In a reply in the remarkably long Grammar nazi thread I started, Mumblefratz said a number of things that made me think we needed to start spewing into a different bucket (and, yes, that's a Mr. Creosote reference).

First, I must vent some frustrated teacher stuff and thank Mumble profusely for the family story about inflation (if you want a family story about hyperinflation, just ask--one of my grandmothers worked in Wiemar Germany before emigrating to St. Louis). Anyone interested in that sort of stuff should bookmark What is a dollar worth?. Students of US political history should get at least a giggle out of this being a page at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis--trust the Grangers to try keeping us pragmatic about the money math.

I'm encouraging y'all to check out this web calculator as the "half on-topic" part of the thread, but I'd be doing it in a "GC III Dreams" topic if the forum had one. The GCII economy, for all that it strongly reflects a modern capitalist world view, does not appear to have a serious effort to include inflation in the modeling, with the possible exception of spy production in DA.

The other part of why I'm trying for a fresh thread is in case some folks are serious about some health care talk. I have a knee-jerk sympathy when Mumble says "I consider doctors to be glorified car mechanics," but I found myself kind of liking the sitcom Scrubs recently. As I mentioned in that other thread, my mom is retired VA nurse, and is no small part of why I want to tell the doctoring class that they need to rethink their third vacation homes. She owned up to liking the show too and reminded me that just because too many docs are in their jobs for bad reasons doesn't mean all docs are bad.