It's not necessarily even corrupt, for that matter. It's about having the personal relationships, and moreover, knowing how the labyrinthine mess that is the DoD Acquisition process works. The rules are intended to keep it fair, but at the same time, also wind up pricing a lot of the inexperienced sorts out of the process simply because you have to know what language to use, how to structure it, etc.

It's not a surprise really. Right now, unless you happen to live in one of the few states where companies are required to offer you more than simply at-will employment, or you're one of the few people still in a union, you pretty much have few protections against the company deciding to fire you tomorrow, whether in the name of downsizing, outsourcing, or just deciding that they don't want to pay someone with your level of experience instead of getting some fresh undergrad desperate to pay off student loans who'll work for a fraction of your salary.

And yes, as much as people decry unions, and the abuses that comes with unions, that's your answer in terms of balancing the power. One person alone just doesn't have the power, unless they're being hired for an executive/C-level position. Can unions abuse their power? Absolutely, so stay involved, vote in your union elections, make sure your union reps are doing their jobs. It's sometimes easier said than done, but it can be better than the alternative. That's what we had to do the last time things were like this, roughly 100 years or so ago.

It's not all that crazy. The general problem is that a lot of people aren't familiar with a liquidity trap, they're just familiar with the problem of too much inflation.

Part of this is because inflation was a really big problem in the 70s and early 80s. The way monetary policy usually works is pretty easy. Growth usually corresponds to inflation. If there's too much inflation, raise interest rates. Growth starts to slow too much, cut interest rates. It's all about smoothing out the up/down (or boom/bust) cycle. In the 70s though, we started having this problem where we were getting high inflation without significant growth, so the standard remedy wouldn't work.

Now (or a few years ago) we were facing a different problem, which is failing growth that wouldn't respond to interest rate cuts, because you can't cut them below zero. Deflation definitely is bad in a modern economy, because it leads to drops in production, and because it also sets up a self-sustaining cycle that you have to break out of (less spending means economy shrinks means deflation means your money is more valuable tomorrow than today means less spending today, etc).

Problem is, the way to break out of that trap is... you have to actively take inflationary measures that would be crazy in any other environment. It's what we had to do in the Great Depression, which was a similar circumstance in terms of the macroeconomic mechanics. Now, maybe they did too much, maybe they didn't do enough in a quickly enough manner - but if you want to see a good example from recent history, look at Japan. They were a powerhouse in the 80s, only to hit this exact sort of thing, and their economy stagnated. It's really only started to kick back into gear after the current government expressly said they're going to try to drive inflation up to get things moving.

Put yet another way... I wouldn't normally want someone to zap my chest with a couple hundred volts of electricity, but if I'm in cardiac arrest, um, yeah, it might be called for.

People who rant about fiat currency tend to miss the point about what money is. Money isn't something of absolute inherent value, it's a representation of productive capacity, that lets people establish relative values of radically different commodities and services, as well as to easily store and transport that value. If I'm a farmer, I don't want to carry a sheaf of wheat around with me to pay for a drink if I get thirsty while I'm in town. Better to use money to represent that, which I can trade to the blacksmith or the carpenter or whomever for what I need, and they can use that same money to come buy wheat from me later.

Gold/silver/etc are certainly traditional forms of money, because they were easily recognizeable in the ancient world as such. The problem with using them as such today is that you can't tailor the supply of money to the amount of production going on. Why do you need to do this? Well, because having it off by too much is bad. Imagine a village where there's 1000 pounds of gold in use as money. Someone comes back from an expedition, having found another 1000 pounds - and causes an immediate 50% inflation because you have 2x the money representing the same amount of production. The reverse is true as well, if production increases by 5% each year, but the amount of gold stays the same - except this time you get deflation, where gold is worth more (so people tend to hoard it to spend later, not now, which in a modern economy is very very bad).

"These aren't the regulatory offenses you're looking for."

"He can go about his business."

"Move along."

Certain expensive cars do provide benefit. It's not just top speed, it's acceleration. Having that ability to go from slow to fast, very quickly, provides an advantage in many situations, that if you've never driven one regularly, you probably wouldn't even think about. Also, you can take that car to a racetrack and let loose in a controlled environment, so at least you do have an option for it. (And that's aside from the fact that some of those cars are also rather visually impressive).

Moreover, some of those cars really aren't -that- much more expensive. You don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a car with some serious power and muscle.

The problem with audiophile gear is that it's largely not scientific - so far as anyone can tell, at least with these cables, it's a bunch of snake oil. A proper car analogy would be something like suggesting that you should only use CarQuest Tires for your car (which cost $10,000), and Monster Sparkplugs and cables because pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo that's not really going to have any discernable effect other than in someone's mind. Now, replacing a 300hp V6 with a 500hp V8? Yeah, you might see a bit of a difference there.

I use only locally generated solar power from unidirectional panels with audio-rated Monster cables to preserve smooth integrity of the power, connected to special reserve batteries with a non-volatile charging mechanism to prevent the introduction of harmful battery fluctuations that might induce noise artifacts into the components. I then had my entire house lined with a special AudioQuest aluminium sheeting to block any gamma rays or neutrinos that might strike a cable or component and cause stutter in the electron flow through the cables and cords.

It's not just their incompetence afterwards. There is evidence that they were made aware of the threat, as recently as three years prior:

In short, they were warned by scientists, and failed to take action.

The part that interests me is how this seems to differ quite radically from grand juries in the U.S., where the citizens on the Grand Jury are largely window dressing. If the prosecutor wants an indictment, they'll get it, and if they don't, they'll make sure the grand jury won't deliver one.

Here, though, it's clear the prosecutors didn't want an indictment, and the citizens forced one anyway.

66% turnout, sadly, isn't all that bad by the standards of most democracies.

By contrast, in the 2014 U.S. Congressional elections, an estimated 36.6% percent of eligible voters participated. (Source: http://www.usnews.com/news/blo... ). I'd have gladly taken the UK turnout rate.

Meanwhile, there's this other bit of news that's gone mostly unnoticed outside Japan: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/ne... Surely this must be coincidence, right? I think not! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Hm, something like this needs a good, catchy name, that also makes for a good acronym.
How about...

Strategic
Kinetic
Yankee
Neural
Exaflop
Terminal

Great! Since you already have admin access to my network, can you fix up the issues from our last server migration? Outlook keeps cutting in and out during the day, and we'd really appreciate it if you could fix that while you're busy copying all our files.

Also, can we contact you later if we need copies of your copies as backups? Thanks!

Guess there's going to be a lot of openings for new clandestine services agents. Let's just hope they guard the information better next time.

I find that I use it constantly for two things (aside from start menu access): Windows+E = Brings up File Manager/Windows Explorer Windows+L = Lock screen in one keypress (rather than two using the C-A-D plus mouse click)