it seems people on here can't distinguish between getting pleasure from porn by yourself and pleasure from sex with a spouse.
It seems people on here can't imagine that you can get pleasure from porn WHILE having sex with a spouse. Porn and real relationships are not mutually exclusive.
If you have to treat something most people enjoy as if it were a shameful, solitary activity to be indulged in secret and then regretted afterwards, you're not in a very healthy place. And I don't care if you're talking about porn or playing golf.
Even when I was a kid, I knew where my parents kept their porn. (Living in a one-room apartment doesn't leave many places for hiding stuff anyway.) My parents, as far as I can tell, knew I was looking at it when I was home alone.
They never raised the issue, and neither did I.
It's funny, my parents had all of their adult educational stuff on a bookshelf we could easily get at (it definitely wasn't porn, though to an insatiably curious 12 year old, "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and "The Joy of Sex" are still akin to the holy grail) and we thought we were so sneaky running off with it for a day or two and studying every word and picture.
A couple of years ago (now that we're all healthy adults in our 30s and 40s) my mom happened to mention that they left that stuff there on purpose because they wanted us to be able to take our time learning about it at our own pace when we were curious. Grown-ups are sneakier than we give them credit for sometimes:)
being exposed to too much porn without any actual, real sexual relationships to compare it to totally screws up your view of what actual sexual relationships are like. This is a good reason to try to limit young teens' porn consumption until they're a little older and have a little more experience. I know some people with seriously f-ed up ideas of how sex should be, or what they expect their partner to be cool with doing...simply because they watch too much porn and don't talk to enough actual women. Fantasy, people. It's fantasy.
Except, I'd say in my experience and those I've know, that romantic movies do FAR more damage to young people's expectations of how real life relationships and sex work. The idea that sex is always some beautifully choreographed, slow-motion event ending in simultaneous orgasm makes LOTS of people think they're doing something "wrong" when they first have sex.
And the vast majority of romance movies, if looked at objectively, basically encourage the notion of relentless pursuit through any means of trickery and illegal activity, no matter how many times the object of your affection says no. Because if you just stalk her enough, eventually she'll realize you're her perfect man! in terms of danger, I'd say that's a MUCH worse idea to put in kids' heads than the idea that maybe they'll meet a girl who likes to blow horses.
Of course I'm not saying we should censor Meg Ryan films so that kids don't get an inappropriate view of romance, just that in real-life relationship terms it is pretty easy for most self-aware teens to understand what is unrealistic about porn.
It's the hedonistic pleasure part of porn that is the problem. Teach children to not engage in materialistic pleasures and they won't be so interested in porn.
I agree completely. And be sure to cut off the clitoris of any females in your household, we don't want them to accidentally enjoy sex while it is being done to them.
They involve teaching a kid to respect themselves and others. It involves talking to your kids about these things. It involves teaching your kids correct principles when they are young and being a good parent. Is it possible to have your child never see porn? Probably not as there are many conspiring men who have their hearts set on addicting as many as they can but you can teach your kid never to go looking for it and what to do if he accidentally finds it.
Or you could, you know, teach your kids that there's nothing shameful about their own bodies or appreciating the beauty of other people's bodies. Then when they grow up they won't need twenty years of therapy and a failed marriage to get over all the emotional turmoil you planted in their minds before they were able to defend themselves.
I'm quite happy to watch porn with my girlfriend, it enhances our sex life and is sometimes a good catalyst for communication about our desires and needs.
Worry about that when it happens. It's not as if these systems scale up to the house level automatically, or to your example: hardware doesn't upgrade by itself.
Yes, it makes much more sense to put the toothpaste back in the tube after is has already made a mess, rather than decide beforehand how we should deal with an inevitable issue. It's not like the government ever does anything controversial in secret -- I remember the big national meeting we had where it was decided to automatically monitor every domestic telephone call and have a computer try to detect terrorist activity. It was "technically impossible" to do, right until we discovered it had been happening for several years already.
I don't think it's practical, or efficient to be monitoring every residence individually, so that just isn't going to happen.
I agree, and 640k should be enough for anybody. There's really a need for only 4 or 5 computers in the world.
Of course I suppose in the future there is a small, remote, miniscule possibility that technology will advance, and what is expensive and difficult today could cost fractions of a penny and be fully automated tomorrow. Naah.
When does it stop being privacy invasion of one person and become just looking at an aggregate group (and thus no longer a real privacy problem)? How many people or sewer connections or whatever?
I don't think it's a question for slashdot or politicians, it's a question for statisticians. I think it would be tremendously useful to be tested every zone's water treatment plants in this manner so that we can see more accurately what health issues and drug uses are statistically unusual.
The courts have often allowed statisticians and researchers access to aggregate and anonymized data that would otherwise be very sensitive, because the value to society is high to know what is really happening. So long as there is no chance that individual users can be tracked back through such analysis (as with the lousy AOL "anonymized" data) there shouldn't be an issue -- indeed I'd demand that the use of such information for any investigations of individuals or households, searches or prosecutions should be prohibited, just in case.
Would it not be the same as searching the garbage you put out on the street?
The difference being that if you have something incriminating to get rid of, you don't have to throw it in your trash can and leave it on the curb. In essence, the laws on trash are basically that you don't need to be "authorized" in order to pick up garbage, recycle it, dispose of it, reuse it, compost it, etc.
In contrast, people don't generally have an option of what to do with their urine and feces -- for most people, it's leaving the building in a wastewater pipe. And you do need the be licensed out the wazoo and have legal agreements with a homeowner and the state before you can just tap into wastewater outflow.
I suspect it would come down to the "expectation of privacy" standard, and most people don't expect their wastewater can be seen by anyone before it is processed, but it's a normal expectation that anyone can peek in an unsecured garbage can.
As rellik says, that's a problem with the installer, not the license. You can just download real open-source code from CVS and compile it and have no requirement to ever even see the license if you like. The only thing you need a license for is to redistribute it.
I know periodically Google gets involved in things that seem to show they're drifting to the dark side of giant ass-raping corporatism, but amazingly obvious pro-customer decisions like this show that there is at least a significant amount of "not Evil" left in the heart of Google.
This is the kind of behavior you expect from a local mom and pop store or some other small business who wants to make you happy more than they want to screw you out of $5 just because they can.
Seeing that Google is taking care of end-of-product-lifed customers is going to make people a lot more comfortable taking a risk on future Google products. I know that if they do something else I'm not sure will last but sounds good, I'll go ahead and buy. I don't think I would have before.
I would like someone, anyone, to explain to me how an extremely large passenger jet (757) can leave only a 16 foot diameter hole in the side a building, no damage from wings and very little (if any) debris at the site.
The same way some gun rounds can pass through a human body and leave no exterior evidence aside from a clean hole a few mms across while others with the same energy but different designs can literally tear a person in half. There's a lot of strange stuff that happens when you get to different parts of velocity/mass/resistance curves.
Guns and ammunition have to both be designed for their desired consequences against desired material -- an anti-personnel round is different from an anti-materiel round even if they're fired from the same weapon.
Since nobody requires planes to be good at crashing into buildings, I doubt Boeing engineers spent much time to make sure the 757 framework would spread out in an acceptably dramatic way rather than compress when meeting 1940s era building materials at high speed.
How is an online store whose songs can only be played by one type of player from a single vendor (the same one who runs the store) considered an "ecosystem"?
Well, ignoring the fact that you can buy an ever-increasing number of songs from the iTunes Store that will play on any platform, on any device, the iTunes ecosystem is not centered around the store. The ecosystem is the iTunes software and the iPod dock connector -- everything else is just the product of the day.
iTunes was a fantastically successful piece of software well before the store existed. It was the first really usable music database/catalog and the fact that it interacted so simply with the iPod only made both products more appealing. iTunes has never given preferential treatment to iTunes Store tracks, or in any way restricted the ability to use CDs/MP3s from other sources as full as purchased media -- that's why it is a center of an ecosystem and not just a vertically integrated iPod accessory. heck, it'll add high quality album art to all your pirated music automatically.
Once the iPod dock connector was standardized, an entire accessory industry sprang up that nobody else has come within an order of magnitude of matching. There's a huge, financially successful ecosystem of hundreds of companies that make products whose sole purpose is to plug from some device to the dock connector. Automobile companies, home theater companies and airlines have redesigned their entertainment systems specifically to take part in this flourishing ecosystem.
If you think twelve companies producing mutually incompatible products that attract no third-party support or longevity comprise a better ecosystem than hundreds of companies producing thousands of products that all work together in various ways across multiple product generations with full compatibility, then, well, I suggest you not send out your resume for any product or market development positions.
The problem with these closed systems, any closed system really, is the inability to find and locate not only the errors, but the correct data either. The more erroneous data there is, the less likely one will find and retrieve the needed data.
That's only a problem if you actually expect to get highly accurate useful intelligence out of the system.
The beauty of the real world is that even though everyone with expertise knows the system is buried in useless data, the 19-year old with the M4 who just found your name in the database considers it gospel that you're a terrorist, the 40-year old cop with his knee on your windpipe thinks he just stopped the next 9/11, and everybody involved gets a medal and a budget increase for protecting us from the bad guys.
Nobody ever has to know that the only reason you were in the database in the first place is because you walked down the wrong street on your way to lunch 9 months ago and stopped to gawk at a WTO protest.
I want to see them push as hard as they can on *everything* - if someone threatens a fillibuster then take them up on it *every time,* and don't play it out as theatrics scheduled in advance. If someone threatens to block something in committee move it to the whole body. Make people go on record for or against every piece of legislation. If it passes or dies, so be it, but at least fight for what you were sent there to do.
Yeah, that's been what pisses me off, too. I understand you can't defeat a filibuster, but damn it at least make the opposition stand on the floor of the Senate and read the phone book and show the country why things aren't changing. make sure that Senator's name is displayed prominently so everyone in America knows exactly who is stopping Congress from accomplishing what 70-80% of Americans want to happen.
Face it, this has been a useless Congress and you can't blame it all on the GOP.
On the contrary, 99% of it can be blamed on the GOP. Their entire goal, admitted many times, has been to obstruct the Democrats from accomplishing anything so that they can be labeled a "do-nothing" congress come the next election cycle. The last thing they want is a fight on the issues since they know they're on the wrong side of every issue poll. The House of Representatives has passed every single policy promised when the Democrats took control, hardly "do-nothing", but hardly meaningful when all of those bills are killed in the Senate by republicans..
Having 51% of the power in the Senate is just enough to decide what to order for lunch -- you have to be able to defeat a filibuster or a presidential veto to actually accomplish anything significantly against what the executive branch wants. Which is wisely the way it was designed to work -- having the opposition slow everything down to molasses prevents big changes from happening every time Congress changes hands. You don't want a legislative branch that is lean and efficient and fast-moving because then we'd have even more laws than we do already! The problem now is that the Executive has grabbed so much power and used it in such an unrestricted manner that the legislature is the only possible hope for countering it in any timely fashion, but any action would have to be taken by over 2/3rds of the Congress in order to defeat the inevitable Presidential veto.
So with only 51% of the senate, the Democrats are basically left with nothing they can do but hold investigations in committees (since even a simple majority does give complete control of all Committees) and hope that the general public gets so pissed off at what is discovered that they push ten republican senators to vote against their own party.
1080p is nowhere NEAR film grain quality. That's still only in the 2 megapixel range. When you start seeing video where each frame is in the 10-20 megapixel range, then you might be talkin'.
1080p is not far off film detail resolution at all. Yes, a film shown from film will look better than a film shown from a 2k scanned transfer of the film, because that's because you're losing quality in both transfers (the transfer of light to the film and the transfer of film to the digital).
But a digital 2k video shot with professional digital equipment will look just as good if not better than a 35mm film capture of the same scene in terms of detail.
Because when your player breaks and there are no replacements being made, or you buy a new TV and can't plug your player into it, you can box up all those great deals and throw them into a landfill.
I remember a friend of mine spending a bunch of money on DIVX movies (the original DIVX, the pseudo-subscription-model Circuit City DVDs) and bragging about how much he saved over us chumps buying or renting real DVDs. Of course when the company went out of business and he had a fine collection shiny coasters, he realized that just saving a few pennies is not always a good deal when you're talking about media formats, unless all you want to do is watch a hundred movies in the next month and long-term viability doesn't matter.
Most people are not looking to add a new box to their attic next to the ones labeled "8-track" or "beta".
I shouldn't trust and government agency with sensitive data. Ever. Private industries seem to be fairing better (or not uniformly reporting their issues).
I would guess that it is more beneficial for a public entity to admit to a data breach than for a private entity. Private companies get bad publicity and lose customers if they admit to a security problem, so they do everything they legally can to keep it hushed up. Government agencies, however, get immediate priority to security funding when there is a security breach. Sure, some people will be put on the hot seat and possibly lose their jobs, but the agency as a whole probably gains when a massive problem occurs causing a public outcry.
The essential thing in the US is that the banking system has become quite enamored of easy credit in the last few decades -- the policy of extending credit to essentially anyone for any reason, based on nothing more than an application and a promise to pay it back at some later date. In a fight to get more customers for such credit, lenders competed with each other to make it as convenient as possible to apply, and therefore as convenient as possible to commit fraud. Simply knowing some easily available information about someone is enough to get you credit in their name.
So long as the creditors themselves don't suffer too much financially from fraud (which they don't, thanks to their generous campaign contributions and strict avoidance of responsibility through their merchant contracts) it's a winning business strategy because it also brings in more legitimate customers.
The fundamental problem is that we benefit from the convenience of easy credit, the banks profit from it, but when anything goes wrong all of a sudden the customer and the merchant (but not the bank) are left with all the costs of fraud. Any solution would inherently restrict the convenient availability of credit to some degree, and the American economy purrs along quite well in large part due to consumer spending that is largely tied to credit.
Slashdot Mirror
Books burned per hour?
It seems people on here can't imagine that you can get pleasure from porn WHILE having sex with a spouse. Porn and real relationships are not mutually exclusive.
If you have to treat something most people enjoy as if it were a shameful, solitary activity to be indulged in secret and then regretted afterwards, you're not in a very healthy place. And I don't care if you're talking about porn or playing golf.
It's funny, my parents had all of their adult educational stuff on a bookshelf we could easily get at (it definitely wasn't porn, though to an insatiably curious 12 year old, "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and "The Joy of Sex" are still akin to the holy grail) and we thought we were so sneaky running off with it for a day or two and studying every word and picture.
A couple of years ago (now that we're all healthy adults in our 30s and 40s) my mom happened to mention that they left that stuff there on purpose because they wanted us to be able to take our time learning about it at our own pace when we were curious. Grown-ups are sneakier than we give them credit for sometimes
Except, I'd say in my experience and those I've know, that romantic movies do FAR more damage to young people's expectations of how real life relationships and sex work. The idea that sex is always some beautifully choreographed, slow-motion event ending in simultaneous orgasm makes LOTS of people think they're doing something "wrong" when they first have sex.
And the vast majority of romance movies, if looked at objectively, basically encourage the notion of relentless pursuit through any means of trickery and illegal activity, no matter how many times the object of your affection says no. Because if you just stalk her enough, eventually she'll realize you're her perfect man! in terms of danger, I'd say that's a MUCH worse idea to put in kids' heads than the idea that maybe they'll meet a girl who likes to blow horses.
Of course I'm not saying we should censor Meg Ryan films so that kids don't get an inappropriate view of romance, just that in real-life relationship terms it is pretty easy for most self-aware teens to understand what is unrealistic about porn.
I agree completely. And be sure to cut off the clitoris of any females in your household, we don't want them to accidentally enjoy sex while it is being done to them.
Or you could, you know, teach your kids that there's nothing shameful about their own bodies or appreciating the beauty of other people's bodies. Then when they grow up they won't need twenty years of therapy and a failed marriage to get over all the emotional turmoil you planted in their minds before they were able to defend themselves.
I'm quite happy to watch porn with my girlfriend, it enhances our sex life and is sometimes a good catalyst for communication about our desires and needs.
Yes, it makes much more sense to put the toothpaste back in the tube after is has already made a mess, rather than decide beforehand how we should deal with an inevitable issue. It's not like the government ever does anything controversial in secret -- I remember the big national meeting we had where it was decided to automatically monitor every domestic telephone call and have a computer try to detect terrorist activity. It was "technically impossible" to do, right until we discovered it had been happening for several years already.
LOL, that was a great post :) I'm amazed how many took it as a troll but hey sometimes you have to suffer for your art!
There are two separate, yet equally important bodily functions...
I agree, and 640k should be enough for anybody. There's really a need for only 4 or 5 computers in the world.
Of course I suppose in the future there is a small, remote, miniscule possibility that technology will advance, and what is expensive and difficult today could cost fractions of a penny and be fully automated tomorrow. Naah.
I don't think it's a question for slashdot or politicians, it's a question for statisticians. I think it would be tremendously useful to be tested every zone's water treatment plants in this manner so that we can see more accurately what health issues and drug uses are statistically unusual.
The courts have often allowed statisticians and researchers access to aggregate and anonymized data that would otherwise be very sensitive, because the value to society is high to know what is really happening. So long as there is no chance that individual users can be tracked back through such analysis (as with the lousy AOL "anonymized" data) there shouldn't be an issue -- indeed I'd demand that the use of such information for any investigations of individuals or households, searches or prosecutions should be prohibited, just in case.
The difference being that if you have something incriminating to get rid of, you don't have to throw it in your trash can and leave it on the curb. In essence, the laws on trash are basically that you don't need to be "authorized" in order to pick up garbage, recycle it, dispose of it, reuse it, compost it, etc.
In contrast, people don't generally have an option of what to do with their urine and feces -- for most people, it's leaving the building in a wastewater pipe. And you do need the be licensed out the wazoo and have legal agreements with a homeowner and the state before you can just tap into wastewater outflow.
I suspect it would come down to the "expectation of privacy" standard, and most people don't expect their wastewater can be seen by anyone before it is processed, but it's a normal expectation that anyone can peek in an unsecured garbage can.
As rellik says, that's a problem with the installer, not the license. You can just download real open-source code from CVS and compile it and have no requirement to ever even see the license if you like. The only thing you need a license for is to redistribute it.
I know periodically Google gets involved in things that seem to show they're drifting to the dark side of giant ass-raping corporatism, but amazingly obvious pro-customer decisions like this show that there is at least a significant amount of "not Evil" left in the heart of Google.
This is the kind of behavior you expect from a local mom and pop store or some other small business who wants to make you happy more than they want to screw you out of $5 just because they can.
Seeing that Google is taking care of end-of-product-lifed customers is going to make people a lot more comfortable taking a risk on future Google products. I know that if they do something else I'm not sure will last but sounds good, I'll go ahead and buy. I don't think I would have before.
I'm not sure what photos or videos you saw of the Pentagon on September 11th, but there was a mark.
The same way some gun rounds can pass through a human body and leave no exterior evidence aside from a clean hole a few mms across while others with the same energy but different designs can literally tear a person in half. There's a lot of strange stuff that happens when you get to different parts of velocity/mass/resistance curves.
Guns and ammunition have to both be designed for their desired consequences against desired material -- an anti-personnel round is different from an anti-materiel round even if they're fired from the same weapon.
Since nobody requires planes to be good at crashing into buildings, I doubt Boeing engineers spent much time to make sure the 757 framework would spread out in an acceptably dramatic way rather than compress when meeting 1940s era building materials at high speed.
Well, ignoring the fact that you can buy an ever-increasing number of songs from the iTunes Store that will play on any platform, on any device, the iTunes ecosystem is not centered around the store. The ecosystem is the iTunes software and the iPod dock connector -- everything else is just the product of the day.
iTunes was a fantastically successful piece of software well before the store existed. It was the first really usable music database/catalog and the fact that it interacted so simply with the iPod only made both products more appealing. iTunes has never given preferential treatment to iTunes Store tracks, or in any way restricted the ability to use CDs/MP3s from other sources as full as purchased media -- that's why it is a center of an ecosystem and not just a vertically integrated iPod accessory. heck, it'll add high quality album art to all your pirated music automatically.
Once the iPod dock connector was standardized, an entire accessory industry sprang up that nobody else has come within an order of magnitude of matching. There's a huge, financially successful ecosystem of hundreds of companies that make products whose sole purpose is to plug from some device to the dock connector. Automobile companies, home theater companies and airlines have redesigned their entertainment systems specifically to take part in this flourishing ecosystem.
If you think twelve companies producing mutually incompatible products that attract no third-party support or longevity comprise a better ecosystem than hundreds of companies producing thousands of products that all work together in various ways across multiple product generations with full compatibility, then, well, I suggest you not send out your resume for any product or market development positions.
That's only a problem if you actually expect to get highly accurate useful intelligence out of the system.
The beauty of the real world is that even though everyone with expertise knows the system is buried in useless data, the 19-year old with the M4 who just found your name in the database considers it gospel that you're a terrorist, the 40-year old cop with his knee on your windpipe thinks he just stopped the next 9/11, and everybody involved gets a medal and a budget increase for protecting us from the bad guys.
Nobody ever has to know that the only reason you were in the database in the first place is because you walked down the wrong street on your way to lunch 9 months ago and stopped to gawk at a WTO protest.
Yeah, that's been what pisses me off, too. I understand you can't defeat a filibuster, but damn it at least make the opposition stand on the floor of the Senate and read the phone book and show the country why things aren't changing. make sure that Senator's name is displayed prominently so everyone in America knows exactly who is stopping Congress from accomplishing what 70-80% of Americans want to happen.
On the contrary, 99% of it can be blamed on the GOP. Their entire goal, admitted many times, has been to obstruct the Democrats from accomplishing anything so that they can be labeled a "do-nothing" congress come the next election cycle. The last thing they want is a fight on the issues since they know they're on the wrong side of every issue poll. The House of Representatives has passed every single policy promised when the Democrats took control, hardly "do-nothing", but hardly meaningful when all of those bills are killed in the Senate by republicans..
Having 51% of the power in the Senate is just enough to decide what to order for lunch -- you have to be able to defeat a filibuster or a presidential veto to actually accomplish anything significantly against what the executive branch wants. Which is wisely the way it was designed to work -- having the opposition slow everything down to molasses prevents big changes from happening every time Congress changes hands. You don't want a legislative branch that is lean and efficient and fast-moving because then we'd have even more laws than we do already! The problem now is that the Executive has grabbed so much power and used it in such an unrestricted manner that the legislature is the only possible hope for countering it in any timely fashion, but any action would have to be taken by over 2/3rds of the Congress in order to defeat the inevitable Presidential veto.
So with only 51% of the senate, the Democrats are basically left with nothing they can do but hold investigations in committees (since even a simple majority does give complete control of all Committees) and hope that the general public gets so pissed off at what is discovered that they push ten republican senators to vote against their own party.
1080p is not far off film detail resolution at all. Yes, a film shown from film will look better than a film shown from a 2k scanned transfer of the film, because that's because you're losing quality in both transfers (the transfer of light to the film and the transfer of film to the digital).
But a digital 2k video shot with professional digital equipment will look just as good if not better than a 35mm film capture of the same scene in terms of detail.
Because when your player breaks and there are no replacements being made, or you buy a new TV and can't plug your player into it, you can box up all those great deals and throw them into a landfill.
I remember a friend of mine spending a bunch of money on DIVX movies (the original DIVX, the pseudo-subscription-model Circuit City DVDs) and bragging about how much he saved over us chumps buying or renting real DVDs. Of course when the company went out of business and he had a fine collection shiny coasters, he realized that just saving a few pennies is not always a good deal when you're talking about media formats, unless all you want to do is watch a hundred movies in the next month and long-term viability doesn't matter.
Most people are not looking to add a new box to their attic next to the ones labeled "8-track" or "beta".
I would guess that it is more beneficial for a public entity to admit to a data breach than for a private entity. Private companies get bad publicity and lose customers if they admit to a security problem, so they do everything they legally can to keep it hushed up. Government agencies, however, get immediate priority to security funding when there is a security breach. Sure, some people will be put on the hot seat and possibly lose their jobs, but the agency as a whole probably gains when a massive problem occurs causing a public outcry.
The essential thing in the US is that the banking system has become quite enamored of easy credit in the last few decades -- the policy of extending credit to essentially anyone for any reason, based on nothing more than an application and a promise to pay it back at some later date. In a fight to get more customers for such credit, lenders competed with each other to make it as convenient as possible to apply, and therefore as convenient as possible to commit fraud. Simply knowing some easily available information about someone is enough to get you credit in their name.
So long as the creditors themselves don't suffer too much financially from fraud (which they don't, thanks to their generous campaign contributions and strict avoidance of responsibility through their merchant contracts) it's a winning business strategy because it also brings in more legitimate customers.
The fundamental problem is that we benefit from the convenience of easy credit, the banks profit from it, but when anything goes wrong all of a sudden the customer and the merchant (but not the bank) are left with all the costs of fraud. Any solution would inherently restrict the convenient availability of credit to some degree, and the American economy purrs along quite well in large part due to consumer spending that is largely tied to credit.