I know of a dentist named Dr. Payne.

> a populist demagogue who was promoted by russia

American voters witnessed this demagogue incite a riot in an attempt to steal an election, and after that 2/3 of them still couldn't be bothered to vote against him.

As an American myself, blaming Americans for this situation seems pretty fair.

The federal government can basically print money. The only reason they "need" your tax money is to limit inflation.

You’re not wrong, unchecked inflation is bad for most people though. Stable currency is pretty important for trade and economic stability. Unless you prefer heating your home by burning stacks of cash

Oh, I agree. I never said unchecked inflation was at all desirable or even ok.

My point was that local and state governments do need your tax dollars, in the sense that that is literally their income. But for the federal government it's different. If federal tax revenue declines, they can just sell more treasury notes and continue to spend as much as before. In that sense, federal tax revenue has no direct effect on federal spending.

The price of oil isn't just about the "cost of gas at the pump". It's about how much it costs to transport anything. There aren't many products that don't need to be transported or that don't depend at least partially on something that does.

So yeah, when the price of oil goes up, oil companies make more money, and prices go up for pretty much everyone.

Maybe some of them don't remain employed for very long.

If they're living in NK then maybe their alternatives for making a living are mostly much worse than this?

In that example it would be more common to describe the watch as a "fake Rolex", for the reason you give (it's a real watch).

He said "holding on to it any longer benefits nobody", implicitly including himself. He may believe that it's to his advantage for the patent to be more widely used.

Which makes sense--I don't doubt that he is a subject matter expert where this patent is concerned. If this algorithm continues to be widely used or its use increases, then that would be likely be good for him.

It may be a bit uncommon, but it's not at all new. For example, on a Linux system I have, there are several files in /usr/bin that use hard links to refer to the same file (inode) by different names:

bunzip2 / bzcat / bzip2

gunzip / uncompress

unzip / zipinfo

pigz / unpigz

pkg-config / x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-pkg-config

perlbug / perlthanks

Use ls -li to show the inode number for each file or directory. For example:

    $ ls -li /usr/bin/{bzip2,bunzip2,bzcat}
    23069197 -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 39144 Sep  5  2019 /usr/bin/bunzip2
    23069197 -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 39144 Sep  5  2019 /usr/bin/bzcat
    23069197 -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 39144 Sep  5  2019 /usr/bin/bzip2

That's more a case of providing the distinct "APIs" ( bzip2 , gunzip etc) to userland / scripts, while the implementation for all is just one binary; than it being "Configuration via name..."

Somewhat similar to how busybox does its thing.

> There is a reason why one can't pay off a credit card with another credit card.

Isn't that exactly what a credit card balance transfer is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_balance_transfer