Perhaps, something about MAGA sure seems to cause more brain damage than a full blown meth addiction in once intelligent people, but even with functioning brains 80 year olds are not as in touch with current events, morals, or norms, nor do they have skin in the game.

It’s easy to vote for programs or projects that won’t have to be paid for, or whose deleterious effects won’t be felt until long after their death….like denying climate change. They can gamble recklessly with the future to see monetary benefits today because they won’t be here when their gamble fails disastrously in 20 years to pay the piper themselves.
I think people making the rules and laws should be expected to live under them for a minimum of 20 years, maybe more, making the age cutoff for election below 60. Nobody is getting smarter or more up to date and in tune with current events and new advanced methods of problem solving after 60.
Once upon a time experience was a valuable feature in a politician, but today the best you could say is they have lots of experience at failure and partisan gridlock no matter which party they’re in. 2 terms is enough for presidents, it should be plenty for senators, representatives, and Supreme Court justices. Professional politicians are an anathema to America, as is a political ruling class or politicians getting rich while in office, and we now have all 3 as the norm.

A German mark had value….until it didn’t. Your opinion of “fiat money” isn’t universal by any stretch. You say it’s universally better. I wholeheartedly disagree, and point to Germany and Venezuela as proof. They aren’t outliers either, (looking at Africa).

Gold is useful and valuable. Digital footprints aren’t. Paper notes aren’t. Printed circuits, connectors, anti oxidation, actual physical money, jewelry, etc. gold has intrinsic value, a dollar bill has about 13210 joules, so its intrinsic worth is about 1 small 1 gram stick as kindling and little more….no matter if it’s a $1 or $500 bill or a check for billions. Again, see Germany, where bills were more valuable as firewood than money.

This deflation idea again. Give me 3 examples of deflation harming/ending a nation on the gold standard please, I’ve never heard of it happening. (Edit: as far as I can find, I’m no economics professor, for the most part the gold standard was abandoned worldwide in the early 1930’s and the last remnants removed in the early 70’s by Nixon)

Explain how unsecured notes guard against speculation….don’t just claim it. I don’t see it, people made a mint short selling Venezuelan (and other failed) dollars….speculating they would crash….they did. What?

GDP is the metric that imparts value to unsecured notes offered by countries.

I think you had a mini stroke, the paragraph starting USofA is a word salad with no meaning.

Name 3. I named Germany post ww1….they didn’t get to borrow or ignore their debts. What are you talking about?

So, the only ones that don’t/can’t borrow are all the ones that need to.

Pretending basing your dollar on Bitcoin is the same as basing it on gold is outrageous idiotic bullshit. Just nonsense. Utterly moronic and pure fantasy. Don’t try moving the goalposts, that’s what you said.

Yes, the fed will take gold. They don’t take Bitcoin, do they? How about shells? Pebbles?

Jesus, you just want to argue. You’re rambling, switching positions and going off on tangents.
It’s not about whether someone might accept it, it’s about whether it’s universally accepted at one value and about holding its accepted long term value. People once gladly accepted beanie babies as payment….stupid people.
Arcata Ca printed up Arcata dollars….you could get them cheap, businesses took them. Wanna put your nest egg into them? You say that’s good money, as good as dollars. I’ll sell them to you for gold, and let’s see who’s doing better in 10 years. Or I’ll sell you pebbles for gold. Any currency you want, I’ll sell you for gold. How’s that working with pebbles or shells? Can you buy currency with them?

It has everything to do with how much it’s worth. Stop jumping subjects because your point is failing to convince. An economy based on pebbles fails because their neighbors don’t value pebbles, but if their pebbles are gold, they succeed because gold is valued universally.

What are you talking about, the gold standard’s ability to keep up? Huh?! No keep up necessary, no slow down required, gold trades exactly as fast as everything else. What is this nonsense?!?

You mean you can’t overspend and go deep into debt?! And that’s bad?! In your opinion, not many economists….and what makes you think you can’t borrow against gold? Secured loans are easier and cheaper to come by. WHAT?!?

Yes, unsecured paper money can just be printed forever, you CAN “sell the universe”. (Or sell dollars who’s overall value is based on your country’s value) over and over, then print more and sell 9/10 again, print more, sell again. Eventually that money is worth less than it costs to print, and your creditors get paid off in dollars worth a tiny fraction of what they lent you. Not if it’s backed with gold.

Miracle cure?!? Quote it. I think you misread. Secured notes being better than unsecured notes is not “miracle cure” or perfection, it’s just measurably better, safer, and more stable. No system is perfect.

If youre a normal country you are always living on credit, if for no other reason, then because it is super easy and cheap to borrow. Also you have to, to make it to the next pay check (tax collection). First your subjects have to produce and sell, then you can collect taxes.

You dont base the value of the dollar on anything. You offer it as a commodity to the market. If your economy sucks or you print too much money the dollar goes down, which can help the economy. Printing money doesnt automatically help the economy though, it just creates space and time to make it possible for the economy to improve.

Improving the economy means creating more or better products and services that are in demand at a competitive cost. Governments in non-dictatorial countries cant really do that directly, they can only create the conditions for this to happen.

Moderate inflation hardly plays a part, except as a moderator (is that a pun?) of shocks. Deflation (and a strong gold standard in a developing economy IS deflation) is deadly, it makes the economy less flexible, less able to adjust.

If you never improve your ecomomy, all you will have left will be to bitch about inflation.

What is too much debt, too much inflation, too much intervention? I wish economics was a science.

Theoretically the economy can get to be so bad that the structure collapses, there are countries which have notoriously bad historical records, and yet every time they restart they have to borrow money to get things going again. Reserves in general are useless. Production, services and a functioning market, recursive production of valuable goods and services which freely and easily find customers is the only thing you can consider a reliable pillar of civilization. Currency is one of those goods and services.

If for any reason yor currency cant freely circulate (see China or the USSR errr... Russia) you can hardly be a superpower, at least not in the economic sense.

Adopting a gold standard so strong that it would destroy the international dollar standard has no advantage for the USofA or for any developed first world country. Even just having the Euro wreaks havoc in weaker European countries economies, but that is another can of worms.

A lot of what is wrong about the gold standard would apply if a country decided to adopt bitcoin as its sole currency btw.

I don't know for a fact but I suspect that you may have to show proof that you are legally allowed to purchase such items. After all "lawyer" is in his title.

My dad showed me how to pick locks when I was 10.

In my 3rd year in high school I got an "A" in English class because the teacher needed to get into a filing cabinet and didn't have the key with her. I told her I could open it but she didn't believe me so I made an deal with her. An "A" in English to pop the lock.

That "A" sure did stand out next to all those "B's" on my report card.

If you've been enticed to be a burglar then that may be a decision you will have to live with.

His videos show that if you want to safeguard your valuables you might want to avoid certain security methods and why so.

Locally, all the beef in my area is grass fed. All unnatural pastures were created as a byproduct of the logging industry, not for cattle. It’s butchered and stays local. I must guess our beef here is that outlier at 9 kg CO2 equivalent per kg….or better.
I also must assume they give no value to the rest of the carcass in their calculations…bone meal, tallow, etc are also valuable commodities not accounted for here.

The biggest issue with food production is the number of mouths to feed. We about 8 billion today and rising. The maximum number that can be supported is estimated to be between 8 and 10 billion, but the maximum that can be sustained naturally without depletion of essential resources is only 1.5 billion, assuming they use the same resources per capita.
To actually be sustainable as a species, we need to eliminate over 80% of the population AND adopt far less destructive behaviors.
Ain’t gonna happen. Start making your chain mail dresses and shoulder pads now, it’s almost time for Thunderdome.

Interesting and valuable info but a real long walk. It's probably a good idea to say the same thing over and over in different ways to make the message clear.

You may be lucky to be alive but you are also becoming more valuable.

Bob,

Here's where we agree on something.

I came from amazing wealth, like total top .01%, then lost everything and ended up in absolute poverty. I taught myself a valuable skill and kept building and building on it. It started with shit jobs, but I kept learning and doing more and never stopped believing in myself or in my ability to better my circumstance. I went to college and learned how to learn more efficiently. Even now, I'm improving my skills on a daily basis. 40 years later, now I'm in the 1%.

This is America to me, one part of it: that in America, you at least have a chance -- however small, however improbable -- to better yourself through your own skills, drive and determination. It's not a 100% guarantee, but I honestly haven't seen another country that fosters this attitude.

For the nb, did I have a leg up? Definitely. I was born with an extraordinary mind into a hyper-affluent family. As a child I went to the best public schools in America during a time when education was valued above all else. By the time my mom and I were basically on the street, I had enough base knowledge to build on what I'd already learned. I also took advantage of community college when it was all but free ($50 a semester) and was able to take pretty much any class that interested me. I was also able to afford a computer when they were very expensive and complicated.

Finally, I was born a white male and caught innumerable breaks because of that. I have zero doubt that I am where I am in part to this accident of birth, because I was told by cops, teachers and employers, sometimes quite openly and sometimes in coded language, that I was preferred over non-white people.

For all America's sin -- and many be thy score -- the nucleus of true capitalism is still alive.

The worst DevOps mistake I ever made:

Assignment: On ~1,000 -physical- RHEL systems, change the default run level from command line to GUI (don't ask).

Solution: Hey, all our config files are controlled by Puppet, so this'll be easy!

(If you don't know what Puppet does, it enforces file configurations, so if you change a single file on the Puppetmaster, that change is pushed out to all servers running Puppet)

Ok, all I need to do it edit a single file, change a single number in said file and issue a single command: reboot. Easy-fuckin'-peasy.

The file I need to change is /etc/inittab -- this file tells a Linux system which "run level" it should initiate upon booting up. runlevel 3 is command line and runlevel 5 is a GUI like Gnome or some other tragic perversion of the whole reason you run Linux in the first place. All I had to do was change from runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. And reboot.

So simple; so stupidly simple.

So stupidly simple at 3:00am. When I hadn't slept all night. On a production network. When I'm working from home away from the office. On a Saturday when no one is in said office.

I make my change and save it, then push it to the version control system. Puppet picks it up and pushes the change to ~1,000 physical computers.

Done and done!

Remember I mentioned that I had to change a single file AND execute a single command: reboot?

Here's where things go tragically wrong.

My changes worked PERFECTLY. Everything did exactly what I told it to: Puppet changed the file, and rebooted the servers.

Only they keep rebooting. They keep rebooting over and over and over and over. I can't access any server on the network. Worse, while I'm trying to figure out WTF I did wrong, the 30 minute time-out I'd set on our alerting system, Nagios, expires.

Did I mention that I pushed this change to ~1,000 servers? ~1,000 servers that won't stop rebooting and aren't reporting into Nagios, thus being marked as down?

At 3:31am, on Saturday morning, the pages to ALL the on-call engineers began. One page per engineer per machine. About one every two seconds. And I'm getting paged, too -- except some of the pages are Nagios and some are utterly irate engineers who want to know exactly WTF is going on and I can't tell which is which because I'm getting text-spammed like crazy.

And those servers? They just keep right on rebooting.

At that point, I felt the kind of existential dread that only people who work in IT know -- the kind of dread that arises a picosecond after you've hit ENTER and realized you've type 'rm -rf /' or some-such -- because I knew at that very second exactly what I'd done wrong.

I'd typo'd "5" and made it "6" in the runlevel. And pushed it to ~1,000 -physical- servers. And then rebooted them ALL.

"So," you're asking, "Whyfor is runlevel 6 a big deal?"

Because of this:

runlevel 3: command line.
runlevel 5: GUI
runlevel 6: REBOOT THE FUCKING COMPUTER.

What I'd done was told every production server on our network to reboot as soon as it rebooted, which leads to another reboot, which leads to another reboot, lather rinse repeat.

At 3:45am on Saturday morning, I knew that every person in IT would have to drive into the office, visit every production server with a bootable USB key, change the BIOS to boot off the key, boot the server into Single User Mode, change the damned file by hand, then reboot the server. This takes about 10 minutes per server -- times ~1,000.

I learned a number of valuable lessons that day:

1. DOUBLE CHECK YOUR FUCKING WORK.
2. See lesson #1
addendum: filing for unemployment insurance in Washington state is amazingly easy.

And that was the very last time I ever worked on physical hardware. To this day, if it's not in the cloud, I ain't fucking touching it.

Here endth the lesson.

Worked for an place I can't discuss trying to make things more efficient. We worked our socks off creating a product which made a small but significant task much faster.

We worked out we could save people 20 mins each per day, ran the numbers across the place and realised it added up to a large number of people freed to do more valuable work.

Then we went to speak to a user at about 1:30pm. "Oh I'm sorry, are you on lunch?". He had his feet up on his desk, reading a book. "No, I'm just done for the day". "You're working a half day?", "No I've finished". "Finished what?" "My 10 widgets for the day".

We realised all we'd done was allow this guy to start reading his book at 1:10pm.

When you buy a safe that is less than $100 you'd be a fool to put valuables in it.

If you by a safe that is $5,000 you'd be fool to use it for your garden shed keys.

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

The words they sing are so much more valuable than the guitars they used to transmit their message for almost free.

"Haven't you heard it's a battle of words," -Us and Them

LOL, come on now, I've never called you names before. Sticks and stones.

So what is your answer to the problem?

I suspect you see the the problem but are at a loss for the answer. Seems you grow frustrated and angry because no one hears you.

I hear you. Your heart sent out an SOS. I'm on your side. I need your pen.

I think I will take that nap. Thanks. I would never give up on you. You are too valuable.

You are delusional if you think you can't write something that people would happily pay for. If you do it for the money your words won't be effective. Write to touch hearts. If you need examples there are tons in songs and movies and books. They all have one thing in common, no matter what. Look for it. It's there. If you touch hearts you give something valuable for free. As far as money is concerned, expect nothing, accept everything. Good or bad.

The judges will find you.