Songbirdo

I'm not arguing against your method for +/- the actual currency inflation rate is market demand's effect. That makes sense. I'm only debating how accurate the inflation rate you're using in the calculation is. Yes, rising prices ("price inflation") is the symptom, not the true cause of inflation (which is actually an increase in the currency supply). Where we may have some disagreement is what we mean by "currency supply". By supply I don't just mean counting the number of dollars represented by the M's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply If the newly dollars are all stashed in a vault (not leveraged for loans, etc), and never enter circulation, prices aren't affected. The newly created currency effectively doesn't exist. Counting how many dollars are in circulation isn't a true measure of the currency supply because it doesn't take into account the velocity of money. Velocity is defined by the number of times one dollar is spent to buy goods and services per unit of time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money The BLS takes an indirect route of calculating the currency supply increases/decreases by measuring the prices of the goods and using that aggregate (the CPI) to approximate the currency supply change. The government then uses the CPI-based inflation rate to drive everything with inflationary cost-increases: social security and I-bonds comes to mind. And don't forget justifying Fed policy with QE since inflation is "low". Which means they have motive to understate inflation, through the CPI, anyway they can. If their measure of price inflation (the CPI) is understated, then the market forces you're explaining, based on the difference with the CPI-based inflation rate, are overstated.

That would be true if it wasn't already money out of your pocket to begin with. If the company has to provide a X% for every Y% you invest, that's less income they are able to pay you directly. Every benefit they offer you is a deduction in the amount they are willing to pay you on the income-side. I would rather have the option to get the X% "company match" included in my normal paycheck rather than the 401k carrot to get me into give up an additional Y% of my remaining income into the government program, but then not get the company's X% if I choose not to participate.

That's all I was trying to say with the post before that. Thank you.

Are you suggesting the current official CPI from the BLS is an accurate indicator for the amount of inflation in the currency supply?

May be something to inquire with him rather than make the relationship-ending decision based on an assumption alone. It may be unfounded. Maybe he lied about his obligation altogether and it was important but didn't think he could tell you? Who knows? Does he have a history of being flaky? There is just too much we don't know about the situation, especially without the most important point of view: the offender's. What are his motives? Why did he blow up at you when he was confronted? etc.

I understand the need commitment: sports team for an analogy - without the full team you simply cannot practice. The extremely short notice of his absence is definitely not preferable nor having the team's best interest in mind. Trying to establish the relative value he places on the team versus the event he attended instead. When did he know he would not be attending the game? What do you mean by "show"? A trade-show? Job fair? An entertainment event of some sort? Who was he attending it with? Example: If it was a job show where he could potentially triple his salary and work his dream job, I'd think it would be an important situation for him to give a rain check.

If I understand it, the above only if you're talking about elastic prices. From Wikipedia on IN-elastic prices: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand Necessities like food, fuel/energy and housing you can find alternatives for to some extent (chicken over steak, generic brands over brand names, etc), but fundamentally you require them in some form, regardless of the price. Side note: In regards to the current CPI (Consumer Price Index) calculations to measure of inflation and in particular their use of substitution: "Well ground beef only rose by this much when steak rose by much more, let's use the beef instead." They use the symptom of rising prices (the consumer seeking alternatives via substitution) to discount inflation. One more reason their CP-Lie is nick-named as such.

For clarity: When you say: Do you mean you rescheduled the "playdate" to Saturday instead of the originally agreed upon Sunday? Or do you mean that on Saturday Person A reminded Person B you all were meeting up the next day (Sunday)? Side question: For how long does this weekly get-together agreement hold? When does it cease? Marriage, kids, college graduation? Until you're all in your 80's?

What would hacking into a computer system of a company and viewing their database of proprietary information be considered?

Disclaimer: Not a financial adviser or a CPA, and therefore I cannot give financial advise and therefore the following should not be considered as much. There's the early withdrawal fee and the income taxes on top of that. And the tax would be at your highest rate since it will be on top of your regular income for the year. Can't forget about the taxes! I've heard the self-directed IRA would let you buy the gold/silver ("IRA approved bullion" like Eagles) with the full amount of the 401k transferred to it (no penalty, no tax), but you will need to look into it further yourself to confirm the notion. Ask yourself: How high of a risk do you think inflation or outright dollar collapse is? Weigh that against the meager but "consistent" returns you'll get in a 401k or a bond. Do the same for the alternatives (your "bitcoin, gold, silver whatever"). Make a decision what you feel is the best route to take.

My very first attempt at cryptography was inspired by the enigma machine from Numberphile. I attempted to do some of the "old-fashioned" character encryption and substitution rather than at the bit-by-bit level. I went to the SHA-1 on the website I linked in the OP to check my hashes, typed in a character and took the output as my reference table: Then set up some weird summation column thing: And whatever the output was, would reference back to the table and look up the correct character and output:

In my everyday life I've been attempting to apply a portion of the "blame" on the opposite side of where it more commonly lies in most situations: Cat tears up the toilet paper in the bathroom. Most get mad at the cat for doing such a thing. But it's a cat, it's just being a cat. It doesn't understand it's not beneficial to you by tearing up the toilet paper; it was just having fun. Sure it's frustrating to you that an entire roll is now wasted, but who left the bathroom door open and allowed the situation to happen? Babies and children similar thing, at least to my current understanding (not a parent), except their ability to learn is substantially greater than a cat's. They're going to do what they're going to do because they learned it from you. Getting angry at them for a gap in their knowledge or when they imitate a not-so-flattering trait of yours is not their fault. They're information sponges and you're the source of the water. Squeeze the sponge and your water comes back out. When it comes to adults, they make their choices and you deal with their choices. And so: She wanted you to be stagnant, unchanging, and never to improve yourself in these regards. She made the choice to remain in said-stagnant state while you made the choice to change instead. They are both fine and OK decisions in my opinion. To change or not to change, that's entirely up to the individual. But you may blame yourself wholly, too: When religious, you decided to get married. In that process you vowed to become a unit, two parts of the same person. You vowed make decisions together. But now that it's starting to fall apart it's all your fault? I don't buy that. I don't think you should have to bear the brunt of the blame.

It sounds like it's just more than the removal from religion, but your values as a whole that changed. These changes were progressive and building on eachother as you went, right? You didn't just wake up one day with a new person inside. She must have noticed the differences as they were occurring. My question is, why didn't she choose to come on this journey with you? Did she offer any feedback on the ideas you were discovering during their appearance?

If they are bleeding out or internally and could possibly die if you do not help...is allowing them to die through inaction moral? Similar to the argument for Doctors refusing to treat a dying patient that they have the remedy. To a lesser extent, by not helping, would letting them suffer longer than they have to be considered moral? If it takes them an extra five minutes, or an hour, to be administered a pain killer at a hospital, for instance. You didn't cause the suffering per se, but you also aren't mitigating it by ignoring them.

Thank you for the warm welcome and also for the critique. The forum as a whole is a bit daunting and I've not yet decided where to dip my toes into philosophy-wise. Then I came across this section and said "Hey, wonder if anyone would be interested?" Good a place as any to start. I'm unfamiliar with the programming languages (had an intro to Visual Basic class six years ago), but I am familiar with Excel from the numerous statistics classes. It aids in my visualization (especially for the Rubik's functions) even if the Excel functions themselves are limited. I imagine the mathematical simplifications of the algorithms you mention can be related to solving a Rubik's cube, yeah? There is something like 500 quintillion possible positions, but using some simple algorithms can bring you back to the start repeatedly. Google found that the maximum number of turns to solve the 3x3x3 is twenty. Many possible combinations, but easily solvable. I can see how a similar idea can be applied to encryption. When I was developing a 3D Rubik's scramble of 8 (2x2x2), 64 (4x4x4) and 512 (8x8x8) bit blocks, I found that even with a hundred random turns, in the end it could be simplified down to a single step. Start here, end here. A "glorified bit rotation", I called it. I concluded the only way the Rubik's function would prove of any usefulness would be to incorporate the idea into another algorithm like the SHA-512 and the AES. That's the primary reason for the 3D array extrapolation goal (though other array-type functions can be applied in similar fashion). Or possibly a transformation to a 3D array to scramble and then transform back to 2D for the AES. One of the interesting things with the Rubik's rotation is that it not only moves the bits around (position ally x,y,z from their starting position), but their position in relation to their neighbors will maintain an orientation to them. A simple right clockwise turn on an 8x8x8 through the middle layer: I've barely scratched the surface on encryption cracks. I'm aware of them, but what they entail and how they come about are not in my realm of understanding (the high level of mathematics). I do know the NIST website has some testing programs to try and break the algorithms or at least make their weaknesses known. I plan to look into that more later down the road. I really appreciate the reality check and I will keep that modesty in mind when dealing with cryptography in the future.

Introduction: I'm in the process of teaching myself how our modern computer cryptographic functions work, and also (eventually) making my own. I started looking into cryptography last July, and have been working on it on and off since then. This thread will consist of my attempts at both recreating the current standards visually in Excel, and developing my own methods. Doing this more as a proof of concept because I am not a computer programmer by trade and such do not know how to make a truly applicable algorithm. If at some point I get extremely daring, I'll try to bring it out of excel and into an actual application. Feedback and input is always welcomed. I can also get into the finer details of the actual Excel formula-side if requested. If unspecified I will simply give the executive summary at every relevant checkpoint. To start the thread it will be a bit of a catch up and a learning curve, but in the followup posts I will try to more fully explain the process/terms. Apologies if I made some mistakes in the very brief description of the algorithms and my recreations. These were completed over six months ago and I'm a little fuzzy on much of the underlying specifics that were being dealt with at the time. Again, as a disclaimer I am not well-versed in computer programming, especially at the bit by bit level, let alone the upper-level language-level. Everything expressed here is to the best of my understanding at the time of posting. As such, if I make a mistake in defining terminology, a concept, etc please correct me otherwise I'm just throwing stuff at a wall and hoping it sticks. Thank you, Songbirdo Recreation in Excel: The recreation starts with the white paper taken from the NIST.gov website: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/examples.html The white papers provide the pseudo-code as well as the function outputs so I may check my work for accuracy. After deciphering the pseudo-code (and looking up a lot of terms on Wikipedia that I don't understand), I attempt to recreate it in Excel. This process has its difficulties as Excel cannot be iterative (a cell cannot reference and write to itself) so additional cells and lines are required for the multiple cycles that these algorithms use. Excel is also very picky with what a 1 (as a number) and 1 (as a piece of text) is. The workaround is simply to use an If/then function to specify the text as a number, and vice versa where needed. Excel also does not have an XOR function (at least my version), and nesting the necessary AND OR functions proved fruitless. So I did a tabular addition and manually carrying the remainders to do the MOD32 additions. For the bit-wise XOR function I just did a simple if/then scenario (where if one is 1 and the other is 1, it will output 0, etc). I tried to colorize by word (the primary color) and then the different shades of that color to help distinguish between each hexadecimal (four bit) sections. (Necessary to keep track of later during the Rubik's twists, see below). The colorization also helped keep track of where each string of the bits were originating from (especially for bit rotations, see SHA-512 spreadsheet and the Wt formulation table - teal blue with speckles of orange red and yellow). SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm): I started with the asymmetric compression function: SHA-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1 It is basically a password encryption function. One-way, "cannot" be reversed. Pictorially it looks something like this: ABCDE are five separate "words" of 32 bits (1's and 0's) each in length. The <<<< are bit rotations, F is a function, the box with a cross through it are XOR (exclusive or) boolean algebra, Wt and Kt are words based on your password (input). After working out the translational problems with Excel I got a working model of the SHA-1 Preview: Link to the full spreadsheet:https://mega.co.nz/#!44U1lZAT!VdAt8f8F9f9Zxd7a8jqkPYDgelwNLD3Cx543II_K2bs Compare the hash values you obtain in the spreadsheet with: http://www.fileformat.info/tool/hash.htm?text=abc SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm): The SHA-1 is no longer as widely used as it once was mainly because it isn't as secure as it used to be. So I moved onto the SHA-2 (specifically the SHA-512 for 512 bit encryption). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2 The underlying algorithm looks pictorially like this: Muuuuch more complex. This is a 512 bit (8 - 32 bit words). Thankfully the white paper had step-by-step outputs so I could check my work. I made three or four minor mistakes that completely changed the outcome. Picture of one cycle comparison (each color is a different Word, Blue = A, Red = B, etc) Link to the full spreadsheet: https://mega.co.nz/#!09UBkR6D!WXl1-wohIAvaEl0RZD_vISlxgJ1NSKXr50K09U90eHQ AES (Advanced Encryption Standard): Onto what I'm working on now! The AES Block Cipher is fancy way of saying "encrypting information (think file encryption) that can be reversed with the password". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard The AES appears to use a combination of 128 (10 cycles), 192 (12 cycles) and 256 (14 cycles) bit encryption and applying four functions per cycle. It encrypts based on an array of bits (2D representation of the bits) instead of a string (one dimensional representation of the bits) like the SHA-512 did. The fact this uses an array excites me as this means its proof that these encryption algorithms can be brought to three dimensions (and more!). And then all sorts of cool functions can be applied, I'll give you a hint: Anyway, need a working AES model before getting into the Rubik's rotations, but I've already got separate spreadsheets to assign and rotate bits in a similar fashion (or at least similar block sizes, may need to adjust them to the correct bit size of the block ciphers) The four functions of the AES are SubBytes (Byte substitution), ShiftRows (similar to a bit rotation, except for the whole row of bits), MixColumns (which I'm currently figuring out) and something called a Round Key value (unsure what this is for as of now, but I know it's based on your key/password). Screenshot of Current Progress (4/1/2014): SubBytes (COMPLETED): take a cell, and based on what the 8 bits are, substitute it with a different 8 bits (shown in hexadecimal format): Copied from the white paper. The colorization was done to error check my typing. I did make an error, enclosed in a box. The lower right one was 93, where it should have been 9e. The columns on the right are reformatting the original table so that the VLOOKUP excel function can be utilized. ShiftRows (COMPLETED): MixColumns (RESEARCHING): RoundKey (RESEARCHING): Reversible XOR (Exclusive Or): One of the really cool things I realized about the XOR function is that it's reversible by reapplying the imput. Which is why the Block Cipher works symmetrically to encrypt and decipher your files. That's the fundamental difference between this block cipher and the compression function SHA. For example, say your (key) is "1" If you (file) is 1 or 0 1 (key) XOR 1 (file) = 0 (output) 1 (key) XOR 0 (file) = 1 (output) So your encyrpted (file) is either 0 if your starting was 1, and 1 if your starting was 0. Apply the key again: 1 (key) XOR 0 (output) = 1 (file) 1 (key) XOR 1 (output) = 0 (file) Tada! Back where you started. The SHA uses a Mod 32 summation to combine separate words. Think of Mod summation like a 12 hour face-clock. It goes from 1 to 12, then goes back to 1, and keeps going around. Mod 32 is like a clock except for 32 bits (the number itself is actually 232 where a clock is just 12). This means when you reach 232, it ticks over and starts from 0 again. If you try to undo that, you don't know if it cycled once, twice, or even at all. This is part of the reason why the compression functions are nearly impossible to crack. This large summation happens 80 times in the SHA-512, consisting of about 10 rows of bits: The largest remainder I've seen (how many times the specific bit cycled between 1 and 0) is nine. So the 232 "clock" looped around up to nine times per cycle, at two positions in the algorithm,and again over 80 cycles, or a total possibility of looping up to 1440 times! Customizable Encryption Algorithms: I had the realization one day driving home that you need two things in order to break an encryption (excluding the obvious: computer, electricity, network, etc etc...). You need the key (password) AAAND you need the algorithm in which it was encrypted. Without both, you cannot possibly hope to decipher the encrypted file. Where the Rubik's Cube "twist" comes into play (once the AES is brought to the third dimension) is the ability to scramble a block or multiple blocks beyond recognition. The rotation algorithm in which you scramble it would be user-chosen and so the encryption algorithm itself becomes customizable. Even if you manage to steal a key (password) to access the files, without the Rubik's rotation algorithm as input, you don't have the appropriate algorithm to decipher it. It's like finding a key on the side of the road but not knowing which lock it was intended to open. Imagine a company having a personalized encryption algorithm proprietary to that company and their network. Talk about secure information storage! This reminds me of what the banks and other online companies use for authentication: two really big prime numbers multiplied together. They store the product openly, but without the two prime numbers to generate the product you cannot be authenticated.