What agency of the government is run efficiently? What agency could compete against any private business if it had to?

USPS competes rather well against UPS and Fedex. They haven't received subsidies for a number of years now. I guess you could argue something about nobody else being able to open mailboxes, but that doesn't seem like a big point for package delivery, at least.

Also, there have been studies showing that Medicare has a much lower overhead than private insurance.

But we also have boondoggles like Amtrak, which unlike private boondoggles, will never die like a failed business should.

because it's far too easy for the bank to abuse.

It's not like you can't read the contract before you sign it. If you don't like the terms, you can always refuse the loan.

That should not affect your rate.

Yes, it should. A longer time horizon for a loan means greater risk for the lender. If rates go up in the future, the lender loses out on the greater gains that could be made at the time. If rates go down (more than slightly), the borrower refinances and the lender will have to reloan out the money at the lower rate. Unexpected inflation will also cost the lender, and that's more likely than deflation.

By letting the rate on the loan adjust, the lender can reduce the interest rate risk for the loan. Reducing the risk allows them to offer a lower initial rate. If you only expect to hold the loan during that initial rate period, an ARM will probably be a good deal.

ARMs are for the bank's benefit, not yours. Unless you're a banker, or can ONLY get an ARM, you're being screwed.

Nobody's ever going to force you to take an ARM. I'm looking for a house right now that I fully expect to live in for no more than six years. If I could get a 7/1 ARM with a lower rate than a 30-year fixed, I'd be a fool not to take it. If there's a chance I'll still be in the same spot eight years from now, then any motivation to get out is a good thing.

You're completely right that the banks are in business to make money, not to be your friend. If they can't make money on a loan, they won't make the loan. You can "convince" banks to make unprofitable loans with subsidies, ie FHA, mortgage interest deduction, but since those are partially responsible for the housing bubble, that tactic seems somewhat questionable.

Just because some unscrupulous lenders push specialized loans onto people who shouldn't really be using them doesn't mean that there aren't valid uses for those products, though. As long as you pay attention to what you're signing, the banks can't screw you without saying so first.

adjustable mortgages need to be outlawed

Now why would you do that? If I know that I'll only be living in my house for 5 years, and the bank feels that it can offer a lower rate for a 5/1 ARM than a 30-fixed, then the ARM is better. Just cause some people cut themselves doesn't mean we ban knives (unless we're the UK...).

Which would be a disaster right now. Getting a tax cut when consumer demand has crashed and unemployment is high will only increase the size of your deficit without any benefits.

Just about every semi-mainstream economist would disagree with you. The only real open question is whether tax cuts or spending increases have more effect on an ailing economy.

Depends upon where you live. I've seen purified silicon spring up out of the desert with little more than sand and lightning as inputs.

Even if you have the silicon, are you going to etch it with your fingernail? And you better have that pattern memorized. No using google to look things up, or pencil and paper to derive equations.

And furthermore, the economy is not zero-sum.

Unproven assertion. I've seen many people try to argue this, but in a finite universe, all economic systems are finite.

There is no law of conservation of wealth. If I combine flour, sugar, and eggs to make cookies, and the cookies are worth more than the constituent flour, sugar, eggs, and energy required to produce them, I have "created" wealth. This process of wealth creation is why the economy is not zero-sum. And I suppose I could conversely destroy wealth by smashing something expensive.

Not always- sometimes more production just ends up creating a bubble of overproduction followed by a crash in which the industry disappears entirely.

Obviously it's pointless to produce more than people want at a price they won't pay, but could you give an example of an industry actually disappearing? In the current financial market, I can still access consumer credit and get a mortgage for 5 times my income, though perhaps that is largely due to government bailout and subsidies. The "US" auto producers may die out, but they will only give way to more efficient "foreign" producers (who assemble cars in the US). The passenger railroad industry is mostly dead, but that was mostly because of an oppressive union, government mismanagement, and competition from the more heavily subsidized automobile and faster airplane.

Alright buddy, you go out and just try to make a microprocessor with only the parts God gave you. You'll give up before you even get something resembling silicon.

And furthermore, the economy is not zero-sum. Yes, you will have less efficient producers pushed out of the market, but generally, more production means there's just more to go around.

Well, the rationale there is that the net growth created by the bailout will more than offset its cost, resulting in a net win for our grandchildren. Whether that's true or not is another story entirely... The other rationale is that our grandchildren will have flying cars and plasma-troids, so the actual cost of the bailout to them will be trivial, right?

Can you name some people you know personally who started poor and wound up rich? Can you even name ONE? "Rags to riches" happens occasionally, but it is extremely rare. Show us your unicorns if you insist they exist.

Look at some of the immigrants about your age, especially the ones from Asia. Plenty of them grew up shoeless and hungry. They may not be filthy rich, but a lot have certainly done quite well. Just because the native born have forgotten the American Dream doesn't mean it's not still out there.

• Rich guy buys GE bonds
• GE uses bond money to build assembly line
• GE assembly line produces toasters for next 10 years
• Profit
• Society has more toasters, GE pays back bond, everyone's happy

Or some such Capitalist nonsense like that. There's only so much you can make with the parts God gave you. Anything else requires some type of investment, and that's why savings is so important.

They sort of tried that, way back in the Atomic Age. Maybe one of these small-scale fusion guys will eventually get something energy positive, though.

After all, when was the last time you read a book and though "Wow, the page layout in this book *rocks*?".

I've thought the opposite. The Circuit Problems Book Which Shall Not Be Named looked like someone just vomited a bunch of text and figures into MSWord. It was appallingly awful.

So what you do is type in Word and then copy/paste it into LaTeX for the formating and everything else.

Are you insane or trolling? All reasonable text editors have spell checkers.

MSWord is not the answer. Ever.

Would the error have been caught with a more alert programmer? Would the error have been caught with a more thorough code review? Would the error have been caught with consistent units in the project?

Programming is an exercise in managing complexity. Anything which increases the system's complexity for no good reason is a Bad Idea. English units are one of those things.

So, you can blame the person, or you can recognize that humans have a finite capacity to understand complex systems. The former approach requires you to find a group of "Heroes" to develop your software. Or if you recognize that many problems are the result of your system and you eliminate needless complexity, your group of competent programmers can do the job, and any heroes you manage to find can do something really cool.

its only the soulless who think ... that all measurements should be in a base ten

No, its anybody who ever had to do an engineering or physics calculation, ever. You can take your bullshit English/Imperial system and go dance in the trees or whatever your trying to get at there.

Remember folks, English Units Crash Rockets.

I have always believed that the vast majority of today's programming languages have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of programmers and consultants.

For example, lots of people use Fortran, C, C++, Python, Perl, Java, or C#. I see absolutely no reason why a single language could not offer all those features. The only reason you "need" all that is because the programmers created all these funny quirks so that they could introduce more and more products and services. This is done so they can charge you more for each of those things, and also to differentiate them from their competitors.

Seriously though...

Different accounts offer different features. You could try to make do with a single deposit account instead of a checkings/savings/CC combo, but probably wouldn't get as much return as you do with specialized products. Loans are totally different from deposit accounts, though, so I don't know how you'd plan to combine them. Also, a lot of the complexity here comes from dealing with Congress's regulations. Since everybody seems to think we don't have enough of those now, that's probably not going to get simpler anytime soon.