They just named the "piggy bank" T-bills. It's the same thing (at least to accountants).
No, accountants know the difference between cash and bonds. Folks like the OP and other ignoramuses however, are not - leading to the widespread and false belief that"SS does not take from the general fund or contribute to the debt or deficit".
Unless the US defaults on the national debt, the money is there, even if the money isn't there.
greenies roll their eyes when the nukies say "Trust us, we know what we're doing!" because they're really bad at math and choose "fuzzy" bullcrap like "Japan was 'due' for a tsunami over facts".
SS and Medicare are self funding. The taxes earmarked for them pay for them.
I don't know about Medicare, but that's not true of Social Security - because the taxes earmarked for SS, rather than being accumulated in piggy bank until needed, have been "invested" in special Treasury bonds. Unless Congress pays off those bonds, using funds from the discretionary side of the ledger, then SS has no cash to pay out.
So yes, SS contributes directly to both the deficit and the debt. It's only "self funding" in theory.
And as the boomers continue to retire (and living much longer than predicted when they paid into the pool), it's only going to get worse.
I'm not sure how a strawman argument gets a +4 interesting.
I don't find that surprising at all given how deeply you misunderstand the nature of crowdsourcing and your propensity to blame it's failure on the media. (That someone reading something they did not create cannot possibly bear any responsibility for it's creation seems to have escaped you... like so much else.)
That's kinda my point - they couldn't separate the signal from the noise... so the OP's claim of "victory" because they found the signal ex post facto is nonsense.
Don't speak for me - because I don't know it. You actually don't either... but you're not honest enough to admit it. You've satisfied your urge for blood and blame and are ready to move on.
I can summarize your comment very simply: "Crowdsourcing! Crowdsourcing! Rah! Rah! Rah! - but don't look behind the curtains. We got many things wrong, but ignore those. It's not our fault. Crowdsourcing! Crowdsourcing! Rah! Rah! Rah!"
In other words, it's not crowdsourcing that failed - the entire point of crowdsourcing is that you get hundreds of answers, most of which are wrong, but a few of which will be correct
Um, no. The idea behind crowdsourcing is to get many eyes and minds working on a problem in search of a correct solution - many hands make light work, and subject matter experts lurk behind the oddest of usernames. If you fail to find a correct answer, then you've failed. Period.
Since you have no experience with the software - of course you don't see a problem. You just wave your magic wand from your ivory tower and state that it "should not connect to the internet", and *poof* problem solved.
Personally after growing up with and loving the original trilogy, the poorly executed CGI completely killed it for me whilst seemingly adding nothing groundbreaking to the main story.
Not that the original stories were particularly groundbreaking... They were pretty much a collection of long extant tropes strung together with some spectacular (for their time) special effects.
Does a spy camera on the side of the road really justify comparisons to 1984?
Of course it does, this is Slashdot, where "the sky is falling, the sky is falling" is considered a measured, reasonable, and modest response to practically everything. Slashdot users probably accounts for the 10-15% of the annual worldwide sales of tin foil.
Are we really anywhere close to the type of life portrayed in 1984?
Not even close. "1984", like many other such terms, has become a cargo cult buzzword. It's a term of opprobrium now, whose original and full meaning has been lost.
The guy was found when they let people out of their houses and one of them stumbled across the guy. If they had let people out earlier would he have been found earlier?
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they let people out early (to use your terminology but noting nobody was actually restrained as you imply) and the guy heads to work to put in a few hours or to the grocery store... and the normal coming and going of people lets the suspect slip away. Or maybe the guy decides to deal with the boat tomorrow - tonight he's gonna find a game on the tube somewhere and have a beer.,
I know you'd like it to be inevitable that the suspect was found by the same guy, only earlier. But the world doesn't work that way.
"I am the Technology Manager of the Justice Party (sorry, no relationship to the Avengers). We are currently working on our Platform (version 2.0) and I would be interested to know what people in the science and technology field would like to see in a platform of a political party.
When a party tries to crowdsource it's planks - it's doomed, as it's just following the fads. (Doubly so when they claim to be working on V2, and there's not V1 available for reference. There are a lot of pretty buzzwords though.)
When the Technology Manager is the one doing the asking.... well, that's just another nail in the coffin that's already been welded, superglued, bolted, and clamped shut.
Not in so many words, no. But you certainly implied it... and to quote from this message:
Engineering is just taking an idea or concept and making it come into being, that could be as simple as adding a switch to a product to turn it off and on or as big as building a nuclear reactor.
As a kid what are you really going to be able to do to design / build and the answer most people would come up with is "Lego"
You're just making it even more obvious that you seem to believe engineering is about "designing and building" physical stuff.
For instance I'm a computer, electrical and embedded engineer, all three of which aren't "Manly" professions but all of which have a VERY small section of females.
If you could wrap your head around the notion that there's more to engineering than building stuff, and actually bother to read and comprehend my original posting - you'd understand why. It has nothing to do with the selection of toys.
On the other hand girls are given a barbie and a easy bake oven and told to have fun, how is that going to lead to a career in engineering.
The problem isn't the sexism of the toys... the problem is that your default belief seems to be that engineering is only about building Manly Stuff. Engineering is a very broad field and includes processes (like what happens in cooking and why and how to control it) as well as physical stuff. (Not to mention a whole raftload of related scientific disciplines, like food science, diet and nutrition, material science, chemical engineering...)
My sister often wonders what would happened to her had her curiosity about what happens during cooking had been channeled into looking deeper, into the scientific method - rather than just being encouraged to follow the recipes and cook "because she was a girl".
Well guys, take a good look: The government found the right people, in a targeted search, within days
Well, not quite. The government found images of suspects, but weren't (so far as we know) anywhere near actually identifying them. Yes, we have the claim that one of the MIT perpetrators was "a suspect in the bombing"... but we don't know if that's a factual claim (I.E. they positively identified the suspect in the bombing and the perpetrator at MIT as being one and the same) or whether it's a case of mistaken identity (I.E. the suspect in the bombing looks somewhat like the perpetrator at MIT).
I also strongly object to the claim that the government "found the right people" - not only because that claim relies on facts not available to the public, but because the determination of their guilt is done in a court of law before a jury of their peers.
The other nerdy part, the elephant in the room everyone is dancing around, is how the much vaunted "crowdsourced" media got it wrong - badly so. That part will go down the memory hole as people confuse "the authorities going through the photos from the crowds" with "the crowds going through the photos".
The signal to noise ratio, the added noise, the fact that people can start leads anonymously, it all reeks of a really bad, lawless, unaccountable lynch mob.
The only question, is who is surprised at this? Years of 4chan and Anonymous bullying and lulz - and folks expect them to clean up their act when the chips are down? Years of forwarding all manner of complete crap and puerile "analysis" and you expect the crowd to get it right this time? (That's the general "you", not the specific "you" OP.)
So now post hoc you scrub out all those false leads and you clean up all the things you were wrong about. Then when that's done you point out the few leads you were right about. Then you go on and on at length about how 4chan and reddit are the new real sources of journalism.
This has been going on for years... It's about time people started realizing it.
Crowdsourced journalism sucks. It work well for basic fact checking, E.G. "did Senator suchandsuch actually vote for bill thisandthat" (though it usually fails at determining of he voted against it because of the main content or the riders, mostly because to the crowd the world is stark black and white) and suchlike... but beyond that, it's just as biased and screwed up as mainstream media.
What part of "rethink the design of the cell phone network" didn't you understand?
What part of "you have no clue how the universe works" didn't you understand? This has nothing to do with the design of the cell phone network - it's endemic to all networks.
For example, think about the difference between the designs of FTP and Bittorrent. One gets congested when you add too much traffic. The other gets faster.
ROTFLMAO. More traffic means congestion, regardless of the protocol. As above, you have no clue how the universe works. Bitttorrent gets faster not because there is more traffic, but because there are more seeds - widely distributed across the net. This works because unlike cell phone communications, there are a bunch of individual and identical copies distributed and accessed asynchronously.
But when you start aggregating all of the possibilities of "disasters that could happen" in "places they could happen" over a long enough timeline, it becomes more and more certain that something will happen somewhere.
True - but utterly irrelevant because in the real world in a specific place - unlikely events are unlikely. (Or to put it another way, "are you stoned or just stupid to come up with tortuous and sophomoric logic?".) We don't build systems to withstand an aggregate chance, because the systems aren't located in some mythical aggregate place - they're located in a specific place.
But it's silly to say, "Well let's just not bother planning for any kind of unlikely event because unlikely things don't happen." They happen all the time.
The level of clueless it takes to repeat that statement is astounding. (Though it shouldn't be, given your track record.)
Cook's Illustrated, Saveur, Neo,Otaku USA, Shop Notes, Wood, Fine Woodworking, Popular Woodworking, Mother Earth News, Reader's Digest, National Geographic... These are just ones off of the top of my head, and in any given month somewhere between a third and half of them find their way into my shopping cart.
The 'net certainly provides a firehose from which to choose, but for the most part it serves up cold, stale Chicken McNuggets... while magazines still (for the most part) serve perfectly cooked Coq a Vin. Quantity isn't quality.
Maybe we want to rethink the design of the cell network to see if we can come up with something than handles the load better and reroutes in case of congestion.
You have a vast misunderstanding of how the world works... Congestion isn't caused by bad routing, it's caused by too much traffic in too small an area in too short a time for the available capacity to handle. You can't reroute into or out of a congested area - because there aren't any routes to be had.
Or maybe we just want to figure out a way to prioritize certain traffic so "Important" calls go through while the rest fail.
That's been a standard part of telephony for at least half a century.
But unlikely things happen all the time, and when one of them causes a problem, they scream, "WHY DIDN'T WE SEE THIS COMING?" We did see this coming. We decided it wasn't cost-effective to protect ourselves. Pay more attention.
Again, a vast misunderstanding of how the world works. Yes, taken as an average and across the whole country - unlikely events happen on a semi-regular basis. But for an individual location? They're still very unlikely.
And they should also be looking back to Ma Bell's studies on how to staff operators to handle phone calls. They found through a lot of study of real-world traffic that you can't staff for the average volume and successfully handle the calls. Calls tended to cluster, so if you wanted to keep wait times acceptable you had to staff for the peak volumes and accept that that meant you'd have idle capacity a lot of the time. I often get the feeling that the engineering side of the carriers understands this, but the business side doesn't quite grasp the idea of call volume not being a normal distribution.
Except... Ma Bell didn't staff for peak volumes, they staffed for peak average. Even when Ma Bell was a monopoly and swimming in cash, they didn't have enough money to staff for peak volumes because that meant having (IIRC) something like 90%+ of your staff idle 90%+ of the time. (On the long distance trunks, IIRC, the peaks were Mother's Day and Christmas Day (the former far larger than the latter), and both were well over double the normal daily average.) But back then, people accepted that you weren't always able to get through as that was a fact of life and always had been. (By "back then", I mean "when I was a teen" - in the 1970's.) Nowadays however, fast computerized switches and high bandwidth trunks mean that not getting through is something that virtually never happens - leading to the unsupported belief that you're supposed to always get through... no matter what the conditions or how extreme the event.
Bitcoin economies have the real potential to destroy houses of finance and investment that do not respect them. they also implicitly mandate a more even playing field for things like wealth and equality as free market capitalisms inefficiencies and dangers require not just tacid but overt acceptance and understanding. fairer prices for housing and the outright ban on deceptive lending would be nearly impossible to avoid, meaning many forms of credit might not continue to exist.
I hope what ever you're medicating yourself with has only minor side effects... because the quoted material above isn't only barely intelligible, it's also utterly disconnected from the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
No, accountants know the difference between cash and bonds. Folks like the OP and other ignoramuses however, are not - leading to the widespread and false belief that"SS does not take from the general fund or contribute to the debt or deficit".
True, but irrelevant to the matter at hand.
There, fixed that for you.
I don't know about Medicare, but that's not true of Social Security - because the taxes earmarked for SS, rather than being accumulated in piggy bank until needed, have been "invested" in special Treasury bonds. Unless Congress pays off those bonds, using funds from the discretionary side of the ledger, then SS has no cash to pay out.
So yes, SS contributes directly to both the deficit and the debt. It's only "self funding" in theory.
And as the boomers continue to retire (and living much longer than predicted when they paid into the pool), it's only going to get worse.
I don't find that surprising at all given how deeply you misunderstand the nature of crowdsourcing and your propensity to blame it's failure on the media. (That someone reading something they did not create cannot possibly bear any responsibility for it's creation seems to have escaped you... like so much else.)
That's kinda my point - they couldn't separate the signal from the noise... so the OP's claim of "victory" because they found the signal ex post facto is nonsense.
Don't speak for me - because I don't know it. You actually don't either... but you're not honest enough to admit it. You've satisfied your urge for blood and blame and are ready to move on.
I can summarize your comment very simply: "Crowdsourcing! Crowdsourcing! Rah! Rah! Rah! - but don't look behind the curtains. We got many things wrong, but ignore those. It's not our fault. Crowdsourcing! Crowdsourcing! Rah! Rah! Rah!"
Um, no. The idea behind crowdsourcing is to get many eyes and minds working on a problem in search of a correct solution - many hands make light work, and subject matter experts lurk behind the oddest of usernames. If you fail to find a correct answer, then you've failed. Period.
The world you live in, where everyone has endless money, is not the world the rest of us live in.
Since you have no experience with the software - of course you don't see a problem. You just wave your magic wand from your ivory tower and state that it "should not connect to the internet", and *poof* problem solved.
Not that the original stories were particularly groundbreaking... They were pretty much a collection of long extant tropes strung together with some spectacular (for their time) special effects.
Of course it does, this is Slashdot, where "the sky is falling, the sky is falling" is considered a measured, reasonable, and modest response to practically everything. Slashdot users probably accounts for the 10-15% of the annual worldwide sales of tin foil.
Not even close. "1984", like many other such terms, has become a cargo cult buzzword. It's a term of opprobrium now, whose original and full meaning has been lost.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they let people out early (to use your terminology but noting nobody was actually restrained as you imply) and the guy heads to work to put in a few hours or to the grocery store... and the normal coming and going of people lets the suspect slip away. Or maybe the guy decides to deal with the boat tomorrow - tonight he's gonna find a game on the tube somewhere and have a beer.,
I know you'd like it to be inevitable that the suspect was found by the same guy, only earlier. But the world doesn't work that way.
When a party tries to crowdsource it's planks - it's doomed, as it's just following the fads. (Doubly so when they claim to be working on V2, and there's not V1 available for reference. There are a lot of pretty buzzwords though.)
When the Technology Manager is the one doing the asking.... well, that's just another nail in the coffin that's already been welded, superglued, bolted, and clamped shut.
Seriously, WTF?
The problem is, you don't know which filter to apply until long after the fact when the truth has been established by other means.
Not in so many words, no. But you certainly implied it... and to quote from this message:
You're just making it even more obvious that you seem to believe engineering is about "designing and building" physical stuff.
If you could wrap your head around the notion that there's more to engineering than building stuff, and actually bother to read and comprehend my original posting - you'd understand why. It has nothing to do with the selection of toys.
The problem isn't the sexism of the toys... the problem is that your default belief seems to be that engineering is only about building Manly Stuff. Engineering is a very broad field and includes processes (like what happens in cooking and why and how to control it) as well as physical stuff. (Not to mention a whole raftload of related scientific disciplines, like food science, diet and nutrition, material science, chemical engineering...)
My sister often wonders what would happened to her had her curiosity about what happens during cooking had been channeled into looking deeper, into the scientific method - rather than just being encouraged to follow the recipes and cook "because she was a girl".
Well, not quite. The government found images of suspects, but weren't (so far as we know) anywhere near actually identifying them. Yes, we have the claim that one of the MIT perpetrators was "a suspect in the bombing"... but we don't know if that's a factual claim (I.E. they positively identified the suspect in the bombing and the perpetrator at MIT as being one and the same) or whether it's a case of mistaken identity (I.E. the suspect in the bombing looks somewhat like the perpetrator at MIT).
I also strongly object to the claim that the government "found the right people" - not only because that claim relies on facts not available to the public, but because the determination of their guilt is done in a court of law before a jury of their peers.
The other nerdy part, the elephant in the room everyone is dancing around, is how the much vaunted "crowdsourced" media got it wrong - badly so. That part will go down the memory hole as people confuse "the authorities going through the photos from the crowds" with "the crowds going through the photos".
The only question, is who is surprised at this? Years of 4chan and Anonymous bullying and lulz - and folks expect them to clean up their act when the chips are down? Years of forwarding all manner of complete crap and puerile "analysis" and you expect the crowd to get it right this time? (That's the general "you", not the specific "you" OP.)
This has been going on for years... It's about time people started realizing it.
Crowdsourced journalism sucks. It work well for basic fact checking, E.G. "did Senator suchandsuch actually vote for bill thisandthat" (though it usually fails at determining of he voted against it because of the main content or the riders, mostly because to the crowd the world is stark black and white) and suchlike... but beyond that, it's just as biased and screwed up as mainstream media.
When I read that, cryptozoology ("a pseudoscience involving the search for animals whose existence has not been proven") was what sprang to mind...
What part of "you have no clue how the universe works" didn't you understand? This has nothing to do with the design of the cell phone network - it's endemic to all networks.
ROTFLMAO. More traffic means congestion, regardless of the protocol. As above, you have no clue how the universe works. Bitttorrent gets faster not because there is more traffic, but because there are more seeds - widely distributed across the net. This works because unlike cell phone communications, there are a bunch of individual and identical copies distributed and accessed asynchronously.
True - but utterly irrelevant because in the real world in a specific place - unlikely events are unlikely. (Or to put it another way, "are you stoned or just stupid to come up with tortuous and sophomoric logic?".) We don't build systems to withstand an aggregate chance, because the systems aren't located in some mythical aggregate place - they're located in a specific place.
The level of clueless it takes to repeat that statement is astounding. (Though it shouldn't be, given your track record.)
What magazines do I still regularly buy and read?
Cook's Illustrated, Saveur, Neo,Otaku USA, Shop Notes, Wood, Fine Woodworking, Popular Woodworking, Mother Earth News, Reader's Digest, National Geographic... These are just ones off of the top of my head, and in any given month somewhere between a third and half of them find their way into my shopping cart.
The 'net certainly provides a firehose from which to choose, but for the most part it serves up cold, stale Chicken McNuggets... while magazines still (for the most part) serve perfectly cooked Coq a Vin. Quantity isn't quality.
You have a vast misunderstanding of how the world works... Congestion isn't caused by bad routing, it's caused by too much traffic in too small an area in too short a time for the available capacity to handle. You can't reroute into or out of a congested area - because there aren't any routes to be had.
That's been a standard part of telephony for at least half a century.
Again, a vast misunderstanding of how the world works. Yes, taken as an average and across the whole country - unlikely events happen on a semi-regular basis. But for an individual location? They're still very unlikely.
Except... Ma Bell didn't staff for peak volumes, they staffed for peak average. Even when Ma Bell was a monopoly and swimming in cash, they didn't have enough money to staff for peak volumes because that meant having (IIRC) something like 90%+ of your staff idle 90%+ of the time. (On the long distance trunks, IIRC, the peaks were Mother's Day and Christmas Day (the former far larger than the latter), and both were well over double the normal daily average.) But back then, people accepted that you weren't always able to get through as that was a fact of life and always had been. (By "back then", I mean "when I was a teen" - in the 1970's.) Nowadays however, fast computerized switches and high bandwidth trunks mean that not getting through is something that virtually never happens - leading to the unsupported belief that you're supposed to always get through... no matter what the conditions or how extreme the event.
I hope what ever you're medicating yourself with has only minor side effects... because the quoted material above isn't only barely intelligible, it's also utterly disconnected from the real world.