Why is inflation good? Why is price stability bad? Why can't the market control the money supply? The government doesn't (constitutionally speaking) even have the authority to control the money supply.

If currency is a reflection of the economy behind it, then by simply printing money, the government makes the economy better, right? Well where does the money come from, where does the value of that money come from? There's no such thing as a free lunch dude. There WAS a fixed value, when we were on the gold standard, $20 to an ounce of gold. Since we left the gold standard, the dollar has LOST VALUE, the more money that they print, the more that gets chipped away. There are charts all of the place that show this.

And yes, there are stats that track the amount of outstanding currency and YES there are economists that talk about China/Japan dumping their debt and how it would be devastating to the economy.

No conspiracies here, just news reports about illicit behavior....or are all corporations above breaking the law to make a buck? Just do a google search for silver market manipulation.

I will keep my gold and I invite you to just consider for a moment that maybe you don't know everything. I once thought as you do because that's what they teach people and then I started to question the foundations of what I was taught and it all came tumbling down. Hey, maybe I am wrong and you have it all wrapped up, but what if I'm not...

There is nothing special about gold. It is not the end-all be-all indicator of inflation. Inflation is measured as the overall increase in the prices of commodities and goods. All of them, not just gold.

That is a popular misconception. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon that is tied to the amount of currency in circulation (a la supply and demand). More currency in circulation means that each unit of currency is worth less. An ounce of gold hasn't changed in the last 90 years, it is still an ounce of gold. What has changed is the number of dollars required to purchase said ounce of gold from $20 to today's $1343.20. Its not the gold that appreciated, but the dollar that depreciated.

Gold is driven by supply and demand (but hey, what isn't) but the difference with gold is that there has been a tremendous amount of market interference by some of the large banks and governments to keep the price of gold down which has interfered with the normal mechanics of supply and demand (giving the impression that there is no demand to drive down prices). Also, inflation has been low in large part because much of the currency that has been printed in the US was send abroad to serve as foreign currency reserves and thus has not entered circulation in the US economy. If countries like China and Japan were to offload their debt onto the open markets you would see the inflation that you say doesn't exist as the currency floods the market.

In essence, printing money is theft (or at best, a hidden tax), as it shaves value off of everyone's currency so that the printers can spend it. The printers get to spend it before it enters the economy and thus loses its value.

It seems that if he knows about the crime before it happens then he is an accessory to the crime and perhaps co-conspirator.

The drilling rigs are not cheap. Having them sit idle will cost millions and millions of dollars. There is demand for them elsewhere in the world. They will contract out to other companies operating in other countries. When the moratorium is lifted in 6 months, there won't be any available rigs to be had which means no jobs either.

I dunno, its kinda in a high crime neighborhood, considering that most of the laws that come out of Washington these days aren't authorized under the Constitution.

A Stephen King book, pretty well written.

Why would they?

I contend that a bank that rakes its customers over the coals in the manner in which you described would quickly have no customers. Word would spread incredibly quickly in today's information age that bank x royally screwed person y and customers would remove their money in droves.

Since the amount of money that a bank can loan is tied to the amount of "reserves" they have on hand, a bank that had any significant number of withdrawals (say 5-10%) would very quickly have its balance sheets become negative rendering the bank insolvent as currently outstanding loans exceed the bank's capital requirements which justify those loans.

Banks compete fiercly for customers with the cost to attract a new customer being quite high. While on the surface it might seem that having more revenue from service charges and fees would be in the best interest of bank x, it clearly would not be worth the tarnished reputation of allowing its customers to be wiped out by some nefarious prankster sending micro-payments.

My point is that sure, banks like to charge fees and penalties, but I think I given compelling reasons why they would be interested in limiting/eliminating the ability of the above mentioned nefarious prankster from wiping someone out.

Every time a law is passed people lose freedom. While each individual law may seem to be reasonable and well-intentioned, the cumulative effect of law upon law upon law is quite restrictive. Additionally, laws are frequently perverted to mean things and to enforce things that they were never intentioned to. Look at abuses of the DMCA, the Patriot act and I am sure countless others that don't come to mind just this moment.

I am sorry, buy why should this be illegal? Why should any respectable government waste everyone's time writing yet another pointless ineffectual over-engineered law that will eventually be abused as it evolves into some sort of tyranical restriction. Why don't banks and other organizations that allow micro-payments simply set a minimum transfer amount such that the amount transferred to the recipient must be positive after any fees are subtracted? Or they could make the sender pay the transfer amount (since in any sort of commerce this cost would be built into the product anyway) OR let the recipient specify (via an account setting) the minimum amount that they will accept as a payment. There are countless ways to avoid negative transfers without getting governments and laws involved. If this happened to me, I would complain to the bank, not the government! If the bank were to be unwilling to provide relief, they must not want me as a customer.

People buy used games because of price. It seems to be that as a game ages, publishers could more aggressively lower the price of a game to continue to attract sales. Just as there are some people who wait for a computer component to be on the market for 6-12 months before purchasing so as to not pay an arm and a leg for performance, there will also be people who do the same thing with games. If the publisher lowers their prices to be competitive with what used shops charge, they would automatically attract sales away the used market. There is no need to use draconian DRM or strong-handed licenses or government legislation.

Despite the reasons for the EHR outage and despite almost any amount of IT planning to mitigate this kind of outage, there are scenarios where such an outage are unavoidable. Working for a hospital, I have seen where both of our WAN circuits have gone down due to fiber cuts by construction contractors outside of our facility (a fairly common occurence in general). There are certainly other ways of procurring connectivity like satellite and cellullar, but these are both prone to their own problems (satellite is affected by the weather and has very high latency and cellular is prone to interference, competes with other cellular users for bandwidth), and are relatively low bandwidth. WAN connectivity isn't really the issue though, Inside of a hospital you can have a dual core network infrastructure and have dual paths to all of your assets, you can have 5000 amp/hour batteries in all of the IDF's, you can over-engineer every aspect of the system and still have a failure somewhere that brings down your system.

Of course, you have to remember that all of this over-engineering costs money. The more money a hospital spends on bulletproofing EHR, the more they have to charge patients or cut corners elsewhere in order to remain profitable. At some point for any system, be it EHR or any other, this process becomes unsustainable as no one could afford the services of the hospital.

Some may see this as a reason why for profit hospitals are bad and why the government should run things. It really wouldn't change. The government is currently effectively bankrupt. We borrow billions from other countries and the Federal Reserve prints up the shortfall causing currency inflation. When our debt becomes so large that our credit rating falters, other countries will be less and less inclined to finance our debts which will bring more inflation as the Fed continues to print the shortfall. Why do people think that the government's budget is any different from a household budget? How long can you keep spending more than you earn and stave off bankruptcy?

The fact of the matter is that a for profit organization has the most incentive to build the most effective and efficient system for dealing with their core business. Of course, governmentrules and regulations and the organizations' leadership (if inept) can stymie this process.

In the Red Dwarf books there was a game called better than life. Basically it made all of your dreams come true (I imagine scantily clad babes would fit into that category) to the point where you would die of hunger rather than turn off the game. Some people just forgot that they were in a game and died for same reason.

Sorry, but most companies aren't in the business of any sort of IT as part of their core business. IT enables their core business, but it is overhead. Whether or not making your own IT cables is cost effective or not is one thing, but it definitely falls under IT. If I took your comment to its logical conslusion I would ask, "Why should his company have a network since networks clearly aren't part of his company's core business?"

These aren't necessarily limited to "terrorism". It seems that these signs could be used in preparing for any number of crimes and perhaps even some legitimate activities (if you were a private investigator for example, there may be others...).

Why is it that nowadays any significantly high profile criminal activity has been reclassified as terrorism? I thought that terrorist acts were supposed to invoke terror in the pursuit of some political end by blowing up/killing buildings/planes/hostages, the idea being that a population would be in so much fear (terror) that they would pressure their government to give in to the demands of the terrorists.

The answer is that there are probably too few of the above classification of terrorists to actually have a war against (as in the war on terror) here in the United States. Those in control need to expand the definition of terror so as to actually have something to have war against. Why have a war on terror at all? Many people are willing to cede their liberty and freedom to catch terrorists of the ilk that perpetrated 9/11 (a la the war on terror) and the government is using that sentiment with regards to the newly reclassified definition of terrorist (pretty much anyone they don't like that they are willing to label as terrorist...protesters, constitutionalists, libertarians etc etc etc. See Missouri's MIAC report which associated supporters of Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr, three presidential candidates all espousing constitutional government)being associated with terrorists. The Bush administration (and now Obama administration) has taken full advantage of the flexibility of the term "terrorist" to assault personal freedoms on an unprecedented scale.

If you see the scales of freedom tipping in the wrong direction, get involved. There are left and right leaning organizations that are trying to restore our freedom:
American Freedom Campaign
The Pen
DownsizeDc.org
The Campaign for Liberty
Restore the Republic
Young Americans for Liberty

MU: Man-made CO2 is a small contributor to overall atmospheric CO2 levels.

Engage the scientific method sections of your brains and challenge the assertions of those inciting the global warming hysteria. Perhaps humans are damning the planet with CO2, perhaps they aren't...but educate yourselves rather than take Al Gore's word for it.