Because that is the remorseless logic of the shrink-wrapped software business. When you mass-produce widgets for the consumer market, the per-unit cost shrinks as the number of units grows. That is the "economy of scale": it works by amortizing fixed costs over more and more units. There are still additional per-unit costs (variable costs); if these are large enough, and the number of units produced is large enough, then the fixed costs eventually become negligble. In this situation, there can be a stable equilibrium between producers of unequal market share.
However, the marginal cost of producing software is nearly zero. The producer with larger market share has a cost advantage which allows him to increase his market share etc. The loser is "killed."
This argument comes up everytime there's an article about space exploration.
Yes, well it's bound to come up if you insist on raising it, isn't it? Here's what the OP actually said:
There [are] a few imbalances in the world that need to be sorted out and space is one of them. The more the merrier.
Clearly, the imbalance meant is the domination of space by first-world powers, and the more the merrier is simple approbation. The post simply doesn't stand up as sarcasm.
Not that I agree with you illiterate wackos - I'm just standing up for truth and beauty. Never has my sig seemed more apposite.
The VAST majority of road wear due to vehicle travel (as opposed to weather/expansion/settling/etc.) is from large trucks and buses.
Yes. As I recall, road damage is proportional to the cube of axle weight.
... if we based taxes entirely on road wear due to vehicle use every trucking company in the country would be taxed out of business over night...
If road wear is a significant cost, then there would be nothing wrong with taxing this way. The true cost of trucking would be passed on to customers and the economy would become more efficient (selecting between trucking and rail based on the true cost and benefit.)
Of course, you are claiming that road wear is not significant:
The vast majority of maintenance work done on roads is not due to traffic volume, it is due to natural processes like weathering.
As far as I know, this is not true. I live in an area where frost heaving causes significant road damage, but even so, heavily used roads must be replaced several times more often than lightly-used roads constructed to the same standard. Rural blacktop decays quickly, but that is because the road bed is not prepared to the same standard.
Or were you thinking that most of the cost of roads has nothing to do with maintenance? There are certainly many other costs: land, policing, signage, snow removal etc.
No helicopter has the required performance (range + service ceiling + payload capacity.) Range is the biggest problem. You might think they could do this in stages, but the antarctic environment makes a chain of helicopter bases impractical. For reference, the Canadian army uses old-fashioned bolt-action rifles in the (much warmer) arctic because semi-automatic weapons are unreliable in that environment.
The Karl Rove ariticle basically made him out to be a reincarnated Goebbels.
It is amusing that you name Karl Rove in connection with Wikipedia. There was a Bizarro cartoon mentioning Karl Rove that ran just before the election - do you recall it? It was a classical landscape, with fluted columns and cypresses. In the foreground was seated a bearded man in chiton and sandals, next to a figure in modern business attire reclining on the grass. The caption was "... but surely you agree that truth can be created by the repetition of a lie."
When you think about it, this is the basic principle of Wikipedia - that truth can be decided by referendum.
But then I realized that only some of that wattage is being converted to waste heat - some of it is actually doing the useful work of the processor.
All - 100% - of the energy entering a system must be either stored or dissipated. It makes no difference whether a system is mechanical or electrical. For instance, an elevator (if poorly balanced) could store energy when it is on the top floor, but it would lose it when it travels down again. The stored energy in one trip to the top is trivial compared to the energy input over many cycles.
Strictly, energy doesn't have to be dissipated as heat; it could be shed with higher energy photons. But that does not occur with CPUs. The bottom line is that every watt input to a CPU is shed as heat.
Since it may not be obvious to all readers, be aware that when you can make a program crash by feeding it bad data, you can typically further manipulate the data you are sending it to take control of the program.
I agree with you that in practice this is often the case. However, it is not necessarily true; the "bad" data may merely exercise a branch not previously taken. When data is not interpreted as a pointer (or otherwise executed) there can be no control of exectution. For instance, the following snippet is a bug but not necessarily a security breach:
[The power to interpret laws] was self-invested by the Supreme Court.
Not at all; to interpret law is one of the primary functions of a judge. To find and argue interpretations is the main function of a lawyer. This state of affairs is a logical necessity, not a cruel and arbitrary caprice. Humans are not capable of writing laws that require no interpretation. The delicious silliness of your post is that the position you are trying to argue itself requires interpretation. Here is the text of the first amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Speech, press, assembly, and petitions are all mentioned, but for some reason the Internet is not. You have interpreted speech or press in a broad sense to include the Internet. So all you are really saying is that your interpretations are valid, and the Supreme Court's are not.
Social security [...] is nothing but a safety net for people who are financially irresponsible.
So it is, but that "nothing" is extremely important, because most Americans are financially irresponsible. Most think that 15% is a reasonable long-run expectation of average equity return. The Economist claims that recent home buyers in San Francisco think that house prices will rise on average 12-16% per annum over the next decade. The financial press was running a filler piece a few days ago, "25 fascinating facts about debt" (see http://biz.yahoo.com/brn/041006/13873_1.html.) To me, the most interesting of the 25 was this: the net worth of the average 50 year old, counting his home equity, is less than $40,000.
Do you grasp yet that social security is as important for you as it is for the financially irresponsible masses? What do you think would be the social consequences if a large fraction of Americans were unable to afford food and shelter? Existing examples are not far to seek. You would need to pay hundreds of billions in taxes for men with guns to protect your property. You would live in constant fear of being kidnapped. The universal franchise would be a distant memory.
I would also add that sometimes patenting actually serves the greater good [...] if patent law works well (which it may or may not), it both rewards the inventor and adds knowledge to society.
"If patent law works"... well that's just the problem, isn't it? Do patents actually do what's advertised on the tin? The assertion is that without the protection offered by patents, clever people would have no incentive to invent new things, and would be obliged to lie about all day watching TV and eating cheezy puffs. But as far as I know, nobody has ever demonstrated this. The theory of patents is in the same family as the theory that says that talented CEOs would have no reason to manage their companies well if they weren't granted vast quantities of risk-free stock options. The evidence is doubtful; there were clever inventions made in the days before patents, and companies run well in the days before stock options.
On the other hand, the disadvantages of patents are certain. This is true even when the idea patented is extremely clever and useful. I won't reiterate them here, except to observe that the success of any enterprise is 10% conception and 90% execution, no matter how brilliant the idea. Few inventors understand this. A gifted entrepreneur can make a silk purse from a sow's ear; but silk purses can be hard to sell.
... I can understand that someone with a fundamentalist Christian background could take stands against gay/lesbian marriage...
Can you? I can't. I mean, let's say you are a fundamentalist christian. Unless you're gay or lesbian, what do you care? How can the mere knowledge that somewhere, somehow, gays are getting married destroy the "values" of your family? Are you worried about sin? How can this ignoble desire to make other people, complete strangers, miserable, without the slightest advantage to yourself be regarded as anything but a sin? Cast out the beam in your own eye.
The whole issue strikes me as an example of misplaced faith in the doctrine of salvation by grace. It's one thing to be saved in spite of your sins; it's quite another to expect to be saved because of them.
Badnarik mentioned eliminating the Federal Reserve. He suggests using the American Liberty Currency as an alternative currency that is backed by gold and silver. I think this is an excellent idea.
OK, but why do you think that? I followed your link to find out for myself, and I concluded that this idea is completely kooky. Aside from all the weird rubbish about international bankers etc, why do you think it would be a good idea to yoke the value of your currency to a pair of commodities? Yes, inflation and deflation would no longer be directly controlled by government decisions... but that's a bad thing. Instead, inflation and deflation would occur randomly as demand for money changed against the capacity to extract gold and silver. We don't have to guess about this; it's exactly what happened in the century and a half before Bretton-Woods. This caused some disasterous depressions in the 19th century.
In any case, bimetallic standards are inherently unstable, because the intrinsic relative values of gold and silver are not constant; the money in a bimetallic standard can therefore be arbitraged against the underlying commodities.
Or do people ususally go the the great outdoors to get away from this kind of stuff
It's just you. Most people avoid actual contact with the great outdoors, but still want the aura of ruggedness and independence that comes with it. The same people who love SUV's will love SUPDA's.
The faster a substance decays, the more energy it emits. Conversely, substances which only decay very slowly emit very little radiation [...] elements with half-lives measured in millions of years do not typically emit enough radiation to be a threat to humans or to nature. The intensively radioactive products tend to get rid of themselves, so it is the medium intensity materials, such as the infamous Sr-90, with half-lives measured in months to millenia, that are particularly dangerous.
This idealization would be true if the decay products were not themselves radioactive, and did not interact with non-radioactive elements, but things are not so simple. It often happens that a (possibly stable) element has several transumutation possibilities in the presence of neutron bombardment; the neutron cross-section (distribution of neutron energies) will favour some more than others. The neutron cross-section is a function of the relative abundance of the different radioactive isotopes present, and therefore changes as radioactive isotopes decay into different radioactive elements, and as stable isotopes are transmuted into active ones. The interaction within a heterogenous collection of isotopes can be complex.
The bottom line is that radioactive material does not necessarily become monotonically less active over time. The peak of activity can be tens of thousands of years in the future.
Judging from the rest of your post, you are serious, and not just trolling, so I'll reply in the same spirit.
If you crack the software, you pay the consequences.
Yes, but you as the victim don't get to decide what those consequences are - society reserves that privilege. This necessary, because you have a tendency to think that a wrong done to you is more grievous than other people do.
You're not owed anything at that point. As far as ethics is concerned, the app could do anything it wanted.
I assume you mean your app may do anything you> want. No, it may not. The mere failure to fulfill a contract is not a blanket exoneration for the actions of the other party. You may be entitled to financial restitution, but this is linked to the losses you have suffered. You are never entitled to simple revenge.
Look at it this way: if you leased a car, you wouldn't expect it to be legal for the leasing company to rig it to explode when you failed to make a payment, would you?
First of all, it is difficult to argue that Asian banks prop up the dollar as an act of goodwill. Rather, they do so as they have incentive to--dollars and dollar-denominated assets continue to be reasonably stable investments over the long term.
It is the central (government) banks of Asia that are buying treasuries; they are not investing in dollar assets, they are selling their own currencies against USD in order to keep their products cheap for export. Yes, they perceive this as self-interest, but it is debatable whether in the long term this is truly so.
There is something in the theory that they cannot afford to sell these bonds, because doing so would cause an economic catastrophe in the US that would engulf their own countries. However, even if they just stop buying more, USD interest rates will skyrocket - unless the current account deficit can be closed.
The only problem is that so far the unsustainable spending has been sustained, and it shows no signs of slowing [...] a flurry of low, fixed-rate mortgages would appear to be a harbinger of doom, for example, but could easily be advantageous in the long run as consumers stretch now to build equity that will bring them benefit later.
A bubble always takes longer to burst than you think. Mortgage refinancings have in fact declined, the ratio of variable to fixed mortgages has increased, and the "equity" that consumers are "building" is vested in dramatically over-valued property. In short, the US consumer is on the hot rails to hell with his foot on the gas.
The third point ignores that convenient economic x-factor, namely productivity.
No, the third point ignores that economics is not a zero-sum game; as other countries "catch up", the market for US goods and services will increase. It is only in relative terms that the US economy will decline.
Did any of you warning about the cost of living notice that the OP is from the UK? I love the UK, and just as soon as I'm independently wealthy, I'll move there. The OP didn't say where he's from, but if it's the SE then the Valley will be cheaper (and better paid.) The "melting pot" comments are also off base. Yes, there are many people from far-off lands in California on H1B's but the situation hardly compares to London. And don't expect the food to be as good as a top-drawer gastro-pub. Your culture shocks are more likely to be caused by urban planning, because with the exception of a few (very expensive) enclaves, California is a strip mall writ large. (The physical geography is spectacular, of course; the opportunities for outdoor recreation are fantastic.)
The comments about border hassles, however, are spot on. Quite apart from the current security hysteria, coming in to "steal jobs from Americans" often causes problems. Oh, and say goodbye to your five weeks of vacation.
Why is suggesting that people pay the debts they incur according to the terms they agreed to flamebait?
It's not, of course. However, suggesting that other people are justified in breaking the law in order to recover these debts might fairly be considered flamebait.
If you can't afford to pay your bills, don't borrow the money.
That is very sound advice. Also, those of us who have no financial problems like to think of debt as primarily a moral issue - it makes us feel good about ourselves. But it is not always the lender who is the good guy. Consider the following situation. You must be aware that house ownership is a goal of most Americans. Unfortunately, not everyone has sufficient income to achieve this dream. Now if such a person applies for mortgage from an honest institution, they will be told the truth: they can't borrow the money because they won't be able to afford their bills.
This is disappointing, but as you say, you don't need a house - there are cheaper forms of shelter. But what's this? Here's an ad from people who claim you can afford a house! So you call them up, and they offer to lend you the money.
Now if you are a low-income earner, it is quite possible that you are not educated about financial matters; the two things are not uncorrelated. It is possible, therefore, that you will not detect the scam - because that's what it is. Here's how it works. An unscrupulous institution deliberately seeks out customers who can't afford loans, and lends them money. The only restriction is that some money must be put down by the borrower. The loan is structured so that the fees are very high and the down money is applied first to these fees. The borrower has no equity in the house even after making a down payment. The lender then wants the borrower to default - the sooner this happens, the sooner the capital can be recovered and recycled on the next borrower. Meanwhile, the old borrower is bankrupt and will probably be harrassed by collection agencies for residual claims.
The scenario described above is not hypothetical; it is the practice described as "predatory lending." Although legislation has been passed against it, it still occurs under various guises.
... every program they have ever written is a logical system...
You mean, every program is a logical system, except for the side-effects. I am sympathetic to the sentiment of your post, but as side-effects are usually the point of a program, this is an important caveat. It gets worse: until the day arrives when end-users specify their requirements in a formal system, formal correctness will have little application.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the value of a Euro $1.60 around 2002?
n &z=m&q=l&c=. The euro has never been higher than it is today. It started around 1.1, drifted up to around 1.2, then plunged well below par before its current rise.
OK. You are wrong: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=EURUSD=X&t=2y&l=o
Why does one have to 'kill' the other?
Because that is the remorseless logic of the shrink-wrapped software business. When you mass-produce widgets for the consumer market, the per-unit cost shrinks as the number of units grows. That is the "economy of scale": it works by amortizing fixed costs over more and more units. There are still additional per-unit costs (variable costs); if these are large enough, and the number of units produced is large enough, then the fixed costs eventually become negligble. In this situation, there can be a stable equilibrium between producers of unequal market share.
However, the marginal cost of producing software is nearly zero. The producer with larger market share has a cost advantage which allows him to increase his market share etc. The loser is "killed."
This argument comes up everytime there's an article about space exploration.
Yes, well it's bound to come up if you insist on raising it, isn't it? Here's what the OP actually said:
There [are] a few imbalances in the world that need to be sorted out and space is one of them. The more the merrier.
Clearly, the imbalance meant is the domination of space by first-world powers, and the more the merrier is simple approbation. The post simply doesn't stand up as sarcasm.
Not that I agree with you illiterate wackos - I'm just standing up for truth and beauty. Never has my sig seemed more apposite.
... is saying we can't protect this material for "100,000 years" really a valid argument? ...
Yes, it is, because the waste proposed for Yucca Mountain will get more, not less active during that period.
The VAST majority of road wear due to vehicle travel (as opposed to weather/expansion/settling/etc.) is from large trucks and buses.
... if we based taxes entirely on road wear due to vehicle use every trucking company in the country would be taxed out of business over night ...
Yes. As I recall, road damage is proportional to the cube of axle weight.
If road wear is a significant cost, then there would be nothing wrong with taxing this way. The true cost of trucking would be passed on to customers and the economy would become more efficient (selecting between trucking and rail based on the true cost and benefit.)
Of course, you are claiming that road wear is not significant:
The vast majority of maintenance work done on roads is not due to traffic volume, it is due to natural processes like weathering.
As far as I know, this is not true. I live in an area where frost heaving causes significant road damage, but even so, heavily used roads must be replaced several times more often than lightly-used roads constructed to the same standard. Rural blacktop decays quickly, but that is because the road bed is not prepared to the same standard.
Or were you thinking that most of the cost of roads has nothing to do with maintenance? There are certainly many other costs: land, policing, signage, snow removal etc.
Why can't they simply drop in with a helicopter?
No helicopter has the required performance (range + service ceiling + payload capacity.) Range is the biggest problem. You might think they could do this in stages, but the antarctic environment makes a chain of helicopter bases impractical. For reference, the Canadian army uses old-fashioned bolt-action rifles in the (much warmer) arctic because semi-automatic weapons are unreliable in that environment.
The Karl Rove ariticle basically made him out to be a reincarnated Goebbels.
It is amusing that you name Karl Rove in connection with Wikipedia. There was a Bizarro cartoon mentioning Karl Rove that ran just before the election - do you recall it? It was a classical landscape, with fluted columns and cypresses. In the foreground was seated a bearded man in chiton and sandals, next to a figure in modern business attire reclining on the grass. The caption was "... but surely you agree that truth can be created by the repetition of a lie."
When you think about it, this is the basic principle of Wikipedia - that truth can be decided by referendum.
If the movies are so bad why are people stealing them ...?
... and the portions are tiny!"
"The food here is terrible
Hello! There are already 648 comments on this article. How on earth could you think it isn't news?
Hint to those whose mothers dropped them on their heads when they were very little: it is not necessary for something to be wrong for it to be news.
But then I realized that only some of that wattage is being converted to waste heat - some of it is actually doing the useful work of the processor.
All - 100% - of the energy entering a system must be either stored or dissipated. It makes no difference whether a system is mechanical or electrical. For instance, an elevator (if poorly balanced) could store energy when it is on the top floor, but it would lose it when it travels down again. The stored energy in one trip to the top is trivial compared to the energy input over many cycles.
Strictly, energy doesn't have to be dissipated as heat; it could be shed with higher energy photons. But that does not occur with CPUs. The bottom line is that every watt input to a CPU is shed as heat.
Since it may not be obvious to all readers, be aware that when you can make a program crash by feeding it bad data, you can typically further manipulate the data you are sending it to take control of the program.
;
I agree with you that in practice this is often the case. However, it is not necessarily true; the "bad" data may merely exercise a branch not previously taken. When data is not interpreted as a pointer (or otherwise executed) there can be no control of exectution. For instance, the following snippet is a bug but not necessarily a security breach:
if (some rare condition) {
*0 = (void *)1
}
Not at all; to interpret law is one of the primary functions of a judge. To find and argue interpretations is the main function of a lawyer. This state of affairs is a logical necessity, not a cruel and arbitrary caprice. Humans are not capable of writing laws that require no interpretation. The delicious silliness of your post is that the position you are trying to argue itself requires interpretation. Here is the text of the first amendment:
Speech, press, assembly, and petitions are all mentioned, but for some reason the Internet is not. You have interpreted speech or press in a broad sense to include the Internet. So all you are really saying is that your interpretations are valid, and the Supreme Court's are not.
Social security [...] is nothing but a safety net for people who are financially irresponsible.
So it is, but that "nothing" is extremely important, because most Americans are financially irresponsible. Most think that 15% is a reasonable long-run expectation of average equity return. The Economist claims that recent home buyers in San Francisco think that house prices will rise on average 12-16% per annum over the next decade. The financial press was running a filler piece a few days ago, "25 fascinating facts about debt" (see http://biz.yahoo.com/brn/041006/13873_1.html.) To me, the most interesting of the 25 was this: the net worth of the average 50 year old, counting his home equity, is less than $40,000.
Do you grasp yet that social security is as important for you as it is for the financially irresponsible masses? What do you think would be the social consequences if a large fraction of Americans were unable to afford food and shelter? Existing examples are not far to seek. You would need to pay hundreds of billions in taxes for men with guns to protect your property. You would live in constant fear of being kidnapped. The universal franchise would be a distant memory.
I would also add that sometimes patenting actually serves the greater good [...] if patent law works well (which it may or may not), it both rewards the inventor and adds knowledge to society.
... well that's just the problem, isn't it? Do patents actually do what's advertised on the tin? The assertion is that without the protection offered by patents, clever people would have no incentive to invent new things, and would be obliged to lie about all day watching TV and eating cheezy puffs. But as far as I know, nobody has ever demonstrated this. The theory of patents is in the same family as the theory that says that talented CEOs would have no reason to manage their companies well if they weren't granted vast quantities of risk-free stock options. The evidence is doubtful; there were clever inventions made in the days before patents, and companies run well in the days before stock options.
"If patent law works"
On the other hand, the disadvantages of patents are certain. This is true even when the idea patented is extremely clever and useful. I won't reiterate them here, except to observe that the success of any enterprise is 10% conception and 90% execution, no matter how brilliant the idea. Few inventors understand this. A gifted entrepreneur can make a silk purse from a sow's ear; but silk purses can be hard to sell.
... I can understand that someone with a fundamentalist Christian background could take stands against gay/lesbian marriage ...
Can you? I can't. I mean, let's say you are a fundamentalist christian. Unless you're gay or lesbian, what do you care? How can the mere knowledge that somewhere, somehow, gays are getting married destroy the "values" of your family? Are you worried about sin? How can this ignoble desire to make other people, complete strangers, miserable, without the slightest advantage to yourself be regarded as anything but a sin? Cast out the beam in your own eye.
The whole issue strikes me as an example of misplaced faith in the doctrine of salvation by grace. It's one thing to be saved in spite of your sins; it's quite another to expect to be saved because of them.
Badnarik mentioned eliminating the Federal Reserve. He suggests using the American Liberty Currency as an alternative currency that is backed by gold and silver. I think this is an excellent idea.
... but that's a bad thing. Instead, inflation and deflation would occur randomly as demand for money changed against the capacity to extract gold and silver. We don't have to guess about this; it's exactly what happened in the century and a half before Bretton-Woods. This caused some disasterous depressions in the 19th century.
OK, but why do you think that? I followed your link to find out for myself, and I concluded that this idea is completely kooky. Aside from all the weird rubbish about international bankers etc, why do you think it would be a good idea to yoke the value of your currency to a pair of commodities? Yes, inflation and deflation would no longer be directly controlled by government decisions
In any case, bimetallic standards are inherently unstable, because the intrinsic relative values of gold and silver are not constant; the money in a bimetallic standard can therefore be arbitraged against the underlying commodities.
Or do people ususally go the the great outdoors to get away from this kind of stuff
It's just you. Most people avoid actual contact with the great outdoors, but still want the aura of ruggedness and independence that comes with it. The same people who love SUV's will love SUPDA's.
The faster a substance decays, the more energy it emits. Conversely, substances which only decay very slowly emit very little radiation [...] elements with half-lives measured in millions of years do not typically emit enough radiation to be a threat to humans or to nature. The intensively radioactive products tend to get rid of themselves, so it is the medium intensity materials, such as the infamous Sr-90, with half-lives measured in months to millenia, that are particularly dangerous.
This idealization would be true if the decay products were not themselves radioactive, and did not interact with non-radioactive elements, but things are not so simple. It often happens that a (possibly stable) element has several transumutation possibilities in the presence of neutron bombardment; the neutron cross-section (distribution of neutron energies) will favour some more than others. The neutron cross-section is a function of the relative abundance of the different radioactive isotopes present, and therefore changes as radioactive isotopes decay into different radioactive elements, and as stable isotopes are transmuted into active ones. The interaction within a heterogenous collection of isotopes can be complex.
The bottom line is that radioactive material does not necessarily become monotonically less active over time. The peak of activity can be tens of thousands of years in the future.
Why is it harsh?
Judging from the rest of your post, you are serious, and not just trolling, so I'll reply in the same spirit.
If you crack the software, you pay the consequences.
Yes, but you as the victim don't get to decide what those consequences are - society reserves that privilege. This necessary, because you have a tendency to think that a wrong done to you is more grievous than other people do.
You're not owed anything at that point. As far as ethics is concerned, the app could do anything it wanted.
I assume you mean your app may do anything you> want. No, it may not. The mere failure to fulfill a contract is not a blanket exoneration for the actions of the other party. You may be entitled to financial restitution, but this is linked to the losses you have suffered. You are never entitled to simple revenge.
Look at it this way: if you leased a car, you wouldn't expect it to be legal for the leasing company to rig it to explode when you failed to make a payment, would you?
First of all, it is difficult to argue that Asian banks prop up the dollar as an act of goodwill. Rather, they do so as they have incentive to--dollars and dollar-denominated assets continue to be reasonably stable investments over the long term.
It is the central (government) banks of Asia that are buying treasuries; they are not investing in dollar assets, they are selling their own currencies against USD in order to keep their products cheap for export. Yes, they perceive this as self-interest, but it is debatable whether in the long term this is truly so.
There is something in the theory that they cannot afford to sell these bonds, because doing so would cause an economic catastrophe in the US that would engulf their own countries. However, even if they just stop buying more, USD interest rates will skyrocket - unless the current account deficit can be closed.
The only problem is that so far the unsustainable spending has been sustained, and it shows no signs of slowing [...] a flurry of low, fixed-rate mortgages would appear to be a harbinger of doom, for example, but could easily be advantageous in the long run as consumers stretch now to build equity that will bring them benefit later.
A bubble always takes longer to burst than you think. Mortgage refinancings have in fact declined, the ratio of variable to fixed mortgages has increased, and the "equity" that consumers are "building" is vested in dramatically over-valued property. In short, the US consumer is on the hot rails to hell with his foot on the gas.
The third point ignores that convenient economic x-factor, namely productivity.
No, the third point ignores that economics is not a zero-sum game; as other countries "catch up", the market for US goods and services will increase. It is only in relative terms that the US economy will decline.
Did any of you warning about the cost of living notice that the OP is from the UK? I love the UK, and just as soon as I'm independently wealthy, I'll move there. The OP didn't say where he's from, but if it's the SE then the Valley will be cheaper (and better paid.) The "melting pot" comments are also off base. Yes, there are many people from far-off lands in California on H1B's but the situation hardly compares to London. And don't expect the food to be as good as a top-drawer gastro-pub. Your culture shocks are more likely to be caused by urban planning, because with the exception of a few (very expensive) enclaves, California is a strip mall writ large. (The physical geography is spectacular, of course; the opportunities for outdoor recreation are fantastic.)
The comments about border hassles, however, are spot on. Quite apart from the current security hysteria, coming in to "steal jobs from Americans" often causes problems. Oh, and say goodbye to your five weeks of vacation.
Why is suggesting that people pay the debts they incur according to the terms they agreed to flamebait?
It's not, of course. However, suggesting that other people are justified in breaking the law in order to recover these debts might fairly be considered flamebait.
If you can't afford to pay your bills, don't borrow the money.
That is very sound advice. Also, those of us who have no financial problems like to think of debt as primarily a moral issue - it makes us feel good about ourselves. But it is not always the lender who is the good guy. Consider the following situation. You must be aware that house ownership is a goal of most Americans. Unfortunately, not everyone has sufficient income to achieve this dream. Now if such a person applies for mortgage from an honest institution, they will be told the truth: they can't borrow the money because they won't be able to afford their bills.
This is disappointing, but as you say, you don't need a house - there are cheaper forms of shelter. But what's this? Here's an ad from people who claim you can afford a house! So you call them up, and they offer to lend you the money.
Now if you are a low-income earner, it is quite possible that you are not educated about financial matters; the two things are not uncorrelated. It is possible, therefore, that you will not detect the scam - because that's what it is. Here's how it works. An unscrupulous institution deliberately seeks out customers who can't afford loans, and lends them money. The only restriction is that some money must be put down by the borrower. The loan is structured so that the fees are very high and the down money is applied first to these fees. The borrower has no equity in the house even after making a down payment. The lender then wants the borrower to default - the sooner this happens, the sooner the capital can be recovered and recycled on the next borrower. Meanwhile, the old borrower is bankrupt and will probably be harrassed by collection agencies for residual claims.
The scenario described above is not hypothetical; it is the practice described as "predatory lending." Although legislation has been passed against it, it still occurs under various guises.
Here in europe it is good practice not to drink and drive at the same time. Apparently this is different in the states...
That ain't the half of it, son. I doubt the OP meant drinking xor driving.
... every program they have ever written is a logical system ...
You mean, every program is a logical system, except for the side-effects. I am sympathetic to the sentiment of your post, but as side-effects are usually the point of a program, this is an important caveat. It gets worse: until the day arrives when end-users specify their requirements in a formal system, formal correctness will have little application.