The US always pays its debts when they are due. I think perhaps the problem is you don't understand how US debt works, and why it is a bit special:

So the most important thing to understand is the US doesn't go and beg people to give it money, rather it auctions debt. People come and purchase the debt. You can do it yourself on their Treasury Direct site. The US sells debt instruments to interested buyers. They are bid on, and whoever bids the lowest interest rate wins. The upshot is the US sets the terms of the debt instruments sold. They have a variety, some are as short as 4 weeks, some as long as 30 years. When you buy something, the terms of repayment are stated up front: What it'll pay, and when. There is no provision to cash out early, and you don't get to dictate any terms, you just choose what note you want to buy (if they are available).

This is how public debt works in a lot of countries, but it isn't how things go when you are getting loans from the IMF.

The other important thing is that all US debt is denominated in US dollars. A US debt instrument specifies how many dollars it'll pay out and that number is NOT inflation adjusted, except in a few very special cases. Well the US government also controls the US mint, which makes US dollars. So the US government can literally print money, and inflate its way in to payments. There are negatives to that, of course, but it is perfectly doable. The US controls its fiscal and monetary policy regarding its debt. Since all its debts are in US dollars, and since US dollars are the world's reserve currency, the US cannot face a crisis where it can't pay, unless such a crisis is internally generated (via the debt limit).

Not the case with Greek debt, it is in Euros and Greece doesn't control the Euro.

Finally, there's the fact that the US has great credit. Doesn't matter if you disagree that it should, fact is it does. Investors are willing to loan the US money for extremely low interest rates because they see it as a very safe investment. 4 week T-Bills have been going for between 0%-0.015%. 30-year bonds have been going for 2.5%-3.75%. Investors bid the interest rates very low because they desire it as a safe investment.

No, no, no. You misunderstand the word stakeholder. The public ARE stakeholders. We have several places in which the stake my be placed and held. The rich will hold the stake prior to insertion, you understand.

And a significant portion of the population is now an ex-prisoner or ex-felon. "In 2008, about one in 33 working-age adults was an ex-prisoner, and about one in 15 working-age adults was an ex-felon. Among working-age men in that same year, about one in 17 was an ex-prisoner and one in eight was an ex-felon." http://www.cepr.net/press-cent... [cepr.net]

I would expect that, but that's not how it's going down. We should all boycott things like TPP, if we're not allowed to know what is in them, then chances are we won't like it and should be saying no.

"I personally don't care about your well being because you fucked up and I'm scared of you" mentality would be like saying, "Why should I pay taxes for public schools if I don't have kids?"

No, I'm happy to pay my taxes to put them in jail and pay for their life in jail. Once they get out my debt to them ends, I would rather they lived somewhere else. A better analogy is I'll pay for your kids to go to school, but once they graduate they're on their own.

And a significant portion of the population is now an ex-prisoner or ex-felon. "In 2008, about one in 33 working-age adults was an ex-prisoner, and about one in 15 working-age adults was an ex-felon. Among working-age men in that same year, about one in 17 was an ex-prisoner and one in eight was an ex-felon." http://www.cepr.net/press-cent... [cepr.net]

If your point is that perhaps we have too many laws, that some of our laws penalize people for dubious crimes, I agree. I would like to see some of those laws (i.e. marijuana) removed. That said, it's still the law in most places and if you can't or won't follow the law, you clearly don't have good impulse control and I find it hard to trust you. It's not hard to not smoke pot, it's easier still to not deal pot. Just don't do it, problem solved. Feel free to campaign to get the laws changed so you can, I've got your back. Until then don't get all whiney about how unfair it is that you get branded a criminal for breaking the law, that's the definition of the word.

100% of inmates who are guilty of a crime

This sounds like the logic behind dismantling advanced/remedial classes. Let's throw everyone together and the good students can "uplift" the bad. So the good students get hurt and perform less well..

I guess you're right, I definitely feel once you fall off the wagon it's on you to get back on. Once you cross certain lines I'm personally not sure I care about your well being and simply want to minimize the chance you can hurt me again. I will grant you many people fall because they are in bad situations, were raised into crime and often don't even realize what they're doing is a crime. But that doesn't excuse anything, particularly repeat offenses.

Most chain pizza has a disgusting crust, though Dominoes seems to be even worse (too sweet, mushy and doughy like it's undercooked) than most.

It is easier with something simpler, not something smaller. When you start doing extreme optimization for size, as in this case, you are going to do it at the expense of many things, checks being one of them. If you want to have good security, particularly for something that can be hit with completely arbitrary and hostile input like something on the network, you want to do good data checking and sanitization. Well guess what? That takes code, takes memory, takes cycles. You start stripping everything down to basics, stuff like that may go away.

What's more, with really tiny code sizes, particularly for complex items like an OS, what you are often doing is using assembly, or at best C, which means that you'd better be really careful, but there is a lot of room to fuck up. You mess up one pointer and you can have a major vulnerability. Now you go and use a managed language or the like and the size goes up drastically... but of course that management framework can deal with a lot of issues.

And also other tradeoffs. It is fashionable for some geeks to cry about the amount of disk space that stuff takes, but it always seems devoid of context and consideration, as though you could have the exact same performance/setup in a tiny amount of space if only programmers "tried harder" or something. However you do some research, and it turns out to all be tradeoffs, and often times the tradeoff to use more system resources is a good one. Never mind just capabilities/features, but there can be reasons to have abstractions, managed environments, and so on.

Or he's trying to hear you reason it out and doesn't care about the answer. As far as I'm concerned there are a variety of good answers to this one that all rely on one assumption or another, some answers are more righter than others. He's going to be the guy to tell you the right answer he wants anyway.

I think earth is an oblate spheroid, so it must be the geographic north pole, which would have the property of being "a triangle" and putting you back where you started. But what hurts my head is when we use terms like north/south/west we're referring to magnetic north (usually), and I'm not sure as you make the traversal he describes you actually end up back where you started. Also i'm not sure how to rule out the south pole (geographic) you could do this same exercise.

It can't be magnetic, the earth is somewhat and unequally distended around the magnetic poles such that you don't end up exactly at the starting point by taking the indicated path, you will end up every so slightly off.

There are two north poles, and he specifically mentioned earth.

Being fired is extreme, but in at least two companies I worked for, there was a strong "you broke it, you bought it" mentality to this sort of thing. If you found a security issue, you were expected to move across the corporation until it got fixed. Derailing your actual job, your personal life, and just about any hope of happiness until it got fixed. Of course you don't report it.

The issue frequently is that IT is seen as the cost center to reduce most, so getting someone in IT to a) acknowledge it is an issue not user error/invalid use case requires champion effort, b) the IT guys that exist are marginally competent, the good ones are too expensive to work here full time, c) frequently users are told how dumb they are, so they aren't even sure if they've found an issue or "I must be doing something wrong", d) how did you find it in the first place? Were you doing something you shouldn't? HMMM?

Messages on the phone uses SMS, which works even on dumb phones. On the Mac messages can link to your favorite message client, which also works on anything. Facetime I will concede.

Still, Skype is owned by Microsoft, and his example is literally using Microsoft on Microsoft to talk to a Microsoft product somewhere else. It's a dumb statement. And while Apple is definitely the most exclusive, I do use Gmail & Hangouts on my iPhone to talk to my wife on Android, and that works just fine and is what I use rather than Messages most of the time because we're too cheap to pay for SMS. So even the meta point is a bit contrived. Most people have ported their apps to the iPhone and the ecosystem works fine, the only one who has not is the one with financial incentive not to (because they sell hardware).