Umm, no.

Again, this is wrong. For one thing, note that broker fees are on the order of fractions of a percent, not 30%.

When you buy Google stock from Google (i.e. during an IPO or subsequent public offering), that money goes to the company so that it can invest the cash in growth -- that means buying equipment, facilities, real estate, hiring and paying employees, etc. That money is most definitely in circulation.

Of course Google isn't selling stock right now because it has plenty of cash to fund growth and doesn't need to raise capital. So if you buy Google stock right now, you're buying it from someone else who bought it from Google (or from someone who did; the chain can be arbitrarily long). But the point is that you're buying it from someone. As it happens, I just sold a non-trivial (for me) chunk of Google stock; there's a check waiting at home for me which I'm going to spend on building a house (well, on covering some of the early incidentals; I'll get a loan for the bulk of it). That money will buy building materials, pay constructor workers, etc. That money is also definitely in circulation.

But what if you buy your stock from a big investment firm rather than from someone like me? Is it out of circulation then? Nope. The investment bank will take your cash and put it into something else... something, in fact, that it believes will be more productive than Google. At least that's true of the value-investing portion of the investment industry, obviously there are other segments that focus on arbitrage. The money managed by those segments is more debatable, but they do contribute significantly to liquidity, which translates to your ability to buy or sell Google stock on a whim.

There are some issues with the velocity of money in the US, which is a measure of how quickly it circulates. It's at the lowest point in decades. The fed has been pumping massive amounts of new money into the system, and it's not helping. I'm not enough of an economist to really understand the issues here, but the most sensible explanation I've seen is that circulation is reduced because people are using the money to pay down debt. We had a massive explosion of velocity fueled by an extravagant credit boom, but it was unsustainable. That unsustainability was a big part of the housing crash and the recession, but we still have excessive debt and the correction isn't over yet, so velocity stays low.

This is an oversight committee that is specifically created to study this topic; there's no "spillage" here, they're fully entitled to access to any and all documents directly pertaining to the issue, which those were.

Many states themselves have grown up in size significantly since then. One would argue that a unitary state the size of California or Texas is already too big for properly functioning democracy.

Can you please point at where it says that? I don't see any mentions of Reagan in the article...

Is that personal income taxation?

How about capital gains?

The entire argument about "passing the tax along" is bullshit. By the same logic, personal income tax is "passed along" to corporations, as people purchase less. It's disingenuous to focus on one particular link in the circular wealth transfer that is a functioning economy, and claim that taxing at that particular link is somehow unfair, while taxing all the others are fair.

As for "getting back at them rich", we just need to start taxing capital gains same as regular income (or better yet, more - it's only fair that "sweat of the brow" earnings are taxed less than collecting rent).

Right, but apps you write on your Tivo can't run on a GNU/Linux installation or an Android installation. You have three platforms now. The API is the platform, and Tivo has the Tivo API, Android has its own toolset and libraries, and X11 is a third.

All of them will probably support very basic command-line software with just a recompile, but if you're coding a finished app with a UI and the sort of interaction with high-level services users expect, you're going to be writing three different apps.

There is no HSM in iOS devices. They do use the ARM TrustZone, which is a good thing, but is no HSM.

Yes, I know the flash is encrypted (read the thread). But the key is on the device...

You're right that the code is not encrypted. What is encrypted is the user data, which is what you want to protect.

Whether or not you need a TPM to call it "secure" depends on the threat model. Under the most extreme threat models, TPMs aren't secure, either (they aren't designed to resist hardware hacks). Under a fairly reasonable threat model which assumes the attacker can read out flash but not RAM (because the RAM contents disappeared when the device was turned off for disassembly), the Android encryption model is secure, to the strength of the user password. The decryption key is gone from RAM so the flash-based storage cannot be decrypted, and of course any copies of the data in RAM are also gone.

Her cause, so far as I can tell, is to stop Federal spooks from spying on her. It does not appear to be stopping Federal spooks from spying on anybody beyond the rarefied circles of Congress.

You mean besides cost? Yeah, that pesky factor that everyone is willing ignore because they want things now, now, now. Also just because the backbone is using high capacity fiber does not mean consumers will get it. Google is probably the biggest user of fiber out there and is certainly the biggest user of dark fiber. I'm sure Google is using the highest capacity they can get at a reasonable cost.

Amen. I have no idea who this guy is, so I can't imagine any other question to ask him.

I don't think it's at all out of order to take some pleasure in one of the most-pro NSA people in Congress being hoisted by her own petard. Is it wrong to take pleasure from the chickens coming home to roost for Feinstein... well maybe a little, but I just can't help myself.

No shit! Congress happily gave Federal agencies powers to spy on virtually every human being on the planet, so they can fucking well live on the same sphere we do.

Don't feel so great when the shoe is on the other foot, eh, Feinstein? Well, a big "fuck you" from the rest of the world.