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They act that way because when 2 people disagree, and there is absolutely no way to determine who is right, the only way to convince the other person is to coerce them.

If I say "Santa has a blue suit", most people would say it's actually a red suit. Fine, lets go find santa and see what color his suit is, that is how you determine the truth, you go find out. But crapola, there is no santa, just fictional images of him, and if I take my 'facts' from a different fictional source than you, we will disagree forever because we are both hopeless morons.

But frankly, you don't have any reason to believe in Christianity. If believe you have talked to Jesus or an Angel, you need medical help. If you believe in these beings without having witnessed them then you are just buying into a very old rumor with no evidence whatsoever.

Also, when the FDIC takes control of a bank, the shareholders of the bank are basically fucked. They lose their money, it isn't a bailout. The FDIC insures YOU against the fatcats, preventing them from blowing your money and leaving you destitute.

Finally, everyone knows that 100k is how much is ensured, and you should also know that that limit is per institution, so you can put money in 80 different banks and have 8M effectively insured.

There are all sorts of issues with the banking system, but it is fairly decent. It is certainly not some dystopia dreamed up by left wing conspiracy theorists (nor right wing, like ron paul).

Was the Roman Empire too big to fail? Sortof, in that it so thoroughly changed how people thought and lived that even 2000 years later we are very obviously Roman in many of our laws, habits, and worldview. The key is that the ruling families of Rome are nowhere to be found as such.

So yes, the American economy will probably continue in much the same form for the next thousand years or so all over the world. Our huge amounts of natural resources, talent, and farmable land aren't going anywhere. The real question, the one coded into the title of this post, is "Is America influential enough to take a huge hit without the people who are currently very wealthy having to give up their money bins." and hopefully, for the rest of us who don't have money bins and can only become wealthy through our own work, and thus depend on a fair system, the answer is no.

The author assumes that all times where any user information is needed, that all the information about that user will be needed. That is silly. Secondly, they completely ignores the billion and one problems he will now have.

For example, how do you ensure that the same AIM username is not used on multiple accounts? With the normalized schema, this is trivially done via a unique constraint on the user_id, screen_name, im_service triplet (probably the 3 make up the composite primary key of the table anyway, so viola, consistent data is ensured).

With the de-normalized schema, you are hopelessly fucked. All data consistency would be forced into some kind of ugly trigger.

Finally, joins are really-really-really fast for things like this. Frankly, the real thing that bites you is inconsistent data that violates basic assumptions your application makes, leading to unintended behavior of your application, most often exceptions that are not handled reasonably. In this case, for example, you might have a way to find your friend via AIM login name, but your app blows up when 2 seperate users are returned by the query due to there being 2 results (or you or your orm only get the first result, making finding the actual friend impossible).

And on and on. It is better to have slower fully reliable data than faster bullshit.

Also, how could this possibly take more than 3 hours to make?

1. Obviously allow password resets to on file email addresses.

2. If the above fails, try geocoding the address with google or geocode.us. If it successfully geocodes, ask the user for the address used to signup for the account, and tell them the zipcode the address was in so they know what address if they moved. Take the address they give you and geocode that. If they are very very close in lat-lon it is the same address (you might call this a geo-hash of the address).

3. No email and fake address? Well, this is a consequence of lying when they signed up, so you might say TFB and let them start a new account.

I can't give you more alternatives without knowing what other info you have on them, but the first two here should cover 90% of your users who didn't lie about their address based on the statistics that I pulled from my butt.