1. Rule 1: put most of your money in a total stock market index fund (60-90%, depending on how risk-averse you are) with the lowest expense ratio possible.
2. Rule 2: Put the rest of it in a bond index fund (10-40%), also with the lowest expense ratio possible.
3. Rule 3: Never, ever sell, even in the worst recession imaginable, except to rebalance or (after retirement) to withdraw living expenses.

Rule 3 is the hard part (psychologically), which is why so many individual investors screw it up. The key is to understand that recessions are irrelevant because the market always eventually goes back up. (And yes, I am including Japan's market in that statement. If you had dollar-cost averaged into Japan's stock market before it crashed and then kept doing that, and did not sell, then you'd still have managed a decent return once you account for dividends.)

Well, the solution is simple then - they should just default. As long as they are internally self-sufficient as you assert, it won't be a problem for them. They won't be able to borrow money for a long time, but they shouldn't have to.

However, I'm not convinced their cash flow is nearly as rosy as you suggest. And of course they need to be able to defend their own borders/etc if they don't want somebody ticked off about their debts to come looking to collect.

And this is a general problem with federated governments. When it comes to socialism/etc they tend to be a race to the bottom, because companies can effectively pay the lowest tax rate anywhere in the federation. It happens in the US as well - if a US state wanted to raise state income taxes to 60% and pay basic income to all their residents, their employment would go to zero because companies would flee the state, since they could do so while still being able to sell their wares in the state's market, since US states cannot interfere with interstate commerce. This is why US states are only "laboratories of democracy" to a limited extent.

If you want to have different tax rates and social policies, then you need to have tariffs at the border. That is obviously a two-edged sword, but it is still the reality of the economics.

iot != cloud

No. "IoT" most definately == cloud. Everything that actually respects your privacy came out before "IoT" was a thing.

"IoT" is a euphemism for "home automation, except trojaned so we can steal your data."

The trouble is that just about every fucking "IoT" device is designed to communicate over the Internet to the manufacturer's servers, even when it would make more sense for it to just communicate with a base station/server over the LAN and have the data never leave your house. Allegedly it's for ease of use, but that's bullshit -- it's for data-mining.

Win 3.x would pre-emptively multitask DOS windows if you had a 386. It was one of its touted features. (There may have been a setting to turn this off and on, it may have been off by default). Personally during this period I used DESQview (or however it was capitalized) as a multitasker.

Windows 3.0/3.1 would pre-emptively multitask DOS windows if running on an 80386.

So did the Acorn Archimedes (the computer the ARM CPU was originally made for). RiscOS even had things like anti-aliased fonts by then, and certain user interface concepts that didn't show up elsewhere until Mac OSX came out.

However, the PC and Microsoft was already massively entrenched, and the news was huge - finally the computers most people actually used at work were going to catch up with the Mac, Amiga, Archimedes and other machines.

But anyone could tell that Windows was going to be huge. The PC was already dominant and Microsoft was already nearing monopoly position in the PC market (and IBM compatibles at the time had fallen in price such that they were price competitive with the Amiga) and the upgrade path for most people was not to buy a whole new computer but just add Windows.

I remember the news at the time. It was huge. Finally, the PC that nearly everyone was using was catching up to the Mac, Archimedes, Amiga etc.

Yeah I know code should be efficient with memory but these days there is no excuse for having less than 4Gb.

Okay, so smartphones, tablets, Chromebooks / "streambooks" and the like aren't valid devices anymore?

I'm a pack-rat and would like to archive whole tab trees for later, see them among the other pages, but not take memory+CPU now.

It's funny how the mobile (Android) versions of both Chrome and Firefox already manage to do this -- I can have 50+ tabs going on my phone and not run out of memory, although some of them will reload when I switch back to them -- but the desktop versions don't.

Somehow I doubt that is going to work on my $70 Seagate 7200RPM hard drive plugged into my $50 motherboard or $20 SATA controller card. However, by all means let me know if it will.

Plus, COW filesystems offer a lot more than just data checksumming.

Agree, as the other reply pointed out as well. And you can do the same with mdadm raid too (though obviously with none of the benefits btrfs/zfs bring for data integrity like checksumming and copy-on-write). Mdadm will also let you reshape an array in place (that is change raid levels or number of disks), though with mdadm that will often result in messing up your stripe alignment and of course it is more likely to eat your data if something goes wrong since if it finds a parity mismatch it has no way to know which copy is bad.

I was just commenting that btrfs tends to have a lot of features that appeal to small system users that you'll actually find missing on zfs, even if it is far less mature overall, and lacking in many enterprise-scale features. It just reflects the emphasis of the developers behind it.

I really can't complain about zfs - it is a great filesystem. However, things like not being able to reshape an array or mix disk sizes in an array are some of the things that hold me back from adopting it. Heck, btrfs will let you switch from raid1 to raid5 without touching any of the data already written - newly-allocated chunks will use raid5 and existing chunks will continue to use raid1 - it doesn't manage arrays at the whole-device level. In practice though you're likely to tell it to rebalance your data of course.

Sure, but with btrfs you can just add one drive and sometimes get its entire capacity added to your array - it works fine with mixed-size disks.

Of course, it might just decide not to boot the next day, and that is the downside to btrfs. It does tend to be a bit more friendly in scenarios where you have a small number of disks, though, which was my main point.

Though there was a good reason for the original compact Macs to discourage users from opening them up -- there were exposed high voltage monitor electronics in there which could give you a hell of a zap of not properly discharged.

The later all in one Macs of the 90s were better in that regard. Their user suitable parts (motherboard, drives) all were easy to get at, but the monitors and power supplies were fully enclosed.