But I know the rest of you walk on water...

Uh, no, we just don't answer the damn phone. That isn't next to impossible. It isn't walking on water. It isn't even going on a diet or quitting smoking. It's easy.

Really, I understand that 99.99% of driving is boring as hell. The other .01% includes moments when you see something in front of you that you didn't see a second ago. In a lifetime of driving, eventually one of those moments may coincide with one of the seconds when you were paying attention to your phone.

As long as you're piloting that your 2 tons of car on the public road, the rest of us would appreciate it if you would please keep your attention on what you're doing.

Well, that ignores the question.

Following some links. A fan of this Peter Schiff guy? You realize he a) appears to have a background in accounting, not economics, b) seems to have his own self interest (selling gold??), c) seems to cling to a lot of ideas that most economists consider long ago discredited. Anyone else you follow for analysis of the economy?

Some sources I'd recommend: The Economist, blogs by Krugman (or pick your favorite actual economist). Agree or disagree, some understanding of a wider variety of viewpoints is helpful.

Right, but the opportunity cost in this case is:

      (income from investing) - (income from stuffing cash under your mattress)

The second number is deflation.

And you're claiming that increasing deflation *increases* the opportunity cost.

At the very least, that's a claim that needs some convincing evidence!

If there is deflation, then I can get a few percent a year just by stuffing my cash under a mattress. Why would that increase the incentive to invest my money?

And I always thought that was the absolute rule too, so when I researched my most recent printer purchase I was surprised how much price-per-page varied within the two categories--some inkjet printers are reported as quite cheap to run, and some lasers quite expensive--and the printer I ended up with was an inkjet for which consumer reports claimed around $.02/page for black-and-white text (if I remember correctly--I tried to check that just now on their website and found they'd switched to using a monthly cost based on average home use).

Look over to the right of the download page. Note where it says "To install Fedora using a USB stick, follow these instructions."

(Also note the command line version of the instructions amount to just dd'ing your choice of iso images onto a usb stick.)

Would it? We talk as if China held most of the US's debt, but of course they don't (about 10% if http://www.businessinsider.com/who-does-the-us-owe-its-debt-to-2011-4 is right), so the market for the securities is huge, and why wouldn't more buyers suddenly take interest if the price dropped a little?

Well, of course it's a bit of a ridiculous scenario to start off with anyway.

Oh, good grief, you're talking about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/us/politics/17budget.html?hpw

No, that's petty political brinkmanship, it's nothing to do with economic fundamentals. The federal government is perfectly capable of paying its obligations, but parties in congress love to play these games with the debt limit to put pressure on the other side.

No, debt service is under 10% of the federal budget, if I remember right (less than 2% of gdp?).

You're almost certainly thinking of the *debt* to gdp ratio, which is very close to 100%--but that's not a critical milestone (according to https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html, Japan's debt-to-gdp ratio was 225% in 2010, and people are still willing to lend to the Japanese government.).

Thanks. That's a fun site to try to use with flashblock....

What's the point of comparing them? They're barely even in the same units (dollars/year vs dollars).

Why on earth should they? A national government is very different in a number of ways--having its own currency not the least....

Huh. How do you calculate the total debt using "accrual" accounting? I mean, if you assume social security and medicare will continue as they are without any tax changes to increase revenue in the coming decades, and you book that all now--yes, of course, you'll get big scary numbers. So what? Is that likely?

But in any case the practical questions are how our debt load is likely to impact our everyday lives. Why is an accrual-based national debt, or total national assets, or whatever, a better measure of that than any of the measures (debt/GDP ratios, bond yields, whatever) that economists usually use to decide whether countries (not companies, but countries!) are in trouble?

Feel free to explain.

Those statements all require support.

I'm no expert--all I know is that for several years now I've seen people claiming on Slashdot that inflation was a mathematical certainty the moment the fed engaged in quantatative easing. And during that time inflation has remained at record lows. So absent actual evidence, I'm inclined to listen to the actual economists who can back up their arguments with actual data....

Citations? And why is "total national assets" the correct measure? Hey, I'm no economist, but most discussion I've seen focus on income (gdp, tax revenue), not assets--which makes sense to me, since income is what we use to pay our debts, not, I dunno, selling off Yellowstone or something.

Eh, correcting myself: I suspect I'm just misunderstanding how they split up the spending categories, billions sounds like a more likely budget. Maybe somebody else can figure that out....

First, the US is very far from broke. We have a huge national income, and (relative to our peers) choose to spend relatively little of it on taxes. We could in theory go "broke" if we fail to raise revenues to cover growing health care costs and/or cut benefits to our aging population. Nobody (least of all the people putting their money where there mouths are and buying US debt) seems to think it's likely that we'll do neither, and thus default.

Second, the proposal in question would require a trivial amount of money; factcheck.org and polifact.com, for example, already do this kind of work. I wonder what their budgets are--probably 6 or 7 figures? A government with a 13-figure budget could do contribute significantly to that kind of work with money that would amount to a rounding error. BBC news appears to be around 8 figures, for a complete news organization with international coverage.

Third, this hardly strikes me as a "waste". If we could better educate our voters with such a tiny fraction of our budget, that sounds like spending that could pay for itself.

And that's an important distinction. It means someone can sniff your credentials for the *session*, and impersonate you as long as you're logged in; but if you detect the mischief, then you can regain control, because your real long-lived credential (your password) is sent under ssl.

It's a tradeoff, but for something non-critical it seem to me like a reasonable one.