This type of control is known in industry as "bang-bang control." Among other factors, it doesn't help that the delay time between twirling the control and feeling the temperature change is often tens of seconds.
With social security, the pool of investors is the entire country's population. This large size and government backing stabilises it. But the financials still rely on continuous population growth, forever, to work well.
The key financial metric in social security is the ratio of pay-ins to pay-outs. For example, it could be 5 paying employees for every retiree. The social security scheme has some minimum, critical ratio that is needed to maintain the tax rates and benefit levels. And if that minimum is, say, 5:1 workers to older retirees, that implies a population in a state of exponential demographic growth.
Right now, the US is propping up its lack of organic demographic growth with immigration, and accumulated trust fund savings from an earlier era. Japan had massive problems with its social security when its population stagnated.
Notice, however, that the government of Japan did not just implode like a securities fraud. This is because governments are fundamentally not like private sector criminals running Ponzi schemes.
Surely, they can just un-replicate it and replenish the replicator protein stocks.
Edit: Thinking about this problem some more, there's probably a serious issue figuring out what fluids and tissues are safe to un-replicate.
Per the technical manual, the personnel transporters have quark-scale resolution, but the cargo transporters and replicators only have molecular-scale resolution. It would be a gross safety violation to put a living being through anything short of a personnel-rated transporter. Meanwhile any kind of bodily fluid that is emitted is going to have a bunch of still living cells, at least for a while. (I'm not even discussing the gametes here yet). So how do you get the computer to safely and reliably make the determination?
I think most of this is genuine belief. There was a doctor named Wakefield who fraudulently published this autism claim in academic journals. Those papers were retracted, but the damage was done.
I think it sticks around as a conspiracy, because otherwise there's not a whole lot else that can explain the causes or origins of autism.
Fortran is older than Basic and C. In fact, Fortran is more or less the first high level programming language. The first Fortran compilers date to the early 1950s.
Fortran was created mainly for the purpose of linear algebra: operations with (giant) matrices. Linear algebra is used to compute approximate solutions to ordinary and partial differential equations, and this is a major part of what people needed computers for (and still do).
Programming concepts like subroutines, functions, if statements with blocks and else clauses... All of those were not in original Fortran because no one had thought of them. These things entered Fortran over time as they became popular, and goto slowly became less popular. Syntax from the punch card era was replaced in Fortran 90, but it is still available as an option for compatibility purposes.
Structurally, I prefer to describe Fortran as like C, but with better built-in arrays, and no built-in general purpose pointers. Not having the pointers allows the compiler to do certain optimizations that C can't. But C is the better systems language, because the pointers let you naturally express all kinds of data structures besides arrays.
The statutory penalty in the US is on the order of $100,000 per infringement. "Statutory" means that the number is written into the law, and the aggrieved party doesn't have to establish or prove actual losses.
A real wealth tax could be devastatingly effective at reducing wealth disparity. It just takes some patience to let the exponential compounding effect kick in. Way, way less blood and lower potential for counter revolution.
GPL licensing on Linux has no effect on these sanctions.
Linux is a piece of software, owned by its individual authors and contributors, but published by Linus. Linus makes every decision about what is and is not in Linux.
Here's how the "sanctions" usually work: the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) publishes a list called the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List. This list contains named individuals, businesses, and organizations that are not American (foreigners only. US Citizens are not supposed to be on the list). It is illegal for any US citizen or US business to transact business with anyone named on SDN. There are severe civil and criminal penalties for the US person if they're not doing due diligence to check their international contacts against the list.
Now how does this affect Linux? It doesn't affect Linux the project or any of the code. But it does mean that Linus the person can't accept contributions from SDN persons. Linus's lawyers have advised him that that would be a "business transaction" within the terms of the law.
Could Linus go in court make an argument that this sanctions regime violates his first amendment rights? Maybe. But I guarantee that would be a big hassle for him and Linux Foundation lawyers.
Could Linux the project restructure itself so that Linus the American is not making every decision on every contribution? Yes. But that would be a major change in organization.
And the records on the LKML seem to indicate that Linus and Linux leadership are at least politically indifferent to the sanctions in the first place, and possibly mildly supportive. So I doubt they'll go to any major effort to change things up.
Edit: And finally I want to be clear on this point... Nothing is stopping sanctioned SDN entities from downloading a tarball off of kernel.org and making their own sanctions-busting GPL kernel with blackjack and hookers. That all seems perfectly legal to me.
At least you don't need to worry about hills in New Orleans.