The only viable option a government wishing to do this is to do a clean room design. Unless of course there are patent restrictions.
Or unless too many of its talented programmers have seen the Office source code and signed an NDA. Any work they produced on a FOSS implementation of Office could potentially be under heavy scrutiny by Microsoft's legal team.
Admirable, but your thriftiness and high principles are no match for our IMF and World Bank arm-twisting and bribes to high-level politicians in your country.
Sincerely,
The Man
P.S. Would you be one of those "hackers" that enables piracy, pedophiles and terrorists on the Internet? Our News® has been full of stories on this topic - I can't believe you're unaware of the scope and horror of the problem.
the choice of American President seems to have a big impact on them, so you think that means there's merit in letting them have some say in who should lead America.
Only because I believe - like the founders of America believed - that the governed, the people who are impacted by the decisions of governmental authority - should have some say in the selection of those who exert authority over them.
Recall the American colonies actually rebelled because we didn't get sufficient representation of our interests from an overseas government authority.
Whatever issues they consider, Americans will choose based on what they think most likely to benefit themselves, Americans, and non-Americans will choose based what they think most likely to benefit themselves, non-Americans.
No. Actually, the more compassionate and forward-thinking Americans, and foreigners, will choose based on what they think most likely to benefit not just themselves, but other Americans, and their children in the future and, yes, even people in other parts of the world.
If I was strictly choosing for myself, I'd vote to continue the tax cuts (from which I benefitted handsomely) and to let social Darwinism take its course as the unfit, the unhealthy, the very old and very young and the impoverished died in the streets.
But I tend to believe there's merit in a system that provides overall benefit to more than just myself. It's not logical, I know, but it's what I believe.
My fellow citizens are blissfully unaware of the impact of American authority abroad. They figure them crazy furriners are jealous of our Merican freedoms and prosperity and that must be the reason we're hated.
They have no idea how American power and influence are being used thousands of miles from home by our government or by our large multinational corporations.
IMHO, it's almost as bad as the delusions that North Koreans operate under. When their people ask their government how come all the famine relief bags of rice had "USA" stamped on the outside there was a simple answer: "The Americans admire and fear us, so they're sending tribute." Now, go back to listening to the state-controlled media.
Interestingly, they've promised to come out with a next generation card, the HD-3000.
For a long time it's been promised to come RSN, with pre-orders expected to be taken starting September 15.
That was yesterday.
Now, pre-orders are expected to be taken starting September 22, with production and shipping a month later.
I have two TiVo's that I like now (loaded to 200 GB on one) but an HDTV flat panel is in my near future (the Sharp 46 in LCD looks nice) and I'm like to try MythTV with one of these pcHDTV cards, a couple of Hauppage 350's, and lots of disk space.
What would be really nice is a quiet, black consumer box form factor case that could take all this and sit inside my stereo cabinet...
I think they both need to step away from the issue here.
Actually, former Green Party supporters of Nader in 2000 have surrendered to the ugly realities of the 2 party system and decided that "Anybody But Bush" is more important than a doomed stand on principle.
I have mixed feelings on it.
In some ways I am disgusted over so many deluded people that can't/won't/don't want to recognize just how badly the current administration is fscking things up.
So much so, that if we got 4 more years of Dick Cheney and friends that more of the general public would start to really feel the shaft (outsource more middle class jobs so every family can have both parents neglecting their kids to work as Walmart associates for low wages, benefits) and the administration would have to deal with the fallout of a stupid expensive quagmire Iraq commitment (and be the ones that have to institute a front door draft), try to balance a budget that lost hundreds of billions in revenue from tax cuts, and in an era of rising interest rates on a $7 trillion debt so the discretionary budget will get squeezed even more, reap the consequences of misguided foreign policy on North Korea, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, etc.
A lot of people are hurting already, but not enough of the voters living in a mediated reality. "We're for freedom and kickin butt and skippin' school!"
[Pardon me for taking advantage of your expertise]...So two questions have bugged me for a while.
Q1: Once I read where there seemed to be the possibility that tornadoes could be driven by magnetohydrodynamic forces [Nalivkin, 1963]. Is that plausible, credible, or are density variations due to thermal buoyancy enough to account for the observable physics of tornadoes?
Q2: What is it - really - that causes lightning? I've heard hand waving arguments about ice particles and triboelectric phenomena - but do people really know what causes charge separation in clouds and between clouds and ground?
Re:Those stats don't really mean much though
on
Mock World Vote
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Americans though are the ones that have judge based on not only all of the issues
There is the possibility - and I know it's remote - that the rest of the world actually gets exposed to more of the issues than the American public does. As an American, I've noticed my fellow citizens being as happily uninformed, strongly-opinionated and emotionally-swayed as the peasants anywhere else in the world.
This argument has been brought up previously:
that the leader of the US has such an influence on the remainder of the world that it would be appropriate, in the representative democratic sense, for the remainder of the world to have some say on the choice of the American leader.
I would suggest that my "per session" rate of failures in Linux is quite high.
This is hard to test.
As another poster points out, it's because Linux desktop sessions typically last so much longer than typical Windows sessions, mostly for historical and cultural reasons.
From the UNIX background, I'd simply lock screen at a low priority on a network, just in case someone else needed to use my spare CPU cycles overnight. Consequently, I'll go for months in the same session before logging out (say for an extended vacation) or possibly getting interrupted by a power failure or someone wanting to upgrade my machine to the next version of RH.
A few years ago I had X lockups on my Linux box because (a) I was using a closed source nVidia proprietary driver and (b) it was bleeding edge hardware that not many others had experience with (dropping in and out of various OpenGL applications).
Windows using friends at the office here are accustomed to turning off their machines at the end of the day, so the mean session time is more like 8-10 hours instead of 4 months. Most of them don't have too many problems.
Now, at home, I have a Linux box that I boot up and use for an hour or two at a time maybe 3 times a week. And I do a shutdown after I log out. No problems, ever.
Frankly, I'm kind of surprised that NT was more stable than 2K and that XP was less stable.
My impression has always been that Win 2K was Finally Good Enough. So good, that upgrading to anything else was not even really needed in most cases. So good, that XP had to meet a high bar and be at least marginally better to convince users they needed to upgrade.
I suspect what is going on is that those users that we'll alternately call SuperPowerExtremeProfessionals (when they're around) or CluelessHavocWreakers (can we talk?) are motivated to change to something newer based on how much they make things crash on whatever environment and OS they happen to be on.
IOW, there's no helping the helpless.
And, as a cautionary note, peope in the FOSS world, people that would be aghast if someone were to repeatedly power cycle their machines during some delicate fsck, should note that the kinds of dissatisfied Windows users that will be moving to Linux, will be those Windows users like the neighbor kid in Toy Story.
It'll be kind of like the Mariel boat lift when Cuba granted freedom to citizens to emigrate to the US - and took the opportunity to empty its prisons and mental asylums.
I've always found it interesting to watch other geeks at work, because each of them finds his own different path through the overgrown jungle of available tools to get their jobs done.
I've shown others applications I use to get my mainly scientific work done and they've been grateful to be exposed to tools and techniques they had no idea even existed.
Admittedly, many just plod along a path of semi-ignorance and are painful to watch (eg.,
$ cd/way/the/hell/over/to/this/place
$ ls
$ cd/way/the/fuck/over/to/some/other/place
$ ls
$ cd/way/the/hell/over/to/this/place . . .
uh, did you know there's this neat thing, a directory stack that you can push around?
Likewise, others have exposed me to various advantages to bash command completion and specialized Emacs Lisp for editing local file formats du jour.
Some just stay in Emacs all the time; others will use vi and escape into subshells several times per minute, etc.
I'm still waiting to see someone whose shell on gecos field is either perl or python instead of *sh.
It's fascinating and I love the opportunity to learn new techniques.
As someone with myopia, I'd suggest laymen's terms like "20/20" or "20/10" or whatever (what would it be? "20/8") to describe the improved perspicacity available in low turbulence air. [BTW, I'm looking into Lasik and wondering just how good my vision could get...]
Or, you could perhaps express it in terms of
At what elevation above sea level would I need to be at the equator or at New York's latitude to gain equivalently good views of the stars? Higher than Everest, I'd guess.
The ultimate, of course, is the Hubble, above the atmosphere. But the transportation and maintenance costs of the Hubble are considerably greater than Dome C.
BTW, nice work, nice web page. Thanks for sharing it.
No wonder. It's clear that Clippy is going to sue erstwhile Office users under the "Alienation of Affection" provision of the EULA you clicked through so quickly under the heated passion of the moment.
Can I use garnome to automagically build, install and test drive this latest Gnome without impacting my default installation or corrupting my ~/.g* files? As a non-root user, too?
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market.
Correct.
But there a several interesting features you neglect.
First, the most important aspect of China is that they insist on pegging the yuan to the dollar. That means that our trade deficit with China does not automatically get corrected by the devaluation of the dollar relative to the yuan. It also means there is a strong tie between the two countries in fiscal and in monetary policy.
People wonder why the hell there was a "jobless recovery" in the US when the Fed took rates down to a 45 year low. Well, there wasn't a jobless recovery. It's just that all the jobs were created in a specific economic region of the US - China. This regional growth disparity is just like what happened when US companies decided they could produce more efficiently in the SunBelt a couple of decades ago. Inflation never was a big problem with the low rates, either. Why? Because it was economy in China that was in danger of overheating - not the US mainland.
The obvious non-free market aspect in China is that there is only one legal trade union and it is under the control of the Party. The corruption (where workers haven't been getting wages, etc.) puts that model under stress (and should have the so-called leaders in power embarrassed to call themselves a worker's paradise, Marxists and representatives of the proletariat). It will be interesting to see if there's political unrest because the leaders of the China don't provide a natural evolution of needed changes in workers rights.
Finally, the free market works best when there are lots of buyers and sellers. Unfortunately, the labor market doesn't always fit into this category. Some examples of why include:
Needs for skilled labor create something of a shortage in labor sellers,
unionization of workers creates a shortage of labor sellers (even unskilled),
corporate mergers into a fewer larger corporations creates a shortage of labor buyers that don't need to offer high wages to compete with each other.
IMHO, government policies worldwide will need much greater coordination in the future because both labor buyers and labor sellers will tend to take advantage of disparities in national government policies worldwide. Employ workers where their wages are the absolute lowest, accrue profits where taxes are the absolute lowest, market products where prices are the highest, etc. Whether the workers, the buyers of products and people in general benefit from this situation, or only a small minority of people that own shares in internationally mobile companies, is a matter that will inevitably cross borders.
The dramatic shift in the US fiscal landscape over the past several decades, where corporations now pay much less tax than individuals, and the shift in corporations transferring profits to overseas subsidiaries from where their business is mostly conducted, where some countries have expensive compassionate social welfare policies (health care, pensions for the old and infirm), policies to prohibit unrestrained damage to the environment (expensive to companies)
show that the system needs some fixing on a larger scale than "one nation at a time".
We're all in it together and the sooner we realize it and develop coordinate policies the better we'll avoid needless stress of disparities.
Is there anykind of a browser plug-in I could use to deciper steganographically enhanced JPEG images that might just come over plain old unsuspicious unencrypted http?
GIFs were evil, PNG support lacked transparency, now JPEGs can cause buffer overflows - I'd say that IE has an image problem... Excuse me while I just run away now.
If you think their is trouble now, what happens when social security can't pay what's owed 20 years from now, and the 401k's are valueless.
Of course, if your 401k has an option to invest in international companies instead of just US companies or, God forbid, just MyCorp, then you ought to plan ahead for the possibility of greater growth in the rest of the world compared to the US.
As a Boomer, I fully expect Social Security benefits to be reduced in some way, be it means-testing, increased retirement age, or the best solution: tie benefit increases to the rate of consumer price increase rather than the generally higher rate of wage increase like they have been doing.
Although, I must say that as the jobless recovery has transitioned into the wage stagnation alongside energy price increases, there is probably a glitch in that wage vs price trend.
But, as usual, social security policy is the third rail of politics, so expect to see squirming to load the responsibility for coming up with the tough medicine onto a scapegoat commission.
It's as if they realize all the far-right and far-left will vote along party lines even if a monkey was running,
Funny you should mention that...
Anyway, rather than parties drifting to center, I think we can rely more that the parties will be drifting to ambiguity and posturing even rather than any kind of common sense centrist platform.
Either way, once either of major parties in the US gets into power they'll just do what they've been paid to do...
here can I get a 72" poster of my home town before it becomes *illegal*.
Fuggedaboutit.
The view of the backyard where that chick sunbathes is all pixelated.
Re:Not suprising; I hope the book's good
on
Dive Into Python
·
· Score: 1
If writing a book like that could get me $60K a year kind of job, I'd write one for free too.
(I hope the author makes enough money - I just want to point out a possible reason for doing that kind of thing).
I'd bet the money making part is one level of indirection from writing the book.
That is, when you put out a resume looking for consulting jobs, etc. being able to list yourself as the author of a widely-recognized and lauded work is helpful.
Slashdot Mirror
The point I'm getting at is, neither one of these guys offer substance.
Not quite. Both Bush and Kerry offer a substantive policy for government.
It's just that neither of them will tell you straight out exactly what that policy is.
If either one of them strayed from their handlers' advice on what to say and how to say it, then they'd lose the election.
The only viable option a government wishing to do this is to do a clean room design. Unless of course there are patent restrictions.
Or unless too many of its talented programmers have seen the Office source code and signed an NDA. Any work they produced on a FOSS implementation of Office could potentially be under heavy scrutiny by Microsoft's legal team.
Admirable, but your thriftiness and high principles are no match for our IMF and World Bank arm-twisting and bribes to high-level politicians in your country.
Sincerely,
The Man
P.S. Would you be one of those "hackers" that enables piracy, pedophiles and terrorists on the Internet? Our News® has been full of stories on this topic - I can't believe you're unaware of the scope and horror of the problem.
the choice of American President seems to have a big impact on them, so you think that means there's merit in letting them have some say in who should lead America.
Only because I believe - like the founders of America believed - that the governed, the people who are impacted by the decisions of governmental authority - should have some say in the selection of those who exert authority over them.
Recall the American colonies actually rebelled because we didn't get sufficient representation of our interests from an overseas government authority.
Whatever issues they consider, Americans will choose based on what they think most likely to benefit themselves, Americans, and non-Americans will choose based what they think most likely to benefit themselves, non-Americans.
No. Actually, the more compassionate and forward-thinking Americans, and foreigners, will choose based on what they think most likely to benefit not just themselves, but other Americans, and their children in the future and, yes, even people in other parts of the world.
If I was strictly choosing for myself, I'd vote to continue the tax cuts (from which I benefitted handsomely) and to let social Darwinism take its course as the unfit, the unhealthy, the very old and very young and the impoverished died in the streets.
But I tend to believe there's merit in a system that provides overall benefit to more than just myself. It's not logical, I know, but it's what I believe.
My fellow citizens are blissfully unaware of the impact of American authority abroad. They figure them crazy furriners are jealous of our Merican freedoms and prosperity and that must be the reason we're hated.
They have no idea how American power and influence are being used thousands of miles from home by our government or by our large multinational corporations.
IMHO, it's almost as bad as the delusions that North Koreans operate under. When their people ask their government how come all the famine relief bags of rice had "USA" stamped on the outside there was a simple answer: "The Americans admire and fear us, so they're sending tribute." Now, go back to listening to the state-controlled media.
Interestingly, they've promised to come out with a next generation card, the HD-3000.
For a long time it's been promised to come RSN, with pre-orders expected to be taken starting September 15.
That was yesterday.
Now, pre-orders are expected to be taken starting September 22, with production and shipping a month later.
I have two TiVo's that I like now (loaded to 200 GB on one) but an HDTV flat panel is in my near future (the Sharp 46 in LCD looks nice) and I'm like to try MythTV with one of these pcHDTV cards, a couple of Hauppage 350's, and lots of disk space.
What would be really nice is a quiet, black consumer box form factor case that could take all this and sit inside my stereo cabinet...
I think they both need to step away from the issue here.
Actually, former Green Party supporters of Nader in 2000 have surrendered to the ugly realities of the 2 party system and decided that "Anybody But Bush" is more important than a doomed stand on principle.
I have mixed feelings on it.
In some ways I am disgusted over so many deluded people that can't/won't/don't want to recognize just how badly the current administration is fscking things up.
So much so, that if we got 4 more years of Dick Cheney and friends that more of the general public would start to really feel the shaft (outsource more middle class jobs so every family can have both parents neglecting their kids to work as Walmart associates for low wages, benefits) and the administration would have to deal with the fallout of a stupid expensive quagmire Iraq commitment (and be the ones that have to institute a front door draft), try to balance a budget that lost hundreds of billions in revenue from tax cuts, and in an era of rising interest rates on a $7 trillion debt so the discretionary budget will get squeezed even more, reap the consequences of misguided foreign policy on North Korea, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, etc.
A lot of people are hurting already, but not enough of the voters living in a mediated reality. "We're for freedom and kickin butt and skippin' school!"
I'm modeling supercells that produce tornadoes
[Pardon me for taking advantage of your expertise]...So two questions have bugged me for a while.
Q1: Once I read where there seemed to be the possibility that tornadoes could be driven by magnetohydrodynamic forces [Nalivkin, 1963]. Is that plausible, credible, or are density variations due to thermal buoyancy enough to account for the observable physics of tornadoes?
Q2: What is it - really - that causes lightning? I've heard hand waving arguments about ice particles and triboelectric phenomena - but do people really know what causes charge separation in clouds and between clouds and ground?
true leaders encourage, inspire, and persuade people who don't *have* to follow them.
That's how captains of athletic teams are usually picked
So that cheerleaders at athletic events would have appropriate qualifications for leadership positions?
Americans though are the ones that have judge based on not only all of the issues
There is the possibility - and I know it's remote - that the rest of the world actually gets exposed to more of the issues than the American public does. As an American, I've noticed my fellow citizens being as happily uninformed, strongly-opinionated and emotionally-swayed as the peasants anywhere else in the world.
This argument has been brought up previously:
There's merit to that argument.
I would suggest that my "per session" rate of failures in Linux is quite high.
This is hard to test.
As another poster points out, it's because Linux desktop sessions typically last so much longer than typical Windows sessions, mostly for historical and cultural reasons.
From the UNIX background, I'd simply lock screen at a low priority on a network, just in case someone else needed to use my spare CPU cycles overnight. Consequently, I'll go for months in the same session before logging out (say for an extended vacation) or possibly getting interrupted by a power failure or someone wanting to upgrade my machine to the next version of RH.
A few years ago I had X lockups on my Linux box because (a) I was using a closed source nVidia proprietary driver and (b) it was bleeding edge hardware that not many others had experience with (dropping in and out of various OpenGL applications).
Windows using friends at the office here are accustomed to turning off their machines at the end of the day, so the mean session time is more like 8-10 hours instead of 4 months. Most of them don't have too many problems.
Now, at home, I have a Linux box that I boot up and use for an hour or two at a time maybe 3 times a week. And I do a shutdown after I log out. No problems, ever.
IANA Regular Windows User..
Frankly, I'm kind of surprised that NT was more stable than 2K and that XP was less stable.
My impression has always been that Win 2K was Finally Good Enough. So good, that upgrading to anything else was not even really needed in most cases. So good, that XP had to meet a high bar and be at least marginally better to convince users they needed to upgrade.
I suspect what is going on is that those users that we'll alternately call SuperPowerExtremeProfessionals (when they're around) or CluelessHavocWreakers (can we talk?) are motivated to change to something newer based on how much they make things crash on whatever environment and OS they happen to be on.
IOW, there's no helping the helpless.
And, as a cautionary note, peope in the FOSS world, people that would be aghast if someone were to repeatedly power cycle their machines during some delicate fsck, should note that the kinds of dissatisfied Windows users that will be moving to Linux, will be those Windows users like the neighbor kid in Toy Story.
It'll be kind of like the Mariel boat lift when Cuba granted freedom to citizens to emigrate to the US - and took the opportunity to empty its prisons and mental asylums.
I've always found it interesting to watch other geeks at work, because each of them finds his own different path through the overgrown jungle of available tools to get their jobs done.
I've shown others applications I use to get my mainly scientific work done and they've been grateful to be exposed to tools and techniques they had no idea even existed.
Admittedly, many just plod along a path of semi-ignorance and are painful to watch (eg.,
uh, did you know there's this neat thing, a directory stack that you can push around?Likewise, others have exposed me to various advantages to bash command completion and specialized Emacs Lisp for editing local file formats du jour.
Some just stay in Emacs all the time; others will use vi and escape into subshells several times per minute, etc.
I'm still waiting to see someone whose shell on gecos field is either perl or python instead of *sh.
It's fascinating and I love the opportunity to learn new techniques.
You'd think they'd have a cooler word for that...
As someone with myopia, I'd suggest laymen's terms like "20/20" or "20/10" or whatever (what would it be? "20/8") to describe the improved perspicacity available in low turbulence air. [BTW, I'm looking into Lasik and wondering just how good my vision could get...]
Or, you could perhaps express it in terms of
The ultimate, of course, is the Hubble, above the atmosphere. But the transportation and maintenance costs of the Hubble are considerably greater than Dome C.
BTW, nice work, nice web page. Thanks for sharing it.
OK, just jumped into an almost gentoo-scale buildasm after getting garnome 2.8.0.
I wonder what Microsoft had in mind?
No wonder. It's clear that Clippy is going to sue erstwhile Office users under the "Alienation of Affection" provision of the EULA you clicked through so quickly under the heated passion of the moment.
Can I use garnome to automagically build, install and test drive this latest Gnome without impacting my default installation or corrupting my ~/.g* files? As a non-root user, too?
Around here we like to know about BIG capacitors and BIG inductors, And big heavy flywheels spinning very fast in a vacuum, too!
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market.
Correct.
But there a several interesting features you neglect.
First, the most important aspect of China is that they insist on pegging the yuan to the dollar. That means that our trade deficit with China does not automatically get corrected by the devaluation of the dollar relative to the yuan. It also means there is a strong tie between the two countries in fiscal and in monetary policy.
People wonder why the hell there was a "jobless recovery" in the US when the Fed took rates down to a 45 year low. Well, there wasn't a jobless recovery. It's just that all the jobs were created in a specific economic region of the US - China. This regional growth disparity is just like what happened when US companies decided they could produce more efficiently in the SunBelt a couple of decades ago. Inflation never was a big problem with the low rates, either. Why? Because it was economy in China that was in danger of overheating - not the US mainland.
The obvious non-free market aspect in China is that there is only one legal trade union and it is under the control of the Party. The corruption (where workers haven't been getting wages, etc.) puts that model under stress (and should have the so-called leaders in power embarrassed to call themselves a worker's paradise, Marxists and representatives of the proletariat). It will be interesting to see if there's political unrest because the leaders of the China don't provide a natural evolution of needed changes in workers rights.
Finally, the free market works best when there are lots of buyers and sellers. Unfortunately, the labor market doesn't always fit into this category. Some examples of why include:
IMHO, government policies worldwide will need much greater coordination in the future because both labor buyers and labor sellers will tend to take advantage of disparities in national government policies worldwide. Employ workers where their wages are the absolute lowest, accrue profits where taxes are the absolute lowest, market products where prices are the highest, etc. Whether the workers, the buyers of products and people in general benefit from this situation, or only a small minority of people that own shares in internationally mobile companies, is a matter that will inevitably cross borders.
The dramatic shift in the US fiscal landscape over the past several decades, where corporations now pay much less tax than individuals, and the shift in corporations transferring profits to overseas subsidiaries from where their business is mostly conducted, where some countries have expensive compassionate social welfare policies (health care, pensions for the old and infirm), policies to prohibit unrestrained damage to the environment (expensive to companies) show that the system needs some fixing on a larger scale than "one nation at a time".
We're all in it together and the sooner we realize it and develop coordinate policies the better we'll avoid needless stress of disparities.
So I'm running Firefox 1.0PR and find that my key bindings are drifting away from my emacs favorites.
Now, when I start typing control characters in a text box, like this one here, weird things happen, like Ctrl-B makes my sidebar go away, etc.
Is there a way to get around this nicely?
Is there anykind of a browser plug-in I could use to deciper steganographically enhanced JPEG images that might just come over plain old unsuspicious unencrypted http?
GIFs were evil, PNG support lacked transparency, now JPEGs can cause buffer overflows - I'd say that IE has an image problem... Excuse me while I just run away now.
Just imagine if Sun had done this in 1990 instead of 2004.
So now Sun is releasing a great OS when:
Cue suggestion for a GPL'd Java to come out now rather than in 2009 after .NET and the CLR have made so many inroads to make the action moot.
If you think their is trouble now, what happens when social security can't pay what's owed 20 years from now, and the 401k's are valueless.
Of course, if your 401k has an option to invest in international companies instead of just US companies or, God forbid, just MyCorp, then you ought to plan ahead for the possibility of greater growth in the rest of the world compared to the US.
As a Boomer, I fully expect Social Security benefits to be reduced in some way, be it means-testing, increased retirement age, or the best solution: tie benefit increases to the rate of consumer price increase rather than the generally higher rate of wage increase like they have been doing.
Although, I must say that as the jobless recovery has transitioned into the wage stagnation alongside energy price increases, there is probably a glitch in that wage vs price trend.
But, as usual, social security policy is the third rail of politics, so expect to see squirming to load the responsibility for coming up with the tough medicine onto a scapegoat commission.
It's as if they realize all the far-right and far-left will vote along party lines even if a monkey was running,
Funny you should mention that...
Anyway, rather than parties drifting to center, I think we can rely more that the parties will be drifting to ambiguity and posturing even rather than any kind of common sense centrist platform.
Either way, once either of major parties in the US gets into power they'll just do what they've been paid to do...
here can I get a 72" poster of my home town before it becomes *illegal*.
Fuggedaboutit.
The view of the backyard where that chick sunbathes is all pixelated.
If writing a book like that could get me $60K a year kind of job, I'd write one for free too.
(I hope the author makes enough money - I just want to point out a possible reason for doing that kind of thing).
I'd bet the money making part is one level of indirection from writing the book.
That is, when you put out a resume looking for consulting jobs, etc. being able to list yourself as the author of a widely-recognized and lauded work is helpful.