Thanks. That's a fun site to try to use with flashblock....

What's the point of comparing them? They're barely even in the same units (dollars/year vs dollars).

Why on earth should they? A national government is very different in a number of ways--having its own currency not the least....

Huh. How do you calculate the total debt using "accrual" accounting? I mean, if you assume social security and medicare will continue as they are without any tax changes to increase revenue in the coming decades, and you book that all now--yes, of course, you'll get big scary numbers. So what? Is that likely?

But in any case the practical questions are how our debt load is likely to impact our everyday lives. Why is an accrual-based national debt, or total national assets, or whatever, a better measure of that than any of the measures (debt/GDP ratios, bond yields, whatever) that economists usually use to decide whether countries (not companies, but countries!) are in trouble?

Feel free to explain.

Those statements all require support.

I'm no expert--all I know is that for several years now I've seen people claiming on Slashdot that inflation was a mathematical certainty the moment the fed engaged in quantatative easing. And during that time inflation has remained at record lows. So absent actual evidence, I'm inclined to listen to the actual economists who can back up their arguments with actual data....

Citations? And why is "total national assets" the correct measure? Hey, I'm no economist, but most discussion I've seen focus on income (gdp, tax revenue), not assets--which makes sense to me, since income is what we use to pay our debts, not, I dunno, selling off Yellowstone or something.

Eh, correcting myself: I suspect I'm just misunderstanding how they split up the spending categories, billions sounds like a more likely budget. Maybe somebody else can figure that out....

First, the US is very far from broke. We have a huge national income, and (relative to our peers) choose to spend relatively little of it on taxes. We could in theory go "broke" if we fail to raise revenues to cover growing health care costs and/or cut benefits to our aging population. Nobody (least of all the people putting their money where there mouths are and buying US debt) seems to think it's likely that we'll do neither, and thus default.

Second, the proposal in question would require a trivial amount of money; factcheck.org and polifact.com, for example, already do this kind of work. I wonder what their budgets are--probably 6 or 7 figures? A government with a 13-figure budget could do contribute significantly to that kind of work with money that would amount to a rounding error. BBC news appears to be around 8 figures, for a complete news organization with international coverage.

Third, this hardly strikes me as a "waste". If we could better educate our voters with such a tiny fraction of our budget, that sounds like spending that could pay for itself.

And that's an important distinction. It means someone can sniff your credentials for the *session*, and impersonate you as long as you're logged in; but if you detect the mischief, then you can regain control, because your real long-lived credential (your password) is sent under ssl.

It's a tradeoff, but for something non-critical it seem to me like a reasonable one.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16workers.html?_r=1

That's a little vague, though it does suggest at least one incident ("needed treatment after receiving a blast of radiation"). (I suppose it could have been purely precautionary.)

I don't really see the downside for the "hard-core" folks either.

Why spend my time on tedious tasks that a computer should be able to automate for me?

Stuff like configuring X, tracking down package dependencies, installing applications from source--OK, the first time I do that stuff by hand, maybe I learn a little bit, but it gets old fast.

These days, thankfully, my Linux distro takes care of most of that that for me, so I can go focus on the stuff I care about. The fact that the stuff I care about is in fact kernel hacking doesn't make running ./configure scripts much more interesting to me than it is to anybody else, really.

Yeah, I do the same thing as you, with prepaid service a few bucks a month is enough to let me do everything I need the cell phone for.

But less expensive pay-as-you-go/pre-paid plans do seem to be showing up. And as the cost of smartphone drops, the pull of subsidies will also drop, so hopefully there will be more progress in that direction.

You might want to look at the various prepaid and pay-as-you-go plans.

As a very light cellphone user I've been paying under $10/mo for t-mobile's prepaid service (with an initial cost of around $50 for the cellphone and "activation fee", if I remember right) for several years now. Even much higher upfront costs can pay off pretty quickly compared to the cost of the two-year contracts.

I'll happily buy a smart phone the moment I can figure out how to get an unlocked (preferably rootable and developer-friendly) smart phone that works with multiple carriers.

I considered the Nexus S, and it looks like you can get minimal month-to-month contracts for around $40/mo if you pass on the subsidy. But as long as it only works well on t-mobile then I'm still effectively locked in....

$20 says she's just milking her celebrity for every dollar she can. She loves complaining about her critics. Why quell any speech that's about *her*?

Somebody who gives up a governership for TV shows and speaking tours has little interest in actually governing. She wants to be a conservative media figure.

Not that she'll say any of that--the possibility of a future run keeps her in the public eye.

Err: GDP and unemployment, graphed for your entertainment.

You're looking at the "brain drain" graph on the Economist article? The y-axis on those graphs is 2009 dollars (raw data here: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/index.html, table H-13).

Though there *are* also some skills you can expect from someone with a decent college education: writing readable email; making a convincing argument about something complicated; using whatever sources they can find to study up on what they need to know to finish a project; dealing with numerical data (not necessarily advanced mathematics, just knowing how to think about orders of magnitude, margins of error, averages, whatever--basic numeracy); deciding when a given source of information is trustworthy; etc. A lot of that in theory you learn in high school, but by the time someone gets a BA they've usually got that stuff pretty well pounded into them.

And then there's more specialized skills: again, not even the junior/senior-level classes you might think of as defining a major, but the basic bits you have to pick up to get there: CS majors will know what a debugger is, how basic logic and bit operations work, what a "for" loop is, how to read documentation, etc--a thousand tiny things any one of which anyone could pick up, but it's nice to know they've got that basic culture already. (Yeah, we've probably all heard the story of an interview where graduate of $prestigiousU flunked on the basics, but that's the exception.)

Har. Yes, let's have the fun of spending a different currency each time we cross a state border. Or of having to go through immigration when I want to take a job in another state.

Or you want to keep the same currency without a strong central government? I don't get the impression that's working out so great for Europe at the moment....