We observe that the little guy gets the shaft, always.

And when the inflation machine is working, who loses? Ultimately, this is not an economic question, but an aesthetic question. The whole world, not America, is on the dollar standard; the whole world experiences monetary dilution; the world’s rich live by printing money, then spending it on goods and services made by the world’s poor.

This, in the 21st century, is “capitalism.” This is the inflation economy. It’s really not so different from the late Roman Empire. That lasted a long time, too.

And if you think the world’s economy should work some other way—you have to explain how, instead, it should work. And then you have to figure out to get it there.

its my cake day! :)

An operating system is an arbitrary black box of overhead that enables well-behaving application programs to perform tasks that users are interested in. Why is there so much fuss about black boxes, and could we get things done with less?

God bless the US

The notion of progress in programming is -- as in anything else -- debatable and hard to define. For various reasons that are besides the point of this essay I believe that we're indeed making progress in the art of programming (otherwise what's the point in getting up in the morning afternoon and going to the office?).