Nonsense, inflation is expansion of money supply, nothing else. Rising prices (or prices that are failing to fall) can be a result of inflation. Inflation changes the size of the measurement units of the economy, value of the currency. Inflation does not improve economy in any way, it destroys the economy both by destroying value of savings and rising prices of real savings, thus denying access to capital for productive purposes and pushing up nominal prices of assets, creating asset bubbles, making it look like economy is growing (faking the GDP), while in reality the economy stays the same (or shrinks), only the units change.

You are using this in an Orwellian fashion to confuse the population on the causes of inflation and its effects.

Socialism is fascism. Socialists want to control companies and companies fight back and buy political power, but the only reason political power can be bought is because socialists allow government to usurp all that power.

The reason for all this debt is lack of productivity and substitution of a real economy with a fake one.

    Americans are an extremely unproductive bunch, living at the expense of the productive Chinese and others, printing money and 'buying' products created by others that they themselves do not produce, thus the 500 Billion USD/year trade deficits for a couple of decades now.

Inflation is rampant, of-course the publicly 'educated' children do not understand what inflation is or why it is bad and they revolt at that thought.

There is no 'your' definition, the definition that you are cheering for is the definition of propaganda, redefining the meaning of words in order to promote wilful ignorance.

And that's the problem with the publics modern perception of credit. Because I do not have a credit card and suggest that you shouldn't either, I'm considered a quack. I buy just as much useless garbage as anyone that modded me down does. I go on vacations, I order things online, I buy soda at the gas station. The only difference is I don't pay a 7% to 30% fee to do all of those things. And that is exactly what a credit card does. It doesn't help your credit. That's a lie driven by marketing campaigns of credit card companies.

You no doubt got modded down because you have virtually every fact you mention entirely wrong. Having a credit card doesn't mean carrying a balance month-to-month, and you don't pay a single penny extra if you don't carry a balance (unless you stupidly sign up for a card with an an annual fee). I actually get 1.5 to 6% back on all my purchases, depending on how they categorize it. Now, you could argue that we pay 3%-ish more for everything as a result of stores passing on the transaction fees to their customers, but then, so do you, and you don't even get the benefits as a result.

And as for your credit rating, sorry, but yes, having a small number of regularly-paid cards most certainly does improve your credit, compared with having no credit history. I could provide you with an hundred links discussing the optimal number of cards and how much to cycle through them monthly, but you could already have done so and apparently chose not to.

Yes, we have a sick view of what "credit" means as a society. That doesn't invalidate the concept itself, just points a damning finger at how badly we tend to misuse it. Kudos to you for at least living within your means (and I mean that sincerely), but you massively overstate the case-for-cash while remaining blissfully ignorant of how credit cards really work in the modern world.

I am of the opinion that if the typical person is hit by lightening and we add up the liabilities and assets that we will find most people are worth less than zero.

Although I sadly agree with you, I also have to consider it largely self-inflicted. Once you enter the workforce and pay off your student loans, you should only go UP from there (with the first year of a new car as the exception, though if you can't afford that slight dip between value and equity, you shouldn't buy new cars). We as a culture simply have a really bad habit of living far beyond our means. Make no mistakes, creditors fully exploit that habit, and no doubt someone will reply that they fall into the 1.4% with some insanely expensive medical condition, but in most cases it still comes down to choosing to spend more than we make.

Outstanding mortgages, car loans and other loans are only part of the issue.

A pretty big part - Short of end-of-life care, most of us will have no bigger outstanding debts than mortgages, cars, and student loans.

the cost of dying and the costs of burials as well as the cost of settling estates

Not material - Although it varies by state, you can get your body disposed of for under $100 (I've often seen $300 cited as the floor for a "cardboard box of ashes", though other cheaper options exist). And for an "estate" with negative net worth, your loved ones can always refuse to have anything to do with it and let the state eat the cost (though most people choose to "do the right thing" for dear-old-$30k-in-debt-dad). And as for the cost of dying, I can guarantee you that my end-of-life care will never push my net worth lower than the price of one last bullet. Again, we choose to drag out that last pathetic six months, at phenomenal expense both financial and emotional. No thanks!

The support of your kids, their education, your widow's needs all are considerations.

Can't afford kids? Don't have any. I realize that counts as all-but-heresy, but seriously, kids cost a lot; if you can't afford those three teens you mention, consider having just one, or even zero. As for your widow, if she can't support herself, you chose poorly in marrying someone incapable of surviving in the modern world in your absence. I want my partner fully capable of getting along without me in the event of my sudden death; I would consider it nothing short of cruel on my part to have her financially dependent on me, and that doesn't mean buying some scam of an insurance policy, it means she can very much support herself on her own income and retirement planning (though admittedly, if I die before we pay off the house, she'd likely need to find a new partner with which to split the household expenses).


Don't get me wrong, I realize we have some wiggle room here, and don't mean this quite as monstrously as it probably sounds. But bluntly, it all comes down to choosing not to live within our means, and you describe some of the biggest examples of that. Choose better

You suggest that I don't understand how computers work because I call pointers an implementation detail, then you go and cite examples where pointers are supposed to be getting used under the hood, and yet those very examples only illustrate the point that it is an implementation detail, and not actually foundational to programming.

One of the definitive works with which I am familiar on the subject of computer science as it pertains to programming, by Knuth doesn't even dedicate a whole chapter to a concept that you seem to think is so fundamental to knowing how to program. Of course, I know that an argument from authority doesn't make one right.

But then neither does an argument from ignorance.

Money is quantifiable,

So is time spent doing what you enjoy. And the only correlation between the two that can be made is by people who can't see past the notion that you need to have a lot of money to be happy.

Plus of course, if you excel at what you enjoy doing, you can probably find people that will pay you for it.

What I think is that people shouldn't be focussing on how much money they can make doing such and such. Do what you love... do it well, and you will almost invariably find that there are people who will pay you to do it.

Just a minor nitpick. Pointers are an implementation detail, not a computer science fundamental prinicple.

Not that I'm knocking "earning big bucks", but it always kinda pisses me off that people talk about compuer programming or a certain type of programming as being especially lucrative, as if that should be some sort of aspiration in life. It certainly pays better than a lot of other jobs that I've had, but how much money you can earn is a pretty shallow metric for success, if you ask me.

If you only want a semipublic file share, just stand up a free AWS Linux instance and lock it down to SSH/SFTP. You get a few GB of free cloud storage (I don't actually know the limit, but I have 8 online now and have never paid a dime), and can sleep well knowing that a breach just means standing up a new instance rather than the end of your career.

You only really need to let people get onto your corporate network if you want to set up "real" remote access such as VPN or, as you mention, one of those crazy-expensive RSA Citrix gateways. And no offense, but the very fact that you have asked Slashdot how to do this on the cheap suggests that you really shouldn't do it at all (aside from my "safe" suggestion above).

Fake money cannot boost real productivity regardless of any conditions, it is shamanism through and through. But relax, nobody is fucking you in the ass, you don't need to squeeze that hard.

That's what it would typically convert to, yes... my point was still that "Will" is not 1st edition attribute. Further, a "Will save" and a "Wisdom attribute save" are two entirely different things. The former adjusts your roll by a bonus or penality that is associated with your wisdom score (much like a save vs spell, with wisdom bonus applicable), while with the latter, you directly compare your raw ability score to the roll itself.

Personally, I prefer using percentile dice for stat checks... with a base of 5% per stat point, plus or minus any situational modifiers. Then the d20 is only used for rolling high, while percentile dice is ordinarily used for rolling low (such as thieving checks, et al). I find that doing this makes things much easier for people who are new to the game, because I used to always get asked "do I need to roll high or low?" by newer players. I still get that every once in a while, but a lot less often since running things this way.

Because they are only giving it away for free for a limited time.... it's a promotion for the software... they aren't actually making the software freely available in general.

The alternative would require that they prepare a special version of the software that doesn't come with the DRM solely for the promotional period... which because of how short it is, it probably wouldn't be worthwhile.

Not that I agree with bundling this software with their game... I remember having it on my system once with some EA software and it caused me a lot of grief (affected my DVD drive in unexpected ways). I haven't installed anything from EA on my computers since, and I doubt I ever will.

I think his point may be, perhaps, that he routinely sweeps his system to make sure infections don't occur, and can currently account for the source of every piece of software using resources on his system. The other poster was, after all, making the claim that if you have windows, then you have malware on your system... so asking him what that malware might be if one is confident that there is none is a perfectly fair question.