for that to hit and the predictions in 2003 were just as correct as the predictions in 2007, both were met with derision and wilful ignorance.

Nothing changed, people are not learning from history, they are cheering for more asset bubbles today, being led forward under the flags of the Federal reserve and the 'Treasury'.

USA routinely tells google to hide sensitive areas and google complies voluntarily

...With the inherent irony that you can then use that hidden data specifically to find "sensitive" areas you might not have known about (just randomly load highest-zoom tiles until you find one with artificially degraded resolution) - Then pull up the same data at 1m resolution from the USGS quarter quad library.

You want something hidden from space? Build it deep enough underground to hide its IR footprint. Attempting to hide things through censorship works sooo well - Just ask Babs S.

Piss off India and your labor supply will come to an end!

You promise?

So how do I go about starting my own Indian mapping competition?


/ H1Bs GTFO.
// Not your fault, but harder to deport Steve Balmer or The Zuck.

- this does nothing at all to contradict what I am saying, in fact it supports my position, not yours.

My position is that people need to be able to negotiate their own terms of employment, their own method of payment and most people select cash instead of vacation time in USA, but specifically this is happening because USA workers are very unproductive, because vast majority of them are employed in the service sector and this is a very unproductive sector as a whole, paying very low wages, it requires little training and the competition for these low wage unskilled position is high.

This means that the USA economy is extremely unproductive and most Americans cannot afford to take vacations, they need every dollar they get just to survive.

In this very thread I posted a number of comments explaining my point of view

and there were many 'back and forward' comments as well. The arguments presented against my position are not based on sound understanding of the economy, prices, money, they are mostly based on ideology, but ideology does not create a sound economy.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
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I don't feel a lot of workaholism in that story - ridiculously overpaid unscrupulous douchebag with too much time and money that has saddened and humiliated his family managed to have what looks like plenty of leisure time.

I agree with you about the workaholism angle as complete BS, but I think you go too far with the second half of your statement.

Geeks in general seem to seek out novelty, which as an underlying character trait, makes us good at what we do. Seeking altered states of consciousness, in my experience, just comes with that territory. That doesn't depend solely on having too much money and free time (though the lack of either certainly limits opportunities to get high) - Just how we view the world.


Oh, and this shit is not new at all - been happening in this industry for decades. more noticeable now that a Googler has publicly disgraced himself.

Really? I don't see it as all that disgraceful - He died having a good time, rather than lying in a hospital bed in agony. Good for him! I hope to die as well, someday.

"...illegal drug use (including abuse of prescription painkillers) among technology workers and executives in high-pay, high-stress Silicon Valley. ..."

I know a shit-ton of people whose lives/work is JUST as stressful working their 3 jobs to make ends meet, but since it's not "high pay" that would probably mean they're not worth talking about, right? Certainly, we're less interesting in the 'why' of their drug abuse issues, because they can only afford cheap mood-altering chemistry like booze and cigs.

Personally, I'd say the fact that Silicon Valley folks make stupid-large amounts of money means they have even LESS of an excuse to complain.

Lots of people have more stress for much less self-inflicted reasons than pursuing of giant piles of cash.

From my experience you need less Linux sysadmins to begin with. Its easier to do remote admin. So the TCO numbers Microsoft claims are usually bullshit.

You have thought about that in terms of doing machine-by-machine maintenance. A large school district has a similar topology to a large enterprise corporation - thousands of systems spread out over dozens or hundreds of sites, with dozens or hundreds of different user-types grouped by function, having various seemingly-arbitrary blocking and auditability rules, and possible liability for certain types of breach, etc.

For maintaining a farm of identical servers, I agree with you completely. For maintaining Grandma's desktop remotely, I agree with you completely. But for maintaining an enterprise desktop environment, Microsoft simply has the best tools for the job. Linux AD-via-Samba quite simply doesn't even come close for the convenience of centralized GP maintenance, and has aothing anywhere near the convenience of drag-and-drop group-based software installation (though Linux does have non-stock application deployment packages available, like Puppet, that partially fill that last point). Linux has nothing even remotely like (W)SUS. And those two alone count as complete showstoppers when it comes to minimizing the number of people required to maintain a large network.

I love Linux, I use Linux, but Linux at the enterprise scale amounts to a non-starter.

Of course, the biggest irony here, school districts don't tend to use Windows, either - They loooove them some Apple products, which have all the same problems described above, plus the pricetag (not saying Apples still cost more, but they don't come free). So in that sense, yes, I can see how Linux would save school districts a hefty chunk of money; at some scale, however, you'll find that switching to MS would likely save money vs the overhead of sys/net ops and helpdesk staff.

No, you ban no "innocent" people. You ban an IP. The IP isn't the person, remember? They can edit from home, or get a login and keep editing all they want. The IP offended, so the IP is banned.

No innocent IP was harmed in the making of this message.

Yes, they do. At a minimum, it's false advertising.

FRY: This is a great, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus. ... I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all. FRY: Oh. What's it called now? PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: Urectum.

Keynesian nonsense. Real demand is not fuelled by fake money. Fake money only steals and misallocates scarce resources. If the Keynesian nonsensical idiotic moronic irrational ignorant ideas were anywhere near the ballpark even, Zimbabwe would have been the most prosperous country in the world and then every other country that ran its currency into hyperinflationary mode.

Inflation is destructive to the economy, not constructive. The most productive era in USA history was during a slightly deflationary period of time, before IRS and Fed existed. You wouldn't know any of it for a very simple reason: you don't know anything about history whatsoever, public "education", you see.

the people that believe that are wrong for many reasons. Freedom being one, actually creating a moral hazard is another, eventual destruction of the economy due to government running things into the ground and then requiring more and more taxes and borrowing is third, inflation caused by printing to satisfy all that excessive spending is fourth, just pushing prices up for no reason by destroying normal competitive forces to set up government sponsored monopolies is fifth and I can go on.

If there is a conspirancy here, it is the conspirancy of stupidity. Every couple of years the government actually posts information about the changes to the inflation calculations and what is counted toward the gdp. If inflation in the 1970s was counted the way it is "counted" today, it would have been negative, yet at the time Nixon imposed price controls to "fight inflation". It was the wrong thing to do, but at least the numbers were not fudged yet. As I said, the measuring stick is changing, yet idiots keep pretending or actually believing that nothing changed. They change definitions and you straight out buy the propaganda. It is actually out in the open, posted for everyone's consumption, but you choose ignorance. See, that is a conspiracy, conspiracg of willful ignorance by denying facts. Now, if you do not actually follow anything, you are not paying attention to the changes in the gdp and inflation accounting, though it is not done in any secrecy whatsoever, then it is a conspiracy of ignorance, but then stop pretending with me here. Use your willful ignorance of the facts, posted, public facts with somebody else, agreed?

There is no productivity increase when you produce nothing that you consume.

There is an obligation to not be abusive

Hi! Welcome to the real world. You'll find the dumpster for your "participation" trophies to the left; and here, you get paid for winning, not "trying" or "good sportspersonship".

Linus doesn't suffer fools gladly. And I applaud him for that.

Obama's foreign policy decisions have basically been exactly what a majority of it's citizens want. It's not pretty by any means but he is fulfilling his promises in this one area of state.