And not only will the federal reserve not create inflation, Janet has been Yellen' about reversing QE (not that anyone believes anything the Fed says anymore). That would effectively take 4 Trillion (yes, with a 'T') out of the economy (though not all at once, hopefully). That would have the same effect as firms hoarding cash. Why would they do that? Because "mebbe' we need to do QE again some time". Which makes absolutely zero sense.

The problem is that the fed keeps screwing with the money supply. Firms then put their efforts into repositioning to take advantage of the new economic conditions rather than getting shit done. I'm not so laissez faire on fiscal policy or regulation, but monetary should be left alone. Let the economy reach equilibrium. Let us plan for the future with some sort of certainty at least on the thing people can control (the amount of money in circulation).

I'm not sure if they're getting data directly from Visa/MC, but why not just let them have it. Make all that data available through a REST API. We obviously can't stop them from tracking us, so why not let them just have out data easily -- and get the data ourselves while we're at it.

Sure, you can download spending data from some banks, but it's not easy. Why not require that banks and/or vendors make every single non-cash transaction available, including itemized details rather than just totals, available in real time via a standard protocol. Imagine the apps we could write to introduce real competition and price comparison into the market if we had that data.

With Michigan's exemplary track record implementing minimal regulations, what could possibly go wrong?

Seriously though, I'm glad their beta(alpha?)-testing this for the rest of us. I think we all agree self-driving cars have great potential once we get it right, but someone has to go first to get there. Way to take one for the team, Michigan!

This implies that rich and upper-middleclass people are stupid. 90% of Americans have a net worth < $1 million. 99.5% have a net worth < $11.8 Million. Under current tax law, you only pay federal estate taxes on the part of your net worth that exceeds $10.9 Million for 2016, which is automatically adjusted for inflation. That < 1% of the population obviously couldn't have elected trump on their own, so the rest of the rich and semi-rich who voted for him must either be stupid or naively optimistic about their future earning prospects. Even if the Democrats were in power and bumped the estate tax exemption down to the pre-Bush $1 million level, that's still only 10% of Americans who'd pay a penny in estate taxes.

Speculating about the higher order effects of how large structural changes in the tax code will effect the income distribution is akin to astrology, but the 1st order effects are clearly more beneficial for a small minority of the wealthiest Americans.

Note that this post isn't rhetorical. It's entirely possible that Trump voters did vote primarily on personal economics and fall into these three categories:

• 1. Think Trump's tax policies will directly benefit them, but just can't or didn't bother to do the very simple math.(i.e. the stupid and the lazy)
• 2. Understand that Trump's tax policies will lower taxes on people richer than them a lot more than it will lower taxes on them directly, but believe the higher-order effects will have a net benefit to them (i.e. trickle-down economics).
• 3. Are really rich and will benefit from Trump's tax policies

I'm just saying that #3 is far too small a voting block to even move the needle in the popular or electoral college votes. If economics was a deciding factor for a significant number of voters, some combination of #1 and #2 were heavily involved.

And there's your answer. He WILL bring jobs back to America. His tariffs will raise prices and cause scarcity. One party control will abolish the minimum wage and the social safety net. Once we're all broke and desperate, deregulation will gut both OSHA and the EPA, making American labor competitive again. Then the incredibly wealthy elite like Trump can manufacture things at home while still increasing their share of GDP even faster than they did under the Democraps (which was pretty fast!)

Slashdot has been making me less productive since before Twitter and Facebook were a gleam in the eye of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg's eyes. And I've been using "well, it's technical, so maybe I'll meet someone or learn something" as an excuse to read slashdot the whole time. Doh! I'm doing it again, right now, as I type. Screw this trash. I'm done with it. I hereby give up caffeine too, since its clearly just a tool the Illuminati use to control us all.

Probation? He needs a "thank you" from both Apple and whatever IT department manages 911. If they can't handle a 6000-phone oops by some kid, WTF do I pay my taxes for? When ISIS and foreign governments launch such attacks, they will be much larger scale and at much less opportune times that really do cause lots of death and mayhem. He basically just walked into their wide open front door and said, "hey, you left the door open". If he happened to track a bit of mud on the carpet on his way out, that seems like a small price to pay.

It's all true, I was there where Nibiru (our mystery planet) and Tiamat (the remnant of which became Earth) collided. And it was a conspiracy too. I know because everyone's home insurance had a interplanetary collision exclusion. WTF! Why would they even put that in there -- unless they knew it was going to happen.

I knew I should have voted for Enlil. He may have been a bully, but at least he wasn't selling influence to the highest bidder like EA.

- Ashurbanipal

Obviously Ecuador is meddling in the US election, but if they hadn't they'd be truly unique among nations. I'm not mad at Ecuador (or Russia if they were the source of leaked info) for hacking or disclosing this that and the other. I expect it. It's just some bits on disk somewhere. It's not like they shot a missile at us. That sort of think occurred long before the Internet, it's just less risky and at greater scale these days.

I just hope to high Heaven that our secret intelligence services have the capability to do the same.

No, I meant that I figured there would be so many people wanting to make this monty python reference that there would be a queue to do so. How did I end up first in the queue? Why would anyone need to wait for a cue to make a Monty Python reference on slashdot?

No go back to eating your donuts (or doughnuts, if you prefer) grammar police.

Great Barrier Reef: I'm not quite dead yet!
Global Warming: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Science: Yes he is
Great Barrier Reef: I'm not
Science: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill
Great Barrier Reef: I'm getting better
Science: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.

How is it that no one beat me to this post here on slashdot?

Terrorist 1: Why all this bombing? Why not hit the great satan where it hurts -- in the pocket book?
Terrorist 2: We though about that, but with Iraq, Social Security, Medicare, bank bailouts, quantitative easing and now Mars, their own government and federal reserve are simply beating us to it. We'd just be spitting in the ocean.

(Yes, I know poo-pooing a Mars mission here on slashdot will get me moded into oblivion, but really?!? Mars? Grow some crops in the desert first and then let's talk about space.)

Okay, I relent and agree. MS actually is pretty f-ing amazing in terms of supporting stuff for the long haul. Sorry, Bill. I apologize. .NET is still a PITA that I don't enjoy coding in though.

Did anyone catch the name of the prosecutor who filed the charges? I'd like to nominate him or her for president if it's not too late.

Uh..fanboy much? Did we forget silverlight? (Yes, I know they've committed to security bug fixes until 2021, but still...)

This is why commercial software is just plain bad -- we buy because we hope to get something near perfect and avoid this type of stuff. But alas, free or commercial, developers have always had the same struggles with an ever-shifting landscape. At very least with FOSS you can take up maintenance of a library yourself if you have to. And a relatively small effort to fix a critical bug or missing feature can pay off big when it brings new users and developers.

Commercial licenses should have a provision that if the vendor ever decides to discontinue future development, they are required to open-source the whole thing for free.