Why we can afford the deficit.

America can afford this deficit

These other countries did not get into trouble because of high public debt ratios alone. They had some combination of the following conditions that limited their debt-carrying capacity: first, a lack of government control of the money supply of the currency in which most of its debt is denominated; second, debt owed in or convertible into gold; third, the lack of a long history of political stability and an effective means of tax collection; fourth, the lack of a large, liquid market for government debt; and fifth, debt owed personally by a king or other supreme ruler. Not one of these conditions applies to the United States.

The Monetary System is just a Spreadsheet

From Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds by Warren Mosler

"It’s that modern money is a spreadsheet! It works by computer! When government spends or lends, it does so by adding numbers to private bank accounts. When it taxes, it marks those same accounts down. When it borrows, it shifts funds from a demand deposit (called a reserve account) to savings (called a securities account). And that for practical purposes is all there is. The money government spends doesn’t come from anywhere, and it doesn’t cost anything to produce. The government therefore cannot run out."

Resetting the lastlog file in Linux

Sometimes (like when you're creating a VM image) you just want to wipe out the lastlog database and make it all clean new and sexy.

lastlog is a sparse file that contains 'maxuid' lots of 'struct lastlog' space. Mostly it's lots of empty space until people login to the machine.

There doesn't seem to be a tool to clear out previous logins, and removing it or using 'touch' means that you lose the 'never logged in' entries for most of the userids.  Using 'adduser' and then 'deluser' just adds needless cruft to your system.

So the way to clear it down is to use 'dd' to create a sparse file the same size as the current lastlog thus:

llsize=$(stat -c%s /var/log/lastlog)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/log/lastlog bs=1 count=0 seek=$llsize


However what we really need is a '-r' reset option on the lastlog command (similar  to the one on the faillog command).