Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Press release from S&P (Score 1) 1239

Not true at all. The first bullet point that explains the reasoning for the downgrade in the article is this:

The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.

The debt is the most important issue.

The fact that they don't trust us to be able to solve the debt problem is the part you quoted. There's nothing in the text that would indicate that that's the more important factor. If we didn't have our huge debt, then the bullet point you quoted would be a non-issue.

Comment Re:Please Remember This During Elections (Score 2) 1239

So your reaction to the destruction of the US's good credit rating and all the devastation that's going to cause to the value of what generations have built in this country is to rail against the one group of people who are trying to get us to spend tax dollars responsibly? The Tea Party?

That makes no sense at all.

When you find yourself trapped at the bottom of a deep hole, stop digging!

Just look at your rhetoric, "Trying to take things away from you". That sense of entitlement is exactly the problem that got us into this mess.

Comment Re:They weren't thinking about it though (Score 1) 1239

Social Security has a pretty decent store of financial instruments that they can liquidate to keep making payments for months in the event of a government shutdown.

Besides that, though, servicing of the debt is around $30B per month, and the Treasury takes in revenues of over $170B per month. There's more than enough there to fund servicing of the debt, social security, medicare, paying military personnel, and a slew of other government functions.

Default on August 2nd was never even close to the problem. Our rating was cut because the fear is that our debt will be $25 trillion in ten years and is spiraling out of our control. Unlike Greece, no one will be big enough to bail us out. We will take the entire global economy with us.

We had a chance to show the world markets that we could make real cuts to our budget and deficit. Forces of the State didn't like that and instead chose to pass huge amounts of debt and looming disaster on to our descendants.

Comment Re:probably should have been lowered anyway (Score 1) 1239

There was never a danger of default. The US tax revenue every month is much greater than the debt servicing payments.

The only thing we were in danger of was a government shutdown. The "default" talk was all theater designed to scare voters.

The reason we were downgraded is because the "debt deal" was pretty close to useless. More theater.

The real problem (as the article mentions) is that we have such a huge debt in the first place. The Tea Party folks were vindicated by this slashing of our rating. They knew all along that it was about the debt. They tried to do something about it. The leaders of the Republican and Democrat parties should be tarred and feathered on their way out of office.

Comment This problem just cannot be solved (Score 2) 126

If only there was a way to have credit card owners approve each charge through the entering of some kind of a pin.

If only credit card numbers weren't special since what really mattered was signed transactions.

If only every consumer had a personal device capable of signing transactions in his pocket at almost all times.

Call me a dreamer, but someday in the next hundred years, I think that all those "huge" technological problems could be solved and we could end this problem of having our credit card and social security numbers being exposed.

Comment Re:TSA will steal your stuff too (Score 1) 178

It's nice to know that Ben Franklin was so incredibly right:

      "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

We've done this to ourselves. We've given these goons so much money and power to make us all safe from terrrrusts, and now our liberty and our safety are greatly diminished.

Comment Re:Zuckerberg should be in prison. (Score 1) 90

I wasn't aware of the hacking accusation for Zuckerberg (if it wasn't in the Social Network, I haven't really paid attention) - but those things only look similar on a technical level.

"The Palin Hacker" was hacking in the cause of subverting an election. As a society, we take messing with the election process a lot more seriously than we do messing with random web sites of would-be college entrepreneurs.

Comment Re:Can we please... (Score 1) 227

No kidding. Joe Biden would be this decade's Dan Quayle if he were a Republican. They'd be showing the bit where he asked the guy in the wheelchair to stand up over and over on the Daily Show. You'd see constant mention of his quote that "J-O-B-S, JOBS!" is a three letter word.

It's funny how the press seems to give him a pass. Such a mystery of the universe.

Slashdot Top Deals

The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

Working...