Well, my point really was, it doesn't matter if we are ready, it's going to happen. Asking the question is pointless as is discussing why we should or shouldn't do it as if we could stop the speeding train.
The ship has sailed, the train has left the station, you cannot stop it now, there's no going back.... No need to worry about stuff you cannot control or stop.
Are you suggesting that a video of a child on YouTube, with no last name and no location (which is less information than the newspaper offered) is a cause for concern?
Perhaps.. It depends on both the context and unknown future events. There is just no way to know for sure.
I think most folks vastly under estimate the amount of data they actually are giving up when they post stuff online. It's hard to understand just how the information will be stored, used and impact people in the future. It may be nothing, or, it may be a huge deal.
I think the young adults who grew up in a culture of oversharing everything, getting your 15 min of fame by going viral, it's tempting to just post stuff. Stuff that will be *really* embarrassing in about 10 years, when your kids find it or when some prospective employer want's you to explain why you posted the video in which you clearly are breaking the law in a big way... "I thought it was funny at the time" may not be enough of an explanation then.
Posting videos/pictures of kids by parents runs along the same lines. What's cute now, may not be all that cute in a few years, and may be very embarrassing if not life altering years down the road. It may also be giving up critical information to people who are out to do harm to kids, perhaps yours. Personally, I'd suggest parents error on the side of caution and refrain from posting stuff about the kids. I'm not saying it's going to happen, I'm just saying I'd avoid the risks because you never really know.
Haven't a clue.. But I'm the kind that used his Note 4 for 10 years before buying a new phone, so I'm not one to care about being at the cusp of the leading edge.
The problem here is that the internet is, by and large, anonymous. You can literally post any steaming pile you like, be as rude, abusive and socially unacceptable as you choose with zero real implications.
The problem here is that there is no personal accountability, at least not really. Sure, you can get TOSed or your account deleted, but it's not like a nymph shift is hard to do. Grab another E-mail, create a new account and post your garbage again and again.
The only real solution I see is to require non-repudiation for all original content. Make it so everybody must be positively identified before your material sees the light of day. Of course, U-Tube would pretty much have to shut down to do something like this.
The chip sets are shipping, phones are being engineered and built, carriers are buying spectrum space, vendors are starting to ship the equipment and the marketing blitz is already on.
It doesn't matter if you are ready or not, it's going to happen unless there is some huge unforeseen world/national event that makes it financially impossible. It's happening, like it or not.
LOL.. Sorry, I should have said "substitution sort" but I remember it by a different name.... But there IS a really good reason to use recursion when dealing with linked lists... I find recursion easier and shorter than writing the while loop. Anyway, the compiler likely just does it recursively anyway if you write your while loop correctly..
It's pointless to ask anything other than a basic programming question during an interview. IF you insist on verifying that a candidate knows the language they claim, do that OUTSIDE the interview. You can present them with a "how do you fix this error" or give them a bit of code and ask them what it does, but any detailed questions like "Solve this problem using recursion" really doesn't tell you anything.
Personally, I ask what seems to be a programming question, but really isn't. I ask them how they'd go about writing some algorithm and then start throwing system integration tests that are failing at them, their coworkers not being available to fix something and a deadline they don't think they can meet. The point is to find out how open they are to ask for help, how readily they will report problems meeting schedule and how they choose to interact with uncooperative coworkers. To me THAT's the stuff that is more important than being able to implement a swap sort on a linked list using recursion.
Unfortunately, Yes. I have a cable card tuner and I run Windows Media Center to DVR protected content. WMC only runs with protected content on Windows 7. There are no other options for this, except for TiVo, which involves buying a whole new set of hardware and paying subscription fees (or paying the cable company entirely too much for the service).
Where I don't like running Windows 7 and I'd replace it in a heartbeat, it's the cheapest solution I could find at the time for the cable card DVR and protected content. I've saved a boat load of money over paying the cable company for the service, or paying TiVo. Although, this is coming to an end pretty soon by the looks of things.
When your town is bankrupt, you got to stop spending somewhere somehow. Adding expenses should not be undertaken lightly or for vain reasons. You have to stop running on the emotional "Yea, I like that idea" and start running on the "We cannot live w/o that" for awhile. Chicago needs to major on things it *needs* like police, fire services, keeping the roads clear and in good repair and picking up the trash. It needs to have a commitment to paying off it's massive debt load and at least try to keep it's tax base from fleeing any faster. It's got to stop the death spiral.
Doing the green thing doesn't help ANY of that. It will only force the city into bankruptcy faster, ending all of these programs before they can have any noticeable effect on Chicago or the world, make Chicago into a urban waste land like Detroit and create a environmental nightmare of rotting buildings and homes where nobody wants to live and nobody has the money to knock down so they will crumble, burn and harbor crime for decades to come. THAT's not good for Chicago at all.
IF you find yourself in such a situation, the recovery from it is to lower your standard of living, retire your debt and stop paying interest.
I know that emergencies happen and debt is sometimes hard to avoid. BUT if you don't DO something different in your financial life when you are on a bad road that leads to bankruptcy, how do you expect to not end up where the road leads?
I know it's not popular, nor does it sound very understanding to say, but YOU are responsible for your finances and only you can fix it when things are going the wrong direction. So if you need a cheaper place to live, spend less on food and clothes, drive a cheaper car or otherwise spend less than you do now that's what you got to do. Maybe a 2nd or 3rd job? Maybe not having any more kids?
Credit isn't the answer, it's just a tool. Credit though for a lot of folks is the killer and the interest being paid is only lowering their standard of living. Sometimes credit is a useful tool, but a dangerous tool that must be used wisely and with caution.
First, I think you should consider that your sample space is pretty skewed. I don't think that you live in poverty, so your exposure to that population is quite low.
During my formative years, we where quite poor as a family so I knew a lot of very poor people. I will admit that my family wasn't destitute, we worked for a living and although we where poor we owned a small farm where we raised cattle, had a huge vegetable garden and even though the work was hard and long and we didn't have money for things like TVs and toys, we where not starving, cold or without housing.
But I disagree. I've seen poverty, up close and far away. The kids I went to high school with where from the 2nd poorest county in the State of North Carolina. The schools where so bad that only the poorest of the poor when to the public schools. IF you had ANY money, you went to private schools. As a result, I was in a class of 250 and only about 7 of us where white and ALL of us where poor. My experiences may be unique to the county I grew up in, but I seriously doubt the attitudes I saw where that unique.
You see, I was raised very differently from many of my peers. I was raised that hard work was how you got more. That you had to watch what you spent your money on. Many of my peers where raised to think money was what the government gave you, that it always comes like clock work and life was about maximizing that check. I swear, some of the brightest kids I knew, kids smarter than I was, kids that could have gone way beyond their poverty had they even tried, just didn't want to try. Out of my class of 250, only 4 of us when to college. Out of that 4 only 2 graduated with a 4 year degree (that I know of). But the most remembered kid from our class was a bright young man who played basketball for Duke, on a scholarship (one of the 4 of us who went to college) but flunked out of school. Does the school recognize me? HALF of the college graduates from that class who holds an BSEE from a very respected school, one of the educational success stories? Yea, right.
But it's about the culture there. The culture I grew up in. They had many of the same opportunities i had, if not more at times, but many where not successful because of their choices, their attitudes, their wrong thinking about what working for a living was and their goals. Sure they started out at a disadvantage, but opportunity was there, still is for many of my classmates who come to the realization they can do better with effort.
Did you just say, low interest credit cards was the answer?
You do understand how bad of an idea that is right?
The problem isn't the availability of cheap credit, but the use of credit for daily living expenses and people's attitude about what credit is for. I'm not one of those "no debt, ever" advocates but I do have TWO basic rules about debt. 1. Pay off unsecured debt AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. My goal is to pay EVERY credit card I have off at the end of the billing cycle and avoid any interest payments. If I find I cannot zero out every credit balance for some reason, my sole focus becomes retiring unsecured debt. NO discretionary spending, no eating out, no new toys. I refuse to live on credit, ever. 2. Debt is ONLY for buying "real" property like cars, houses and the like and then ONLY when the item that secures the debt could be sold for more than the debt. So I never buy a new car where I'm underwater, even after the depreciation hit taken when it gets titled and I never take loans out for longer than I plan to drive the car. So I put nearly 35% down on my home 20 years ago and now have over $200K in equity.
Cheap credit isn't the answer, properly taught and executed handling of money and credit is the answer. Actually cheap credit is more of a gateway drug to financial problems, carrying the promise of instant gratification, buy now pay later. Successful financial thinking is save now, buy later, so when it comes time to buy that pair of boots, you can afford the ones that last because you did't blow the money on interest, toys or eating out. I think cheap credit would only add to the problem.
Where it is the natural tendency of government to follow such paths, it is by far NOT a given they will.
The legal basis of the USA's existence, if interpreted within it's ORIGINAL intent, would make such abuses difficult to exercise. We have very strict rules of evidence for criminal trials based on the Constitution's recognition of basic rights. Rules which protect us from governmental abuses.
However, I'm not saying it's not possible such abuses could come, only that we will have to either re-define what the constitution says (using the "living breathing document canard") or amend it. Well, short of just plain ignoring it by packing the courts with judges who don't care about the law as written...
North Korea comes to mind - A place where when you escape the country go be free, they lock up your family you leave behind in their famous death camps for "re-education" or really death by exposure, starvation and hard labor.
Or, closer to home, those living in Venezuela who don't happen to support the socialist government are getting shot and killed in the streets by the military for protesting, while everybody else dies slowly of starvation.
Even though the story about the boots is fictional, there's a way out of that trap. You have to realize that you only need to buy a single pair of the good leather boots, to solve that particular problem for the rest of your life. After you get your first pair, you slowly save up the $50 for the next pair over the next 10 years. And then with the net money saved, you can get out of other traps.
The reason why people fail is because they cannot hold savings long enough to buy the expensive but durable goods. Instead, they'll spend their savings on something they don't need (as much).
It's even worse today with credit. Now you can buy what you want now, and pay over time for it. What ends up happening for the undisciplined is they buy frivolous stuff on credit, then end up struggling to make the payments WITH INTEREST and that drives their eventual standard of living down. You have less to live on if you have to service that interest on your debt because that big TV you purchased on "sale" now costs you 30 months of interest too, making it cost more than the bigger TV outright. Or that new car costs you more than you can afford for 80 months and when it's 5 years old and you want to trade, you still have 20 months of payments.. But don't worry, they will roll that onto your next car's payment... It's a slippery slope and it take discipline to get off of it, lots of discipline.
But that's really what makes the difference here, discipline and hard work. I've meet very few folks who where poor because they didn't have the ability or opportunity to not be poor. And I've meet some desperately poor people growing up in the back woods of North Carolina. Many where living this way by choice, they didn't want more, or couldn't be bothered to make it happen. It was a social thing for them. One young man who graduated high school with me, 4th in the class, had a dream of moving out of his mother's house so he could get his own address and start collecting his own welfare checks. He was a bright guy, could have gone to college for nearly free and easily pulled himself, and his family out of poverty, but that's not what he chose to do.
Not all poor are there by choice, but unless they are unable to work though no fault of their own, they need not stay in poverty.
You must not be from around Chicago... Everybody knows that the city AND the state are on the brink of bankruptcy and the population of both are in a rapid decline as those who have the means are leaving, taking their money with them. Which leaves mostly the poor and middle class, who DON'T have the money to do this green thing, so it's going to just destroy their standards of living... Again.... But that's the breaks in Illinois these days, the taxpayer is getting reamed while the government is blowing money on stupid stuff that helps nobody.
The only thing this idea will ensure is that both Chicago and Illinois will be further in to debt, able to provide even less services and security for it's citizens, and make that inevitable bankruptcy happen sooner, while it lines the pockets of the "green" energy executives who sell all the services and equipment that will need to be purchased. Companies like Soylindra will go boom democrat donors will collect huge paychecks, then the boom will be a bust when Chicago's creditors stop buying bonds to finance the democrat machine that runs the city and state.
So yea, feel free to go "green" if you like... It won't work, even if you try. All you will do is create pain and suffering, expand urban blight, drive more folks out of the middle class into poverty. But that's what this green thing really boils down to isn't it? To *really* address this climate change issue, we are going to need to return to pre 1900's days, including farming and transportation techniques, which will necessitate the return to pre 1900's population levels, WORLD WIDE. This is absolutely impossible, short of a natural disaster or pandemic that removes half the world's population. Like it or not, if you do this "green" thing and push it too far by regulations, the social and economic impacts will end up with the deaths of untold numbers though starvation, war, pestilence and just plain violence. I don't want to see that.
I hope you enjoy dying of a treatable cancer when your health insurance company cuts you off. Here in the socialist hellhole of Canada I'll just get treatment. Such hell compared to your freedumbs!
LOL.. You DO understand that there can be no limits to health insurance coverage now in the USA right? It's literally illegal to write such a policy now.
Man, is this what they teach in schools these days.. Do try to think a bit past your nose and ask yourself a few "then what" questions.
Wealth is NOT a fixed sized pie. Wealth can be created and the pie gets bigger, or it can be consumed and the pie gets smaller. I dare you to think about that for awhile. More wealth means more to spread around and isn't that what we really need?
Capitalism is responsible for creating more wealth than ANY other economic model it makes the pie bigger. Socialism has exactly the OPPSIT effect, it consumes wealth and makes the pie smaller.
So... The goal is to increase the average size of individual slices of pie, specifically my slice. I say we do this by making a bigger pie. In the mean time, you are complaining because some have bigger slices than you.... You want to take from the big slices of pie, to supplement the smaller pieces, I want to grow the pie as big as possible and I'm not so concerned that Bill Gates has a huge slice, as long as my slice is growing.
How about you take your mindlessness and go learn some history.
Venezuela was a vibrant economic force in South America only 20 years ago. They where rich in natural resources and had great prospects for ever increasing standards of living, improving health care and freedom for it's citizens. Now it's a country wide slum, the likes of which you've likely never seen, much less experienced. They are awash in poverty, death, starvation and oppression.
What changed? I dare you to go investigate and figure it out for yourself.
My Venezuelan friends generally agree with me. The mistake was adopting a government which was based on socialism. They where giving the "poor" stuff and taking from the "rich" to pay for it. Now, nearly EVERYBODY is poor and starving. The government took everything and squandered it, spent more than it could tax and is now printing Bolivars as fast as it can in an attempt to pay it's bills. Inflation is at 4 digits and their creditors are getting stiffed. The house of cards is falling, death and bloody violence will be the inevitable result. But that's ALWAYS the result when socialism runs amuck like this.
All this "green energy" zero emissions stuff is fine and dandy, as long as it's not a mandate. Once you do stupid stuff like this, making it mandatory, you do two things.
1. Make it more expensive. You heard me right "green" is NOT free, it's actually much more expensive than current alternatives, namely Natural Gas. This economic truth is rarely understood much less acknowledged and the effect of this on the local economy is measurable and not in a good way. When energy becomes more expensive, people, industry, and jobs leave.
2. Spend lots of money on revamping, renewing, changing technology. When you change all your vehicles to electric, it means that you have to git rid of the current fleet and by a new one. In this case, government will have to replace all their vehicles, from the police cars all the way though city buses. This means junking parking lots full of expensive things which where supposed to last another few decades. It also means buying all the infrastructure to support the new energy sources, which is in itself expensive.
So, what does all this mean? In the end, it means the already brisk pace folks are leaving Chicago and the state will continue to increase as they ditch Illinois for it's high taxes, high costs of living and lowering standards of living. It also means that the city of Chicago will be adding greatly to it's already unmanageable debt, either raising taxes or lowering services to compensate and either of those accelerates the departure of the people who are just trying to live a better life.
Illinois is heading to being like Detroit on a state wide basis. Keep it up you loonies.. Just shoot yourselves in the foot, both hands and the head and get it over with. A quick death is better than a long lingering bout in the ICU.
Save the planet, just go ahead and commit suicide if you like, just do it quick. This slow meandering death is bad for the environment. Just set up the "death" centers and start up a lottery to decide who gets to visit because the way I see it, to get what you want we need to cut down the population by about 50%, world wide...
Maduro would be forced to admit that his (and his predecessor's) policies of socialistic reforms have failed and the country is now solely dependent on handouts for survival. That the people are starving and in nearly open revolt because the system is broken.
This is a HUGE difference from the Venezuela of only two decades ago. The government has since taken over most private companies, soaked up their resources paying for social programs and ran everything into the condition we see today. This is how such ideas always have ended. Maduro cannot admit to his failure or the whole political gig is up for him and given the conditions he'd be lucky to make it out of the country alive to live in exile.
AND.. What kind of standard of living does the average person in China have? China has been forced into making capitalistic reforms to keep their economy alive.
Oh, and don't forget, the only people trying to get into China for a better standard of living are from North Korea...
Ah come on.. Even the most secure password is all but pointless... UNLESS... You:
1. Change it often.
2. Don't reuse it at other sites or later at the same site.
3. Is Complex and long.
4. is not easy to guess.
Which is why I NEVER reuse my passwords and alter my usernames between sites. That way, when the information gets hacked, I don't have to worry about somebody saying "Hey, users are lazy and here is a user ID on this site with a password I know, over here on that other site... Let's see if he reused is password.. " 9 times out of 10 they will get logged in.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, my point really was, it doesn't matter if we are ready, it's going to happen. Asking the question is pointless as is discussing why we should or shouldn't do it as if we could stop the speeding train.
The ship has sailed, the train has left the station, you cannot stop it now, there's no going back.... No need to worry about stuff you cannot control or stop.
Are you suggesting that a video of a child on YouTube, with no last name and no location (which is less information than the newspaper offered) is a cause for concern?
Perhaps.. It depends on both the context and unknown future events. There is just no way to know for sure.
I think most folks vastly under estimate the amount of data they actually are giving up when they post stuff online. It's hard to understand just how the information will be stored, used and impact people in the future. It may be nothing, or, it may be a huge deal.
I think the young adults who grew up in a culture of oversharing everything, getting your 15 min of fame by going viral, it's tempting to just post stuff. Stuff that will be *really* embarrassing in about 10 years, when your kids find it or when some prospective employer want's you to explain why you posted the video in which you clearly are breaking the law in a big way... "I thought it was funny at the time" may not be enough of an explanation then.
Posting videos/pictures of kids by parents runs along the same lines. What's cute now, may not be all that cute in a few years, and may be very embarrassing if not life altering years down the road. It may also be giving up critical information to people who are out to do harm to kids, perhaps yours. Personally, I'd suggest parents error on the side of caution and refrain from posting stuff about the kids. I'm not saying it's going to happen, I'm just saying I'd avoid the risks because you never really know.
so who is asking for this?
Haven't a clue.. But I'm the kind that used his Note 4 for 10 years before buying a new phone, so I'm not one to care about being at the cusp of the leading edge.
The problem here is that the internet is, by and large, anonymous. You can literally post any steaming pile you like, be as rude, abusive and socially unacceptable as you choose with zero real implications.
The problem here is that there is no personal accountability, at least not really. Sure, you can get TOSed or your account deleted, but it's not like a nymph shift is hard to do. Grab another E-mail, create a new account and post your garbage again and again.
The only real solution I see is to require non-repudiation for all original content. Make it so everybody must be positively identified before your material sees the light of day. Of course, U-Tube would pretty much have to shut down to do something like this.
The chip sets are shipping, phones are being engineered and built, carriers are buying spectrum space, vendors are starting to ship the equipment and the marketing blitz is already on.
It doesn't matter if you are ready or not, it's going to happen unless there is some huge unforeseen world/national event that makes it financially impossible. It's happening, like it or not.
LOL.. Sorry, I should have said "substitution sort" but I remember it by a different name.... But there IS a really good reason to use recursion when dealing with linked lists... I find recursion easier and shorter than writing the while loop. Anyway, the compiler likely just does it recursively anyway if you write your while loop correctly..
It's pointless to ask anything other than a basic programming question during an interview. IF you insist on verifying that a candidate knows the language they claim, do that OUTSIDE the interview. You can present them with a "how do you fix this error" or give them a bit of code and ask them what it does, but any detailed questions like "Solve this problem using recursion" really doesn't tell you anything.
Personally, I ask what seems to be a programming question, but really isn't. I ask them how they'd go about writing some algorithm and then start throwing system integration tests that are failing at them, their coworkers not being available to fix something and a deadline they don't think they can meet. The point is to find out how open they are to ask for help, how readily they will report problems meeting schedule and how they choose to interact with uncooperative coworkers. To me THAT's the stuff that is more important than being able to implement a swap sort on a linked list using recursion.
lol are people still using Micro$oft Win-Doze?
Unfortunately, Yes. I have a cable card tuner and I run Windows Media Center to DVR protected content. WMC only runs with protected content on Windows 7. There are no other options for this, except for TiVo, which involves buying a whole new set of hardware and paying subscription fees (or paying the cable company entirely too much for the service).
Where I don't like running Windows 7 and I'd replace it in a heartbeat, it's the cheapest solution I could find at the time for the cable card DVR and protected content. I've saved a boat load of money over paying the cable company for the service, or paying TiVo. Although, this is coming to an end pretty soon by the looks of things.
Sometimes, you gota do what you gota do.
When your town is bankrupt, you got to stop spending somewhere somehow. Adding expenses should not be undertaken lightly or for vain reasons. You have to stop running on the emotional "Yea, I like that idea" and start running on the "We cannot live w/o that" for awhile. Chicago needs to major on things it *needs* like police, fire services, keeping the roads clear and in good repair and picking up the trash. It needs to have a commitment to paying off it's massive debt load and at least try to keep it's tax base from fleeing any faster. It's got to stop the death spiral.
Doing the green thing doesn't help ANY of that. It will only force the city into bankruptcy faster, ending all of these programs before they can have any noticeable effect on Chicago or the world, make Chicago into a urban waste land like Detroit and create a environmental nightmare of rotting buildings and homes where nobody wants to live and nobody has the money to knock down so they will crumble, burn and harbor crime for decades to come. THAT's not good for Chicago at all.
IF you find yourself in such a situation, the recovery from it is to lower your standard of living, retire your debt and stop paying interest.
I know that emergencies happen and debt is sometimes hard to avoid. BUT if you don't DO something different in your financial life when you are on a bad road that leads to bankruptcy, how do you expect to not end up where the road leads?
I know it's not popular, nor does it sound very understanding to say, but YOU are responsible for your finances and only you can fix it when things are going the wrong direction. So if you need a cheaper place to live, spend less on food and clothes, drive a cheaper car or otherwise spend less than you do now that's what you got to do. Maybe a 2nd or 3rd job? Maybe not having any more kids?
Credit isn't the answer, it's just a tool. Credit though for a lot of folks is the killer and the interest being paid is only lowering their standard of living. Sometimes credit is a useful tool, but a dangerous tool that must be used wisely and with caution.
First, I think you should consider that your sample space is pretty skewed. I don't think that you live in poverty, so your exposure to that population is quite low.
During my formative years, we where quite poor as a family so I knew a lot of very poor people. I will admit that my family wasn't destitute, we worked for a living and although we where poor we owned a small farm where we raised cattle, had a huge vegetable garden and even though the work was hard and long and we didn't have money for things like TVs and toys, we where not starving, cold or without housing.
But I disagree. I've seen poverty, up close and far away. The kids I went to high school with where from the 2nd poorest county in the State of North Carolina. The schools where so bad that only the poorest of the poor when to the public schools. IF you had ANY money, you went to private schools. As a result, I was in a class of 250 and only about 7 of us where white and ALL of us where poor. My experiences may be unique to the county I grew up in, but I seriously doubt the attitudes I saw where that unique.
You see, I was raised very differently from many of my peers. I was raised that hard work was how you got more. That you had to watch what you spent your money on. Many of my peers where raised to think money was what the government gave you, that it always comes like clock work and life was about maximizing that check. I swear, some of the brightest kids I knew, kids smarter than I was, kids that could have gone way beyond their poverty had they even tried, just didn't want to try. Out of my class of 250, only 4 of us when to college. Out of that 4 only 2 graduated with a 4 year degree (that I know of). But the most remembered kid from our class was a bright young man who played basketball for Duke, on a scholarship (one of the 4 of us who went to college) but flunked out of school. Does the school recognize me? HALF of the college graduates from that class who holds an BSEE from a very respected school, one of the educational success stories? Yea, right.
But it's about the culture there. The culture I grew up in. They had many of the same opportunities i had, if not more at times, but many where not successful because of their choices, their attitudes, their wrong thinking about what working for a living was and their goals. Sure they started out at a disadvantage, but opportunity was there, still is for many of my classmates who come to the realization they can do better with effort.
Did you just say, low interest credit cards was the answer?
You do understand how bad of an idea that is right?
The problem isn't the availability of cheap credit, but the use of credit for daily living expenses and people's attitude about what credit is for. I'm not one of those "no debt, ever" advocates but I do have TWO basic rules about debt. 1. Pay off unsecured debt AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. My goal is to pay EVERY credit card I have off at the end of the billing cycle and avoid any interest payments. If I find I cannot zero out every credit balance for some reason, my sole focus becomes retiring unsecured debt. NO discretionary spending, no eating out, no new toys. I refuse to live on credit, ever. 2. Debt is ONLY for buying "real" property like cars, houses and the like and then ONLY when the item that secures the debt could be sold for more than the debt. So I never buy a new car where I'm underwater, even after the depreciation hit taken when it gets titled and I never take loans out for longer than I plan to drive the car. So I put nearly 35% down on my home 20 years ago and now have over $200K in equity.
Cheap credit isn't the answer, properly taught and executed handling of money and credit is the answer. Actually cheap credit is more of a gateway drug to financial problems, carrying the promise of instant gratification, buy now pay later. Successful financial thinking is save now, buy later, so when it comes time to buy that pair of boots, you can afford the ones that last because you did't blow the money on interest, toys or eating out. I think cheap credit would only add to the problem.
Where it is the natural tendency of government to follow such paths, it is by far NOT a given they will.
The legal basis of the USA's existence, if interpreted within it's ORIGINAL intent, would make such abuses difficult to exercise. We have very strict rules of evidence for criminal trials based on the Constitution's recognition of basic rights. Rules which protect us from governmental abuses.
However, I'm not saying it's not possible such abuses could come, only that we will have to either re-define what the constitution says (using the "living breathing document canard") or amend it. Well, short of just plain ignoring it by packing the courts with judges who don't care about the law as written...
North Korea comes to mind - A place where when you escape the country go be free, they lock up your family you leave behind in their famous death camps for "re-education" or really death by exposure, starvation and hard labor.
Or, closer to home, those living in Venezuela who don't happen to support the socialist government are getting shot and killed in the streets by the military for protesting, while everybody else dies slowly of starvation.
Even though the story about the boots is fictional, there's a way out of that trap. You have to realize that you only need to buy a single pair of the good leather boots, to solve that particular problem for the rest of your life. After you get your first pair, you slowly save up the $50 for the next pair over the next 10 years. And then with the net money saved, you can get out of other traps.
The reason why people fail is because they cannot hold savings long enough to buy the expensive but durable goods. Instead, they'll spend their savings on something they don't need (as much).
It's even worse today with credit. Now you can buy what you want now, and pay over time for it. What ends up happening for the undisciplined is they buy frivolous stuff on credit, then end up struggling to make the payments WITH INTEREST and that drives their eventual standard of living down. You have less to live on if you have to service that interest on your debt because that big TV you purchased on "sale" now costs you 30 months of interest too, making it cost more than the bigger TV outright. Or that new car costs you more than you can afford for 80 months and when it's 5 years old and you want to trade, you still have 20 months of payments.. But don't worry, they will roll that onto your next car's payment... It's a slippery slope and it take discipline to get off of it, lots of discipline.
But that's really what makes the difference here, discipline and hard work. I've meet very few folks who where poor because they didn't have the ability or opportunity to not be poor. And I've meet some desperately poor people growing up in the back woods of North Carolina. Many where living this way by choice, they didn't want more, or couldn't be bothered to make it happen. It was a social thing for them. One young man who graduated high school with me, 4th in the class, had a dream of moving out of his mother's house so he could get his own address and start collecting his own welfare checks. He was a bright guy, could have gone to college for nearly free and easily pulled himself, and his family out of poverty, but that's not what he chose to do.
Not all poor are there by choice, but unless they are unable to work though no fault of their own, they need not stay in poverty.
You must not be from around Chicago... Everybody knows that the city AND the state are on the brink of bankruptcy and the population of both are in a rapid decline as those who have the means are leaving, taking their money with them. Which leaves mostly the poor and middle class, who DON'T have the money to do this green thing, so it's going to just destroy their standards of living... Again.... But that's the breaks in Illinois these days, the taxpayer is getting reamed while the government is blowing money on stupid stuff that helps nobody.
The only thing this idea will ensure is that both Chicago and Illinois will be further in to debt, able to provide even less services and security for it's citizens, and make that inevitable bankruptcy happen sooner, while it lines the pockets of the "green" energy executives who sell all the services and equipment that will need to be purchased. Companies like Soylindra will go boom democrat donors will collect huge paychecks, then the boom will be a bust when Chicago's creditors stop buying bonds to finance the democrat machine that runs the city and state.
So yea, feel free to go "green" if you like... It won't work, even if you try. All you will do is create pain and suffering, expand urban blight, drive more folks out of the middle class into poverty. But that's what this green thing really boils down to isn't it? To *really* address this climate change issue, we are going to need to return to pre 1900's days, including farming and transportation techniques, which will necessitate the return to pre 1900's population levels, WORLD WIDE. This is absolutely impossible, short of a natural disaster or pandemic that removes half the world's population. Like it or not, if you do this "green" thing and push it too far by regulations, the social and economic impacts will end up with the deaths of untold numbers though starvation, war, pestilence and just plain violence. I don't want to see that.
I hope you enjoy dying of a treatable cancer when your health insurance company cuts you off. Here in the socialist hellhole of Canada I'll just get treatment. Such hell compared to your freedumbs!
LOL.. You DO understand that there can be no limits to health insurance coverage now in the USA right? It's literally illegal to write such a policy now.
Man, is this what they teach in schools these days.. Do try to think a bit past your nose and ask yourself a few "then what" questions.
Wealth is NOT a fixed sized pie. Wealth can be created and the pie gets bigger, or it can be consumed and the pie gets smaller. I dare you to think about that for awhile. More wealth means more to spread around and isn't that what we really need?
Capitalism is responsible for creating more wealth than ANY other economic model it makes the pie bigger. Socialism has exactly the OPPSIT effect, it consumes wealth and makes the pie smaller.
So... The goal is to increase the average size of individual slices of pie, specifically my slice. I say we do this by making a bigger pie. In the mean time, you are complaining because some have bigger slices than you.... You want to take from the big slices of pie, to supplement the smaller pieces, I want to grow the pie as big as possible and I'm not so concerned that Bill Gates has a huge slice, as long as my slice is growing.
How about you take your mindlessness and go learn some history.
Venezuela was a vibrant economic force in South America only 20 years ago. They where rich in natural resources and had great prospects for ever increasing standards of living, improving health care and freedom for it's citizens. Now it's a country wide slum, the likes of which you've likely never seen, much less experienced. They are awash in poverty, death, starvation and oppression.
What changed? I dare you to go investigate and figure it out for yourself.
My Venezuelan friends generally agree with me. The mistake was adopting a government which was based on socialism. They where giving the "poor" stuff and taking from the "rich" to pay for it. Now, nearly EVERYBODY is poor and starving. The government took everything and squandered it, spent more than it could tax and is now printing Bolivars as fast as it can in an attempt to pay it's bills. Inflation is at 4 digits and their creditors are getting stiffed. The house of cards is falling, death and bloody violence will be the inevitable result. But that's ALWAYS the result when socialism runs amuck like this.
All this "green energy" zero emissions stuff is fine and dandy, as long as it's not a mandate. Once you do stupid stuff like this, making it mandatory, you do two things.
1. Make it more expensive. You heard me right "green" is NOT free, it's actually much more expensive than current alternatives, namely Natural Gas. This economic truth is rarely understood much less acknowledged and the effect of this on the local economy is measurable and not in a good way. When energy becomes more expensive, people, industry, and jobs leave.
2. Spend lots of money on revamping, renewing, changing technology. When you change all your vehicles to electric, it means that you have to git rid of the current fleet and by a new one. In this case, government will have to replace all their vehicles, from the police cars all the way though city buses. This means junking parking lots full of expensive things which where supposed to last another few decades. It also means buying all the infrastructure to support the new energy sources, which is in itself expensive.
So, what does all this mean? In the end, it means the already brisk pace folks are leaving Chicago and the state will continue to increase as they ditch Illinois for it's high taxes, high costs of living and lowering standards of living. It also means that the city of Chicago will be adding greatly to it's already unmanageable debt, either raising taxes or lowering services to compensate and either of those accelerates the departure of the people who are just trying to live a better life.
Illinois is heading to being like Detroit on a state wide basis. Keep it up you loonies.. Just shoot yourselves in the foot, both hands and the head and get it over with. A quick death is better than a long lingering bout in the ICU.
Save the planet, just go ahead and commit suicide if you like, just do it quick. This slow meandering death is bad for the environment. Just set up the "death" centers and start up a lottery to decide who gets to visit because the way I see it, to get what you want we need to cut down the population by about 50%, world wide...
No, this is food and medicine, nothing more..
Maduro would be forced to admit that his (and his predecessor's) policies of socialistic reforms have failed and the country is now solely dependent on handouts for survival. That the people are starving and in nearly open revolt because the system is broken.
This is a HUGE difference from the Venezuela of only two decades ago. The government has since taken over most private companies, soaked up their resources paying for social programs and ran everything into the condition we see today. This is how such ideas always have ended. Maduro cannot admit to his failure or the whole political gig is up for him and given the conditions he'd be lucky to make it out of the country alive to live in exile.
AND.. What kind of standard of living does the average person in China have? China has been forced into making capitalistic reforms to keep their economy alive.
Oh, and don't forget, the only people trying to get into China for a better standard of living are from North Korea...
The Socialist Utopia in Venezuela crumbles.... Socialism has never worked. Yet we still hear calls for socialist ideas ringning loud and clear.
Those who know history are bound to watch in alarm while those who don't know history insist on repeating it over their objections.
Ah come on.. Even the most secure password is all but pointless... UNLESS... You:
1. Change it often.
2. Don't reuse it at other sites or later at the same site.
3. Is Complex and long.
4. is not easy to guess.
Which is why I NEVER reuse my passwords and alter my usernames between sites. That way, when the information gets hacked, I don't have to worry about somebody saying "Hey, users are lazy and here is a user ID on this site with a password I know, over here on that other site... Let's see if he reused is password.. " 9 times out of 10 they will get logged in.
- 1 million records from pet care delivery service PetFlow
Well, I know what flows from pets and if somebody wants to hack to get that kind of stuff... Power to them.