Come on, a gamer wouldn't do that kind of research unless they were playing MMOs, or *maybe* a hardcore RPG. If he played shooters he would have just accused the other killers of hacking and tried to build an aimbot in retaliation.

(I am a bad person.)

Thanks! That was exactly the sort of answer I was looking for.

The broken link should probably point here.

If I read the article right, they're using a hypervisor (Xen) to directly run an Erlang interpreter (LING VM) that they wrote. The interpreter relies on Xen to provide some higher-level functionality. (Wikipedia says this is called paravirtualization.) So it's not quite a web server running on bare (virtual) metal, cool as that would be.

It looks like the significance of this is twofold. First, people are using VMs to create run-time environments that are less featureful than a standard OS but much faster to start up. Second, there's a working demo of a simple virtualized web server using this concept. I don't really follow virtualization tech, so maybe someone can clarify this? I'm not clear on exactly what the difference is between a hypervisor+para-API and a normal OS.

For some reason I decided to hunt through the Slashcode repository to see how moderation works, and I think you're right. To be on the list of eligible users, you have to have a certain minimum karma and a UID that's older than a certain limit. The list is then processed to select "good" moderators based on metamoderation and whether they actually use all their mod points. The good moderators are more likely to receive tokens, which eventually become mod points. I'm not clear on whether anything else can give tokens, since there are a lot of files and I'm manually reading through the repository. But it looks like you can get more mod points just by moderating fairly, which I guess was the whole point of metamod in the first place.

I didn't do anything like a full survey of the code base, so obviously take this with a grain of salt.

I'm not sure it's bias that's the root problem. There are many more other factors to consider:

1. Slashdot was born in a time when computer geeks were frequently abused and ostracized as teenagers. One of our defense mechanisms for this was to decide (often with adult encouragement) that we were smarter and better than everyone else.
2. Intelligent people with technical training (i.e. geeks) can easily come up with a plausible-sounding explanation for just about anything. You'll sometimes hear this called Engineer's Syndrome.
3. Moderation is focused on modding up entertaining writing and modding down flagrant spam. There's no separate mod option for rating actual subject matter expertise.
4. Getting modded +5 is rewarding (for your ego, at least). There's no reward for not commenting.
5. You have to be an active commenter to get mod points.

The upshot of all this is that users are motivated to comment regardless of what they add to the discussion. We underestimate how much we don't know, and thus overrate the comments of people like us. There's very little incentive for humility here.

(All this is based on my observations from reading and commenting in the past ~15 years. Am I a psychologist? No. Have I done any kind of rigorous study of this? No. Am I doing the thing I complained about in #2 above? Quite possibly! See how easy it is to fall into this trap? ;-) )

Meanwhile, the Slashdot headline adds an apostrophe to "Higgs". :-(

Then show it. Your entire string of posts has been an appeal to emotion and argument by assertion; "debt is bad" and "think of the children!" repeated as nauseum without any reference to mechanisms, causes, consequences, or any solution beyond hopelessly vague "fiscal discipline". You insist on using absolute numbers instead of percentages purely so you can use scary adjectives, in the process showing no understanding of exponential growth. You show no comprehension of the fact that the deficit has been declining for years, or that the biggest budget-related issue in the news is (too) massive spending cuts due to the sequester. You show no interest in taxation or other policies that affect the federal budget. In fact, you seem unclear that taxes, deficits, and the debt are closely related, and that it doesn't make sense to talk about one without involving the other two.

In response to what I've said and the links I've provided (that stuff took time, by the way), you've barely even touched on anything I've said to you. You've also repeatedly accused me of a lackadaisical and child-damning apathy when I have already given specific changes I support to lower the debt. I take offense at that.

On top of all that stuff, you have the nerve to complain that you have "no dog in [the global warming] fight". So much for our children and grandchildren! (Plus an order of magnitude more!) And of course *that's* all "problems estimated" and "severity unknown".

Finally, you still haven't said how much your taxes went up. I think you're trolling. Or maaaaybe a college Libertarian. But more likely trolling. Well done! You got me.

One more thing -- regarding your ideas about children being responsible for the debt and me getting off the hook...

I am 30 years old. I expect to be paying taxes for several decades yet. I expect to do my part to pay off the debt (or as much as we need to; I doubt we'll need to take it down to zero). I am not "saddling" anyone with anything. I am committing myself at my financial peak to help pay for this, and I have no hesitation about doing so. The United States has paid off large debts several times in the past, and we will do so again.

You have been talking like debt has some intrinsic moral value. Perhaps this is an "agree to disagree" thing as well. You do not seem interested in technical or historical arguments. I hope the future brings you peace.

Er... there's a big difference between saying that no debt would be better than having a large debt and going off on extended rants to the tune of:

My actual disagreement is over that stuff. I don't think that stuff is true. I don't think your predictions of doom will come true. I don't think that my grandchildren (or children, for that matter) will actually be saddled with an enormous, crushing debt that will lead to an apocalyptic future. I think paying off the debt is not that difficult and will not take all that long if we do it right. I think we will probably do it right once the current Republican Party no longer controls Congress. I think that will happen by the time the recession ends.

Maybe what you want is for me to be more angry? Okay then...

GRR! Debt BAD! More debt MORE BAD! Debt make children SAD! Sad children make HULK ANGRY! HULK HATE BIG NUMBERS! HULK NO CARE ABOUT TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF GOVERNMENT FINANCING! HULK SMASH DEBT NOW! SMAAAASH!

Nah, on second thought agreeing to disagree was a better idea.

Mortgages? Car loans? College loans? Lines of credit for businesses with irregular revenue streams? Do you understand how much of our modern economy requires debt to function? Debt is just a tool. It's not magical evil.

For you and me (and Apple), whose income can be uncertain, sure. But do you really want the government to hoard cash? That's over-taxing.

For you and me, yes. For the U.S. government, no, because it can *borrow money by offering its debt as a safe and stable investment*. A negative sign on the balance sheet does not affect a stable government the way it does an (unstable) private individual or company. There's nothing magical about crossing the zero. You could do it too, if a bank trusted you enough (i.e. offered a low enough price for your debt). Private companies do it as well, although not as much.

Debt is bad because of interest payments and because if you have enough of it people won't loan you more money. Neither of those is currently an existential threat. The latter is not currently a threat at all. Also, the government does have income to pay off the debt. It's called "taxes". Which for some reason you keep trying to ignore.

The basic principles, maybe, but the practice certainly isn't. The U.S. government is an immortal organization. It has a self-controlled revenue stream that is ~25% of our GDP and a ~225-year track record of stability and not defaulting on debts. You are nobody. You are tiny. You have a limited lifespan. Your revenue stream is dependent on what kind of job you can get, if any. Your debt is a similar kind of product, but it's certainly not identical, and investors do not treat it the same way. Your spending alone cannot alter the state of the economy. Comparing yourself to the government is like comparing your gravity to the moon's. The moon squishes the entire planet and causes tides. You do nothing.

Here is a list of debt vs. GDP for every country in the world. Only a handful have no debt, and few of those are nice places to live.

The people who are buying the debt (and thus taking on the risk) don't seem to think so. I'll say this again -- in the last year or two people have been *paying the government money to hold its debt*. Have you ever been offered a negative interest rate? No? That's because bankers think you are *less reliable than the government*. Debt doesn't materialize out of thin air. You sell it to people -- a bond market. That bond market decides what is too much debt, and they bet their own money on it. What makes you think you're smarter than them?

P.S. Remember, there's still proportionally less debt than there was during WW2. Using words like "insane" and "unprecedented" is misleading.

The universe is not obligated to behave in ways that you understand or like, or in ways that always match your personal experience. There are many subjects that feature complex and counter-intuitive behavior. Do you also have this reaction to plate tectonics, the germ theory of disease, evolution by natural selection, quantum mechanics, relativity, etc?

In the short run, yes. The reason for a gradual change is that sudden massive spending cuts would both kill our already slow economic recovery and plunge millions of people into deeper poverty. That would be far worse than having some extra debt.

FYI, the politicians who are screaming the loudest about deficits are really just using them as an excuse to cut popular social programs. Their deficit-reduction plans are terrible at actually reducing the deficit. So don't take them too seriously.

I already have. I would like to return tax rates to what they were in the late 1990s after the recession ends. I also support reduced defense spending and higher capital gains/estate taxes. I vote accordingly.

Just to clarify, I do agree that having no debt would be better than having a large debt. What I'm arguing here is that our government having a large debt is not the existential threat you're making it out to be.

Whoa, who said anything about going back to sleep? There are lots of real problems to deal with -- income inequality, the fallout from the Citizens United decision, global warming, drone wars, and a hundred others besides. If you want to focus on the deficit now, start campaigning against the Republicans who have gridlocked Congress and are preventing any reasonable solutions from being implemented. Hopefully they'll collapse on their own before too long, but you seem like the proactive sort, so maybe you should start working on that now.

So your argument is that data doesn't matter? That macroeconomics can't be any more complex than "big numbers are scary, therefore I'm right"? This is either amazingly arrogant or trolling. If you're trolling, congrats! You got me. If you're sincere, then I hope the failure of our society to collapse becomes clear sooner rather than later so you can stop feeling so bad.

It's not great, but it's not The End Of The World As We Know It. There are always spikes in the debt during major wars and economic crises. We had a higher debt-GDP ratio in World War 2 than we do now.

First off, it's not. See Fig. 1-1: The deficit has been declining for the last few years. And while it is currently worse than anything since WW2, if you look at the 1980s you'll see that it's not *that* much worse.

Secondly, the reason for the current high deficits is high unemployment (fewer people paying taxes). In the short term (~5 years), we need more spending to make up the demand shortfall. Ideally that would have happened in 2009 with a ~$2T stimulus, but unfortunately we didn't get that. In the medium to long term, the deficit is dominated by Medicare and Medicaid costs. The Affordable Care Act will do a lot to lower those. Single-payer could probably do more, but unfortunately we didn't get that either.

It doesn't have to be, if we actually pay it off. Remember, we were running surpluses 15 years ago, and that didn't require massive budget cuts and the end of every safety net. The economy grows exponentially (for now, at least). Inflation is also exponential. The debt is an absolute dollar number, and does not grow on its own. (Bond rates have been dipping into the negative -- people are paying us to loan us money.) A moderate tax increase adds up (just as the Bush tax cuts have). And since taxes are super-duper-low right now, raising them (after the recession is over) is the easiest and least painful fix.

Which was 60% of GDP at the time. Absolute numbers are misleading. The U.S. has a staggeringly huge economy, so any number that's proportional to it will also be staggeringly huge. Sixty years of exponential growth adds up, so now we talk in trillions instead of billions. For comparison, the median household income at the time was under $5000.

The point of my response was that this is not, in fact, what is happening. It would take quite a lot of tax increases to get back to what has been normal for the last 60 years, and such tax increases would eliminate the deficit outright. Your statements about the government being "out of control" are vague by necessity, because you don't have trillions of dollars of actual "waste, pork, duplication, mismanagement, corruption, and stupidity" to point to. The spending that gets attention (like the stimulus and healthcare reform) are deficit-*reducing* measures.

(I'm still curious how you managed to get a huge tax increase, by the way.)

The only thing currently dooming "our children" is global warming. The debt probably isn't even in the top 10. This is good news. You should be happy about it.

If you want to see a spending cut-based approach to deficit reduction in a recession, look at Europe. Maybe start with the UK, which is heading into a triple-dip recession and still can't run a surplus.

I know a lot of this stuff is counter-intuitive, that's just how life is sometimes.

How much is "way up"? Are you just getting a W-2, or is this some weird capital gains thing, or what?

You know tax rates are actually pretty low now, right? Here's a link with inflation-adjusted numbers. Compare 2013 to 2003 -- slight tax cut. Compare 2013 to 2003 -- the thresholds are almost exactly the same, except we now have the 39.6% bracket again at >$400k. 1993 has really progressive brackets -- for married filing jointly, the 28% threshold is ~$58k vs. ~$143k today. In 1983 you'd hit the 40% bracket at around $105k, a quarter of what it is today, plus the highest bracket is 50%!

Don't even look at 1953. Your head might explode, and I don't want to be responsible for that.

So you're outvoted by people who like government services and social safety nets? Might want to consider moving, then.