Now how this all equates to breaking the sound barrier, I have no idea. As other posters said, at the extreme altitudes he's starting at his TV will be quite significant. However the speed of sound is also a lot less at those heights.
They're just dicking with you - it's a publicity stunt. The speed of sound at sea level is 343 meters per second at STP. However at say 40,000 to 80,000 feet, the velocity you need to travel at is much greater to reach the sound barrier, since the air is 1) colder and 2) less dense. According to some charts, the "speed of sound" is 1147.6 knots which is 2125 km/h which is 590.27 meters per second. So to reach the "sound barrier" (and all the associated resistances), you need to reach that velocity. However you will notice that even if you get partly there - 400 meters per second, you have technically broken the "sea level" speed of sound.
Since the air is less dense, terminal velocity is higher the higher you are - after all terminal velocity is the balance between the downward force provided by gravitation acting on your mass, and the opposite resisting force that is a function of your velocity, the density of the medium you are traveling through, your shape, and thus cross sectional area. Since the air is much less dense, terminal velocity will accordingly be higher. I'm not a physicist so I can't whip out the formulas but a bit of googling should do it.
So it's a trick. He will NOT break the sound barrier - that would involve him heating up a great deal and probably being torn apart. After all, he's not made of titanium. However it is possible he will travel at > 343 meters per second at some point during his flight. But saying he will travel "faster than sound" is just marketing BS.
Gaming experience is highly subjective, and therefore there is no way to measure it. Therefore you are attempting to measure a subjective gaming experience by measuring objective quantities associated with a game: time played versus cost of game, etc. However these are not necessarily indicators of a good gaming experience, any number of other subjective variables come into play, such as attention span, willingness to become involved in the game world or user interface, etc.
In other words, you could pay professionals to do expensive market research into what makes a "good" game rather than just asking slashdot, and still walk away with doubts - because after all there's always the chance that 1) people who are willing to take time to answer surveys and participate in research do not necessarily represent your target market and 2) people lie on surveys.
There's no sure thing to any business venture - it always involves risk. Common sense (and looking at past successes) should tell the game maket what people want. But if you stick to that, you'll just keep making newer versions of the same product, the gamers will get bored. So innovation is also necessary. But there's no way to be absolutely certain about what makes a "good" game. Usually when you try to make everyone happy, however, you end up disappointing everyone. Look at a game like Falcon 4.0: it never sold much, it was over priced, and it was complicated as hell. And yet no other fighter jet simulation comes close, it has a loyal fan base, it has been modded so far from the original that several different, stand alone games now exist based on the old original Falcon 4. We're talking over 10 years later, which is a lifetime for computer games, and many people (myself included) still play it. But it's a niche game, with very loyal (but very few) followers. Then look at something (I will stick to combat sims) aimed at a broader market: Combat Flight Simulator 3. Without modding, it is generally considered a flop for many reasons, despite having an adequate user interface, adequate flight models, adequate graphics, etc. However it did not excel at anything. It tried to please the arcade type gamer and the "hard core" gamer, and failed at both.
Your freedom of speech doesn't give you the right to harass other people.
See, this is where the trouble begins. What does harassment mean, exactly? Let's see, according to some dictionaries:
1. to disturb persistently; torment, as with troubles or cares; bother continually; pester; persecute. 2. to trouble by repeated attacks, incursions, etc., as in war or hostilities; harry; raid.
But we've only changed one ambiguous word with several others. What does "disturb" mean? 1. to interrupt the quiet, rest, peace, or order of; unsettle. 2. to interfere with; interrupt; hinder: Please do not disturb me when I'm working. 3. to interfere with the arrangement, order, or harmony of; disarrange: to disturb the papers on her desk. 4. to perplex; trouble: to be disturbed by strange behavior.
Very well, so if I crash my car near your house at 6am and the noise wakes you up, I have "interrupted your rest" and therefore I have "harassed" you. Or if you are about to do something illegal and I interfere with you so that you don't do it, I am also harassing you. Or if I ask you a riddle that perplexes you, I am harassing you.
In fact, harassment is completely subjective. It's not good to put subjective words into law. If I punch you in the face and cause visible damage, that is objective. If I take something that you can prove is yours, that's objective. But what about "harassment"? Some people are completely intolerant and consider themselves "harassed" at the drop of a hat. Others are far more tolerant. Still others never feel "harassed".
I think that people who talk on the cell phone are rude. Yet I don't feel harassed when it happens. I think that many people lack basic manners and a reasonable education, yet this doesn't harass me. However when a government writes ambiguous laws and I am forced to rely on the "common sense" of a judge, I do feel harassed when it turns out that there are some real idiots on the bench.
So along come these anonymization services so we can have an online presence without giving up our privacy -- and now that's been declared illegal?
From the header:
Although the ruling does not make use of WHOIS privacy illegal, it does serve as a clear message from the court that coupling the use of privacy services with intentional spamming will likely result in a violation of the CAN-SPAM act.
It is so small that it produces a very minimal amount of horsepower, which is not useful for any actual way.
Unless of course you have several billion of them on a gram sized object. If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card.
The concept is an exciting one. Sci fi has been toying with the idea of "wrist pads" and other wearable sophisticated electronics for decades now. However a fundamental problem remains: the power source. Although some effort is being made in that area too. I just don't want to think about where they're planning on storing the batteries...
If you know anything at all about security, you won't let your data be stored on someone else's computers and travel on someone else's network in the first place. (Spoken in the voice of Fat Tony) Off-site storage is absolutely necessary, but there are other, more expensive, more tedious, but far more secure methods of keeping your data off site. And please don't keep a paper trail.
I think you can legally get MASM (Microsoft Macro Assembler) somewhere on the internet for free. A good place to start would be Microsoft. Then you can do what real coders do, and teach yourself!
And to think I paid several hundred dollars for that, back in the day.
we should have a holding bay at each border and run blood tests
Remember that some tests, like those for HIV, can take up till 6 months before the chance of false negatives are eliminated. I therefore suggest a period of quarantine in an isolated cell for at least 6 months for all travelers.
Meta studies are scientific, though, depending on the circumstances, they may not be as good evidence as a primary study.
As a physician I agree - to a point. Meta studies of double blind randomized clinically controlled trials, however, cannot be compared to a meta studies of subjective patient surveys. The source of the meta study is important, and it must be consistent, otherwise the meta-data is absolutely useless. I think the GP was referring more to the source of the data rather than the fact a meta-analysis was used.
here is some "fishy" stuff going on.. First off, though - these researchers did not set up these studies. They used lawyers to get data from some of these companies or something like that- it's kind of vague.
Granted such a study is not scientific and has no merit per se. However this type of thing might be enough to get a real group of scientists interested in setting up a real, controlled study. After all science is all about asking questions and getting answers. There might be a valid question. So now someone will look for a reliable, reproducible answer.
I have NEVER seen a study where you report like you did the research but you actually didn't.
Tobacco companies claiming that smoking is "safe" circa 1970's and 80's?
GPS is nice. Loran is a wonderderful back up. But you just can't beat a sextant and a nautical almanac, either. Just like it's a good idea to learn to add before using a calculator, it's a good idea to have some sort of low tech back up for navigation. You never know when your generator will die, and the batteries in your GPS will leak that same day, leaving you stranded.
If you do any real savings, a sextant (and knowing how to use it!) is a must.
Good, this is turning into a smart debate rather than a flame war (as is so common on the internet).
Approx 450 billion in interest on the national debt (2008), and income tax receipts are around 1100 billion. About half of income tax pays the interest on the debt.
That's one way of looking at it. But then if you consider that the annual federal budget for 2009 was around 3100 billion dollars - this is money spent by the government for paying the government, subsidizing, building, etc; and then consider that total revenue was 2700 billion for that year (including but not limited to taxes, bond issues, etc) - forget about even paying interest on the debt with taxation. All the US is doing is adding to its debt - to the tune of 600+ billion in 2009. You can't just say that taxes pay interest on the debt. There is other spending than just the interest on the debt happening!
You need money... A medium of exchange.
We agree on "money" being arbitrary, be it salt, pepper, gold or paper currency. We agree that "money" as we have defined it has no intrinsic value (except in the case of salt an pepper, which can be used to preserve food). You can neither eat paper nor gold.
The reserve currency status makes the US the biggest market.
Then we agree to disagree. How did the US become the reserve currency in the first place? Well it was a country with a stable government and relatively free, a large population, a vast array of untapped natural resources, a country embracing the technological boom as far back as the industrial revolution, and with a flourishing economy. In my opinion it's not the "US dollar" that has contributed to the "American Way of Life", but rather all of the above. People looked at the US and saw an empire that would never end. Therefore the US dollar became the de facto currency for trade.
The US was (and marginally still is) the world's major exporter of any manufactured good. Industry is what led to the high standard of living in the US - the highest standard of living in the world. But over time, everyone wants a piece of the pie. When wealth is too easily obtained, the value of being wealthy decreases. In the US people take their standard of living for granted. I personally have lived in places outside the US where it takes 5 hours on horseback and 3 hours in a car to get to the nearest hospital - not because it's far away but because the roads are so bad. Americans feel entitled to have two or more cars per family. It's normal to have a nice house on a 1/2 acre lot. They demand that streets be flawless and well lit. Et cetera.
The rest of the world sees this, and visits the US, and watches American television and American movies and can't help but be impressed. Of course we want US dollars, they are much safer than our piece of junk currency. But, the mountain of debt is growing. The US government has not been able to pay its bills for a long time. Most US citizens are not only in debt when the deficit is considered, but also personally in debt, owing mortgages and student loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Confidence in the US dollar is waning, yet Americans refuse to give up their standard of living. The US government prints trillions and exports the debt, to people who think that America as we know it will last forever. Well I deal in stocks. Yes it's wise to follow a trend. But when the trend reverses suddenly (and it always happens suddenly), you don't want to be the one left holding the bag. America will have all of its houses and buildings and infrastructure. And it won't be able to afford to maintain them. Just like Rome - there came a time when no one was around to fix the aqueducts and roads... and it had nothing to do with the value of the Denarius and everything to do with bad fiscal management.
Why would gold, an industrial commodity, be in the inflation basket?
Gold has nothing to do with the inflation basket. I never said it should be measured as part of the basket, otherwise then inflation would be sky high! That would contradict the point I was making. However gold and other commodity prices have everything to do with the purchasing power of your currency. But feel free to quote random pieces of my comment and try to make links between them that aren't there. And you say I am the conspiracy theorist?
Here is a debunking of their misleading sensationalist claims by BLS economists John Greenlees and Robert McClelland.
Sure. They don't have an agenda either. Frankly I don't care either way. I'm not out to sell anyone on anything. You think that everything is rosy, fine. Enjoy. I honestly hope that you're young, and your retirement is a long way off.
The interest of which you service through your income taxes.
You assume I am from the US. I am not.
Plus, the US does not service interest on its debt through taxation. It services the interest by issuing still more debt, like a giant Ponzi scheme on an international level; and by inflating the currency to artificially reduce the debt and its interest. Taxation alone is nowhere near enough to pay the bills of the US government, on all levels. Look at California, for example. Yet they keep spending money.
It's ridiculous to think of a nation as bankrupt.
It doesn't matter how many resources a nation has if its people are starving. The US is not there yet, but economic collapses can and do lead to unemployment and eventually if the situation isn't corrected - food riots. You can have farmers with bumper crops that literally rot in the field because there's no one to take them to market. Perhaps you're just too young to remember.
A nation can define it's own currency representing all the wealth that the nation can produce.
It doesn't happen magically. For that you need credit. For that, you need someone to take the risk and invest capital into building all the networks that move things from place to place, and sell things to people. When a financial system collapses, credit disappears, companies shut down, and people are put out of work. The whole spinning wheel of economics grinds to a sudden halt. You can't restore confidence just by telling people everything is ok. Creditors and risk takers have to start seeing return on their investment again, before they will be willing to continue providing credit. That takes time.
Without China and japan exporting to America, products would simply be produced locally instead.
You are out of touch with reality. There's a whole attitude adjustment that's required. Manual labor is now seen as something degrading in the US. The US has to import immigrants to do physically demanding work. The typical US citizen wants to own a business, or work in an office for a large corporation, or at best be in charge of machinery. No college graduate is willing to go and manually pick crops. They want a house or apartment and a car and a "good" job with a "good" income. They will riot before accepting a reduction in standard of living. Then let's not get into all the rules, regulations and by-laws that get in the way of setting up any sort of manufacturing business. Then there's all the hassle of employing people, and all rules and regulations involved with that. Why do you think so much American business has been moving offshore in the first place?
Conversely working in a factory under a roof is a step up for the Chinese worker. It beats working in the field, or trying to raise and live off of 4 goats. It sure beats planting rice, and having to deal with the rats and your neighbor stealing your crops.
If the US dollar wasn't the reserve currency, China and Japan wouldn't be exporting to the USA.
People export to the USA because the USA demands goods and is willing to pay for them. The dollar has nothing to do with it. China and Japan export to Europe, Asia, Latin America and Oceania too. Just the US is the biggest market. The US has a "standard of living" to maintain. This standard of living, however, is financed by debt. It's like the guy who takes out a mortgage on his house to go on holidays, and buy a big screen TV, and to drink booze. Oh he's going to live like a king for a while. But one day there will come a reckoning.
and Japanese parts where the profits go home to Japan
And then they turn around and buy US debt with those profits. You really have no clue about how a global economy works, do you? If it wasn't for China and Japan, the US would be bankrupt and you would not be enjoying your current standard of living.
Oh, I would love to hear you detail exactly how the government has been gouging you in particular.
Oh let's see - start with 1) destroying the value of the US dollar, which both increases the cost of imports (trivial stuff like, say, oil), 2) persistently lying about inflation because ok we'll say there's no inflation by taking out transport and energy from the inflation equation then we'll use substitution and hedonics to skew the inflation numbers in our favor and of course the cost of housing tripling or more has NOTHING to do with inflation and when you hear on the news things like "tuition fees have not kept up with household income" that isn't inflation either.
Here's a quote for you:
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
So I guess you belong to the 999,999 other people. I hope enjoy having your savings destroyed by inflation. Continue to believe the government when they say there is no inflation - there's even DEFLATION (hah! Then why do prices keep going up? How much is gold this morning? $1147/troy oz?). Yeah, believe that. Or you can see the real numbers, calculated in the traditional way.
Slashdot Mirror
Now how this all equates to breaking the sound barrier, I have no idea. As other posters said, at the extreme altitudes he's starting at his TV will be quite significant. However the speed of sound is also a lot less at those heights.
They're just dicking with you - it's a publicity stunt. The speed of sound at sea level is 343 meters per second at STP. However at say 40,000 to 80,000 feet, the velocity you need to travel at is much greater to reach the sound barrier, since the air is 1) colder and 2) less dense. According to some charts, the "speed of sound" is 1147.6 knots which is 2125 km/h which is 590.27 meters per second. So to reach the "sound barrier" (and all the associated resistances), you need to reach that velocity. However you will notice that even if you get partly there - 400 meters per second, you have technically broken the "sea level" speed of sound.
Since the air is less dense, terminal velocity is higher the higher you are - after all terminal velocity is the balance between the downward force provided by gravitation acting on your mass, and the opposite resisting force that is a function of your velocity, the density of the medium you are traveling through, your shape, and thus cross sectional area. Since the air is much less dense, terminal velocity will accordingly be higher. I'm not a physicist so I can't whip out the formulas but a bit of googling should do it.
So it's a trick. He will NOT break the sound barrier - that would involve him heating up a great deal and probably being torn apart. After all, he's not made of titanium. However it is possible he will travel at > 343 meters per second at some point during his flight. But saying he will travel "faster than sound" is just marketing BS.
De gustibus non est disputandum
Gaming experience is highly subjective, and therefore there is no way to measure it. Therefore you are attempting to measure a subjective gaming experience by measuring objective quantities associated with a game: time played versus cost of game, etc. However these are not necessarily indicators of a good gaming experience, any number of other subjective variables come into play, such as attention span, willingness to become involved in the game world or user interface, etc.
In other words, you could pay professionals to do expensive market research into what makes a "good" game rather than just asking slashdot, and still walk away with doubts - because after all there's always the chance that 1) people who are willing to take time to answer surveys and participate in research do not necessarily represent your target market and 2) people lie on surveys.
There's no sure thing to any business venture - it always involves risk. Common sense (and looking at past successes) should tell the game maket what people want. But if you stick to that, you'll just keep making newer versions of the same product, the gamers will get bored. So innovation is also necessary. But there's no way to be absolutely certain about what makes a "good" game. Usually when you try to make everyone happy, however, you end up disappointing everyone. Look at a game like Falcon 4.0: it never sold much, it was over priced, and it was complicated as hell. And yet no other fighter jet simulation comes close, it has a loyal fan base, it has been modded so far from the original that several different, stand alone games now exist based on the old original Falcon 4. We're talking over 10 years later, which is a lifetime for computer games, and many people (myself included) still play it. But it's a niche game, with very loyal (but very few) followers. Then look at something (I will stick to combat sims) aimed at a broader market: Combat Flight Simulator 3. Without modding, it is generally considered a flop for many reasons, despite having an adequate user interface, adequate flight models, adequate graphics, etc. However it did not excel at anything. It tried to please the arcade type gamer and the "hard core" gamer, and failed at both.
So the RIAA has only succeeded in removing one person from the labor pool.
Ahhh but that's to make up for the "thousands" of people put out of work by her downloading 24 songs, er, right?
I knew there was a reason I was growing so much of it in my fridge...
Your freedom of speech doesn't give you the right to harass other people.
See, this is where the trouble begins. What does harassment mean, exactly? Let's see, according to some dictionaries:
1. to disturb persistently; torment, as with troubles or cares; bother continually; pester; persecute.
2. to trouble by repeated attacks, incursions, etc., as in war or hostilities; harry; raid.
But we've only changed one ambiguous word with several others. What does "disturb" mean?
1. to interrupt the quiet, rest, peace, or order of; unsettle.
2. to interfere with; interrupt; hinder: Please do not disturb me when I'm working.
3. to interfere with the arrangement, order, or harmony of; disarrange: to disturb the papers on her desk.
4. to perplex; trouble: to be disturbed by strange behavior.
Very well, so if I crash my car near your house at 6am and the noise wakes you up, I have "interrupted your rest" and therefore I have "harassed" you. Or if you are about to do something illegal and I interfere with you so that you don't do it, I am also harassing you. Or if I ask you a riddle that perplexes you, I am harassing you.
In fact, harassment is completely subjective. It's not good to put subjective words into law. If I punch you in the face and cause visible damage, that is objective. If I take something that you can prove is yours, that's objective. But what about "harassment"? Some people are completely intolerant and consider themselves "harassed" at the drop of a hat. Others are far more tolerant. Still others never feel "harassed".
I think that people who talk on the cell phone are rude. Yet I don't feel harassed when it happens. I think that many people lack basic manners and a reasonable education, yet this doesn't harass me. However when a government writes ambiguous laws and I am forced to rely on the "common sense" of a judge, I do feel harassed when it turns out that there are some real idiots on the bench.
So along come these anonymization services so we can have an online presence without giving up our privacy -- and now that's been declared illegal?
From the header:
Although the ruling does not make use of WHOIS privacy illegal, it does serve as a clear message from the court that coupling the use of privacy services with intentional spamming will likely result in a violation of the CAN-SPAM act.
Cough. You were saying?
It is so small that it produces a very minimal amount of horsepower, which is not useful for any actual way.
Unless of course you have several billion of them on a gram sized object. If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card.
The concept is an exciting one. Sci fi has been toying with the idea of "wrist pads" and other wearable sophisticated electronics for decades now. However a fundamental problem remains: the power source. Although some effort is being made in that area too. I just don't want to think about where they're planning on storing the batteries...
Yes, completely hilarious.
They tore down the libraries. Because lending books is evil.
If you know anything at all about security, you won't let your data be stored on someone else's computers and travel on someone else's network in the first place. (Spoken in the voice of Fat Tony) Off-site storage is absolutely necessary, but there are other, more expensive, more tedious, but far more secure methods of keeping your data off site. And please don't keep a paper trail.
For a list of entirely subjective replies.
China now owns the US dollar, thanks to the Fed. But don't take my word for it. If I were the US I would invest in some lube and bend over quietly.
I think you can legally get MASM (Microsoft Macro Assembler) somewhere on the internet for free. A good place to start would be Microsoft. Then you can do what real coders do, and teach yourself!
And to think I paid several hundred dollars for that, back in the day.
we should have a holding bay at each border and run blood tests
Remember that some tests, like those for HIV, can take up till 6 months before the chance of false negatives are eliminated. I therefore suggest a period of quarantine in an isolated cell for at least 6 months for all travelers.
Meta studies are scientific, though, depending on the circumstances, they may not be as good evidence as a primary study.
As a physician I agree - to a point. Meta studies of double blind randomized clinically controlled trials, however, cannot be compared to a meta studies of subjective patient surveys. The source of the meta study is important, and it must be consistent, otherwise the meta-data is absolutely useless. I think the GP was referring more to the source of the data rather than the fact a meta-analysis was used.
here is some "fishy" stuff going on.. First off, though - these researchers did not set up these studies. They used lawyers to get data from some of these companies or something like that- it's kind of vague.
Granted such a study is not scientific and has no merit per se. However this type of thing might be enough to get a real group of scientists interested in setting up a real, controlled study. After all science is all about asking questions and getting answers. There might be a valid question. So now someone will look for a reliable, reproducible answer.
I have NEVER seen a study where you report like you did the research but you actually didn't.
Tobacco companies claiming that smoking is "safe" circa 1970's and 80's?
GPS is nice. Loran is a wonderderful back up. But you just can't beat a sextant and a nautical almanac, either. Just like it's a good idea to learn to add before using a calculator, it's a good idea to have some sort of low tech back up for navigation. You never know when your generator will die, and the batteries in your GPS will leak that same day, leaving you stranded.
If you do any real savings, a sextant (and knowing how to use it!) is a must.
The Iranian Cyber Army strikes again! First Baidu then Google!
Will blame this on piracy in 5, 4, 3, 2...
Good, this is turning into a smart debate rather than a flame war (as is so common on the internet).
Approx 450 billion in interest on the national debt (2008), and income tax receipts are around 1100 billion. About half of income tax pays the interest on the debt.
That's one way of looking at it. But then if you consider that the annual federal budget for 2009 was around 3100 billion dollars - this is money spent by the government for paying the government, subsidizing, building, etc; and then consider that total revenue was 2700 billion for that year (including but not limited to taxes, bond issues, etc) - forget about even paying interest on the debt with taxation. All the US is doing is adding to its debt - to the tune of 600+ billion in 2009. You can't just say that taxes pay interest on the debt. There is other spending than just the interest on the debt happening!
You need money... A medium of exchange.
We agree on "money" being arbitrary, be it salt, pepper, gold or paper currency. We agree that "money" as we have defined it has no intrinsic value (except in the case of salt an pepper, which can be used to preserve food). You can neither eat paper nor gold.
The reserve currency status makes the US the biggest market.
Then we agree to disagree. How did the US become the reserve currency in the first place? Well it was a country with a stable government and relatively free, a large population, a vast array of untapped natural resources, a country embracing the technological boom as far back as the industrial revolution, and with a flourishing economy. In my opinion it's not the "US dollar" that has contributed to the "American Way of Life", but rather all of the above. People looked at the US and saw an empire that would never end. Therefore the US dollar became the de facto currency for trade.
The US was (and marginally still is) the world's major exporter of any manufactured good. Industry is what led to the high standard of living in the US - the highest standard of living in the world. But over time, everyone wants a piece of the pie. When wealth is too easily obtained, the value of being wealthy decreases. In the US people take their standard of living for granted. I personally have lived in places outside the US where it takes 5 hours on horseback and 3 hours in a car to get to the nearest hospital - not because it's far away but because the roads are so bad. Americans feel entitled to have two or more cars per family. It's normal to have a nice house on a 1/2 acre lot. They demand that streets be flawless and well lit. Et cetera.
The rest of the world sees this, and visits the US, and watches American television and American movies and can't help but be impressed. Of course we want US dollars, they are much safer than our piece of junk currency. But, the mountain of debt is growing. The US government has not been able to pay its bills for a long time. Most US citizens are not only in debt when the deficit is considered, but also personally in debt, owing mortgages and student loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Confidence in the US dollar is waning, yet Americans refuse to give up their standard of living. The US government prints trillions and exports the debt, to people who think that America as we know it will last forever. Well I deal in stocks. Yes it's wise to follow a trend. But when the trend reverses suddenly (and it always happens suddenly), you don't want to be the one left holding the bag. America will have all of its houses and buildings and infrastructure. And it won't be able to afford to maintain them. Just like Rome - there came a time when no one was around to fix the aqueducts and roads... and it had nothing to do with the value of the Denarius and everything to do with bad fiscal management.
Why would gold, an industrial commodity, be in the inflation basket?
Gold has nothing to do with the inflation basket. I never said it should be measured as part of the basket, otherwise then inflation would be sky high! That would contradict the point I was making. However gold and other commodity prices have everything to do with the purchasing power of your currency. But feel free to quote random pieces of my comment and try to make links between them that aren't there. And you say I am the conspiracy theorist?
Here is a debunking of their misleading sensationalist claims by BLS economists John Greenlees and Robert McClelland.
Sure. They don't have an agenda either. Frankly I don't care either way. I'm not out to sell anyone on anything. You think that everything is rosy, fine. Enjoy. I honestly hope that you're young, and your retirement is a long way off.
The interest of which you service through your income taxes.
You assume I am from the US. I am not.
Plus, the US does not service interest on its debt through taxation. It services the interest by issuing still more debt, like a giant Ponzi scheme on an international level; and by inflating the currency to artificially reduce the debt and its interest. Taxation alone is nowhere near enough to pay the bills of the US government, on all levels. Look at California, for example. Yet they keep spending money.
It's ridiculous to think of a nation as bankrupt.
It doesn't matter how many resources a nation has if its people are starving. The US is not there yet, but economic collapses can and do lead to unemployment and eventually if the situation isn't corrected - food riots. You can have farmers with bumper crops that literally rot in the field because there's no one to take them to market. Perhaps you're just too young to remember.
A nation can define it's own currency representing all the wealth that the nation can produce.
It doesn't happen magically. For that you need credit. For that, you need someone to take the risk and invest capital into building all the networks that move things from place to place, and sell things to people. When a financial system collapses, credit disappears, companies shut down, and people are put out of work. The whole spinning wheel of economics grinds to a sudden halt. You can't restore confidence just by telling people everything is ok. Creditors and risk takers have to start seeing return on their investment again, before they will be willing to continue providing credit. That takes time.
Without China and japan exporting to America, products would simply be produced locally instead.
You are out of touch with reality. There's a whole attitude adjustment that's required. Manual labor is now seen as something degrading in the US. The US has to import immigrants to do physically demanding work. The typical US citizen wants to own a business, or work in an office for a large corporation, or at best be in charge of machinery. No college graduate is willing to go and manually pick crops. They want a house or apartment and a car and a "good" job with a "good" income. They will riot before accepting a reduction in standard of living. Then let's not get into all the rules, regulations and by-laws that get in the way of setting up any sort of manufacturing business. Then there's all the hassle of employing people, and all rules and regulations involved with that. Why do you think so much American business has been moving offshore in the first place?
Conversely working in a factory under a roof is a step up for the Chinese worker. It beats working in the field, or trying to raise and live off of 4 goats. It sure beats planting rice, and having to deal with the rats and your neighbor stealing your crops.
If the US dollar wasn't the reserve currency, China and Japan wouldn't be exporting to the USA.
People export to the USA because the USA demands goods and is willing to pay for them. The dollar has nothing to do with it. China and Japan export to Europe, Asia, Latin America and Oceania too. Just the US is the biggest market. The US has a "standard of living" to maintain. This standard of living, however, is financed by debt. It's like the guy who takes out a mortgage on his house to go on holidays, and buy a big screen TV, and to drink booze. Oh he's going to live like a king for a while. But one day there will come a reckoning.
and Japanese parts where the profits go home to Japan
And then they turn around and buy US debt with those profits. You really have no clue about how a global economy works, do you? If it wasn't for China and Japan, the US would be bankrupt and you would not be enjoying your current standard of living.
If anyone is smoking anything, it's you.
Oh, I would love to hear you detail exactly how the government has been gouging you in particular.
Oh let's see - start with 1) destroying the value of the US dollar, which both increases the cost of imports (trivial stuff like, say, oil), 2) persistently lying about inflation because ok we'll say there's no inflation by taking out transport and energy from the inflation equation then we'll use substitution and hedonics to skew the inflation numbers in our favor and of course the cost of housing tripling or more has NOTHING to do with inflation and when you hear on the news things like "tuition fees have not kept up with household income" that isn't inflation either.
Here's a quote for you:
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
So I guess you belong to the 999,999 other people. I hope enjoy having your savings destroyed by inflation. Continue to believe the government when they say there is no inflation - there's even DEFLATION (hah! Then why do prices keep going up? How much is gold this morning? $1147/troy oz?). Yeah, believe that. Or you can see the real numbers, calculated in the traditional way.