We spent $2.9 trillion (out of $2.5 trillion in revenue) on "mandatory" and defense in 2012. In other words, we were already $400 billion in the red before we even spent a penny on national parks or NASA or roads or any of the other stuff people actually want the government to do. In 2012, all that stuff cost only $615 billion, which is small peanuts compared to the "mandatory" junk. Clearly, all this whining about cutting out little chunks of programs, like the Tea Partiers are doing, is pretty much worthless.
More to the point, they're certainly not talking about cutting "mandatory"+defense by 36%, which is what it actually would have taken in order to balance the budget in 2012. Even Paul Ryan's plan would have an ~$850 billion deficit in 2013 and a ~$525 billion deficit in 2014!
(2012 revenue total came from here; the rest came from here)
Not to mention, of course, I could also cite stuff like this and this....
Not smart, poor. Unless you count smart as not getting in deeper straits than I am already in.
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. The fact that you realize you can't afford to have debt separates you from many (most?) people, including those at the same income level.
I have no idea of what your comment on belief was about or in reference to regarding something I said.
Oops! I quoted the wrong part of your message; that was supposed to have been in reply to "The worst part of this whole mess, apart from people's losses, is that by the time elections roll around, folks won't remember, and if they do, they'll likely remember it wrongly anyway."
The point I completely failed to make was that folks don't pay attention to what's actually going on either now or later; they just parrot what [Fox News|CNN] says without thinking about it.
If you ask today's "programmers" to provide an engine for a kitchen blender, they'll use a V8 truck (not the engine of the truck, but the entire truck) and connect the blender to the wheels of the truck somehow. Being able to take the engine out of the truck would be a big improvement already.
Now you start to get more useful. I would skip all that crap at the start and just go straight into learning a procedural language and an object orientated language. When I say learn them though, I mean REALLY learn them making sure you learn the shortfalls of both.
You should also be learning a functional language (e.g. Lisp, Scheme or Haskell) and maybe even a logic programming language (e.g. Prolog) as well.
Then there is the issue that in many cases the code being slightly slower than it could be is not as important as it being easy to work on. When you end up with a huge project it makes sense to do things like modularise the code at the expense of performance so that each module can be looked at as a distinct entity.
You still need to know better than to use an n^2 algorithm when an n*log(n) one will do.
Besides, web programming brings with it new performance concerns of its own, such as structuring your database schema to be efficient for the kinds of queries you're going to be running often, or knowing not to send 92 streams of information when you hit "apply" when all you really needed was an HTTP POST with some form data.
No it doesn't; home insurance covers when some external event damages your furnace, but I'm talking about when it breaks by itself because it's worn out.
car insurance covers writing off your car even when you're at fault
But what about some other kind of general liability? Do you really have insurance that covers every kind of accident you could possibly cause?
yeah house insurance to cover an appliance is nonsense
So you seem to agree with me, but you're not making sense otherwise. If you agree that you should pay to replace your own appliance, how do you do so if you have zero savings? Say your income (after taxes and retirement account funding) is $3000/month and your spending is $3000/month (which is what "living paycheck to paycheck" means!). Then something petty and stupid, like your microwave breaks and you need to spend $50 to get a new one. Well congratulations, that $50 put you in the hole. Now you need to buy it on credit, but the credit payment isn't in your budget either, so interest accrues. This process accelerates until you're bankrupt. And all because you couldn't be bothered to set aside literally a couple bucks a month.
What living paycheck to paycheck means is that you have zero flexibility to absorb that kind of minor unexpected expense. Do you really not see how insane that is?!
"Income protection insurance" covers your furnace breaking? Or an accident (automobile or otherwise) for which you are at fault? Or getting arrested (whether you deserve it or not) and needing to bail yourself out? Or any number of other things which aren't covered by insurance that a person with a reasonable emergency fund could take in stride, but which would completely screw over someone living on the edge?
workers compensation or payouts if laid off without cause
We have that. The problem is that the maximum it pays is minimum wage, and you're only eligible if you're a full-time employee (not a contractor).
I have zero margin for error and I realistically expect that even if something major were to go wrong that I'll be just fine.
If you actually have insurance for everything, don't you realize how inefficient that is compared to self-insuring with an emergency fund?
And what about the flip side: where there's an opportunity that requires extra money in order to take advantage of? Say, an incredible deal on some investment, or you win a vacation (but you still have to pay for food while you're there), or something like that? Wouldn't you have to refuse because you don't have the extra money?
Is there then a category below "genuinely"? Because I'm too poor to have debt.
No, you're just too smart to have debt. A lot of similarly poor but less smart people turn to payday lending/loan sharks and spend their lives running from collection agencies. There's always somebody willing to lend no matter how poor you are, as long as the rates are usurious enough.
My social security check just covers the rent on a place of ~180 sq.ft.; I get a much smaller check from SSI and a very small amount from the state - both of these last to bring me up to some level of mandated minimum, as I understand it, for a total which works out around 75% of poverty level.
Are you in subsidized housing? Are you getting food stamps? If not, it kind of sounds like you should look into them...
My social security check just covers the rent on a place of ~180 sq.ft.; I get a much smaller check from SSI and a very small amount from the state - both of these last to bring me up to some level of mandated minimum, as I understand it, for a total which works out around 75% of poverty level.
Nah, people will believe what they want to believe (i.e., what the talking heads tell them), just like they do right now.
$50/household/3 months, with discounts for elderly or long-time residents and streets with official neighborhood watch programs.
Other than the extra patrols, I haven't gotten the impression that I'm buying any special treatment. Maybe the guy that administers the security patrol is buddy-buddy enough to get special treatment, but I'm not aware of it.
Our patrol really is just a cop working overtime and getting paid by us instead of the city (and usually using his own car with a magnetic label on it instead of a police car). He's actually more accountable than the regular beat cops because he has to "check in" as he patrols by scanning a QR code at various locations around the neighborhood.
I don't know about that... around here, "rent-a-cop" is truth in advertising because they hire actual police officers from the same jurisdiction. I think they have pretty much the same equipment and arrest powers as they do when they're on duty for the city.
Our government was set up intentionally for things like what is happening right now
Out of 435 members of the House, 200 Democrats and at least 22 Republicans support passing the continuing resolution (even with the ACA intact). This is a majority. What's happening now is that Boehner is using a House-self-imposed procedural rule (the Hastert Rule) to prevent the issue from coming up for a vote due to the desires of 210 out of 232 Republicans.
This "Hastert Rule," by the way, was only invented a couple of decades ago and was certainly not "intentional" on the part of the Founding Fathers (or any other ethical person, for that matter).
I haven't seen anyone posting about "the minority Republicans" who mean that the Republicans only received 46.9% of the vote, except is responses like yours. So, no, I reject the argument that the use of the phrase "the minority" to describe the Republicans in the House is anything other than Democrat propaganda, which has been supported by the media where I've heard it repeated uncritically, and is now used by people such as Howitzer86 above without realizing its erroneous nature.
Some people talking about "the minority Republicans" are referring to the 210 Republican Representatives (including Boehner) who are preventing an acceptable (to the Democrats) continuing resolution from coming up for a vote using the Hastert Rule.
There are 435 seats in the House
200 are aligned with the Democrats
232 are aligned with the Republicans
3 seats are vacant
22 of the Republicans would be willing to compromise
That means only (232-22) / 435 = 48% of the House is unwilling to compromise
but the Hastert Rule says that because (232-22) / 232 = 90% of the majority party oppose it, it can't come to the floor for a vote!
In conclusion: a majority of the House supports funding the government (including allowing the ACA to continue), but cannot vote due to a minority composed of 90% of the Republican caucus.
"Minority" is correct, because it's referring to only a portion of the Republican caucus. Due to the House's self-imposed Hastert Rule, a vote on the continuing resolution is being prevented due to the wishes of a "majority of the majority," meaning 210 of the 232 Republicans. (The other 22 Republicans would be willing to compromise.) However, the total number of Representatives is 435, so the 210 that are preventing the vote represent only 48.3% of the total -- a minority.
But the president doesn't have the constitutional power to spend money; he has to spend what Congress tells him to spend, neither more nor less (a lot of Americans don't seem to understand this).
It makes perfect sense that the President can't spend more than Congress budgets, but how is he prohibited from spending less?
Tell me again how living, paying bills, eating, paying a mortgage, from paycheck to paycheck isn't exactly the definition of living within their means? Isn't that kind of the definition, and people who aren't living within their means are accumulating debt rather than repaying it?
Having zero margin for error because you unrealistically expected nothing to go wrong ever means that you are guaranteed to be in the "accumulating debt" category sooner or later. So no, living paycheck-to-paycheck is not living within your means, in the same way that water in a cup filled to the brim is no longer "within" the cup when the cup gets bumped and sloshes it over the edge.
Clearly, that is not what we're doing, because the most efficient way to "stockpile" would be to not pump it all out of the ground in the first place. That's the whole idea behind the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which the "drill baby, drill!" folks are trying to shortsightedly destroy.
Slashdot Mirror
...that the Secretary of Education is furloughed right now, or he'd have some explaining to do!
We spent $2.9 trillion (out of $2.5 trillion in revenue) on "mandatory" and defense in 2012. In other words, we were already $400 billion in the red before we even spent a penny on national parks or NASA or roads or any of the other stuff people actually want the government to do. In 2012, all that stuff cost only $615 billion, which is small peanuts compared to the "mandatory" junk. Clearly, all this whining about cutting out little chunks of programs, like the Tea Partiers are doing, is pretty much worthless.
More to the point, they're certainly not talking about cutting "mandatory"+defense by 36%, which is what it actually would have taken in order to balance the budget in 2012. Even Paul Ryan's plan would have an ~$850 billion deficit in 2013 and a ~$525 billion deficit in 2014!
(2012 revenue total came from here; the rest came from here)
Not to mention, of course, I could also cite stuff like this and this....
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. The fact that you realize you can't afford to have debt separates you from many (most?) people, including those at the same income level.
Oops! I quoted the wrong part of your message; that was supposed to have been in reply to "The worst part of this whole mess, apart from people's losses, is that by the time elections roll around, folks won't remember, and if they do, they'll likely remember it wrongly anyway."
The point I completely failed to make was that folks don't pay attention to what's actually going on either now or later; they just parrot what [Fox News|CNN] says without thinking about it.
I think you mean "bottom-up."
By that standard, Jeremy Clarkson is an expert programmer. Therefore, that is a terrible analogy!
Not to mention the tolerances! Most people have no idea just how precise they have to be in order to hold together yet easily pull apart like that.
(Sorry for replying twice; I left something out.)
You should also be learning a functional language (e.g. Lisp, Scheme or Haskell) and maybe even a logic programming language (e.g. Prolog) as well.
You still need to know better than to use an n^2 algorithm when an n*log(n) one will do.
Besides, web programming brings with it new performance concerns of its own, such as structuring your database schema to be efficient for the kinds of queries you're going to be running often, or knowing not to send 92 streams of information when you hit "apply" when all you really needed was an HTTP POST with some form data.
No it doesn't; home insurance covers when some external event damages your furnace, but I'm talking about when it breaks by itself because it's worn out.
But what about some other kind of general liability? Do you really have insurance that covers every kind of accident you could possibly cause?
So you seem to agree with me, but you're not making sense otherwise. If you agree that you should pay to replace your own appliance, how do you do so if you have zero savings? Say your income (after taxes and retirement account funding) is $3000/month and your spending is $3000/month (which is what "living paycheck to paycheck" means!). Then something petty and stupid, like your microwave breaks and you need to spend $50 to get a new one. Well congratulations, that $50 put you in the hole. Now you need to buy it on credit, but the credit payment isn't in your budget either, so interest accrues. This process accelerates until you're bankrupt. And all because you couldn't be bothered to set aside literally a couple bucks a month.
What living paycheck to paycheck means is that you have zero flexibility to absorb that kind of minor unexpected expense. Do you really not see how insane that is?!
More like:
Democrats: "We want to turn all the vital things back on."
Republicans: "Nope, we have to leave some things turned off."
"Income protection insurance" covers your furnace breaking? Or an accident (automobile or otherwise) for which you are at fault? Or getting arrested (whether you deserve it or not) and needing to bail yourself out? Or any number of other things which aren't covered by insurance that a person with a reasonable emergency fund could take in stride, but which would completely screw over someone living on the edge?
We have that. The problem is that the maximum it pays is minimum wage, and you're only eligible if you're a full-time employee (not a contractor).
If you actually have insurance for everything, don't you realize how inefficient that is compared to self-insuring with an emergency fund?
And what about the flip side: where there's an opportunity that requires extra money in order to take advantage of? Say, an incredible deal on some investment, or you win a vacation (but you still have to pay for food while you're there), or something like that? Wouldn't you have to refuse because you don't have the extra money?
No, you're just too smart to have debt. A lot of similarly poor but less smart people turn to payday lending/loan sharks and spend their lives running from collection agencies. There's always somebody willing to lend no matter how poor you are, as long as the rates are usurious enough.
Are you in subsidized housing? Are you getting food stamps? If not, it kind of sounds like you should look into them...
Nah, people will believe what they want to believe (i.e., what the talking heads tell them), just like they do right now.
$50/household/3 months, with discounts for elderly or long-time residents and streets with official neighborhood watch programs.
Other than the extra patrols, I haven't gotten the impression that I'm buying any special treatment. Maybe the guy that administers the security patrol is buddy-buddy enough to get special treatment, but I'm not aware of it.
Our patrol really is just a cop working overtime and getting paid by us instead of the city (and usually using his own car with a magnetic label on it instead of a police car). He's actually more accountable than the regular beat cops because he has to "check in" as he patrols by scanning a QR code at various locations around the neighborhood.
I don't know about that... around here, "rent-a-cop" is truth in advertising because they hire actual police officers from the same jurisdiction. I think they have pretty much the same equipment and arrest powers as they do when they're on duty for the city.
Now that's a Smart idea!
Out of 435 members of the House, 200 Democrats and at least 22 Republicans support passing the continuing resolution (even with the ACA intact). This is a majority. What's happening now is that Boehner is using a House-self-imposed procedural rule (the Hastert Rule) to prevent the issue from coming up for a vote due to the desires of 210 out of 232 Republicans.
This "Hastert Rule," by the way, was only invented a couple of decades ago and was certainly not "intentional" on the part of the Founding Fathers (or any other ethical person, for that matter).
Some people talking about "the minority Republicans" are referring to the 210 Republican Representatives (including Boehner) who are preventing an acceptable (to the Democrats) continuing resolution from coming up for a vote using the Hastert Rule.
In conclusion: a majority of the House supports funding the government (including allowing the ACA to continue), but cannot vote due to a minority composed of 90% of the Republican caucus.
"Minority" is correct, because it's referring to only a portion of the Republican caucus. Due to the House's self-imposed Hastert Rule, a vote on the continuing resolution is being prevented due to the wishes of a "majority of the majority," meaning 210 of the 232 Republicans. (The other 22 Republicans would be willing to compromise.) However, the total number of Representatives is 435, so the 210 that are preventing the vote represent only 48.3% of the total -- a minority.
Breakfast is incidental to terrorism, but hostage-taking is a defining feature.
It makes perfect sense that the President can't spend more than Congress budgets, but how is he prohibited from spending less?
No it's not, because (a) their "means" includes not only the flush times, but the lean times as well, and (b) "within" does not mean "on the edge".
Having zero margin for error because you unrealistically expected nothing to go wrong ever means that you are guaranteed to be in the "accumulating debt" category sooner or later. So no, living paycheck-to-paycheck is not living within your means, in the same way that water in a cup filled to the brim is no longer "within" the cup when the cup gets bumped and sloshes it over the edge.
It's earned the "dismal" part, but I'm not so sure about the "science."
Whoops! Yes, I meant "unwilling." Thanks!
Clearly, that is not what we're doing, because the most efficient way to "stockpile" would be to not pump it all out of the ground in the first place. That's the whole idea behind the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which the "drill baby, drill!" folks are trying to shortsightedly destroy.