gregatragenet2

And another Krugmanism, in the early 2000's: "To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble."

this guy has been on the wrong side of history so often I have no idea why anyone listens to him.

It is interesting how this thread is split between messages of 'they should make better decisions' and then the reply/response that absolves the decision-maker by stating that it's the fault of the 'stress of poverty', not the fault of the decision-maker. I think the reason more people make these short-sighted bad decisions is exactly because they're being told that being in poverty doesn't have anything to do with the personal decisions you make but your 'circumstance'. If we tell people this, what motivation do they have to make prudent long-term decisions at the expense of short-term gratification? What they decide as an individual doesn't matter, or so their told - and they are told that it's a 'societal' problem, that 'society' needs to address/fix, so again, where's the motivation to make sacrifices at an individual level to increase one's lot in life?

Regardless of the reality - of the two statements "it's your decisions that affect your level of poverty" and "it's society's fault you are poor" - one of these statements empowers the individual to make better choices, and the other discourages it.

PS: +1 to the folks who said garage sale / thrift store / second-hand couches. It's mind-boggling that anyone struggling w/ money would buy(/rent) new furniture.

I was complaining to a friend recently about how the city of Mountain View has approved so much new commercial property development while approving very little residential property development. And he brought up a good point. A lot of the unused space in Mountain View is superfund sites. The development of new commercial space is happening at these sites (the whole area around Moffett including Google). It's easy to ensure commercial entities are meeting the requirements to mitigate the pollutants in these areas (proper HVAC and ventilation systems, etc) than with individual residences - and the limits on the amount of exposure are also lower for commercial areas vs. residential areas. So this could be a strong factor on why there's way more commercial development than residential in Mountain View and surrounding communities.

Another possibility - the author was required by a court order to provide a backdoor for unfettered access to truecrypt disk, and to not disclose the existence of the order. The solution was to modify the code so that everyone has unfettered access (i.e. disable encryption entirely) and make the recommendation that everyone switch to something else.