I think most of us would agree this has gotten out of hand. This federal government is completly ignoring the Constitution, and getting more brazen about it each day. As the Court ruled in Marbury vs Madison, "any law repugnant to the Constitution is null and void". Null and void, empty of any validity - because these actions are not within the powers delegated to the government by people, they are without force of law, but are rather unlawful acts by the people commuting them.
Suppose 100 of us or so wanted to start taking action and enlisting others to take action, in an organized way. We would need to start by defining our objective precisely. We'd need a measurable goal, worded such that we could know when that goal had been achieved. It would need to be specific enough that we could all agree to pursue that goal and we'd know we were acting with unity. Unlike the Occupy movement and others, we could stand together with a clear message and a clear goal, knowing where exactly we wished to go would guide our path. Can anyone state in clear, concise and precise language exactly what we'd seek to achieve?
TFS points out that Clinton tried essentially the same thing, but weaker. I see Obama is using the same argument as Clinton. I'm pretty sure Obama was quoting Clinton when he said "despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address, we canâ(TM)t penetrate that, thatâ(TM)s a problem".
I noticed you said you are "European". I'm curious, if you don't mind my asking. How old are you? Did your parents call themselves European, or did they say French/German/Belgian etc.?
> what are your feelings on the rise of brogrammers
We don't have very many data points from which to draw reliable conclusions. We know that essentially all studies show that younger professionals hold fewer gender stereotypes than older ones, so the RISE of such seems quite unlikely. All of the reliable evidence points toward LESS bigotry over time, not more. So the phrase "rise of programmers" is probably factually inaccurate clickbait.
There are of course SOME men and women who have issues with the other gender. Does "some" mean 1/100 people? 1/1000? We don't know. Here's something I do know:
When my boss started her job the group consisted of two guys who had been close friends for years, one loner, and she was the new person. She could have felt left out since the two guys had that close friendship. She could have blamed that on sexism and completely eliminated any chance of a good relationship. Later, when I joined the team, the two friends didn't invite me to join them for lunch either. I'm a guy, so not sexism - they just didn't welcome the new person into their close friendship.
On the other hand, we have that blogger at the conference you mentioned. She heard a guy say something about a tool. She doesn't know what he said, she reports, but she's sure it must have been sexist and inappropriate. I'd be willing to bet that she half-hears a lot of "must be sexism" based on her viewpoint.
So we simply don't know how much of that goes on. I haven't seen it. That may be because I work in Texas, and the ladies whose opinions I respect also work in Texas. I wouldn't be surprised if it were much more common in California or Denver. People from California and Denver SEEM to be much, much more preoccupied with gender and ancestry than we are here in Texas. It's just not something we talk and think a lot about - not in a way that you might consider positive (promoting diversity etc.) and not in a negative way. It's just not something we spend our time on.
That's frustrating, I know. Your complaint appeared to dissapear into a black hole. It actually went into a database. Once in a while they take look at the companies with the most complaints and that sort of thing. They do take action once in a while. Not as much as we'd like, but occasionally.
I found out the FBI does similar for common, ordinary IT attacks involving malware, spear-phishing etc. They don't fully pursue every case individually, but they want to know so that they can spot a TREND of increased spear-phishing in a particular industry or something.
As a Republican, I don't LIKE pointing out that the federal government occasionally does something useful, but I have to be true to the facts.:)
I (barely) qualify as a kernel contributor. Neither Linus nor anyone else involved with the kernel even KNOWS what my racial heritage is*. That's as it should be, because skin complexion doesn't have any effect on the quality of ideas or code. It's simply not relevant. It's a distraction. All this talk about "diversity" is a sneaky way of continuing to divide people into groups based on where their great-great-grandparents were born. It's a stealthily way of keeping racism alive, forcing the politics of division into situations where people don't know or care about your ancient ancestors, they care about getting job done and done well.
I've never seen a penis or vagina produce any code, so we don't need more women in tech, we need more competent people in tech. Competent people like my mother, my boss Rachel, and myself. Rachel has helped solve some tough problems at work. She's never used her boobs to do so, meaning they just aren't relevant.
* also, most Slashdot readers don't know my racial heritage. Some therefore make the most ridiculous and comical accusations, like the idiot the other day who accused me of "dog whistle racism". Apparently he thinks that "planning ahead" == "white". At first that's offensive, for him to imply that my family can't plan ahead because we're too dark. Then I remember living with that kind deeply racist thinking while hating racism and therefore hating yourself must be quite painful. I pity the guy.
TFS asks "it possible that using secure email services can be construed as an indicator of being a terrorist? ", then proceeds to say the police found multiple copies of the anarchist group's books in their houses. So yes, the leads they used DID identify the people they were looking for.
The more interesting question is "how much evidence is sufficient to justify an arrest?"
In the US, standing on the corner of MLK Blvd at night is a VERY strong indicator that one is a crack dealer (if male) or prostitute (if female). It is not, however, sufficient evidence to justify an arrest.
Good policing will involve looking at the totality of many indicators to highlight suspects, then further investigation to determine whether or not the initial indicators were correct. As an example:
A guy stands on the same street corner in the crack district for several hours. Cars pull up, he leans into the car for a few minutes, pulls something out of his pocket, then the car pulls away. After watching this for some time, police drive up to ask him what he's doing out there all night. He runs away as soon as he sees police. At this point we have several indicators - we "know" he's selling crack; with enough confidence that if we wanted to buy crack, we'd go talk to him. Now is the time for police to look into it further, so:
The next night, one of the police officers drives up in an unmarked car, not wearing his uniform. The officer hands the guy a $20 bill without saying anything. The guy hands the officer some crack. Now it's time to arrest the guy.
First, we saw a number of indicators, which let the police know WHO they should have a look at. Next, it was time to see about getting hard evidence one way or the other.
That's essentially how we train local and state police to keep an eye out for indications of possible terrorist activity. If it's hot out and someone is wearing a heavy trenchcoat to a large 4th of July event while walking purposely toward the center of the crowd rather than socialing like everyone else, watch them for a minute. If they walk over to a table and pull something from under their coat and put it under the table, have look. If they walk quickly away from the item they just put under the table... None of these indicators by themselves justify immediate arrest, they DO justify taking a closer look.
I wouldn't put SENSITIVE documents in the cloud. That said:
>Every smartphone has enough CPU power and memory to run a WP in Chrome
FTFY
or:
>Every smartphone has enough CPU power and memory to run an extremely basic WP, without change tracking or any other post-189 features
> Maybe there is a point in having your document stored in 'the cloud'
I first used Google Docs for collaborative editing. Another person and I were both making little edits to the document, sometimes I'd edit it one day and he'd edit it the next, sometimes we were both editing it simultaneously while we were on the phone. When we were taking turns, having it online in Google docs made it easier. When we were collaborating in real-time, having it online was a requirement.
After becoming familiar with Google Docs for collaboration, later I needed to do schoolwork, which I do on my work desktop, my work laptop, my personal laptop, my phone, and occasionally on my tablet. Working on that collection of documents on five different devices, it sure makes sense to have it in the cloud rather than copy it around from device to device whenever I have ten minutes free to work on it.
Again, not so much for sensitive documents, and I like having a local copy (or three) of documents of long-term importance. For school work, personal notes, or anything else that wouldn't be catastrophic if it leaked, Google Docs or similar systems make a lot of sense sometimes.
From TFA "Last Friday, Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), along with Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), signed a letter calling on Holder to end Equitable Sharing."
Where "calling on" means telling him "you can set reasonable rules of your choosing, or we can set them for you".
The one thing that most annoys my client with low vision is updates that cause things to be in different places or look different. Like a touch typist, he relies on memory much more than people with normal sight do. He CAN put his nose to the screen and find the icon for ____, but it's much easier if it's in the same place it has always been.
The Brits needed to keep up with the US. The Americans, being too preoccupied with American Idol and Honey Boo Boo to get a clue about the issues, elected Bush Jr and Obama. Not to be outdone by the Americans, the UK went one stupider with Cameron.
You CAN try to become very educated in not only stocks, but in specific industries, then try to pick the right stocks. Some people do that. If you're good or lucky, you might make quick money. That's not the way I do it, or the way most people do it.
If you pick ANY decade any time in the last 80 years, the indexes never lost money. Which means broad bases mutual funds never lost money. Ever. Over ANY 20 year period, the returns are about the same. For exanple, the economy was booming when Clinton took office, and declining when he left office. The Bush Jr years were similar - good folowed by bad. That's pretty consistent - up and down in the short term, but in the long term you can pretty much guarantee you'll get BOTH, good and bad. And the good years always offset the bad, plus about 9%.
Picking a fund is simple with this boring but always successful approach. You want a no-load index fund. That just means your not paying sales fees, and the fund owns a shitload of different stocks, so you don't care if one does poorly. Bonus points if you pick one with a low "expense ratio", which simply means you're not paying much to the company operating the fund. It's slow, it's boring, and it's how people become millionaires if they don't get a movie deal.
Finding 3:00 to 6:DD in ANY file or device, not just a specific type of log:
grep '[3-6]:[0-9][0-9]
Note we've been doing it that way since the late seventies, so there's nothing for the sysadmins to learn. All files, disks, etc are searched with the same command, and the same one you've always used, on any *nix.
> My understanding is that SystemD makes binary logs for its own purposes, and that the binary features include indexes so it can very quickly answer queries like "what were the last ten things logged by Apache?"
Oh okay, this huge monstrosity is worth it if it does things like make it easy to see the last ten log entries from Apache. Because for the last 35 years we've never been able to do:
tail/var/log/httpd/error_log
Lennart would add a hundred thousand extra lines of code before thinking about "tail".
over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/...
And that includes people who got degrees in African-American Art History! People who chose degrees with a thought toward doing productive work earn even more.
If you apply the SAME type of thinking to choosing which company to work for, choosing the job with the best prospects for advancement rather than the best starting salary, you do even better.
Also, if you apply the SAME type of thinking to choosing which company to work for, choosing the job with the best prospects for advancement rather than the best starting salary, you do even better.
I don't know if BEA will let me deep link, so here's another presentation of the data. The data all comes from the same source. http://www.tradingeconomics.co...
Please note this tells us something important about the effects of each party's policies on the ECONOMY, only. We need to look at other data to comment on party policy effects on social issues such as crime rate or anything else. So it doesn't mean Republicans are better; it doesn't mean you should vote Republican. Unless of course jobs and the economy are your primary concern
If you like the hopeful Democrat ideals, maybe you decide this means you should push your Democrat representatives to set the agenda, but allow Republican bean-counters to calculate the details of how to do it effectively and efficiently. This bit of fact doesn't address any of that, of course. It only shows that Republican policies improve the economy.
over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/...
And that includes people who got degrees in African-American Art History! People who chose degrees with a thought toward doing productive work earn even more.
> Cite, please. Even a $5 cup of coffee a day and a $600 iWhatever per year only add up to ~$2000 per year. Over 40 years, that's $80,000. Can YOU live on $8,000 a year??
Check this out. This is going to blow your mind, and if you're smart, change your life. It comes out to not $80,000, but $733,637.22! Here's the thing:
The first year, you sock away $2,000 in your low-risk index mutual fund. At the end of the year, the money has earned you $180, so at the end of the first year you have $2,180 from that first year. You add $2,000 more from not buying coffee, which is $4,180. Over the next year, that earns $376 of dividends or interest, for $4556 total. Your money expands exponentially!
Even if you just put away $2,000 ONCE, then never add to it, in 40 years that $2,000 turns into $62,819.10. This is how most millionaires became millionaires - by putting away about $200-$500 per month.
Here's a calculator that makes it easy to compute the results of saving different amounts for different periods of time: http://www.daveramsey.com/arti...
Since you mentioned a 40-year time horizon, you can safely use 9% as your interest rate. The market has good years and bad years, but over any 10-20 year period it's rather consistent - you'll get an annualized return of 9% over any long period.
> It is a shame we have only your word that you didn't just, you know, make this all up. You cite no specific figures for any administration, or overall figures
Oh sorry, you don't know how to look up the economic growth rate? You could google "economic growth table" and find the numbers reported everywhere, but the canonical source is the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Here's a link. http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTab...
For your convenience, here are the official BEA numbers labeled the name of which president did the budget for that year: http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...
From 2011-2014, gas dropped from $4 / gallon to to $3.40 / gallon. At the same time, Texas unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9%. So the Texas economy has been getting better while oil prices have been falling.
Since 2007, gas prices have been up and down, sometimes as low as $1.59, sometimes as high as $4.10. Texas has had lower unemployment than the rest of the country the whole time. From 2009-2011 the price of gas doubled - Texas had low employment as the price doubled. From 2007-2008/2009 the price of gas was cut in half. Texas did better than the rest of the country over that period too.
> I'm spending about $5,000 on a vacation now. Because my kids are only kids for a very short period of time.
Did you save up $5,000, so you are now able to do that without worrying about? Or are you putting it on credit, potentially creating a problem for yourself later?
If the former, that's awesome, and an example of the kind of thing I aspire to.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most of us would agree this has gotten out of hand. This federal government is completly ignoring the Constitution, and getting more brazen about it each day. As the Court ruled in Marbury vs Madison, "any law repugnant to the Constitution is null and void". Null and void, empty of any validity - because these actions are not within the powers delegated to the government by people, they are without force of law, but are rather unlawful acts by the people commuting them.
Suppose 100 of us or so wanted to start taking action and enlisting others to take action, in an organized way. We would need to start by defining our objective precisely. We'd need a measurable goal, worded such that we could know when that goal had been achieved. It would need to be specific enough that we could all agree to pursue that goal and we'd know we were acting with unity. Unlike the Occupy movement and others, we could stand together with a clear message and a clear goal, knowing where exactly we wished to go would guide our path. Can anyone state in clear, concise and precise language exactly what we'd seek to achieve?
TFS points out that Clinton tried essentially the same thing, but weaker. I see Obama is using the same argument as Clinton. I'm pretty sure Obama was quoting Clinton when he said "despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address, we canâ(TM)t penetrate that, thatâ(TM)s a problem".
Government is like alcohol - a little bit can make things more pleasant, too much leads to major trouble.
And Ted Kennedy get enough.
I did put a smiley after that comment. Here's why I said that, jokingly. Some people reason as follows:
If some government does one thing good (at a cost of $2 trillion), then ten times as much government will be ten times as good.
Government is like alcohol - a little bit can make things more pleasant, too much leads to major trouble.
I noticed you said you are "European". I'm curious, if you don't mind my asking. How old are you? Did your parents call themselves European, or did they say French/German/Belgian etc.?
> what are your feelings on the rise of brogrammers
We don't have very many data points from which to draw reliable conclusions. We know that essentially all studies show that younger professionals hold fewer gender stereotypes than older ones, so the RISE of such seems quite unlikely. All of the reliable evidence points toward LESS bigotry over time, not more. So the phrase "rise of programmers" is probably factually inaccurate clickbait.
There are of course SOME men and women who have issues with the other gender. Does "some" mean 1/100 people? 1/1000? We don't know. Here's something I do know:
When my boss started her job the group consisted of two guys who had been close friends for years, one loner, and she was the new person. She could have felt left out since the two guys had that close friendship. She could have blamed that on sexism and completely eliminated any chance of a good relationship. Later, when I joined the team, the two friends didn't invite me to join them for lunch either. I'm a guy, so not sexism - they just didn't welcome the new person into their close friendship.
On the other hand, we have that blogger at the conference you mentioned. She heard a guy say something about a tool. She doesn't know what he said, she reports, but she's sure it must have been sexist and inappropriate. I'd be willing to bet that she half-hears a lot of "must be sexism" based on her viewpoint.
So we simply don't know how much of that goes on. I haven't seen it. That may be because I work in Texas, and the ladies whose opinions I respect also work in Texas. I wouldn't be surprised if it were much more common in California or Denver. People from California and Denver SEEM to be much, much more preoccupied with gender and ancestry than we are here in Texas. It's just not something we talk and think a lot about - not in a way that you might consider positive (promoting diversity etc.) and not in a negative way. It's just not something we spend our time on.
That's frustrating, I know. Your complaint appeared to dissapear into a black hole. It actually went into a database. Once in a while they take look at the companies with the most complaints and that sort of thing. They do take action once in a while. Not as much as we'd like, but occasionally.
I found out the FBI does similar for common, ordinary IT attacks involving malware, spear-phishing etc. They don't fully pursue every case individually, but they want to know so that they can spot a TREND of increased spear-phishing in a particular industry or something.
As a Republican, I don't LIKE pointing out that the federal government occasionally does something useful, but I have to be true to the facts. :)
Racist? Do you think only black people go to MLK to buy crack? You're mistaken as to the facts. The white hookers are there too.
It's unfortunate that so many cities have chosen to rename Crack Blvd to MLK Blvd, but they have.
I (barely) qualify as a kernel contributor. Neither Linus nor anyone else involved with the kernel even KNOWS what my racial heritage is*. That's as it should be, because skin complexion doesn't have any effect on the quality of ideas or code. It's simply not relevant. It's a distraction. All this talk about "diversity" is a sneaky way of continuing to divide people into groups based on where their great-great-grandparents were born. It's a stealthily way of keeping racism alive, forcing the politics of division into situations where people don't know or care about your ancient ancestors, they care about getting job done and done well.
I've never seen a penis or vagina produce any code, so we don't need more women in tech, we need more competent people in tech. Competent people like my mother, my boss Rachel, and myself. Rachel has helped solve some tough problems at work. She's never used her boobs to do so, meaning they just aren't relevant.
* also, most Slashdot readers don't know my racial heritage. Some therefore make the most ridiculous and comical accusations, like the idiot the other day who accused me of "dog whistle racism". Apparently he thinks that "planning ahead" == "white". At first that's offensive, for him to imply that my family can't plan ahead because we're too dark. Then I remember living with that kind deeply racist thinking while hating racism and therefore hating yourself must be quite painful. I pity the guy.
TFS asks "it possible that using secure email services can be construed as an indicator of being a terrorist? ", then proceeds to say the police found multiple copies of the anarchist group's books in their houses. So yes, the leads they used DID identify the people they were looking for.
The more interesting question is "how much evidence is sufficient to justify an arrest?"
In the US, standing on the corner of MLK Blvd at night is a VERY strong indicator that one is a crack dealer (if male) or prostitute (if female). It is not, however, sufficient evidence to justify an arrest.
Good policing will involve looking at the totality of many indicators to highlight suspects, then further investigation to determine whether or not the initial indicators were correct. As an example:
A guy stands on the same street corner in the crack district for several hours.
Cars pull up, he leans into the car for a few minutes, pulls something out of his pocket, then the car pulls away.
After watching this for some time, police drive up to ask him what he's doing out there all night.
He runs away as soon as he sees police.
At this point we have several indicators - we "know" he's selling crack; with enough confidence that if we wanted to buy crack, we'd go talk to him. Now is the time for police to look into it further, so:
The next night, one of the police officers drives up in an unmarked car, not wearing his uniform.
The officer hands the guy a $20 bill without saying anything.
The guy hands the officer some crack.
Now it's time to arrest the guy.
First, we saw a number of indicators, which let the police know WHO they should have a look at.
Next, it was time to see about getting hard evidence one way or the other.
That's essentially how we train local and state police to keep an eye out for indications of possible terrorist activity. If it's hot out and someone is wearing a heavy trenchcoat to a large 4th of July event while walking purposely toward the center of the crowd rather than socialing like everyone else, watch them for a minute. If they walk over to a table and pull something from under their coat and put it under the table, have look. If they walk quickly away from the item they just put under the table ...
None of these indicators by themselves justify immediate arrest, they DO justify taking a closer look.
I wouldn't put SENSITIVE documents in the cloud. That said:
>Every smartphone has enough CPU power and memory to run a WP in Chrome
FTFY
or:
>Every smartphone has enough CPU power and memory to run an extremely basic WP, without change tracking or any other post-189 features
> Maybe there is a point in having your document stored in 'the cloud'
I first used Google Docs for collaborative editing. Another person and I were both making little edits to the document, sometimes I'd edit it one day and he'd edit it the next, sometimes we were both editing it simultaneously while we were on the phone. When we were taking turns, having it online in Google docs made it easier. When we were collaborating in real-time, having it online was a requirement.
After becoming familiar with Google Docs for collaboration, later I needed to do schoolwork, which I do on my work desktop, my work laptop, my personal laptop, my phone, and occasionally on my tablet. Working on that collection of documents on five different devices, it sure makes sense to have it in the cloud rather than copy it around from device to device whenever I have ten minutes free to work on it.
Again, not so much for sensitive documents, and I like having a local copy (or three) of documents of long-term importance. For school work, personal notes, or anything else that wouldn't be catastrophic if it leaked, Google Docs or similar systems make a lot of sense sometimes.
From TFA
"Last Friday, Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), along with Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), signed a letter calling on Holder to end Equitable Sharing."
Where "calling on" means telling him "you can set reasonable rules of your choosing, or we can set them for you".
The one thing that most annoys my client with low vision is updates that cause things to be in different places or look different. Like a touch typist, he relies on memory much more than people with normal sight do. He CAN put his nose to the screen and find the icon for ____, but it's much easier if it's in the same place it has always been.
The Brits needed to keep up with the US. The Americans, being too preoccupied with American Idol and Honey Boo Boo to get a clue about the issues, elected Bush Jr and Obama. Not to be outdone by the Americans, the UK went one stupider with Cameron.
You CAN try to become very educated in not only stocks, but in specific industries, then try to pick the right stocks. Some people do that. If you're good or lucky, you might make quick money. That's not the way I do it, or the way most people do it.
If you pick ANY decade any time in the last 80 years, the indexes never lost money. Which means broad bases mutual funds never lost money. Ever. Over ANY 20 year period, the returns are about the same. For exanple, the economy was booming when Clinton took office, and declining when he left office. The Bush Jr years were similar - good folowed by bad. That's pretty consistent - up and down in the short term, but in the long term you can pretty much guarantee you'll get BOTH, good and bad. And the good years always offset the bad, plus about 9%.
Picking a fund is simple with this boring but always successful approach. You want a no-load index fund. That just means your not paying sales fees, and the fund owns a shitload of different stocks, so you don't care if one does poorly. Bonus points if you pick one with a low "expense ratio", which simply means you're not paying much to the company operating the fund. It's slow, it's boring, and it's how people become millionaires if they don't get a movie deal.
Finding 3:00 to 6:DD in ANY file or device, not just a specific type of log:
grep '[3-6]:[0-9][0-9]
Note we've been doing it that way since the late seventies, so there's nothing for the sysadmins to learn. All files, disks, etc are searched with the same command, and the same one you've always used, on any *nix.
> My understanding is that SystemD makes binary logs for its own purposes, and that the binary features include indexes so it can very quickly answer queries like "what were the last ten things logged by Apache?"
Oh okay, this huge monstrosity is worth it if it does things like make it easy to see the last ten log entries from Apache. Because for the last 35 years we've never been able to do:
tail /var/log/httpd/error_log
Lennart would add a hundred thousand extra lines of code before thinking about "tail".
The census bureau reports that:
over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/...
And that includes people who got degrees in African-American Art History! People who chose degrees with a thought toward doing productive work earn even more.
If you apply the SAME type of thinking to choosing which company to work for, choosing the job with the best prospects for advancement rather than the best starting salary, you do even better.
Also, if you apply the SAME type of thinking to choosing which company to work for, choosing the job with the best prospects for advancement rather than the best starting salary, you do even better.
I don't know if BEA will let me deep link, so here's another presentation of the data. The data all comes from the same source.
http://www.tradingeconomics.co...
Please note this tells us something important about the effects of each party's policies on the ECONOMY, only. We need to look at other data to comment on party policy effects on social issues such as crime rate or anything else. So it doesn't mean Republicans are better; it doesn't mean you should vote Republican. Unless of course jobs and the economy are your primary concern
If you like the hopeful Democrat ideals, maybe you decide this means you should push your Democrat representatives to set the agenda, but allow Republican bean-counters to calculate the details of how to do it effectively and efficiently. This bit of fact doesn't address any of that, of course. It only shows that Republican policies improve the economy.
The census bureau reports that:
over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/...
And that includes people who got degrees in African-American Art History! People who chose degrees with a thought toward doing productive work earn even more.
> Cite, please. Even a $5 cup of coffee a day and a $600 iWhatever per year only add up to ~$2000 per year. Over 40 years, that's $80,000. Can YOU live on $8,000 a year??
Check this out. This is going to blow your mind, and if you're smart, change your life. It comes out to not $80,000, but $733,637.22! Here's the thing:
The first year, you sock away $2,000 in your low-risk index mutual fund. At the end of the year, the money has earned you $180, so at the end of the first year you have $2,180 from that first year. You add $2,000 more from not buying coffee, which is $4,180. Over the next year, that earns $376 of dividends or interest, for $4556 total. Your money expands exponentially!
Even if you just put away $2,000 ONCE, then never add to it, in 40 years that $2,000 turns into $62,819.10. This is how most millionaires became millionaires - by putting away about $200-$500 per month.
Here's a calculator that makes it easy to compute the results of saving different amounts for different periods of time:
http://www.daveramsey.com/arti...
Since you mentioned a 40-year time horizon, you can safely use 9% as your interest rate. The market has good years and bad years, but over any 10-20 year period it's rather consistent - you'll get an annualized return of 9% over any long period.
> It is a shame we have only your word that you didn't just, you know, make this all up. You cite no specific figures for any administration, or overall figures
Oh sorry, you don't know how to look up the economic growth rate? You could google "economic growth table" and find the numbers reported everywhere, but the canonical source is the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Here's a link.
http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTab...
For your convenience, here are the official BEA numbers labeled the name of which president did the budget for that year:
http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...
From 2011-2014, gas dropped from $4 / gallon to to $3.40 / gallon.
At the same time, Texas unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9%. So the Texas economy has been getting better while oil prices have been falling.
Since 2007, gas prices have been up and down, sometimes as low as $1.59, sometimes as high as $4.10. Texas has had lower unemployment than the rest of the country the whole time. From 2009-2011 the price of gas doubled - Texas had low employment as the price doubled. From 2007-2008/2009 the price of gas was cut in half. Texas did better than the rest of the country over that period too.
> I'm spending about $5,000 on a vacation now. Because my kids are only kids for a very short period of time.
Did you save up $5,000, so you are now able to do that without worrying about?
Or are you putting it on credit, potentially creating a problem for yourself later?
If the former, that's awesome, and an example of the kind of thing I aspire to.