The following are 50 economic numbers from 2011 that are almost too crazy to believe. (via ZeroHedge)

#1 A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.

#2 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be “low income” or impoverished.

#3 If the number of Americans that “wanted jobs” was the same today as it was back in 2007, the “official” unemployment rate put out by the U.S. government would be up to 11 percent.

#4 The average amount of time that a worker stays unemployed in the United States is now over 40 weeks.

#5 One recent survey found that 77 percent of all U.S. small businesses do not plan to hire any more workers.

#6 There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then.

#7 Since December 2007, median household income in the United States has declined by a total of 6.8% once you account for inflation.

#8 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.6 million Americans were self-employed back in December 2006.  Today, that number has shrunk to 14.5 million.

#9 A Gallup poll from earlier this year found that approximately one out of every five Americans that do have a job consider themselves to be underemployed.

#10 According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.

#11 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs.  Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

#12 Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job.  In July, only 81.2 percent of men in that age group had a job.

#13 One recent survey found that one out of every three Americans would not be able to make a mortgage or rent payment next month if they suddenly lost their current job.

#14 The Federal Reserve recently announced that the total net worth of U.S. households declined by 4.1 percent in the 3rd quarter of 2011 alone.

#15 According to a recent study conducted by the BlackRock Investment Institute, the ratio of household debt to personal income in the United States is now 154 percent.

#16 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages.  According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married.  Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.

#17 The U.S. Postal Service has lost more than 5 billion dollars over the past year.

#18 In Stockton, California home prices have declined 64 percentfrom where they were at when the housing market peaked.

#19 Nevada has had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation for59 months in a row.

#20 If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.

#21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18 percent of all homes in the state of Florida are sitting vacant.  That figure is 63 percent larger than it was just ten years ago.

#22 New home construction in the United States is on pace to set a brand new all-time record low in 2011.

#23 As I have written about previously, 19 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 34 are now living with their parents.

#24 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

#25 According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980.  Today they account for approximately 16.3%.

#26 One study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.

#27 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.

#28 The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.

#29 It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit for 2011 will be558.2 billion dollars.

#30 The retirement crisis in the United States just continues to get worse.  According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 46 percent of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, and 29 percent of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved for retirement.

#31 Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.

#32 According to a study that was just released, CEO pay at America’s biggest companies rose by 36.5% in just one recent 12 month period.

#33 Today, the “too big to fail” banks are larger than ever.  The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011.

#34 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.

#35 According to an analysis of Census Bureau data done by the Pew Research Center, the median net worth for households led by someone 65 years of age or older is 47 times greater than the median net worth for households led by someone under the age of 35.

#36 If you can believe it, 37 percent of all U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.

#37 A higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty(6.7%) than has ever been measured before.

#38 Child homelessness in the United States is now 33 percenthigher than it was back in 2007.

#39 Since 2007, the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent.

#40 Sadly, child poverty is absolutely exploding all over America.  According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4% of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1% of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6% of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6% of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.

#41 Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps andone out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#42 In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income.  Today, government transfer payments account for more than 18 percent of all income.

#43 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits.  Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.

#44 Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP.  Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.

#45 For fiscal year 2011, the U.S. federal government had a budget deficit of nearly 1.3 trillion dollars.  That was the third year in a row that our budget deficit has topped one trillion dollars.

#46 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.

#47 Amazingly, the U.S. government has now accumulated a total debt of 15 trillion dollars.  When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.

#48 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.

#49 The U.S. national debt has been increasing by an average of more than 4 billion dollars per day since the beginning of the Obama administration.

#50 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

I just saw this article in Bloomberg about Obama wanting to tax corporate jets and private planes an additional $100/per flight. Sure it’s a small amount but that’s beside the point. It’s easy to rag on “corporate jet” owners, but one thing stuck out from the article.

The main rational for charging the $100/flight is that “General aviation users currently pay a fuel tax, but this revenue does not cover their fair-share use of air traffic services.” Basically commercial airlines pay $1,300 – $2,000 in taxes to cover the air-traffic controllers, but private jets only pay $60. Okay fair enough – basically it costs the system the same for a jumbo jet as it does corporate jets, so they should pay the same amount. Rational principle.

But why isn’t this principle carried over in taxation? Doesn’t anyone see the hypocrisy in their argument?

The top 5% pay 60% of federal taxes. Does providing billionaires government services cost more than the ordinary man? Do billionaires really cost the government more? Do roads for them cost more? Does their national defense cost more? Why should they pay taxes at a higher rate?

My Netflix recommends “Heartfelt Dramas Featuring a Strong Female Lead.” FML. I should have learned in elementary school. This is why you don’t share with girls.

I’ve drank the Cool-aid, fallen for the hype, and purchased an iPhone. I’m keeping it this time for one reason: FaceTime.

Most of the shortcomings that made me return the 1G, 3G, and 3GS are still there, but the killer application that I can’t live without is FaceTime. Skype, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger, all have been around for years – video chatting isn’t new, but with FaceTime, Apple does it right. The ability to have a handheld device, press a single button, and be able to share lives across the continent is magical.

From a technical standpoint it’s an engineering marvel. I clearly remember the days when simple actions like AIM Direct Connect would require port forwarding behind routers and often failed. Today, I’m able to video chat, in amazing quality, without a single thought to firewall configuration. If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of how FaceTime really works, check out Packet Stan’s blog, but Apple has managed to use technologies that have existed for years and turned them into something truly magical.

FaceTime technology coupled with the iPhone 4′s superb hardware and software allow crystal clear audio, and not quite HD, but excellent video quality. In fact, with the shoddy AT&T coverage I have my house, I was having 5-6 dropped calls every hour; with FaceTime, I have virtually none. The hardware is so good it picks up whispers and conversations in the other rooms. The software so good, that there are zero ambient noises – it actually sounds as if the person is in the same room.

I was a skeptic when FaceTime first came out, thinking I never video chat on my PC, so why would I care to on my phone? Today I’m a fan – I love it. There is no replacement for seeing someone in person, but for people who have dear ones far away, FaceTime certainly makes the distance seem less.

PS: I’m still an ardent BlackBerry user and can’t live without my BlackBerry. I still believe the BlackBerry experience is unrivaled for work. When compared to an iPhone, for contacts, emails, tasks, and calendars, I firmly believe the Blackberry is a superior device. However, with my new found love of FaceTime, it has been relegated to my daytime phone, and the iPhone is my evening phone. I can’t wait to upgrade to iPhone 5.

It’s November 2nd, 2010. Election day. This year America celebrates 234 years of democracy. Democracy is a beautiful thing.

Funny (and probably true) election day quote:

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. – George Bernard Shaw

But more seriously:

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. -Robert Hutchins

Please take twenty minutes out of your day and go vote!

So my new favorite product is Dropbox. Rarely do I get so enthusiastic about a product, but it’s simply the easiest way I’ve found to backup files, share large files over the web, share files between my multiple devices (desktop, laptop, blackberry, and iPhone), all without ever leaving the native OS I’m working with. No file web upload boxes, no proprietary upload clients, just native folders on my computer, and a little background application working the magic.

That said, Dropbox has a very hand feature called Public Folders. Simply create a folder in your root Dropbox called “Public” and any content you put in there will be web-accessible to anyone, anywhere, on any device. This is particularly handy for me, as I often have to work with large files (too large to email), and having to turn up my FTP client, upload files to my webserver, and sharing the links is tedious. Simply drag a file to my Public Folder, Dropbox uploads it, and gives me a public URL similar to http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9502594/test.txt. I can share this file with anyone, anytime, and they can access it anywhere.

However, I prefer giving the semblance my data is on my own servers, for a variety of reasons.

Enter mod_rewrite. I have the following .htaccess file in a folder on my web server called “dl” (for download) which allows me to mask my Dropbox URL and provide users with a URL such as http://kadakia.com/dl/test.txt.

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# Check to see if mod_rewrite is installed / avaliable
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
 
# Check to see if file or directory exists
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 
# Rewrite to Dropbox URL. Make sure you change the data after "/u/" (9502594) to your own user ID
RewriteRule ^e/(.*)$ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9502594/$1 [L,QSA]    # Embedded File
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9502594/$1?dl=1 [L,QSA] # Force Download (Default)
</IfModule>

Some points:

• Be sure to change the “9502594″ with your own user ID.
• You don’t necessarily need line 6/7, but they are useful in case you want to host some content on your own servers rather than from your Dropbox. It tells Apache to check to see if the file exists, otherwise, rewrite to Dropbox.
• If you send a bad link, (a file that doesn’t exist on your server or Dropbox), the default 404 page will be Dropbox. This doesn’t bother me, but it may bother you.
• There is no file transfer load on your server, as you are doing an redirect. Your server isn’t downloading the data, and then transferring to user. The user will be downloading directly from Dropbox, saving you bandwidth.
• Many files may be executable by your user’s web-browser (.mp3, .htm, .html, .txt). However, most of the time, you are trying to share a file and would like people to download the file to their computers. Dropbox has a function that allows you to force download of the content, by appending ?dl=1 to your URL. On the flip side, sometimes you may be trying to make the content embeddable such a signature or an embedded picture. You can change the URL and add an e before the file name to allow the content to be embedded (if the user’s browser supports it).
• For me, download as default was more useful, but you can just as easily reverse it. Make the catch all without the ?dl=1, and change the ^e/ to something like ^f/ (for force download).

Embedded: http://kadakia.com/dl/e/test.txt
Download: http://kadakia.com/dl/test.txt

That’s all folks.

It’s scary how little we are investing into our infrastructure. Infrastructure is the foundation for tomorrow’s commerce. Instead of nearly all tax revenue being spent on transfer payments, it’s time to make a shift and rebuilding American infrastructure.

I’ve historically used MD5 for encrypting passwords in web applications. While MD5 is great in most instances, I’ve become aware how vulnerable it is to a brute force attack. In past projects, user/password combos were simply used for validating simple harmless data or posting comments – hardly worth a hackers time. However, I’ve recently been working on a project that will entail storing users credit card numbers, among other personal details, so security is of utmost importance.

MD5 or simple hashing will make a hackers job more difficult, and is certainly better than storing passwords as plain text in a database. However, simply using a hash alone isn’t enough. An attacker can generate hashes for numerous potential passwords (either randomly or from a dictionary). The hashes generated are then compared with those in your user database and any matches will reveal the password. Powerful computers make this all the easier as they are able to generate hashes at thousands per second, and MD5 hash databases are already available for nearly every word.

How to make it harder for hackers? Salt.

Before generating a hash we create a random string of characters of a predetermined length, called salt, and prepend this string to our plain text password. If the string is long enough and randomly generated – the resulting hash will almost certainly be different each time we generate a password, requiring a hacker to rebuild his entire database of MD5 hashes for every random possible variation. Two users with the same password, will have different hashes, because their passwords are rehashed with a unique random code. When we try and validate a user’s login credentials we follow the same process, only this time we use the salt from our database instead of generating a new random one. We use the user supplied password, run our hashing algorithm, then compare the result with the hash stored in the database.

Here is my simple code:

// Hash function
define('SALT_LENGTH', 5);
function generateHash($plainText, $salt = null){
   if ($salt === null){
      $salt = substr(md5(uniqid(rand(), true)), 0, SALT_LENGTH);
   }
   else{
      $salt = substr($salt, 0, SALT_LENGTH);
   }
   return $salt . sha1($salt . $plainText);
}

// Sign Up
$newUser[user_password] = generateHash($_POST[user_password]);
$newUser[user_email] = $_POST[user_email];
$db->insert("users",$db->escape($newUser));

// Login Check
$storedPass = $db->get_var("SELECT user_password FROM users WHERE user_email = '$_POST[user_email]'");
$passwordHash = generateHash($_POST[user_password],$storedPass);
if($db->get_row("SELECT * FROM users WHERE user_email = '$_POST[user_email]'
                                       AND user_password = '$passwordHash'")){
   echo "User is authenticated";
}
else{
   die("Bad username/password");
}

Calling generateHash() with a single argument (the plain text password) will cause a random string to be generated and used for the salt. The resulting string consists of the salt followed by the hashed password which is hashed with your salt appended. We store that in a database. When you’re checking a user’s login, the situation is different in that you already know the salt you’d like to use. The string stored in your database can be passed to generateHash() as the second argument when generating the hash of a user-supplied password for comparison.

While nothing is perfect, and virtually every password is vulnerable at some point to brute force (it’s just a function of time and computing power) this simple few lines of code will add n^SALT_LENGTH more variations to your user’s passwords making your application that much more secure.