Just a note on your comment regarding legal tender. Consider this, from Wikipedia...

There is, however, no federal statute that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in cents or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.[26]

This depends upon what you do with your savings. If it's under your mattress, or in a savings account, you're probably correct. If you're not afraid of some volatility, then an index fund (S&P for example), would have kept you ahead of it.

A quadrupling of price is not a 400% increase. It's the original price, plus 300%. Also, it would take much less than 40 years. "Simple math" doesn't include compounding. Someone please correct this if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual answer would be a bit over 14 years via the Rule of 72.

She's Finnish, so she's probably unfamiliar with technology widespread in US police helicopter sorties. :-p

Selection bias. By means of comparison, only beautiful girls get caught in the storm of events in modern action movies, ugly slobs are always safe. (Well, I'm being somewhat facetious here, but you catch my drift.)

If your logic is correct, that might just clean up itself nicely when more women start "doing something". Either that, or your logic is wrong, seeing as humanity survived for many millennia without women doing nothing.

She doesn't care about you, she's in love with a journalist and currently wanted for triple murder. Too busy a schedule.

It actually is stupid. His logic apparently suggests that all it takes for criminals to succeed in their endeavours is to not use mobile communication devices (because without them, the authorities are screwed!). So the outcome would be that everyone would get snooped except for the criminals who won't get caught.

More like Isaac Asimov's Robot City. (He didn't write the series, but I loved the idea.)

Could have been the iAPX 432 of Intel. That would have been even worse for Intel. Oh, wait...

Well it's a stupid idea to use all that spiffy CPU performance for syscalls anyway, regardless of whether the CPU is an Intel chip or an AMD chip...or not?

Wasn't it Israelis who fixed Intel after Intel got broken with that P4 thingy?

That's mighty nice of them, but there is such a thing as fixed costs. Even though going from one ton to 100 kg is very much worth it, going from 100 kg to 1 kg probably likely won't save you nearly *that* much. There's also the issue of mission objectives, reliability etc. (Is the thing supposed to just land on the Moon and drive around, or do we want to, say, drill a bit?)

Agreeing with parent on this. I keep two credit cards (different types since not all merchants take certain ones), and pay them off every month. I charge pretty much everything, getting points on one, and cash back on the other. Getting money back from paying my kids $120k education was a bonus.

Secret != illegal
Not that I'm agreeing with what their doing, but I do believe there need to be secrets.l

Companies are replacing many software engineers with low-paid outsourced "coders" with similar credentials to what these people will end up with. I suppose that in theory, the people coming out of these programs would be qualified to compete for those jobs.