Epiphany

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I had an epiphany yesterday. It went something like this:

It’s not your fault that you’re stupid. It’s the fault of somebody smarter and in a position of power who is working to keep you in the dark.

Discuss.

—

In retrospect, “smarter”, to me, suggests intelligence and compassion. Obviously, that’s not really a valid term. They just have power over you.

A Few Words on Debt…

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I thought I’d read this some time ago and went searching for it yesterday to no avail. Oddly, Jennifer referenced it today (that’s a bit freaky — I think it, and the answer presents itself. Hang on… thinking about a new car… damn).

Anyway, Dave Ramsey scales the national finances from trillions of dollars down to something that the public can wrap its collective minds around. You get something that’s pretty scary.

Here’s the, uh, money:

If their household income was $55,000 per year, they’d actually be spending $96,500—$41,500 more than they made! That means they’re spending 175% of their annual income! So, in 2011 they’d add $41,500 of debt to their current credit card debt of $366,000!

This isn’t surprising to me at all. Oddly, way back when — you know, when public schools used to actually teach students to think to some degree — we were required to take and pass a personal finance class to graduate from High School. We discussed the same sort of thing. The message has been lost. But, hey, I’m the bad guy because I choose to live within my means.
So, let’s take this another few steps forward. Let’s predict this spending into the future a few years. We’ll be optimistic and assume that that $55,000 gains 1% per year — to account for population growth, er, I mean, “raises”. Also, let’s assume a 3% annual inflation rate — er, I mean increase in spending.
Don’t forget the interest on that $366,000 of debt — that’s harder to nail down as there’s no single interest rate. Although I did find something that seems to suggest that it’s hugely expensive if we take into account that the debt is $14.5T and we’ve paid $4B in interest this year — that works out to a whopping 36% per year! I’d have to be smoking crack to actually use that number, so let’s be optimistic and assume that the interest on our debt is a respectable 4.5%.
So, let’s project:
Annual Income
Annual Spending
Deficit
New Debt, With Interest
1
$55,000
$96,500
-$43,845
-$428,288
2
$55,550
$99,395
-$46,271
-$495,915
3
$56,106
$102,377
-$48,782
-$569,207
4
$56,667
$105,448
-$51,378
-$648,512
5
$57,233
$108,612
-$54,064
-$734,193
6
$57,806
$111,870
-$56,842
-$826,632
7
$58,384
$115,226
-$59,715
-$926,233
8
$58,967
$118,683
-$62,686
-$1,033,420
9
$59,557
$122,243
-$65,758
-$1,148,641
10
$60,153
$125,911
-$68,934
-$1,272,366
That right there illustrates doom and screams that you must stop fscking spending money.
Me? I live within my means. And, when I stand up and tell my nation’s government that I expect them to live within their means, it doesn’t make me or people who think like me terrorists.

Mmm… fork bombs…

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There’s an old quote: “Unix doesn’t prevent you from doing stupid things because that would also prevent you from doing clever things.”

So, we’ll start with a yummy, delicious fork bomb–a classic from the past:

:(){ :|:& };:

Old, elegant, and oddly — unless you actually use it maliciously — very effective at testing your ulimits and overall system performance. Not malicious to the point of data loss as it will, on a poorly-configured system, only flood it with running programs.

So, what kind of OS would let you do this? The same kind that would let you do this as the local administrator:

sudo rm -rf /

Basically, wipe out the entire root of the system and, if applicable and configured appropriately (or, rather, unsafely), every single attached network volume.

Mistakenly type that on one of your core systems to which you’ve attached all of your network storage (in read mode) and you’re likely going to have a very, very bad day.

However, if you need to quickly and legitimately wipe out the root volume on a Unix system, that’s pretty handy. And, slightly modified, it’s also handy for removing very large directory structures just about anywhere. So, very, very handy.

Before you go getting on a soapbox and start screaming, “See! See! Unix is dangerous!” let us direct our attention to Windows:

Another classic from the past. This time for DOS and Windows (that, sadly, doesn’t work anymore) is this one:

echo y | format c: /s /q /vol:bugfree

The one worked on Windows ME and older. And, with Windows 98 still in the wild, but in endangered numbers, it’s still semi-useful. This one, when used inappropriately, is malicious as it instantly formatted the C: drive. Can’t do it anymore because the job of Windows is now to protect you from yourself.

What if we need to quickly and legitimately wipe a Windows installation? Sorry. Nothing available in the OS for that.

All those layers of protection, restriction, and oversight now added to Windows means that–even as the administrator, in charge of everything on the system–it’s more and more difficult to do useful, efficient things.