the flu shot you receive is not going to be the virus you're exposed to this winter. It may be close, but it won't be an exact match (the virus constantly mutates which reminds me - why do fundies want flu shots if they don't believe in evolution?). It may also be way off. Either way, any time you inject something to provoke an immune response, you're taking a risk of getting more than you bargained for. Immune responses to other proteins in the vaccine, an over-reaction because your number has come up, etc.
every time you introduce foreign antigens into the body, you increase the odds of auto-immune responses. Look at dogs whose owners are stupid enough to have their dogs vaccinated annually - they have a higher incidence of both arthritis and lepto-spirosis. Sometimes, that which doesn't kill you makes you weaker, not stronger, in the long run;
not every pathogen is amenable to vaccines. The body only has a bit more than a couple of hundred different templates to match up against diseases. If you don't have the right template, a vaccine simply isn't possible.
The first contact with a foreign agent may just prime the system for a fatal over-reaction the next time in some people. Think about bee and wasp stings, or injectable iodine for CAT scans, as examples.
people die from the flu every year. Millions. H1N1 doesn't look to be any worse, statistically, than the average flu. People are confusing people coming down with H1N1 with people dying from it. They're also using H1N1 as a "grab-bag" for deaths. Of the 151 original fatal cases in Mexico, turns out 145 were NOT from H1N1. Big difference between 151 and 6. What we're seeing is the same herd mentality we've seen in the housing bubble, and the internet stock bubble.
In other words, while I agree with some vaccines, I don't agree with flu vaccines. The virus mutates too quickly, and we'd be better of practicing proper hygene to limit its' spread. Wash you hands, stop picking your nose, don't share cups, plates, utensils, mice, keyboards, phones, teach people not to rub their eyes with their hands (great way to get that bug you picked up off a door handle into your body), don't allow people to come into work or school sick ("but I don't want to waste a sick day being sick whaaa!!!"), get plenty of fresh air, good food, and exercise, make sure that work places and bedrooms are well ventilated, and stay away from smokers.
It's just common sense - but too often, we just want a pill because it's less work.
Repeatedly injecting foreign substances to provoke immune responses has also been implicated in rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases later in life.
And no, doctors aren't necessarily up on the latest and greatest. Look how many decades they told people with peptic ulcers to see a shrink to learn to handle stress. The flat-out refused to believe that ulcers were caused by an infection. Ditto with certain forms of cancer and viruses. Heck, they thought they could "cure" gays and lesbians for over a century. Some even wanted to "cure" the "disease" of being left-handed up until a decade ago.
Even now, some doctors are saying thatyou should pick your nose and eat it, despite the fact that the boogers are there FOR YOUR PROTECTION, and picking your nose short-circuits that process, damages tissue (allowing direct access to the blood stream), and helps spread contaminants (stop wiping your snot all over the place - it's like a culture medium for bacteria).
In other words, doctors can also fall victim to simplistic logical fallacies. Or are you going to start picking your nose and chewing it because some doctor mistakenly thinks it's the right thing to do?
Actually, those mouthwash commercials are bogus. Gargling with crap like Listerine (active ingredient - 27% booze) actually strips the mouth and throat of a protective layer of mucous, and can contribute not only to you catching diseases, but also to a higher risk of throat cancer.
Booze is for drinking, not spitting out.
If you have to gargle, use a salt-water solution. It's cheaper, safer, and also environmentally friendlier than mouth wash.
I'm a healthy skeptic. In both senses of the word. Never had a flu shot, because I don't buy into the hype - I do my research when something doesn't make sense, and this whole H1N1 crap has been exaggerated from the beginning.
"151 dead from Swine Flu in Mexico", on recounting, turned out to be 6.
turns out that a lot of the numbers from around the world were similarly inflated. Also, people "coming down with H1N1" isn't the same as people dying from it. Millions die from the flu every year. Why the big panic for a flu that is no worse than average? Money!!!
Get people panicking, and you can profit from it. Ask DHS, Blackwater, etc.
I'll stick with preventative measures, as opposed to a shot that may or may not be effective this season
Seems to me that if his house burns down, he's screwed even if his terabyte of pr0n is backed up "in the cloud somewhere."
Why? He'd just restore it from where it is. Might take a little while, but better than losing it (assuming it's something that matters, not pr0n).
He's GOT NO FUCKING HOUSE! How is that *not* screwed?
Or is he going to restore his house "from the cloud?"
The cloud is a dumb idea. It was originally supposed to be everyone's computer, as a distributed system, not some client-server shit that these companies are trying to intermediate themselves into as a substitute for coming up with something better.
In other words, your computer and thousands of others would devote some bandwidth and storage to backing up chunks of each other's data, sharing where appropriate, making available to the wolrd+dog where appropriate. Files that you want backed up would be broken up into redundant little pieces, and distributed among your peers, and in return, you'd do the same for others.
When it comes time to restore, you'd restore from the various chunks out there, and since there's lots of redundancy, and lots of bandwidth (since each box is only contributing a small chunk), restores would be as fast as your downlink.
Instead, the cloud has been taken from its' natural setting by companies who want to be for-profit gate-keepers, even though, by their very nature, they will do a worse job (less redundancy, not geographically spread out, etc.)
The web really should become read/write, like it was supposed to be in its' original design.
... or they could install sinks and hand-washing stations in every room.
More people pick up infections in the hospital than anywhere else, and one of the reasons is that basic sanitary procedures are lacking. Simple things, like doctors washing their hands after contact with a patient (and those clipboards holding charts have a LOT of nasty bugs floating on them).
Simply having doctors washing their hands between patients reduced infections by 20% in one study.
Then again, we have grown adults who still insist on picking their nose and eating their boogers at traffic lights. Ask any cop who's done time in a patrol car.
Aggressive vaccinations result in higher incidence of auto-immune diseases over the long term. That's why you shouldn't give your dog annual rabies shots if you want to reduce the risk of arthritis (plus, the shot is good for 10 years, and even the vets will admit that anything over every 3 years is pushing it).
ANY time you introduce foreign proteins into a host, you're going to provoke an immune response, and the more often you do, the more likely you are to have "your number come up" wrt provoking the wrong type of immune response - one where your body fails to differentiate between the foreign protein, and your own.
Wash your hands, don't pick your nose, stay away from people who show symptoms, don't share your keyboard, mouse, cell phone, or cup, get plenty of fresh air and exercise, eat right, have adequate ventilation, stay away from smokers, have a glass of something alcoholic every day or two, and you'll be fine, and you'll lower your chances of rheumetoid arthritis in your old age.
If everyone had the flu shot, there would be no more flu.
If more people have the flu shot, there will be less flu than there is now.
Absolutely not true. Try some prevention for a change. Get people to wash their hands, stop picking their nose, and stay at home when they're sick. Don't share mice, keyboards, phones. Stop with the "pair programming" where you're breathing down each others' backs. The flu shot is a crap-shoot in terms of effectiveness, and stats show that this latest virus is no more fatal than the average.
For example, of the 151 cases in Mexico when it first started, upon re-examination, only 6 were swine flu.
This tendancy to report ANYTHING as "possibly H1N1 - PANIC!!!" is stupid. I've never had a flu shot, and never will. And if you've had one, keep away from me - you're more, not less, likely to have a compromised immune system in the long run if you get annual flu shots.
I just bought a terabyte drive for $100 to back up the other terabyte drive I bought several months ago for $160. Now everything is backed up in multiple. And I can access it without getting online. And I don't have to worry about my cloud storage company going out of business and taking all my data with it.
And if your house burns down, you're screwed.
Seems to me that if his house burns down, he's screwed even if his terabyte of pr0n is backed up "in the cloud somewhere."
Put things in perspective.
Just buy a few hdds, rotate them out, drop them off at a friends, or if you're really paranoid, a safety deposit box., Cheap, off-site, and better redundancy. Also, since the backups are hours instead of months, they're actually going to be useful.
Within a week or so all the cameras would be mapped out. It's not like they're not fixed, and you can't, you know, see what they're looking at. Someone would start a web site and ask people to identify stills from each camera to geotag them. Oops - already been done. Then people will start sharing video feeds. ("Want to know what the traffic's like at the corner of 1st and Main? Click here.")
(you can't blackmail someone if you don't know who they are).
They won't stay anonymous for long. Look how quickly dog-shit girl was identified. Once you have the location, you start following the person via cam.
Then there's the whole DoS of the cameras issue. It's been done. A lot of cameras have their own web-server.
This is just a bad idea on top of another bad idea.
so anyone who deals with outside organisations on a regular basis needs MS Office.
Not to b too harsh, but this is not true - nobody complains when I send them a.doc that was created with OO (though I keep the original in.odt format).
Most spreadsheets are not that complicated, and will also work just fine.
The only difference between most.docs produced by Word and by OpenOffice is that the OO one is MUCH smaller.
Of course, now that the US has gone about and socialized/intervened in so much of their economy (auto makers, banks, insurance companies, real estate) they make us look like wild crazy capitalist swine. United Statist Amerika.
I just hope that things don't go completely to hell in a hand-basket down there - Celine Dion might decide to move back!
If you can tell someone what you do, and they dont understand what you do, then you need to work on selling your skills.
You're assuming that the headhunter is even mildly competent in the field of interest that they're trying to fill the job for.
Most of them think:
the Internet == the Web == Internet Explorer,
that programming is "typing stuff in the computer (how hard can it be?)",
that Java == JavaScript,
that a server is the waiter/waitress who brings them their food,
that you don't know how to use a spelling checker because you left out the "a" in "perl" (but as a favour they'll "fix it" for you),
that you have an anger management problem if you're "proficient in bash",
that a file system is the same as a "filing system",
that the one true format is.doc,
that "plain text format" == Word,
that the command line is only used by crackers,
that hackers == crackers,
that unix were castrated slaves in ancient Rome,
that a database is "like a Rolodex",
that since even they can draw pretty diagrams using Access, that databases are easy,
that PowerPoint doesn't make you stupid,
that lying (padding, stretching the truth, anything that might make them a sale) is okay
So, where do these people come from? If you haven't figured it out by now, they're RealtWhores who ended up in a different job. Just like RealtWhores, they almost always add no value, you can't expect them to be honest because their interests conflict with yours, it's ultimately all about "getting the listing", and with the Internet, they're quickly becoming obsolete.
In six months, we are able to hire 9 people instead of 4 if we can get a 20% discount.
Somehow, the math doesn't add up... let's use small, easy, round numbers.
Jane goes to the store to buy chocolate bars. Instead of $1 each, they're on sale for 20% less. Instead of 4 for $4, she can now buy 5 for the same $4.
Possible scenarios:
4 of the 5 original hires are pregnant, and you add their unborn in your body count.
One or more suffer from MPD.
The job doesn't require warm bodies, 4 are dead, so you don't have to pay them, just keep them from thawing out
if you are lying on my behalf your behavior reflects on me and i do not tolerate that kind of horseshit.
Here's what I've said when people ask me to lie for them: "No. If I'm willing to lie for you, then I'm willing to lie to you."
I simply don't trust someone who's willing to lie "for me" - especially in the instance cited - where the headhunter is really lying for himself - he wants the $$$.
We have tens of millions of people with buyers' remorse and wrecked finances, and a global financial meltdown, because their mortgage broker lied "for" them.
"Can I move there? I'm tired of the idiots surrounding me in the US.... I hear you don't actually kill your people in the name of insurance corp profits as well."
Take the test:
There's a number of steps that could be taken to fix the US, but lets face it, ain't gonna happen:
Cut military spending by 50% (the military uses 97% of all the energy used by the feds). Total spending is between 900 billion and 1.2 trillion. Savings - around $500 billion annually
Take HALF the money spent on the military and divert it to exploration - space and ocean. These have a better long-term payback in terms of jobs - Cost - around $250 billion, but it will revitalize education, tech, etc.
Remove the deduction for interest paid on home loans - it's really a subsidy from renters (who were more prudent) to owners - savings of $80 billion a year.
Stop bailing out homeowners and banks and wall street; you got greedy, you pay the price. Instead of making housing less affordable with subsidies (which just keeps the price artificially high), let the market find the true price - a price where investors can make money, and people aren't afraid that the price might drop even more. Savings - $500 billion.
End the health-care debate. Medicaid for everyone, mandatory to be enrolled in it, sliding fee scale. Charge enough so that you can cover the administration costs. Total cost will be less than is currently spent right now by the country, but it will cover everyone. Savings - $15 billion a year.
Stop worrying about the stock market. Most jobs are created by small business. Worry about THEM instead. Make it clear that Wall Street is on its' own, that firms and banks that fail will be nationalized, not bailed out, and that people WILL go to jail if they've committed crimes, not get golden parachutes. Savings - priceless.
Electoral finance reform - no more PACs. Individuals only, limit of $3k per annum per person.
Tell California no more fed money whatsoever if Prop. 13 isn't rescinded. No need to bail out Cali in 2 years.
Total savings would be (after spending) at least $850 billion. The 4 biggest biggest porkers - military contractors, finance, health care, and politicians - should have to go on a lean diet, rather than starving out the rest of the country.
Of course, ain't gonna happen Politicians don't want to lose those precious campaign bribes.
Riiight - this from the country that's going to default on its' debt by 2020. Not going to happen.
Fix your problems. Stop electing crack-heads for president (that's 3 terms in a row now). Stop letting Wall Street dictate what's best for America. Stop letting lobbyists dictate health-care policies that run contrary to the country's best long-term interest. Stop believing that a GED means anything. Stop giving taxpayer money to the people who helped cause the economic melt-down by their scams. Start charging people for mortgage fraud, rather than helping them stay in homes illegally gotten. Start nationalizing the banks and firms that were at the heart of the mortgage bubble. Stop allowing hedging on investments that you don't own a direct interest in. Stop allowing lobbyists to fund electoral campaigns.
In other words, start cleaning up your own mess like any grown adult should. Your patent system, the DMCA, etc., are just the tip of the iceberg.
The "hybrid vehicle" claim trail goes back to 1999. However, working implementations were already in use in the '70s. The patent on the "device" in the claim should never have been granted.
Look in the dead tree files for buses powered by an engine+electric motors to drive the wheels, among other things.
So since the original patent is bogus - prior art from several decades before the original claim was filed - so is "preheating the engine".
the USPTO is broken. Fortunately, within the next decade, the rest of the world won't care. The dollar will continue its' historic devaluation in inverse lock-step with the national debt. Look for it to be work +/- 20 cents in terms of today's purchasing power by the end of the next decade. (Not so surprising when you consider that in the last 40 years, it's lost over 90% of its' purchasing power, and by some measures, over 96%).
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In other words, while I agree with some vaccines, I don't agree with flu vaccines. The virus mutates too quickly, and we'd be better of practicing proper hygene to limit its' spread. Wash you hands, stop picking your nose, don't share cups, plates, utensils, mice, keyboards, phones, teach people not to rub their eyes with their hands (great way to get that bug you picked up off a door handle into your body), don't allow people to come into work or school sick ("but I don't want to waste a sick day being sick whaaa!!!"), get plenty of fresh air, good food, and exercise, make sure that work places and bedrooms are well ventilated, and stay away from smokers.
It's just common sense - but too often, we just want a pill because it's less work.
Read what you wrote - "They prime your own immune system to start building up the immunities on its own." Unfortunately, antibodies aren't all that discrete. For example, the same antibody reaction that's been implicated in type one (juvenile) diabetes, where cows milk ends up leaking into the infants' bloodstream and provoking an antibody reaction; later on in life, the same antibodies start destroying the isles of langrahen; once enough are gone, no more insulin production.
Repeatedly injecting foreign substances to provoke immune responses has also been implicated in rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases later in life.
And no, doctors aren't necessarily up on the latest and greatest. Look how many decades they told people with peptic ulcers to see a shrink to learn to handle stress. The flat-out refused to believe that ulcers were caused by an infection. Ditto with certain forms of cancer and viruses. Heck, they thought they could "cure" gays and lesbians for over a century. Some even wanted to "cure" the "disease" of being left-handed up until a decade ago.
Even now, some doctors are saying thatyou should pick your nose and eat it, despite the fact that the boogers are there FOR YOUR PROTECTION, and picking your nose short-circuits that process, damages tissue (allowing direct access to the blood stream), and helps spread contaminants (stop wiping your snot all over the place - it's like a culture medium for bacteria).
In other words, doctors can also fall victim to simplistic logical fallacies. Or are you going to start picking your nose and chewing it because some doctor mistakenly thinks it's the right thing to do?
Actually, those mouthwash commercials are bogus. Gargling with crap like Listerine (active ingredient - 27% booze) actually strips the mouth and throat of a protective layer of mucous, and can contribute not only to you catching diseases, but also to a higher risk of throat cancer.
Booze is for drinking, not spitting out.
If you have to gargle, use a salt-water solution. It's cheaper, safer, and also environmentally friendlier than mouth wash.
I'm a healthy skeptic. In both senses of the word. Never had a flu shot, because I don't buy into the hype - I do my research when something doesn't make sense, and this whole H1N1 crap has been exaggerated from the beginning.
"151 dead from Swine Flu in Mexico", on recounting, turned out to be 6.
turns out that a lot of the numbers from around the world were similarly inflated. Also, people "coming down with H1N1" isn't the same as people dying from it. Millions die from the flu every year. Why the big panic for a flu that is no worse than average? Money!!!
Get people panicking, and you can profit from it. Ask DHS, Blackwater, etc.
I'll stick with preventative measures, as opposed to a shot that may or may not be effective this season
He's GOT NO FUCKING HOUSE! How is that *not* screwed?
Or is he going to restore his house "from the cloud?"
The cloud is a dumb idea. It was originally supposed to be everyone's computer, as a distributed system, not some client-server shit that these companies are trying to intermediate themselves into as a substitute for coming up with something better.
In other words, your computer and thousands of others would devote some bandwidth and storage to backing up chunks of each other's data, sharing where appropriate, making available to the wolrd+dog where appropriate. Files that you want backed up would be broken up into redundant little pieces, and distributed among your peers, and in return, you'd do the same for others.
When it comes time to restore, you'd restore from the various chunks out there, and since there's lots of redundancy, and lots of bandwidth (since each box is only contributing a small chunk), restores would be as fast as your downlink.
Instead, the cloud has been taken from its' natural setting by companies who want to be for-profit gate-keepers, even though, by their very nature, they will do a worse job (less redundancy, not geographically spread out, etc.)
The web really should become read/write, like it was supposed to be in its' original design.
... or they could install sinks and hand-washing stations in every room.
More people pick up infections in the hospital than anywhere else, and one of the reasons is that basic sanitary procedures are lacking. Simple things, like doctors washing their hands after contact with a patient (and those clipboards holding charts have a LOT of nasty bugs floating on them).
Simply having doctors washing their hands between patients reduced infections by 20% in one study.
Then again, we have grown adults who still insist on picking their nose and eating their boogers at traffic lights. Ask any cop who's done time in a patrol car.
Aggressive vaccinations result in higher incidence of auto-immune diseases over the long term. That's why you shouldn't give your dog annual rabies shots if you want to reduce the risk of arthritis (plus, the shot is good for 10 years, and even the vets will admit that anything over every 3 years is pushing it).
ANY time you introduce foreign proteins into a host, you're going to provoke an immune response, and the more often you do, the more likely you are to have "your number come up" wrt provoking the wrong type of immune response - one where your body fails to differentiate between the foreign protein, and your own.
Wash your hands, don't pick your nose, stay away from people who show symptoms, don't share your keyboard, mouse, cell phone, or cup, get plenty of fresh air and exercise, eat right, have adequate ventilation, stay away from smokers, have a glass of something alcoholic every day or two, and you'll be fine, and you'll lower your chances of rheumetoid arthritis in your old age.
Absolutely not true. Try some prevention for a change. Get people to wash their hands, stop picking their nose, and stay at home when they're sick. Don't share mice, keyboards, phones. Stop with the "pair programming" where you're breathing down each others' backs. The flu shot is a crap-shoot in terms of effectiveness, and stats show that this latest virus is no more fatal than the average.
For example, of the 151 cases in Mexico when it first started, upon re-examination, only 6 were swine flu.
This tendancy to report ANYTHING as "possibly H1N1 - PANIC!!!" is stupid. I've never had a flu shot, and never will. And if you've had one, keep away from me - you're more, not less, likely to have a compromised immune system in the long run if you get annual flu shots.
Seems to me that if his house burns down, he's screwed even if his terabyte of pr0n is backed up "in the cloud somewhere."
Put things in perspective.
Just buy a few hdds, rotate them out, drop them off at a friends, or if you're really paranoid, a safety deposit box., Cheap, off-site, and better redundancy. Also, since the backups are hours instead of months, they're actually going to be useful.
Nothing worse than restoring from old data.
Within a week or so all the cameras would be mapped out. It's not like they're not fixed, and you can't, you know, see what they're looking at. Someone would start a web site and ask people to identify stills from each camera to geotag them. Oops - already been done. Then people will start sharing video feeds. ("Want to know what the traffic's like at the corner of 1st and Main? Click here.")
They won't stay anonymous for long. Look how quickly dog-shit girl was identified. Once you have the location, you start following the person via cam.
Then there's the whole DoS of the cameras issue. It's been done. A lot of cameras have their own web-server.
This is just a bad idea on top of another bad idea.
Not to b too harsh, but this is not true - nobody complains when I send them a .doc that was created with OO (though I keep the original in .odt format).
Most spreadsheets are not that complicated, and will also work just fine.
The only difference between most .docs produced by Word and by OpenOffice is that the OO one is MUCH smaller.
It's Kanuckistan, you ignorant clod!
With a "K", Tabernac! :-)
Of course, now that the US has gone about and socialized/intervened in so much of their economy (auto makers, banks, insurance companies, real estate) they make us look like wild crazy capitalist swine. United Statist Amerika.
I just hope that things don't go completely to hell in a hand-basket down there - Celine Dion might decide to move back!
Not just MRIs. Plastic surgeons as well ...
The same mindset that would have allowed for open source would have allowed for other "breaking the government waste" pattern activities.
Why buy and maintain MS-Office licenses when there's a better, free, alternative? Teh "Because ..." mentality.
Rogers had an exclusive deal to sell iPhones in Canada. Starting in November, Bell and Telus will also be selling iPhones.
Interestingly enough, Bell's existing network is CDMA, not GSM. Bell and Telus partnered to build a new HSPA network to compete with Rogers.
bthis time, please use a nuke so we're guaranteed to see the dust plume.
After all, nuking them from orbit is the only way to be sure!
You're assuming that the headhunter is even mildly competent in the field of interest that they're trying to fill the job for.
Most of them think:
So, where do these people come from? If you haven't figured it out by now, they're RealtWhores who ended up in a different job. Just like RealtWhores, they almost always add no value, you can't expect them to be honest because their interests conflict with yours, it's ultimately all about "getting the listing", and with the Internet, they're quickly becoming obsolete.
Somehow, the math doesn't add up ... let's use small, easy, round numbers.
Jane goes to the store to buy chocolate bars. Instead of $1 each, they're on sale for 20% less. Instead of 4 for $4, she can now buy 5 for the same $4.
Possible scenarios:
Or maybe it's that GED math ...
Here's what I've said when people ask me to lie for them: "No. If I'm willing to lie for you, then I'm willing to lie to you."
I simply don't trust someone who's willing to lie "for me" - especially in the instance cited - where the headhunter is really lying for himself - he wants the $$$.
We have tens of millions of people with buyers' remorse and wrecked finances, and a global financial meltdown, because their mortgage broker lied "for" them.
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/index.asp
Total savings would be (after spending) at least $850 billion. The 4 biggest biggest porkers - military contractors, finance, health care, and politicians - should have to go on a lean diet, rather than starving out the rest of the country.
Of course, ain't gonna happen Politicians don't want to lose those precious campaign bribes.
n/t
Riiight - this from the country that's going to default on its' debt by 2020. Not going to happen.
Fix your problems. Stop electing crack-heads for president (that's 3 terms in a row now). Stop letting Wall Street dictate what's best for America. Stop letting lobbyists dictate health-care policies that run contrary to the country's best long-term interest. Stop believing that a GED means anything. Stop giving taxpayer money to the people who helped cause the economic melt-down by their scams. Start charging people for mortgage fraud, rather than helping them stay in homes illegally gotten. Start nationalizing the banks and firms that were at the heart of the mortgage bubble. Stop allowing hedging on investments that you don't own a direct interest in. Stop allowing lobbyists to fund electoral campaigns.
In other words, start cleaning up your own mess like any grown adult should. Your patent system, the DMCA, etc., are just the tip of the iceberg.
Look in the dead tree files for buses powered by an engine+electric motors to drive the wheels, among other things.
So since the original patent is bogus - prior art from several decades before the original claim was filed - so is "preheating the engine".
the USPTO is broken. Fortunately, within the next decade, the rest of the world won't care. The dollar will continue its' historic devaluation in inverse lock-step with the national debt. Look for it to be work +/- 20 cents in terms of today's purchasing power by the end of the next decade. (Not so surprising when you consider that in the last 40 years, it's lost over 90% of its' purchasing power, and by some measures, over 96%).