to essentially turn toilets into a community center.

A sillier goal is difficult to imagine...

I didn't ignore anything. As I said, deflationary currencies encourage savings. People held on to the money they felt would maintain its value, and spent the inflationary money. It's Gresham's law in action, and pretty much all economists agree it's a typical dynamic. Nothing about my comment ignored the facts of what I responded to. I simply interpreted the facts accurately and pointed out a subtlety that you were not perceiving.

The fact is that the US experimented with going off the gold standard throughout the 1800s, but overall stayed with it, and we experienced growth while the purchasing power of the dollar, long term, went up by about 40% over that century.

I know this is difficult for one-track minds like this AC to understand, but many issues are in fact nuanced and complex. Shockingly, law appears to be one of those. Just to name a single example: data retention laws. They vary by jurisdiction.

As someone who runs NoScript, Adblock Plus and various other user scripts, I think it's a good thing to be able to take control over your own experience. It's good not to be passive. It's good to see only what you want to see. The more people do this, the more these companies have to comprehend that this is the nature of the network in which they have chosen to participate. The Web would lose most of its appeal to me if it were entirely corporate controlled like television.

What's really sad is that other mediums like television, radio, and periodicals are one-to-many, heavily centralized, and don't include such great control over what you see. They're package deals that require you to accept the crap along with the content and are often not worthwhile.

I use startpage.com myself. I like the idea of getting actual Google search results without any sort of Google tracking. They don't even log your IP address and they're outside of US jurisdiction.

By the way I hope our federal legislators appreciate that. I hope they are proud that now, "outside of US jurisdiction" has become a selling point.

Oh, really, mass psychosis? How about this: USA is trying desperately to maintain perceived value of its dollar, while it's destroying the current value of it every day with more and more money printing, and now that it can't even hold the dollar price of gold up it's trying to ensure that there is yet another 'crisis' somewhere outside of the US. Worked last time with Europe being in crisis due to Greek bankruptcy and later Cyprus disaster, at that time people rushed into the US dollar.

Now even with the Russian / Ukrainian situation people are not flocking into the dollar. However who in fact started this particular movement in Ukraine? It was a combination of European and American political interests.

You think that the rest of the world is oblivious to these machinations, what you are observing is that while people may not have the information, on a visceral level they get it - there is a strategy behind what is happening in the Eastern European block, what happened in Georgia and now in Ukraine.

You think this is 'mass psychosis', I think it is mass rejection of American intervention. Maybe the USA should stop trying to meddle with everything in the world and then people wouldn't be put into this position.

- oppression.

The word is oppression. How about this: you have your government regulated banks and I have my banks that are not regulated by anybody, that's the way I prefer it.

Anyone who needed to have that explained to them is demonstrably resistant to facts and so-called "common sense" and is therefore a lost cause. Mass numbers of non-individuals agreeing with you bandwagon-style is the only thing they would find persuasive.

Sick citizens cost a state, not in on-the-book expenditures, but in lost productivity and higher hospitalization costs -- especially because of the large number of very sick people covered by hospitals' indigent care pools. This directly translates into higher dollar costs in health care and insurance.

The same insurance that would cost my family $8811/year in Massachusetts would cost an unbelievable $12576 in Mississippi, even though everything else is much more expensive here. Mississippi has the lowest cost of living in the country; Massachusetts is among the highest. Yet they pay 40% more for the same health insurance, when all things being equal you'd expect them to pay 30% less. Why? Is medical care cheaper here? Absolutely not. We're chock full of very expensive, high tech teaching hospitals where the cost of an aspirin would give you a stroke. We have the most expensive cost for medical procedures in the country of any state but Alaska.

So why is health insurance such a relative bargain here? Because we have by far the lowest rate of uninsured people in the country (4.0%) thanks to Mitt Romney's implementation of what later came to be called "Obamacare". Yes, our medical care is more expensive here but because we get preventive care and screening we use less of it.

Mississippi's uninsured rate is 15%, and consequently it's full of poor, unnecessarily sick people. the number of unnecessarily sick people. Here in Massachusetts when you hit 65 you can expect to enjoy 15 years of *healthy* life before your health fails. In Mississippi it's 10.8 years. Mississippi has a shocking infant mortality rate -- a total of 1% of live births. And all those unnecessarily sick babies who didn't get prenatal care cost people living in Mississippi a fortune.

So while Mississippi saves immediate cash outlay by not expanding Medicaid, that's penny wise and pound foolish. People carrying insurance end up spending so much more they could expand Medicaid for a fraction of the costs, and if you're a Mississippian you can expect to get more sick and die younger than any other state in the country. Some deal.

Mississippi has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country -- a shocking 1% (10 per 1000 live births) of newborns in Mississippi don't make it. Sick, uninsured babies are very expensive.