Inflation is the rate of change. If inflation is positive prices are rising. Inflation can be declining (second derivative) but still positive.
Right now inflation over a 12 month period is higher than the historical norm of about 2%, but is falling. For individual months it’s been mostly normal levels.
An associate is typically a fresh MBA grad or someone with a few years of tenure out of school.
Awkward imbalance of levels aside, I enjoy the consulting lifestyle personally. It’s interesting to work with many different clients and have enough political clout to get things done on a fast timeline.
While it is true that using a fake ID to commit other crimes is generally more serious and is the more common case, producing an image of a fake ID is still recognized as a felony.
The canceling out part is the reason quantum computing works. We basically just avoid computing a bunch of bad answers making the actual problem faster to solve. So it has some observable examples.