Yes, I meant exactly what I said. Without constant inflation, you could save money from working and retire on it. With inflation, you are instead forced to invest that money, generally in financial instruments, and hope that it grows at least as fast as inflation (plus whatever taxes and fees you get charged for the privilege of having your money keep up with inflation). Inflation therefore punishes savers.

The rich have much greater access to and control over productive assets. They control the financial sector, which gains most of the benefits of saver's money being forced into investments. Constant inflation is the largest cause of growing wealth inequality.

If you consistently increase the money supply faster than the rate of economic growth, people stop thinking your money is legitimate. Economists call that inflation, and it's used to devalue non-productive savings and make borrowing cheaper, which combined means it's just a way to make rich people richer. It screws everyone else and eventually the inevitable result is a currency crisis.

Borrowing and spending only makes sense if the borrowing leads to enough additional income in the future to justify paying off the interest on the loan. That generally means infrastructure spending, for infrastructure that is actually needed to create real growth.

Borrowing for anything else just makes you poorer in the long term.

What Europe calls austerity, everyone else calls living within one's means. Which, in the long term, is non-optional.

Good luck with that. Ratings agencies can't even give an honest appraisal of the country's debt without getting dragged into lawsuits and being forced to fork over billions of dollars in penalties. Any company that actually defied the police state would be out of business within a week.

At 10 I could bike anywhere I could reach. I had my own boat, and a gas account at the marina, and would frequently be out all day.

I usually bussed to school, because it was a couple of miles, but I could and did walk or bike it fairly often.

I'm astonished at how coddled most children are, these days. No wonder everyone's scared all the time.

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

Read that. All of it. And then come back and tell me what their mission statement is.

Would Quebec be enough? Please, take it.

Yeah I'd put it in the late 1700's.

http://naturalpatriot.org/wp-c...

Yeah I was mostly joking. The one time I was called I served willingly. Most of the other people on my jury were idiots, though. Seriously.

Only if you're an idiot who can only point and click gui buttons and whose solution to any problem is to reboot.

The comparison to Windows NT is because systemd insists on binary logs, takes over vast chunks of functionality that it has no business touching, and makes it basically impossible to debug problems. It makes the experience of administering the server much more like administering Windows than administering Linux should be.

Yeah, these are people too stupid to get out of jury duty. Probably not educated professionals.

You have to protect religion, or else certain sects of Christians pass laws that oppress everyone else just for believing in a slightly different sky faerie than they do, or even for not believing in sky faeries at all. Protecting everyone's beliefs or the lack thereof is the only way to keep the meddlers out.

My grade 12 math teacher basically gave me a 0, dropping me 20%, for participation and attendance. Despite having a 95% test average that term. So for the rest of the year I brought no work to class and just sat and read a paperback. I figured I couldn't do worse than 0. Man that pissed her off.

Probably not the best way to handle it, but screw teachers who punish good students for not doing things their way.