Social and political interests tend to have a heavy coincidence with geography. If you are on the coasts you care way more about the fishing industry than people in the heartland. If you are in a desert you care more about water conservation. If you are near oil and natural gas your livelihood or the livelihood of your neighbors probably depends on the energy industry. By virtue of being in a population dense area, you automatically have a powerful voting block on various area specific issues. What's more, the people in other areas are not your neighbors, you have much less incentive to protect their interests, and are much less likely to hear their anger and complaints when you don't. By and large people from Wisconsin are not going to be able to come and protest march down the streets of LA if California -- 8 x the population of Wisconsin -- decides corn should be taxed to subsidize making action movies.
The senate already gives proportional control by statehood and prevents that sort of issue.
Why would you purchase insurance on something that another entity is controlling? I'll accept liability for my own actions, but I won't accept liability for Google/Tesla/etc's actions; I don't control the software, so why should I pay for the liability?
Are you implying that Facebook has a duty to publish your copyrighted material? They're not destroying copyrighted material when they stop hosting any more than people are stealing when they copy copyrighted information.
I've used Jekyll and it is wonderful to be able to author in plain old Markdown. You can just write what you want and be guaranteed that you'll always be able to render it somehow, and with Jekyll you can implement your own organization of flat files. It comes with templating and looks good on mobile too. Jekyll Now is pretty nice to kick the tires.
I've found that the time spent managing passwords has drastically decreased with a password manager like KeePass, and to boot I have more secure passwords. Password re-use is the single largest problem with data leaks, and you will have problems with remembering oddball usernames where your preferred username is taken. Solve all the problems in one shot and use KeePass or similar. Your "super complicated" KeePass password is just a correcthorsebatterystaple and passwords are a ctrl-v away (highlight the entry you want to auto-type, hit ctrl-v, and it alt-tabs and types it in for you).
I can't tell you how many accounts I've lost before going to a secure, centralized manager. How do you remember all your usernames?
Hopefully the cure for obesity would be more in the form of managing both satiety and metabolism properly. This would let obese people eat less, therefore remaining both efficient as well as healthy.
If Apple handed them signed firmware, they could extract it and use it on others. The current firmware is not vulnerable, hence the request for Apple to create and sign malicious firmware.
I'm having trouble imagining one that opens outward, since the idea of it opening inward is that it can brace against the valve seat when the cylinder is firing. If you open it outward, the mechanism takes the full brunt of the forces against the surface area of the valve vs. a valve seat. Is there a good way to alleviate that issue?
"Then, assessors will record life consequences like changes in work patterns, self-employment, artistic endeavors, or idleness".
If they are doing that, the money is not unconditional. You must provide this information or have someone study/watch what you do with your life. Those are conditions. Give me the money and expect nothing in return - that is unconditional.
Yes I agree that the study is flawed for that reason, as well as another parent poster's reason of the study being 5 years and not indefinite. People will need to better themselves or at least not slide backwards in order to ensure that they don't falter in 5 years when the money ends and they will potentially want to do more because they are being watched. Both of these affect the outcome.
And this ladies and gentlemen is exactly why I don't want to live in a socialist shithole. If the nannystate provides us with our income or some portion of it, they will eventually (or immediately) require us to let them watch and analyze everything and anything we do with our lives. If you take this money, this is what you want for yourself and the rest of society. Period.
Wait, what? The measurement is part of this study; Y-Combinator is doing this study to determine if policy should follow so they need to quantify the result. Government would only have to balance the books: do taxes bring in more than the basic income and all of the other expenses cost?
I'm not saying that if we enact a basic income it does not mean that we will not have a lot of the analysis (hell we're getting it with or without a basic income, at this rate), but it does not follow that it must be requirement for basic income.
Give a friendlier distribution that is focused on end users a try. I've been very pleased with Linux Mint lately. The Cinnamon desktop is quite nice and is plug-and-play: I spent less time installing and customizing this to my satisfaction last week than an equivalent Windows install (I gave up installing Windows on this laptop already).
I don't think that a Linux distribution that is focused on an embedded environment is a good representation of the state of the art on Linux. It would be like dismissing Win7 after using WinCE.
And just in the last 4 months, we saw the bottom drop out of the oil market due to weak demand. That's a signal. Not that there's a massive oil-production conspiracy (I'm not saying there isn't) - but that demand is falling because the economy is failing.
You understand, of course, that there is literally a massive oil-production conspiracy? It's called OPEC, and they have a history of manipulating the market. In this case, it seems that they're looking to make oil unprofitable for us until the small players have to go belly up.
We're seeing it in the 9% drop in CS grad starting salaries.
We're also seeing the industry start to mature as well as competitive pressure from abroad and through the H1B program. Programming is not as sexy as it was in 1998.
We're seeing it in the mass layoff at IBM.
You may have something here, but indirectly. IBM has been on a collision course with failure ever since they started chasing imaginary dividend numbers in order to appease shareholders. They've mortgaged their future in the name of short-term profit and the chickens are coming home to roost. The root cause, of course, would appear to be shareholders' intolerance for companies engaging in long term investment and actual research. They would appear to be happier to gut companies and distribute their value to insiders. This is the strategy that is dooming our competitiveness in the long term and killing our middle class.
I'm sure some contorted logic could qualify; subject X is using software Y, and we need to fool subject X into downloading our software Z... I agree with your initial sentiment though: "sometimes doesn't mean much given today's Federal government".
You have to look at everything as one big picture:
1) You can't legally talk about being the subject of an NSL, or you probably do time in a PMITA prison.
2) The developers would really like to fight the NSL, but would really not like to do time in a PMITA prison
3) An NSL presumably cannot coerce you to keep doing what you're doing, only to not tell people that you were subject to one.
Therefore, it would seem prudent to tip everyone off in a covert way (e.g. replacing instances of "U.S." with "United States", reuploading your same signing keys, saying "not secure as", etc.) but have an overt reason to stop use of the product. It's a very fine line they're walking, and they risked a lot by doing what they did if they were subject to an NSL. In their shoes, I would also say that I lost interest after walking as close to the line as possible. They're gagged and already have at least some chance of having their lives ruined for the actions that they did take. It's not like they can say "Yep, I was NSL'd"
I would guess that they were NSL'd for their signing keys; that would make it less secure in the future so the correct option is to burn the brand now. Reports said that both signing keys signed the new (crippled/canaried) executable, and that the keys had been re-uploaded with the same content on sourceforge. Their legit URL points to their sourceforge site. Instances of "U.S." in their source code were replaced with "United States".
It looks to me like they went through a lot of trouble to burn the brand down before any damage could be done with the NSA's new-found signing keys. It's a very, very bad sign that this happened to TrueCrypt. Good on them for being brave enough to inform us, despite the real risks they faced in doing so. If this project is forked, we can only hope the new maintainers are brave enough to do the same when the NSA goes after them. It also raises the question: how much other infrastructure has been compromised while the maintainers have stood silently by?
That is actually exactly the case.
Since Chrome came out, FireFox has slowly been aping Chrome's features. When Chrome first came out, I hated it. Despised, in fact. FireFox was my browser on all of my machines. Gradually, FireFox started adopting every feature in Chrome that I found infuriating. A few months ago, I said fuck it. If FireFox wants to look like Chrome, I may as well run Chrome and get all of the performance of Chrome.
If FireFox quit all of the dumb things that it has been doing in pursuit of Chrome, I would go back to FireFox. If it keeps trying to be Chrome, I WILL JUST USE CHROME.
They're likely not using top of rack switches, since you can pack a nutty amount of bandwidth into relatively few links with 10GB switches a la Cisco 3120s. I would be unsurprised if they had a Nexus 7000 in the middle of it all.
The article does mention that they're using HP Blade servers, not Dells as another commenter posted. In the video they showed a BL490c g6 blade, which is a dual socket Nehalem blade at 16 per chassis. For cooling they were using watercooled APC pods. The power isn't really the hard part, there is a version of the HP c7000 chassis that has two three-phase plugs straight into the chassis if you don't feel like running C19/C20 PDUs on the side of the racks.
If you're using a *nix box somewhere on your devel network, "dig +trace host.domain.tld" is a beautiful thing as you'll avoid the cache (and therefore any potentially broken caching nameserver behavior) as all the nameservers you hit will be authoritative. You can see if it truly has propagated, which you can't do with a simple nslookup due to negative caching if your first lookup wasn't successful. Right now you could have a negative record cached for the TTL in the SOA and would have to wait until it expires before you see the live record, while it was already live for everyone else. You'll also be able to devel your app faster because you won't hit the caching server until it's live. There may be an equivalent flag on nslookup but I haven't found it after a few minutes of poking around.
Sure it makes me judgmental, but I'm judgmental for this reason: I feel that American society has too much of a tendency to buy consumer trash that won't actually make them happy and freely gets in debt to do so rather than weighing pros and cons of purchase (immediate temporal happiness vs. long term debt and unhappiness down the road if mismanaged) vs. further growth and stability. Do you not think that society would be much healthier if the average person cut down their consumerish tendencies and got what they needed and a few things of convenience/toys rather than catering exclusively to how they feel at the cost of long term savings or stability? If you're so lacking in judgment, how do you feel about people who are 100k in consumer debt? 50k? 20k? Where do you draw the line, and what guidelines do you put in? If you still don't feel fit to pass some sort of judgment, then how do you feel about the fact that right now the average savings rate is negative, and the average household credit card debt (counting everyone, not just households with debt) is $8.3k as of late 2008? Do you deny that there is an irresponsible way to use credit? Do you believe that society as a whole can be healthy if society as a whole isn't saving in any stage in its life? That is why I judge.
Re: para 2: It does harm to society if you cannot support yourself at later points in your life because your behavior is that of rampant consumerism and show no signs of stopping. It sounds like you're not one of those, so I again don't understand why you're offended. If you want to borrow some money, cool. Just don't be in overall debt on borrowing unless it's a good reason. The guidelines that I put forward were only that. And sure, it may not be my business, but neither will it be my business to support you when you fail. Too bad American society has deemed that it is my business to support you if you fail, so it became in my interest (also known as my business) that you be responsible for thyself (which it sounds like you are!) instead of being a consumer whore and running up your debt expecting the rest of society to owe you a living. Try telling me that there aren't plenty of folks out there doing exactly that, while having exactly that attitude.
I would genuinely love to see the renting vs. owning argument and what percentage of the population it applies to in which portion of their life. I personally believe that owning is something that one should do as soon as its feasible in their lives if they're not in an insane area, and relocate if they can't afford to buy in an area (I escaped CA for this reason, and we can see how well the average person who bought a $400k house on my budget is doing now). I don't see how renting can be sustainable until you're dead while maintaining a lifestyle devoid of savings (because renting was a sign that you shouldn't carry overall debt, remember?).
If you don't ignore student debt, you can most certainly attempt to put a monetary value on it over the course of your life in expected earnings and add it to the balance sheet as a reverse loan (accrues money over time), adjusted for how you'll actually use it vs. what the statistics say (e.g. if you're flipping burgers your degree doesn't add anything to your salary). In an attempt to give the benefit of the doubt to most student debt, I figured that I would take its value for granted (as you have) and simply ignore it. Car debt is debt on a depreciating asset, and consumer debt often worthless. Consumer goods are generally something that you buy yourself after you have standing to responsibly buy them (you've saved/budgeted money for them over the course of a few months after your saving/bills). This is something that our society has forgotten in its quest to fill the void of unhappiness with temporal pleasures. Overall debt is wrong if you are accruing it for the wrong reasons. You should strive to save, so as to have a healthy lifestyle and as a consequence a healthy economy.
Re: judgemental and unrealistic: Unrealistic my ass. I'm a homeowner at under 25 while making under $50k a year, make extra payments so as to be on track to pay my house off in 18 years, STILL put money in savings, don't have student debt, do have an education, don't have car debt, do have reliable transportation, am currently growing my income still with advancement/certification at work, fully expect to hit six figures by the time I'm 35 at the latest, haven't had a month's salary on plastic since I was working in grocery in college, have stellar credit, and did it all on my own (caveat: I had good parents who were firmly middle class, so I had a good home life). Please call me unrealistic again. Pretty please.
Re: having 24 months interest free on plastic: That's an exception as long as you can manage it and don't fall into the common trap of overextending yourself. If you can make that money work for you and still have it set aside to pay it off in that no-interest timeframe, then you're ahead of the game and I applaud you. You're also in the minority and not who the initial poster was talking about, hence my comments about you getting indignant about comments not even directed at you.
Re: your renting rant: I'm sorry for not being more clear in my post, renting wasn't a bullet point that alone represents irresponsibility. It was more of an indicator that you shouldn't have things on plastic and carry student debt/car debt/etc. as well. If there's a commonality between most of the people that I have seen not be able to manage money and are in debt, it's that they're renting well beyond when they should because they can't manage to save.
Re: six figure spending habits: Going back to my comment about being in the black overall, which is the best marker of you know.. not being in debt... If you're not in the black (ignoring student debt, which again I already covered as being a type of investment that doesn't show up on a balance sheet as neutral), and you're making six figures.. you may want to re-evaluate your spending on consumer crap unless you're otherwise investing in long term gains (e.g. starting a business). If you're in the black, THEN QUIT BEING OFFENDED BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT IN DEBT.
If you can't sell all of your possessions and be in the black, you're in debt. Judging from your earlier post about having a mortgage, if you were to sell your house and put it towards the mortgage you would hopefully be in the black still. If you're driving reasonable cars that hold their value or are buying cars that aren't a significant portion of your net worth (and therefore won't wipe you out when they do depreciate) then you're fine. Tuition loans are a different class of debt, you're doing the same as a mortgage except your assets aren't tangible (at least you can't get foreclosed on your knowledge!)
The people he's talking about are the sorts that are:
a) paying rent (or spent a ridiculous sum on a house before the bubble burst, expecting to get rich)
b) have more than a month's salary on a credit card (and aren't paying it off every month as you suggest)
c) are upside down on car payments
d) spent more money on college than they can ever afford to pay off because they spent far more on tuition than they could ever expect to pay off reasonably in their career choice
or any combination of the above. Quit acting indignant and as if you've been personally attacked as being irresponsibly in debt because you have a mortgage
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Social and political interests tend to have a heavy coincidence with geography. If you are on the coasts you care way more about the fishing industry than people in the heartland. If you are in a desert you care more about water conservation. If you are near oil and natural gas your livelihood or the livelihood of your neighbors probably depends on the energy industry. By virtue of being in a population dense area, you automatically have a powerful voting block on various area specific issues. What's more, the people in other areas are not your neighbors, you have much less incentive to protect their interests, and are much less likely to hear their anger and complaints when you don't. By and large people from Wisconsin are not going to be able to come and protest march down the streets of LA if California -- 8 x the population of Wisconsin -- decides corn should be taxed to subsidize making action movies.
The senate already gives proportional control by statehood and prevents that sort of issue.
Why would you purchase insurance on something that another entity is controlling? I'll accept liability for my own actions, but I won't accept liability for Google/Tesla/etc's actions; I don't control the software, so why should I pay for the liability?
Are you implying that Facebook has a duty to publish your copyrighted material? They're not destroying copyrighted material when they stop hosting any more than people are stealing when they copy copyrighted information.
I've used Jekyll and it is wonderful to be able to author in plain old Markdown. You can just write what you want and be guaranteed that you'll always be able to render it somehow, and with Jekyll you can implement your own organization of flat files. It comes with templating and looks good on mobile too. Jekyll Now is pretty nice to kick the tires.
I've found that the time spent managing passwords has drastically decreased with a password manager like KeePass, and to boot I have more secure passwords. Password re-use is the single largest problem with data leaks, and you will have problems with remembering oddball usernames where your preferred username is taken. Solve all the problems in one shot and use KeePass or similar. Your "super complicated" KeePass password is just a correcthorsebatterystaple and passwords are a ctrl-v away (highlight the entry you want to auto-type, hit ctrl-v, and it alt-tabs and types it in for you).
I can't tell you how many accounts I've lost before going to a secure, centralized manager. How do you remember all your usernames?
Hopefully the cure for obesity would be more in the form of managing both satiety and metabolism properly. This would let obese people eat less, therefore remaining both efficient as well as healthy.
If Apple handed them signed firmware, they could extract it and use it on others. The current firmware is not vulnerable, hence the request for Apple to create and sign malicious firmware.
I'm having trouble imagining one that opens outward, since the idea of it opening inward is that it can brace against the valve seat when the cylinder is firing. If you open it outward, the mechanism takes the full brunt of the forces against the surface area of the valve vs. a valve seat. Is there a good way to alleviate that issue?
"Then, assessors will record life consequences like changes in work patterns, self-employment, artistic endeavors, or idleness".
If they are doing that, the money is not unconditional. You must provide this information or have someone study/watch what you do with your life. Those are conditions. Give me the money and expect nothing in return - that is unconditional.
Yes I agree that the study is flawed for that reason, as well as another parent poster's reason of the study being 5 years and not indefinite. People will need to better themselves or at least not slide backwards in order to ensure that they don't falter in 5 years when the money ends and they will potentially want to do more because they are being watched. Both of these affect the outcome.
And this ladies and gentlemen is exactly why I don't want to live in a socialist shithole. If the nannystate provides us with our income or some portion of it, they will eventually (or immediately) require us to let them watch and analyze everything and anything we do with our lives. If you take this money, this is what you want for yourself and the rest of society. Period.
Wait, what? The measurement is part of this study; Y-Combinator is doing this study to determine if policy should follow so they need to quantify the result. Government would only have to balance the books: do taxes bring in more than the basic income and all of the other expenses cost?
I'm not saying that if we enact a basic income it does not mean that we will not have a lot of the analysis (hell we're getting it with or without a basic income, at this rate), but it does not follow that it must be requirement for basic income.
Give a friendlier distribution that is focused on end users a try. I've been very pleased with Linux Mint lately. The Cinnamon desktop is quite nice and is plug-and-play: I spent less time installing and customizing this to my satisfaction last week than an equivalent Windows install (I gave up installing Windows on this laptop already).
I don't think that a Linux distribution that is focused on an embedded environment is a good representation of the state of the art on Linux. It would be like dismissing Win7 after using WinCE.
And just in the last 4 months, we saw the bottom drop out of the oil market due to weak demand. That's a signal. Not that there's a massive oil-production conspiracy (I'm not saying there isn't) - but that demand is falling because the economy is failing.
You understand, of course, that there is literally a massive oil-production conspiracy? It's called OPEC, and they have a history of manipulating the market. In this case, it seems that they're looking to make oil unprofitable for us until the small players have to go belly up.
We're seeing it in the 9% drop in CS grad starting salaries.
We're also seeing the industry start to mature as well as competitive pressure from abroad and through the H1B program. Programming is not as sexy as it was in 1998.
We're seeing it in the mass layoff at IBM.
You may have something here, but indirectly. IBM has been on a collision course with failure ever since they started chasing imaginary dividend numbers in order to appease shareholders. They've mortgaged their future in the name of short-term profit and the chickens are coming home to roost. The root cause, of course, would appear to be shareholders' intolerance for companies engaging in long term investment and actual research. They would appear to be happier to gut companies and distribute their value to insiders. This is the strategy that is dooming our competitiveness in the long term and killing our middle class.
"Hey, thanks for fixing the IP conflict man! *shuts off breaker and gas line to furnace, replaces thermostat*"
I've got nothin'. Are they on the req list?
Launching rubber bullets and tear gas, which share the 40mm platform.
I'm sure some contorted logic could qualify; subject X is using software Y, and we need to fool subject X into downloading our software Z... I agree with your initial sentiment though: "sometimes doesn't mean much given today's Federal government".
You have to look at everything as one big picture:
1) You can't legally talk about being the subject of an NSL, or you probably do time in a PMITA prison.
2) The developers would really like to fight the NSL, but would really not like to do time in a PMITA prison
3) An NSL presumably cannot coerce you to keep doing what you're doing, only to not tell people that you were subject to one.
Therefore, it would seem prudent to tip everyone off in a covert way (e.g. replacing instances of "U.S." with "United States", reuploading your same signing keys, saying "not secure as", etc.) but have an overt reason to stop use of the product. It's a very fine line they're walking, and they risked a lot by doing what they did if they were subject to an NSL. In their shoes, I would also say that I lost interest after walking as close to the line as possible. They're gagged and already have at least some chance of having their lives ruined for the actions that they did take. It's not like they can say "Yep, I was NSL'd"
I would guess that they were NSL'd for their signing keys; that would make it less secure in the future so the correct option is to burn the brand now. Reports said that both signing keys signed the new (crippled/canaried) executable, and that the keys had been re-uploaded with the same content on sourceforge. Their legit URL points to their sourceforge site. Instances of "U.S." in their source code were replaced with "United States".
It looks to me like they went through a lot of trouble to burn the brand down before any damage could be done with the NSA's new-found signing keys. It's a very, very bad sign that this happened to TrueCrypt. Good on them for being brave enough to inform us, despite the real risks they faced in doing so. If this project is forked, we can only hope the new maintainers are brave enough to do the same when the NSA goes after them. It also raises the question: how much other infrastructure has been compromised while the maintainers have stood silently by?
That is actually exactly the case. Since Chrome came out, FireFox has slowly been aping Chrome's features. When Chrome first came out, I hated it. Despised, in fact. FireFox was my browser on all of my machines. Gradually, FireFox started adopting every feature in Chrome that I found infuriating. A few months ago, I said fuck it. If FireFox wants to look like Chrome, I may as well run Chrome and get all of the performance of Chrome. If FireFox quit all of the dumb things that it has been doing in pursuit of Chrome, I would go back to FireFox. If it keeps trying to be Chrome, I WILL JUST USE CHROME.
They're likely not using top of rack switches, since you can pack a nutty amount of bandwidth into relatively few links with 10GB switches a la Cisco 3120s. I would be unsurprised if they had a Nexus 7000 in the middle of it all.
The article does mention that they're using HP Blade servers, not Dells as another commenter posted. In the video they showed a BL490c g6 blade, which is a dual socket Nehalem blade at 16 per chassis. For cooling they were using watercooled APC pods. The power isn't really the hard part, there is a version of the HP c7000 chassis that has two three-phase plugs straight into the chassis if you don't feel like running C19/C20 PDUs on the side of the racks.
"tasteless beer commercials"
Did you mean the beer was tasteless, the beer commercial was tasteless, or both?
If you're using a *nix box somewhere on your devel network, "dig +trace host.domain.tld" is a beautiful thing as you'll avoid the cache (and therefore any potentially broken caching nameserver behavior) as all the nameservers you hit will be authoritative. You can see if it truly has propagated, which you can't do with a simple nslookup due to negative caching if your first lookup wasn't successful. Right now you could have a negative record cached for the TTL in the SOA and would have to wait until it expires before you see the live record, while it was already live for everyone else. You'll also be able to devel your app faster because you won't hit the caching server until it's live. There may be an equivalent flag on nslookup but I haven't found it after a few minutes of poking around.
Sure it makes me judgmental, but I'm judgmental for this reason: I feel that American society has too much of a tendency to buy consumer trash that won't actually make them happy and freely gets in debt to do so rather than weighing pros and cons of purchase (immediate temporal happiness vs. long term debt and unhappiness down the road if mismanaged) vs. further growth and stability. Do you not think that society would be much healthier if the average person cut down their consumerish tendencies and got what they needed and a few things of convenience/toys rather than catering exclusively to how they feel at the cost of long term savings or stability? If you're so lacking in judgment, how do you feel about people who are 100k in consumer debt? 50k? 20k? Where do you draw the line, and what guidelines do you put in? If you still don't feel fit to pass some sort of judgment, then how do you feel about the fact that right now the average savings rate is negative, and the average household credit card debt (counting everyone, not just households with debt) is $8.3k as of late 2008? Do you deny that there is an irresponsible way to use credit? Do you believe that society as a whole can be healthy if society as a whole isn't saving in any stage in its life? That is why I judge.
Re: para 2: It does harm to society if you cannot support yourself at later points in your life because your behavior is that of rampant consumerism and show no signs of stopping. It sounds like you're not one of those, so I again don't understand why you're offended. If you want to borrow some money, cool. Just don't be in overall debt on borrowing unless it's a good reason. The guidelines that I put forward were only that. And sure, it may not be my business, but neither will it be my business to support you when you fail. Too bad American society has deemed that it is my business to support you if you fail, so it became in my interest (also known as my business) that you be responsible for thyself (which it sounds like you are!) instead of being a consumer whore and running up your debt expecting the rest of society to owe you a living. Try telling me that there aren't plenty of folks out there doing exactly that, while having exactly that attitude.
I would genuinely love to see the renting vs. owning argument and what percentage of the population it applies to in which portion of their life. I personally believe that owning is something that one should do as soon as its feasible in their lives if they're not in an insane area, and relocate if they can't afford to buy in an area (I escaped CA for this reason, and we can see how well the average person who bought a $400k house on my budget is doing now). I don't see how renting can be sustainable until you're dead while maintaining a lifestyle devoid of savings (because renting was a sign that you shouldn't carry overall debt, remember?).
If you don't ignore student debt, you can most certainly attempt to put a monetary value on it over the course of your life in expected earnings and add it to the balance sheet as a reverse loan (accrues money over time), adjusted for how you'll actually use it vs. what the statistics say (e.g. if you're flipping burgers your degree doesn't add anything to your salary). In an attempt to give the benefit of the doubt to most student debt, I figured that I would take its value for granted (as you have) and simply ignore it. Car debt is debt on a depreciating asset, and consumer debt often worthless. Consumer goods are generally something that you buy yourself after you have standing to responsibly buy them (you've saved/budgeted money for them over the course of a few months after your saving/bills). This is something that our society has forgotten in its quest to fill the void of unhappiness with temporal pleasures. Overall debt is wrong if you are accruing it for the wrong reasons. You should strive to save, so as to have a healthy lifestyle and as a consequence a healthy economy.
Regarding your new house (con
Re: judgemental and unrealistic: Unrealistic my ass. I'm a homeowner at under 25 while making under $50k a year, make extra payments so as to be on track to pay my house off in 18 years, STILL put money in savings, don't have student debt, do have an education, don't have car debt, do have reliable transportation, am currently growing my income still with advancement/certification at work, fully expect to hit six figures by the time I'm 35 at the latest, haven't had a month's salary on plastic since I was working in grocery in college, have stellar credit, and did it all on my own (caveat: I had good parents who were firmly middle class, so I had a good home life). Please call me unrealistic again. Pretty please.
Re: having 24 months interest free on plastic: That's an exception as long as you can manage it and don't fall into the common trap of overextending yourself. If you can make that money work for you and still have it set aside to pay it off in that no-interest timeframe, then you're ahead of the game and I applaud you. You're also in the minority and not who the initial poster was talking about, hence my comments about you getting indignant about comments not even directed at you.
Re: your renting rant: I'm sorry for not being more clear in my post, renting wasn't a bullet point that alone represents irresponsibility. It was more of an indicator that you shouldn't have things on plastic and carry student debt/car debt/etc. as well. If there's a commonality between most of the people that I have seen not be able to manage money and are in debt, it's that they're renting well beyond when they should because they can't manage to save.
Re: six figure spending habits: Going back to my comment about being in the black overall, which is the best marker of you know.. not being in debt... If you're not in the black (ignoring student debt, which again I already covered as being a type of investment that doesn't show up on a balance sheet as neutral), and you're making six figures.. you may want to re-evaluate your spending on consumer crap unless you're otherwise investing in long term gains (e.g. starting a business). If you're in the black, THEN QUIT BEING OFFENDED BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT IN DEBT.
If you can't sell all of your possessions and be in the black, you're in debt. Judging from your earlier post about having a mortgage, if you were to sell your house and put it towards the mortgage you would hopefully be in the black still. If you're driving reasonable cars that hold their value or are buying cars that aren't a significant portion of your net worth (and therefore won't wipe you out when they do depreciate) then you're fine. Tuition loans are a different class of debt, you're doing the same as a mortgage except your assets aren't tangible (at least you can't get foreclosed on your knowledge!)
The people he's talking about are the sorts that are:
a) paying rent (or spent a ridiculous sum on a house before the bubble burst, expecting to get rich)
b) have more than a month's salary on a credit card (and aren't paying it off every month as you suggest)
c) are upside down on car payments
d) spent more money on college than they can ever afford to pay off because they spent far more on tuition than they could ever expect to pay off reasonably in their career choice
or any combination of the above. Quit acting indignant and as if you've been personally attacked as being irresponsibly in debt because you have a mortgage
"Nonetheless, highway deaths are down in the USA"
The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration has upped their standards, so up yours!