Marry someone, and spend the rest of your lives helping each other remember who you are and what you've done.
Fifty years from now, you'll be able to look back at everything you've done together --- and realize what a terrible idea that was in the first place, but at least now you have someone to commiserate with.
No, you don't need to "emulate the absorption spectra of oxygenated hemoglobin" --- the whole idea of the "gummy bear attack" is to put a thin fingerprint-replica cover, with material properties extremely similar to a layer of skin, over your real live finger (which provides the color, pulse, temperature, conductivity, elasticity, etc. of a living human, and can be used in plain sight of a security guard monitoring the scanner). A thin gelatin layer is likely to be very difficult to distinguish from a slightly thick-skinned (e.g. callused) real human finger, since gelatin is basically made from the same materials as human connective tissue.
Among other things, it indicates the manufacturer isn't obsessed with cutting every possible corner to save themselves money. It's not that Chinese manufacturers aren't perfectly capable of high quality work --- crappy Wal-Mart Quality goods are the result of *American* investor-leeches demanding products with the absolute cheapest materials and manufacturing quality (resulting in items with only the outward appearance of actually functional goods). A manufacturer willing to spend a couple more percent of the price of a product on US-waged labor also probably won't be skimming pennies by making internal parts out of terrible low-grade materials that fall apart after a month of use.
I haven't put a gummy bear on a spectrometer to check, but my naive guess is that plain gelatin (which is basically boiled-down skin and connective tissue bits anyway) would already have a very similar transmission profile to skin (e.g. fairly transparent with no strong/distinctive spectral features), so you wouldn't even need to search for fancier materials. Not that a little materials research would likely be a major deterrent to an attacker who is already willing to *murder and hack off body parts* to defeat your system.
Does this device offer the least bit of protection against the "gummy bear attack" (i.e. a thin molded replica fingerprint, formed from, e.g., etched gelatin, over a living finger)? If not, then it's pretty useless (because lugging around a whole dead body or even severed finger is already riskier/harder than a simple replacement mold).
Finally, someone standing up against Computer Algebra Systems! Those whizzy calculators are destroying education in this country, leaving children mathematically crippled, unable to manage the simplest symbolic manipulation in their own heads.
Yeah, I didn't RTFS beyond the headline; why do you ask?
A guy has just seen a gang of bandits break into his neighbors' house to rape, murder, and rob them. Now, I think this guy is an awfully crummy fellow --- he beats his wife, and molests his children. I hope he gets kicked out of his house to die miserable and alone. However, having seen what the bandits have done to a bunch of other homes, I know his wife and children will be even worse off if the bandits get to them. I'm in a bit of a moral quandary, but I'm not going to condemn this guy for arming up to lay some whoop-ass on the bandits if they show up at his door --- it's not the best of situations, but better than giving the bandits free rein.
If you're going to talk about "thugs on the street," please remember that the street where the violence happens isn't in your home town --- the U.S. is the real knife-wielding thug who's shown up on Baghdad Street, and is swaggering towards Tehran Avenue. If you're capable of a little self-reflection, your argument above justifies Iran arming up.
Yeah, and Stalin wasn't a Communist, and No True Scotsman would ever tell a lie.
The Irish Republican terrorists/freedom-fighters (depending on which side you adhere to) may not have been toeing the line of Vatican City policy, but they certainly were closely integrated with Catholicism as it actually existed in their country. They operated with the tacit support, rather than condemnation from the pulpit, of their faith communities. There certainly were internal Irish Catholic calls for peacemaking; but more often, a reconciliation of the faith with the "necessary evils" of violent resistance activity.
Luther wasn't the *first* to stand against the Pope --- rather, the first to do so while also accumulating enough backing from local and regional political leaders (Fredrick, Elector of Saxony et al.) to avoid being squashed with extreme prejudice by the Inquisition. A "reformation" for Islam, to cause meaningful change in the conflict-ridden Middle East, requires a pre-existing political shift to significant leadership factions who would benefit from a "kinder, gentler" Islam, rather than the authoritarian extremism that keeps the current group in power.
As a non-car-owner myself, and appalled at the level of societal and environmental externalities attributable to car use, I'm personally in favor of increased deterrents to automotive proliferation. However, I think these need to be balanced by even greater enhancements to public transportation alternatives --- in most US cities (and even more so rural areas), cracking down on automotive use is a highly "regressive tax" that harms the poorest and most vulnerable most. A nice solution would require first having a great, tree-lined, bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly path to the nearest WalMart (even better if WalMarts were eradicated for diverse locally-owned shops).
One significant difference: the $10000 1337 D0ll@rz napkin may not have required an approximately equal amount (by monetary value) of energy to be wasted in its creation. Bitcoin is an ecological disaster, because the market for Bitcoin creation means it is favorable to burn a nearly equal amount of money on hardware+energy to set up a mining rig. For a fiat currency by government mandate (or other convenient shared societal delusion), each $100 bill doesn't entail wasting $99 of resources to create (I bet it's pretty easy to pen your 1337 D0ll@rz napkin, yet still useful as a currency if enough people agree to provide goods/services in exchange --- including the original scrawler, if this currency is likely to take off).
Brilliant! An ATM that I put cash *into* to get magic numbers out --- for all those times when I've been standing in a market thinking "gee, it would be handy to have a bit less spending cash in my wallet right now."
Perhaps there's some middle-ground solution? We could require all cars to be registered (and tracked in government databases), and operators to be licensed and trained. We could mandate insurance for drivers, and require new cars to be built with reasonable safety features (while grandfathering in older collectible models). Maybe even additional taxes on car fuels, beyond the sales taxes on ordinary goods? Limitations on car operation in school zones? Fines, loss of licensing, and criminal penalties for dangerous driving (even in cases no damage is done)? This way, people who have grown up in a driving culture, passed down from parents to children, can still responsibly drive cars for recreation and utility, while keeping unlicensed fleets of murder vehicles out of the hands of criminals. But perhaps I'm the crazy dreamer to think that society could ever agree to such a solution.
You may not ever be able to get rid of them all. But when a slum houses more roach than human tenants by mass, it's probably time to raze the tenements to the ground with fire and re-build something more suitable for human habitation. The most dismal sectors of the web, consisting of tiny slivers of human content wedged between giant mounds of advertisers' feces, are overdue to be razed and rebuilt from scratch, based on new models besides maximally-intrusive-scumbag-ad-supported content. No doubt the roaches will slowly infiltrate back in, but at least in the interim conditions are improved.
I have friends around the country and they have all been complaining about high grocery prices. So while your mileage may vary, I have good evidence that this is far from a local phenomenon. (Not to mention that I buy much of my food at nation-wide franchise chains. On average, their prices are not likely to vary a lot from one region to another.)
I didn't say prices weren't rising at all, but your claim of ~50% over the last two years is quite a jump --- at that scale, it's unlikely to be largely the result of government monetary policies, which are going to come much closer to 5% than 25% per year. National coordinated price rises across big-chain franchises is probably more an indication of the expected results of oligopolistic pricing in a non-competitive market.
It's up 24% from the last time it was raised, 6 years ago, to $7.25. That is significantly different from government's claimed inflation rates. Your argument that it is "down 50%" just reinforces what I was saying: inflation is higher than what government has been claiming. But anybody with half a brain who has looked at how the government calculates it knows that anyway.
My reference point for ~50%, about which I should have been more clear, was the minimum wage ~50 years ago (not the 6-year-old definition). I agree that government inflation estimates often tend towards the low side --- hence, e.g., the harm of attempts to tie government benefits to CPI. However, the difference is typically more on the order of 5% vs. 3%, instead of the "oh noes! hyperinflationary disaster!" panics based on cherry-picking particular fluctuation-prone goods.
Whooooosh! It's simply not in your worldview that government monetary policy can be unsustainable, or investors wrong, eh?
Whooooosh yourself. Government monetary policy certainly can go horribly wrong; and US historical and current practice has generally been quite sub-optimal. However, it has if anything erred on the side of too little inflation, protecting investors over stimulating economic activity. Printing up free money at a controlled rate actually *works* for keeping society chugging along quite stably; just think of it as an un-evadable tax on hoarding US$. Investors also certainly can be wrong --- I generally consider having society's resources primarily controlled by a few investing billionaires *wrong* on a much more fundamental level. But investors considering US bonds (hence the multi-decade financial stability of the US government) to be a safe stable bet (despite continuing the long, publicly visible tradition of "printing new money") are not making imprudent decisions.
P.S.: how pathetic is it that you rail against "people with shitty entitled attitudes," then declare yourself to be a natural lord over all us serfs? Self-reflection is apparently not one of your strong points.
Ha, ha, ha. You think I'm a fan of 9-5 jobs and college debt --- because your world view is so limited that you think it's the only alternative to your "free market" feudalism?
I think I've seen you use self-identify with the term "anarcho-capitalist" in previous posts (or maybe that was someone else?). Perhaps you should spend some time reading some actual anarchists (hint, these people don't idolize feudalism and living high off the oppression of serfs). Kropotkin is a good start (and plenty of more modern works bring these ideas more directly to bear on contemporary issues --- but underlying power dynamics haven't changed that much over the centuries).
Maybe a perfect isolationism would work great in whatever parallel universe Ayn Rand came from. If all the capitalist ideologues really could go live in their own world --- perhaps their own Mars colony --- then everything would be great. Unfortunately, they can't (or at least don't) --- folks we disagree with are still pissing in our water, polluting our air, voting in our elections, and buying our factories to ship our jobs to China for a quick buck. Accumulated wealth is a currency of power wielded over those who never consented to the system of accumulation. Have you given up using our "socialist" roads, postal, internet, and fire protection systems? Have you found a way to assure the acrid smoke from your burning house doesn't enter the air outside your property line? As distasteful as you find it, we're stuck living in a world with different people. You don't have to befriend them all. You don't have to have sex with them all. As you've demonstrated, you don't even have to do business with them all. But you are stuck in a world that gives the lie to your fantasies of perfect isolationism within your personal monarchy. Only in your deluded mind is recognizing and engaging with the challenge of a pluralistic society a "one-size-fits-all mentality".
Oh? First, there is generally a 2-3 year delay between inflationary influences and the start of inflation actually hitting the market. So most of it won't have hit the market yet anyway. But some. Have you checked your grocery bill lately? I don't know about yours, but mine has been up somewhere around 50% over just the last couple of years. And short-term commodities like that are usually the first to see a major hit.
My grocery bill has been more stable; your personal anecdotes (and mine) may not be indicative of overall economic trends. Maybe inflation is about to go through the roof? Nonetheless, folks with billions to invest are still volunteering to buy long-term treasury bonds at worse interest than my checking account. Not that billionaire investors can't be terribly wrong.
If inflation isn't significantly above the government-claimed "approximately 2%", why do they want to raise the minimum wage 24%? Just an arbitrary figure in a misguided attempt to "legislate prosperity"? Or an attempt to cover actual costs of living the government lied about? Either one is bad news.
Maybe because the minimum wage is down by more than 50% from when it was introduced many decades ago? You realize that proposed 24% increases aren't just covering for one year of stagnant wages?
Investors always have been "pretty sure". They were sure of that in 1929... that's why the markets were at an all-time high, just before the big crash. They were just as sure in 1999-2000. And they were just as sure in 2007-2008. Look at the YouTube clips from both periods, of people saying "Come on in! The economy has never been better! The market has never been higher!"
And investors holding government bonds during the recent crash did quite well. Investments based on the private sector tanked, but no one lost a cent on Treasury bonds. The private sector is notoriously unstable; the US government has historically managed to produce a rather stable currency with well-defined slow inflation, which is why investors are eager to buy (at interest rates that lose to inflation) in economically unstable times.
I'm not complaining about your openness about your political beliefs. Just pointing out that your belief system only seems to "work" by isolating yourself into a self-contained ideologically authoritarian enclave that brooks no dissent. I personally think that robust ideas can hold up to external scrutiny and engage in dialog besides "screw off and stop criticizing me." Indeed, I think cultivating a general atmosphere of creative dissent to ideological hegemony is beneficial to humankind. I actually want a society that "invests in people with shitty entitled attitudes" [a.k.a. attitudes different from and challenging to mine], instead of an unchallenged intellectual monoculture where everyone either agrees with me or hits the road.
And yet you're terrified to hire someone who might have heard of "feminism or any of the other progressive mindsets"? If your businesses are really such shining lights of goodness, you should have no problem changing the minds of previously-"indoctrinated" workers, as they see how wonderful your world really is. Yet you can't tolerate the idea that any worker might arrive with any prior ability to independently think and challenge your pre-ordained order, before you've the chance to indoctrinate them first?
Well, it seems that the government's regular printing of money isn't exactly plunging the currency into a terrible deflationary spiral. Why do you think investors would buy up 10 and 30 year notes? Is it because they think the government is printing up so much money that in 10 to 30 years we'll be paying for bread with wheelbarrows of billion dollar bills? It seems that big investors are pretty sure that all this money printing won't hurt the value of their dollar-based bonds --- they could've bought gold, or corn futures, or anything else, but something about the expected management of the US dollar makes them eager to tie up assets at extra low interest rates. Perhaps printing money is key to the government and economy staying long-term stable?
Slashdot Mirror
Marry someone, and spend the rest of your lives helping each other remember who you are and what you've done.
Fifty years from now, you'll be able to look back at everything you've done together --- and realize what a terrible idea that was in the first place, but at least now you have someone to commiserate with.
No, you don't need to "emulate the absorption spectra of oxygenated hemoglobin" --- the whole idea of the "gummy bear attack" is to put a thin fingerprint-replica cover, with material properties extremely similar to a layer of skin, over your real live finger (which provides the color, pulse, temperature, conductivity, elasticity, etc. of a living human, and can be used in plain sight of a security guard monitoring the scanner). A thin gelatin layer is likely to be very difficult to distinguish from a slightly thick-skinned (e.g. callused) real human finger, since gelatin is basically made from the same materials as human connective tissue.
Among other things, it indicates the manufacturer isn't obsessed with cutting every possible corner to save themselves money. It's not that Chinese manufacturers aren't perfectly capable of high quality work --- crappy Wal-Mart Quality goods are the result of *American* investor-leeches demanding products with the absolute cheapest materials and manufacturing quality (resulting in items with only the outward appearance of actually functional goods). A manufacturer willing to spend a couple more percent of the price of a product on US-waged labor also probably won't be skimming pennies by making internal parts out of terrible low-grade materials that fall apart after a month of use.
I haven't put a gummy bear on a spectrometer to check, but my naive guess is that plain gelatin (which is basically boiled-down skin and connective tissue bits anyway) would already have a very similar transmission profile to skin (e.g. fairly transparent with no strong/distinctive spectral features), so you wouldn't even need to search for fancier materials. Not that a little materials research would likely be a major deterrent to an attacker who is already willing to *murder and hack off body parts* to defeat your system.
Does this device offer the least bit of protection against the "gummy bear attack" (i.e. a thin molded replica fingerprint, formed from, e.g., etched gelatin, over a living finger)? If not, then it's pretty useless (because lugging around a whole dead body or even severed finger is already riskier/harder than a simple replacement mold).
Finally, someone standing up against Computer Algebra Systems! Those whizzy calculators are destroying education in this country, leaving children mathematically crippled, unable to manage the simplest symbolic manipulation in their own heads.
Yeah, I didn't RTFS beyond the headline; why do you ask?
A guy has just seen a gang of bandits break into his neighbors' house to rape, murder, and rob them. Now, I think this guy is an awfully crummy fellow --- he beats his wife, and molests his children. I hope he gets kicked out of his house to die miserable and alone. However, having seen what the bandits have done to a bunch of other homes, I know his wife and children will be even worse off if the bandits get to them. I'm in a bit of a moral quandary, but I'm not going to condemn this guy for arming up to lay some whoop-ass on the bandits if they show up at his door --- it's not the best of situations, but better than giving the bandits free rein.
If you're going to talk about "thugs on the street," please remember that the street where the violence happens isn't in your home town --- the U.S. is the real knife-wielding thug who's shown up on Baghdad Street, and is swaggering towards Tehran Avenue. If you're capable of a little self-reflection, your argument above justifies Iran arming up.
Yeah, and Stalin wasn't a Communist, and No True Scotsman would ever tell a lie.
The Irish Republican terrorists/freedom-fighters (depending on which side you adhere to) may not have been toeing the line of Vatican City policy, but they certainly were closely integrated with Catholicism as it actually existed in their country. They operated with the tacit support, rather than condemnation from the pulpit, of their faith communities. There certainly were internal Irish Catholic calls for peacemaking; but more often, a reconciliation of the faith with the "necessary evils" of violent resistance activity.
Luther wasn't the *first* to stand against the Pope --- rather, the first to do so while also accumulating enough backing from local and regional political leaders (Fredrick, Elector of Saxony et al.) to avoid being squashed with extreme prejudice by the Inquisition. A "reformation" for Islam, to cause meaningful change in the conflict-ridden Middle East, requires a pre-existing political shift to significant leadership factions who would benefit from a "kinder, gentler" Islam, rather than the authoritarian extremism that keeps the current group in power.
As a non-car-owner myself, and appalled at the level of societal and environmental externalities attributable to car use, I'm personally in favor of increased deterrents to automotive proliferation. However, I think these need to be balanced by even greater enhancements to public transportation alternatives --- in most US cities (and even more so rural areas), cracking down on automotive use is a highly "regressive tax" that harms the poorest and most vulnerable most. A nice solution would require first having a great, tree-lined, bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly path to the nearest WalMart (even better if WalMarts were eradicated for diverse locally-owned shops).
One significant difference: the $10000 1337 D0ll@rz napkin may not have required an approximately equal amount (by monetary value) of energy to be wasted in its creation. Bitcoin is an ecological disaster, because the market for Bitcoin creation means it is favorable to burn a nearly equal amount of money on hardware+energy to set up a mining rig. For a fiat currency by government mandate (or other convenient shared societal delusion), each $100 bill doesn't entail wasting $99 of resources to create (I bet it's pretty easy to pen your 1337 D0ll@rz napkin, yet still useful as a currency if enough people agree to provide goods/services in exchange --- including the original scrawler, if this currency is likely to take off).
Brilliant! An ATM that I put cash *into* to get magic numbers out --- for all those times when I've been standing in a market thinking "gee, it would be handy to have a bit less spending cash in my wallet right now."
Perhaps there's some middle-ground solution? We could require all cars to be registered (and tracked in government databases), and operators to be licensed and trained. We could mandate insurance for drivers, and require new cars to be built with reasonable safety features (while grandfathering in older collectible models). Maybe even additional taxes on car fuels, beyond the sales taxes on ordinary goods? Limitations on car operation in school zones? Fines, loss of licensing, and criminal penalties for dangerous driving (even in cases no damage is done)? This way, people who have grown up in a driving culture, passed down from parents to children, can still responsibly drive cars for recreation and utility, while keeping unlicensed fleets of murder vehicles out of the hands of criminals. But perhaps I'm the crazy dreamer to think that society could ever agree to such a solution.
You may not ever be able to get rid of them all. But when a slum houses more roach than human tenants by mass, it's probably time to raze the tenements to the ground with fire and re-build something more suitable for human habitation. The most dismal sectors of the web, consisting of tiny slivers of human content wedged between giant mounds of advertisers' feces, are overdue to be razed and rebuilt from scratch, based on new models besides maximally-intrusive-scumbag-ad-supported content. No doubt the roaches will slowly infiltrate back in, but at least in the interim conditions are improved.
If the advertising industry is still capable of responding, we obviously haven't nuked them enough yet.
You have one too many "ah"s in there.
Dammit, why did I know that from memory?
I have friends around the country and they have all been complaining about high grocery prices. So while your mileage may vary, I have good evidence that this is far from a local phenomenon. (Not to mention that I buy much of my food at nation-wide franchise chains. On average, their prices are not likely to vary a lot from one region to another.)
I didn't say prices weren't rising at all, but your claim of ~50% over the last two years is quite a jump --- at that scale, it's unlikely to be largely the result of government monetary policies, which are going to come much closer to 5% than 25% per year. National coordinated price rises across big-chain franchises is probably more an indication of the expected results of oligopolistic pricing in a non-competitive market.
It's up 24% from the last time it was raised, 6 years ago, to $7.25. That is significantly different from government's claimed inflation rates. Your argument that it is "down 50%" just reinforces what I was saying: inflation is higher than what government has been claiming. But anybody with half a brain who has looked at how the government calculates it knows that anyway.
My reference point for ~50%, about which I should have been more clear, was the minimum wage ~50 years ago (not the 6-year-old definition). I agree that government inflation estimates often tend towards the low side --- hence, e.g., the harm of attempts to tie government benefits to CPI. However, the difference is typically more on the order of 5% vs. 3%, instead of the "oh noes! hyperinflationary disaster!" panics based on cherry-picking particular fluctuation-prone goods.
Whooooosh!
It's simply not in your worldview that government monetary policy can be unsustainable, or investors wrong, eh?
Whooooosh yourself. Government monetary policy certainly can go horribly wrong; and US historical and current practice has generally been quite sub-optimal. However, it has if anything erred on the side of too little inflation, protecting investors over stimulating economic activity. Printing up free money at a controlled rate actually *works* for keeping society chugging along quite stably; just think of it as an un-evadable tax on hoarding US$. Investors also certainly can be wrong --- I generally consider having society's resources primarily controlled by a few investing billionaires *wrong* on a much more fundamental level. But investors considering US bonds (hence the multi-decade financial stability of the US government) to be a safe stable bet (despite continuing the long, publicly visible tradition of "printing new money") are not making imprudent decisions.
P.S.: how pathetic is it that you rail against "people with shitty entitled attitudes," then declare yourself to be a natural lord over all us serfs? Self-reflection is apparently not one of your strong points.
Ha, ha, ha. You think I'm a fan of 9-5 jobs and college debt --- because your world view is so limited that you think it's the only alternative to your "free market" feudalism?
I think I've seen you use self-identify with the term "anarcho-capitalist" in previous posts (or maybe that was someone else?). Perhaps you should spend some time reading some actual anarchists (hint, these people don't idolize feudalism and living high off the oppression of serfs). Kropotkin is a good start (and plenty of more modern works bring these ideas more directly to bear on contemporary issues --- but underlying power dynamics haven't changed that much over the centuries).
Maybe a perfect isolationism would work great in whatever parallel universe Ayn Rand came from. If all the capitalist ideologues really could go live in their own world --- perhaps their own Mars colony --- then everything would be great. Unfortunately, they can't (or at least don't) --- folks we disagree with are still pissing in our water, polluting our air, voting in our elections, and buying our factories to ship our jobs to China for a quick buck. Accumulated wealth is a currency of power wielded over those who never consented to the system of accumulation. Have you given up using our "socialist" roads, postal, internet, and fire protection systems? Have you found a way to assure the acrid smoke from your burning house doesn't enter the air outside your property line? As distasteful as you find it, we're stuck living in a world with different people. You don't have to befriend them all. You don't have to have sex with them all. As you've demonstrated, you don't even have to do business with them all. But you are stuck in a world that gives the lie to your fantasies of perfect isolationism within your personal monarchy. Only in your deluded mind is recognizing and engaging with the challenge of a pluralistic society a "one-size-fits-all mentality".
Oh? First, there is generally a 2-3 year delay between inflationary influences and the start of inflation actually hitting the market. So most of it won't have hit the market yet anyway. But some. Have you checked your grocery bill lately? I don't know about yours, but mine has been up somewhere around 50% over just the last couple of years. And short-term commodities like that are usually the first to see a major hit.
My grocery bill has been more stable; your personal anecdotes (and mine) may not be indicative of overall economic trends. Maybe inflation is about to go through the roof? Nonetheless, folks with billions to invest are still volunteering to buy long-term treasury bonds at worse interest than my checking account. Not that billionaire investors can't be terribly wrong.
If inflation isn't significantly above the government-claimed "approximately 2%", why do they want to raise the minimum wage 24%? Just an arbitrary figure in a misguided attempt to "legislate prosperity"? Or an attempt to cover actual costs of living the government lied about? Either one is bad news.
Maybe because the minimum wage is down by more than 50% from when it was introduced many decades ago? You realize that proposed 24% increases aren't just covering for one year of stagnant wages?
Investors always have been "pretty sure". They were sure of that in 1929... that's why the markets were at an all-time high, just before the big crash. They were just as sure in 1999-2000. And they were just as sure in 2007-2008. Look at the YouTube clips from both periods, of people saying "Come on in! The economy has never been better! The market has never been higher!"
And investors holding government bonds during the recent crash did quite well. Investments based on the private sector tanked, but no one lost a cent on Treasury bonds. The private sector is notoriously unstable; the US government has historically managed to produce a rather stable currency with well-defined slow inflation, which is why investors are eager to buy (at interest rates that lose to inflation) in economically unstable times.
I'm not complaining about your openness about your political beliefs. Just pointing out that your belief system only seems to "work" by isolating yourself into a self-contained ideologically authoritarian enclave that brooks no dissent. I personally think that robust ideas can hold up to external scrutiny and engage in dialog besides "screw off and stop criticizing me." Indeed, I think cultivating a general atmosphere of creative dissent to ideological hegemony is beneficial to humankind. I actually want a society that "invests in people with shitty entitled attitudes" [a.k.a. attitudes different from and challenging to mine], instead of an unchallenged intellectual monoculture where everyone either agrees with me or hits the road.
And yet you're terrified to hire someone who might have heard of "feminism or any of the other progressive mindsets"? If your businesses are really such shining lights of goodness, you should have no problem changing the minds of previously-"indoctrinated" workers, as they see how wonderful your world really is. Yet you can't tolerate the idea that any worker might arrive with any prior ability to independently think and challenge your pre-ordained order, before you've the chance to indoctrinate them first?
edit: s/deflationary/inflationary
Well, it seems that the government's regular printing of money isn't exactly plunging the currency into a terrible deflationary spiral. Why do you think investors would buy up 10 and 30 year notes? Is it because they think the government is printing up so much money that in 10 to 30 years we'll be paying for bread with wheelbarrows of billion dollar bills? It seems that big investors are pretty sure that all this money printing won't hurt the value of their dollar-based bonds --- they could've bought gold, or corn futures, or anything else, but something about the expected management of the US dollar makes them eager to tie up assets at extra low interest rates. Perhaps printing money is key to the government and economy staying long-term stable?