I'm wondering if the best setup might be a hybrid, with a feeder system that has puts exactly two people at each register, on checking out and one on deck.
Then you don't have latency getting to place in, but it's still working almost as fast as a single queue. 90% of the people would get handled just as fast, with only the single person behind the slow person getting screwed. Which seems unfair, but is still more fair than single lines, where everyone behind the slow person is screwed.
That is essentially what you're talking about with the anticipation person, but that seems to require some foreknowledge that would only apply to certain situations. Sometimes you can tell when someone is about to leave, like at a store...when someone's paying, they're about to leave, there's not anything else they can do after they've paid for their stuff.
But some places, like a bank, that might be tricky sometimes, and people might get annoyed if they're 'supposed' to only go forward when someone is about to leave, only to find out they are not, in fact, leaving. So just putting them two deep to start with might be better.
Um, actually, the first amendment applies to non-citizens also. It is a bar on the government making such a law. There is no exception for non-citizens.
But, perhaps more importantly, because the government is barred from making such laws, there are not actually any such laws, even if, hypothetically, they could make such laws about non-citizens.
The laws about classified documents only apply to those who have signed up to have them applied to them, period. That is how they are written to pass constitutional muster. Some sort of hypothetical wide-reaching laws that controlled people who had not agreed to them might actually, under your theory of how the constitution works, pass muster for non-citizens, but such laws do not actually exist regardless.
But, as I pointed out, non-citizens have first amendment rights in this country, just like they have fourth and fifth amendment rights. That is because those rights restrict the government from doing things, period. They are not 'citizen rights' or 'people rights', they are 'government restrictions'.
No, he doesn't. He's a foreign national, publishing US secrets to the public domain in a foreign country. The US constitution does not apply to him.
If US law applies to him, if they actually wish to have him extradited from Sweden or England, the US constitution does apply to him.
In your crazy universe, where the US conducts military operations against individuals in allied nations, no, the constitution would not apply, but we're not actually living in that universe.
I do believe, tho, that the US has a right to militarily strike against this person, and against wikileaks, to protect US interests. They appear to have declared war on the US.
Really? You think the US has the right to conduct military operations against England? You want the US to attack a street in England and attempt to capture Assange?
Perhaps you should lay off the crack, dude.
(Wouldn't invading England require NATO to declare war on us?)
Also, the only "game" that is obvious about Assange and the rape charge is that Assange is lying like a trapped child that someone's persecuting him.
Do you actually know any facts whatsoever about the 'case' against him, or his behavior WRT to the case?
He looks like someone who was illegally slandered for a month without any charges being actually filed or the police talking to him at all, and then the second he left the country (As he does all the time...he doesn't live in Sweden.), they put out nonsensical 'we want to know where he is Interpol' alerts, despite the fact they uh, knew where he was. (Because he was still offering to talk to them, as he'd been offering for a month...he just refused to hang around in Sweden forever and be slandered but not charged.)
And the second Sweden actually managed to put together a extradition warrant for the UK that the UK actually accepted, he turned himself in.
But in your universe he's somehow on the run from the law. I guess in your universe, when a government continually leaks information about how you're under investigation but refuses to actually speak to you or charge you, you have to stay in that country forever.
No, it isn't. They can't nail you for violating your agreement, but they can still nail you for creating a potential for damage. It's not the classified-ness that gets you, it's the reason it was classified.
Uh, no they can't.
There is no law that even vaguely covers what you are trying to describe. There is no law that prohibits a citizen of another country from doing stuff that damages US interests.
You're probably thinking of 'treason', but Assange can't commit that for a fairly obvious reason. (And what he did wouldn't qualify anyway.)
The law doesn't say anything close to what you seem to think it says.
People not only have a first amendment right to speak, they have a first amendment right to be spoken to, and they have the right to aid others in speaking to them. (Yes, the courts have actually upheld this, when the government attempted to get sneaky and assert people have the right to say whatever they want, but the government could arrest people for listening.)
Manning waived his rights when he got clearance, and he has, rightly, been arrested. (And then, wrongly, illegally held in solitary confinement for no reason whatsoever, probably to get him to make up something about Assange that they can arrest him on.)
Assange did not waive any of his rights, he has a first amendment right to be told things, and cannot be punished for helping people tell him things, even if that person was breaking the law at the time.
Any speech between two people is constitutionally protected. Just because one person has waived that protection does not mean the other person is somehow committing a crime if he 'helps' the conversation somehow. That is flatly absurd...he has a constitutional right to have that conversation, period, even if the other person does not. (Moreover, the idea of speech that becomes criminal based on the legal status of another person is absurdity ascendant. How is anyone else supposed to know they waived their speech rights?)
There is, of course, a distinction between helping the conversation, and inciting the original crime, but Assange did not do the latter.
So you're suggesting that if I, in any way, inform people how to give me classified information, I have committed a crime?
That's bullshit on so many levels I don't know how to start.
It is not criminal to knowingly receive classified information. It is not criminal to instruct people how to give the information to you.
If what you just said was illegal, then you just outlawed the Pentagon Papers. All you have to prove is that, at any point, Deep Throat was given directions to the parking garage.
Um, and you have noticed the CIA is 'investigating' this, right? The CIA. You know, the organization that routinely frames people for crimes?
The US has no Official Secrets act. It is perfectly legal for anyone to tell classified information to anyone else as long as they have not sign documents stating they will not do that.
Basically, all punishment for leaking classified information is contractual. Mannings agreed to it, and hence he be punished.
No one else did, certainly no one at Wikileaks, and hence the government cannot do anything^W^W^W will instead torture Manning until he claims Assange 'incited' Manning to or something so they can extradite Assange from the country where they've got him held on a bogus rape charge now. (Whereupon the charge will magically go away.)
The game is really obvious, people. Really REALLY fucking obvious.
I'm just a little baffled that the CIA is openly admitting the government is trying to figure out ways to charge Assange with a crime. (Since when does the CIA investigate crime? When they need to invent a crime, that's when. The FBI and whatnot have moral objections to framing people, the CIA does it all the time.)
Receiving classified information is not illegal, even knowingly. Neither is informing someone where they can leave classified information where you'd see it better.
And anything Manning's says is suspect. He's being tortured until he makes up some bogus way for them to arrest Assange.
Right now, they have that guy locked up in solitary confinement (without actually having had a trial yet, mind you.)
The suspicion is that they're doing it so he'll testify (aka, make up something) against Assange.
Basically, the US government has decided to go after Wikileaks, despite them not doing anything that is the slightest bit illegal, and something that is literally indistinguishable from journalism. (And wouldn't have been illegal even if they did it in the US. The fact they aren't in the US makes that even less likely they are in violation of any US law.)
This is the CIA's team to invent some charges against Wikileaks.
Everyone needs to read this. It's before the CIA's announcement, but it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on with that.
How would you stop a sober moron from doing the same?
If you do that enough to annoy 'the public', you're a 'public nuisance'.
Laws that punish people for merely being drunk in public are idiotic. As long as they aren't endangering themselves or others, or doing the sort of stuff that should get them locked up anyway, like wandering up and down the street yelling at people, the idea that they should be punished is absurd.
Frankly, there are some constitutional issues there the court needs to look into WRT to outlawing drunkenness. You have a right to be in public, it's called 'the right to peaceable assemble'. You do not lose that right simply because you are drunk.
Likewise, you also have the 'right to movement', which is not in the constitution but the courts have constantly upheld exists. You have the right to move from place to place, which is usually applied on a larger scale, like the right to actually relocate and travel from one state to another, but you have to also have the right to move from one place to a place down the street. (Or you couldn't do larger moves.)
Yes, the courts have ruled that you don't have to be allowed to do it in a specific manner, (Which was a constitutional argument against the No Fly list.), so they could likewise ban drunk driving...but the ban on public drunkenness appears to ban all movement.
Yes, yes, in theory you have to something else besides be drunk to be charged with 'public drunkenness', but, at least in my state, that can be simply having 'vulgar, profane, loud, or unbecoming language', whatever the hell the police decides is 'loud' or 'unbecoming'.
Which is a rather strange way to avoid the constitutional issue by...um...using another thing that's unconstitutional. Last I checked, you have a first amendment right to use unbecoming or even vulgar language. (And, no, that is not, in itself, a public nuisance. That has to be a pattern of some sort, that actually bothers at least a few actual people, not just a cop.)
Or the cop can simply claim you were 'boisterous', which literally means that you have energy. (Presumably, if you didn't have energy, you'd be arrested for sleeping public.)
Serious question: What's this? [usps.com] A lot of people say the USPS is totally self-funded but then why do they request funding from Congress every year? Is that considered a separate organization within the USPS or something?
The blind and oversea voting and Revenue Forgone Reform Act (Which is lower postal rates for charities) are stuff that, for whatever reason, Congress has decided the post office should do for free or cheap, and Congress pays them each year for that. The Post Office is only self-supporting for normal stuff, Congress had it do charity work that Congress pays for.
The 'reconciliation' stuff is them getting their money back from money they had left over at the end of previous years and 'loaned' to the government. Presumably because there's a recession and it needs the money because profits are down. And, as the article points out, it doesn't have a lot money left 'in the bank'.
Half the stuff people do there can be done on the automated machines they now have, instead of wasting time in line.
Assuming the damn automated machines work. Or even exist
At my local post office, the stamp vending machines have disappeared. Or, rather, we had perfectly functional stamp vending machines, and they were removed for some reason, and another vending machine was added, then it broke, then it was removed.
Now the only way to buy stamps is to stand in line.
And I could have sworn, at some point, we had a scale too. You could weigh your package, buy stamps, and mail it. Now you have to get in line. it's just idiotic.
Seriously, next time you sit in line at the PO, listen to all the stupid, inane questions people ask, like they've never been to a post office before in their lives.
I end up having to mail stuff out of my company sometimes, and, like I said, pretty much everyone who doesn't have a stamp has to get in line, so I end up behind them. (It's not their fucking fault, half the time the damn post office changed the rates on them so they just need 3 more damn cents on their envelope. If I was them I'd just use two stamps.)
And, yeah, a lot of the questions do seem very inane. There are all sorts of things you could read in line about different options, but people apparently are unable to do that.
The post office can deliver onto private property.
In fact, believe it or not, it can't be kept out by property owners if a resident wants their mail delivered somewhere. If someone wants their mail delivered inside of a locked apartment building, or even a college dorm that doesn't allow non-residents, and the post office wants to deliver there, the owner of the building cannot keep them out.
In short, if they have a letter for you, and you want them to deliver it to you at a location, and they want to deliver it at that location, they technically can demand to be let through whatever locked doors they want to deliver it to that location, regardless of whose property that is.
This is all mostly moot because the post office doesn't want to deliver mail in such a manner, though, that would be insane. It will often demand that people put up mailboxes on the public right away if they want delivery, and would certainly look long and hard before deciding to deliver mail on private property against someone's wishes.
But it raises an interesting legal point if postal employees are used for anything else while delivering mail.
But we're talking about putting them on postal vehicles, which operate 99.99999% on public roads, and it would be a simple matter to leave them off any vehicles that leave them.
They should raise postage rates to the next highest five cents, and then raise them again by five cents when those get too low.
The idiotic 'raise them random amounts' is part of what's reducing the amount of stuff people mail. First class letters should always be a multiple of 5 cents, so you just throw another 5 cents on there if they raised the rate.
Which means the next rate raise should be to 50 cents, because it's 44 cents right now.
In fact, all rates should be a multiple of five cents. Mailing a DVD? Pre-stamped envelope should cost 85 cents or whatever. Postcard? 30 cents. Even the weight tables for stuff should be rounded up.
The only time it should be anything else is stuff like bulk rates, which are not done via stamps.
And at some point, they should entirely get rid of any stamps lower than 5 cents. They should have 5 cent stamps, 1 dollar stamps, and whatever-amount-the-first-class-rate-is stamp. Maybe a 25 also, I dunno. Maybe a 90 cent stamp for the large envelope base rate.
I'm not trying to say what they can and can't do, but at some point the entire thing got out of control...do we really need 1 cent stamps? 2 cent stamps? 8 cent stamps? Just operate the entire postal system in increments of 5 cents, and stop wasting everyone's time. (It's worth mentioning the retail universe operates in increments of 10 at the minimum. All items at a store will either end in 5 cents or 9 cents, depending on the store, and most items over five dollars end in either 95 or 99.)
Otherwise, yes, I entirely agree with your post. The USPS is the cheapest postal service, and incredibly efficient, and I'm sure FedEx and UPS would really like them to stop.
That's a serious problem in any study that looks at environmental factors for sickness.
Poor people generally live in much crappier conditions than non-poor, and have much poorer health.
Some of their poor health is almost certainly from their living conditions, but some of it is is instead from the poor nutrition, some from their lack of medical care, some from the less-safe jobs they work, and some is just from their general stress.
Often, looking at other countries can help, because the poor, while still having crappy living conditions and nutrition there, often have different crappy living conditions and nutrition. (For example, the poor in Asian countries often live almost entirely off rice, whereas the poor in the US live almost entirely off fat and sugar. Neither of those diets are good for you, but they cause different medical issues.) And sometimes they actually do have medical care, and you usually can find different types of jobs they work.
Hard to account for their stress levels, though, which medicine is discovering more and more contributes to bad health...it doesn't usually 'make you sick', but it makes it much harder to fight off sickness. People who are living paycheck to paycheck seem to be inherently sicker than those who are in the exact same situation but have six months pay in the bank.
More adults cause the installation of more cell phone towers, and higher birth rates cause more adults.
So higher birth cause more cell phone towers, although with a 20 year lag or so. If a place has X births, and another place has 3X births, in 20 years the second place will have probably added 3X times more cell towers as the first added. (Obviously, other population-affecting variables could happen also.)
There is a logical error in using these results, to prove that though, because, right now, cell towers are the result of birth rates 20-60 years ago.
Although, if you did that study, people obviously wouldn't come to the erroneous conclusion the study is trying to get people to leap to. (They would, instead, come to an even more erroneous one that cell phone radiation travels backwards in time to cause more fertility.)
And for normal readers, the error is just the same as anyone believing a rumor.
Wikipedia is an entirely useful place if you treat it as some random person telling you things. It's like if you went to a room with every human in it and stood up and yelled 'Does anyone understand quantum mechanics' or 'Does anyone know the winners of the 1994 Nobel prizes?' and someone came up to you and asserted that they did and told you about those things.
They're supposed to also be carrying the books to back up their claims, but you generally only check those if it's a controversial issue or you have some other reason to think they might be lying. This is entirely reasonable, and it's entirely reasonable for people to get tricked by others, just like people can get tricked any conversation.
The actual problem here is news organizations getting tricked, because they aren't supposed to rely on asking people stuff. They might learn stuff from random people, but they must then go and check it out.
When did 'Muslim' become 'racial data'? And perhaps more importantly, when the fuck did 'tinted skin' mean Muslim?
The reason the media didn't say the crime was done by 'immigrants' is the reason it always doesn't says that...because no one can fucking tell someone's an immigrant without knowing who they are. It's the same reason they don't say 'Their last name started with an R'.
Take your idiotic racist blather and conspiracy theories somewhere else.
The spammer^Wfelony computer hijack (Let's call them by their worse crime) crowd have always had a 'we're being censored' mentality, so it makes sense they'd decided to host a mirror of a site that actually is being censored by various governments. (Admitted, not censored well.)
Then they can imply their 'censorship' (aka, the fact no sysadmin wants anything to do with them at all because they harm other computers on the internet, both via spam and felony computer hijack, so sysadmin quite sanely stop their users from reaching those places and vis versa) is the same as Wikileaks censorship (aka, the fact that various governments are actually putting pressure on their host to take them them down and removing their domain names, and forcing them to relocate.)
And then, thanks to Anon's goddamn fucking stupid DDoS, the criminal gangs of felony computer hijackers can even attack people who are 'censoring' them and people blame it on Anon. This despite the fact that Spamhaus, even if it was actually anti-Wikileaks in position, which they've made clear they are not, has not actually done anything to harm Wikileaks in the slightest way.
Um, no there isn't. Child-like and childish are entirely distinguished by whether or not you approve of the action. Childish means 'like a child', as does child-like. There is no definitional difference between them, just the connotation of one being bad, and one being good.
What you mean is that there is a difference between childish/child-like and irresponsible. Building cushion forts is not irresponsible. Randomly attacking people on the internet is.
Interesting, I had not heard of this. Good to see someone's actually figured it out.
And, yeah, their prices aren't very competitive. We have one where I am, and I usually end up buying shampoo and stuff at the local grocery store while there, and going to the gas station for quick things.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm wondering if the best setup might be a hybrid, with a feeder system that has puts exactly two people at each register, on checking out and one on deck.
Then you don't have latency getting to place in, but it's still working almost as fast as a single queue. 90% of the people would get handled just as fast, with only the single person behind the slow person getting screwed. Which seems unfair, but is still more fair than single lines, where everyone behind the slow person is screwed.
That is essentially what you're talking about with the anticipation person, but that seems to require some foreknowledge that would only apply to certain situations. Sometimes you can tell when someone is about to leave, like at a store...when someone's paying, they're about to leave, there's not anything else they can do after they've paid for their stuff.
But some places, like a bank, that might be tricky sometimes, and people might get annoyed if they're 'supposed' to only go forward when someone is about to leave, only to find out they are not, in fact, leaving. So just putting them two deep to start with might be better.
Um, actually, the first amendment applies to non-citizens also. It is a bar on the government making such a law. There is no exception for non-citizens.
But, perhaps more importantly, because the government is barred from making such laws, there are not actually any such laws, even if, hypothetically, they could make such laws about non-citizens.
The laws about classified documents only apply to those who have signed up to have them applied to them, period. That is how they are written to pass constitutional muster. Some sort of hypothetical wide-reaching laws that controlled people who had not agreed to them might actually, under your theory of how the constitution works, pass muster for non-citizens, but such laws do not actually exist regardless.
But, as I pointed out, non-citizens have first amendment rights in this country, just like they have fourth and fifth amendment rights. That is because those rights restrict the government from doing things, period. They are not 'citizen rights' or 'people rights', they are 'government restrictions'.
No, he doesn't. He's a foreign national, publishing US secrets to the public domain in a foreign country. The US constitution does not apply to him.
If US law applies to him, if they actually wish to have him extradited from Sweden or England, the US constitution does apply to him.
In your crazy universe, where the US conducts military operations against individuals in allied nations, no, the constitution would not apply, but we're not actually living in that universe.
I do believe, tho, that the US has a right to militarily strike against this person, and against wikileaks, to protect US interests. They appear to have declared war on the US.
Really? You think the US has the right to conduct military operations against England? You want the US to attack a street in England and attempt to capture Assange?
Perhaps you should lay off the crack, dude.
(Wouldn't invading England require NATO to declare war on us?)
Also, the only "game" that is obvious about Assange and the rape charge is that Assange is lying like a trapped child that someone's persecuting him.
Do you actually know any facts whatsoever about the 'case' against him, or his behavior WRT to the case?
He looks like someone who was illegally slandered for a month without any charges being actually filed or the police talking to him at all, and then the second he left the country (As he does all the time...he doesn't live in Sweden.), they put out nonsensical 'we want to know where he is Interpol' alerts, despite the fact they uh, knew where he was. (Because he was still offering to talk to them, as he'd been offering for a month...he just refused to hang around in Sweden forever and be slandered but not charged.)
And the second Sweden actually managed to put together a extradition warrant for the UK that the UK actually accepted, he turned himself in.
But in your universe he's somehow on the run from the law. I guess in your universe, when a government continually leaks information about how you're under investigation but refuses to actually speak to you or charge you, you have to stay in that country forever.
No, it isn't. They can't nail you for violating your agreement, but they can still nail you for creating a potential for damage. It's not the classified-ness that gets you, it's the reason it was classified.
Uh, no they can't.
There is no law that even vaguely covers what you are trying to describe. There is no law that prohibits a citizen of another country from doing stuff that damages US interests.
You're probably thinking of 'treason', but Assange can't commit that for a fairly obvious reason. (And what he did wouldn't qualify anyway.)
In what universe is that 'the question'?
The law doesn't say anything close to what you seem to think it says.
People not only have a first amendment right to speak, they have a first amendment right to be spoken to, and they have the right to aid others in speaking to them. (Yes, the courts have actually upheld this, when the government attempted to get sneaky and assert people have the right to say whatever they want, but the government could arrest people for listening.)
Manning waived his rights when he got clearance, and he has, rightly, been arrested. (And then, wrongly, illegally held in solitary confinement for no reason whatsoever, probably to get him to make up something about Assange that they can arrest him on.)
Assange did not waive any of his rights, he has a first amendment right to be told things, and cannot be punished for helping people tell him things, even if that person was breaking the law at the time.
Any speech between two people is constitutionally protected. Just because one person has waived that protection does not mean the other person is somehow committing a crime if he 'helps' the conversation somehow. That is flatly absurd...he has a constitutional right to have that conversation, period, even if the other person does not. (Moreover, the idea of speech that becomes criminal based on the legal status of another person is absurdity ascendant. How is anyone else supposed to know they waived their speech rights?)
There is, of course, a distinction between helping the conversation, and inciting the original crime, but Assange did not do the latter.
So you're suggesting that if I, in any way, inform people how to give me classified information, I have committed a crime?
That's bullshit on so many levels I don't know how to start.
It is not criminal to knowingly receive classified information. It is not criminal to instruct people how to give the information to you.
If what you just said was illegal, then you just outlawed the Pentagon Papers. All you have to prove is that, at any point, Deep Throat was given directions to the parking garage.
Um, and you have noticed the CIA is 'investigating' this, right? The CIA. You know, the organization that routinely frames people for crimes?
Since when the fucking CIA investigate crimes?
It doesn't matter what is 'considered' the leak.
The US has no Official Secrets act. It is perfectly legal for anyone to tell classified information to anyone else as long as they have not sign documents stating they will not do that.
Basically, all punishment for leaking classified information is contractual. Mannings agreed to it, and hence he be punished.
No one else did, certainly no one at Wikileaks, and hence the government cannot do anything^W^W^W will instead torture Manning until he claims Assange 'incited' Manning to or something so they can extradite Assange from the country where they've got him held on a bogus rape charge now. (Whereupon the charge will magically go away.)
The game is really obvious, people. Really REALLY fucking obvious.
I'm just a little baffled that the CIA is openly admitting the government is trying to figure out ways to charge Assange with a crime. (Since when does the CIA investigate crime? When they need to invent a crime, that's when. The FBI and whatnot have moral objections to framing people, the CIA does it all the time.)
How the fuck is what you described illegal?
Receiving classified information is not illegal, even knowingly. Neither is informing someone where they can leave classified information where you'd see it better.
And anything Manning's says is suspect. He's being tortured until he makes up some bogus way for them to arrest Assange.
Right now, they have that guy locked up in solitary confinement (without actually having had a trial yet, mind you.)
The suspicion is that they're doing it so he'll testify (aka, make up something) against Assange.
Basically, the US government has decided to go after Wikileaks, despite them not doing anything that is the slightest bit illegal, and something that is literally indistinguishable from journalism. (And wouldn't have been illegal even if they did it in the US. The fact they aren't in the US makes that even less likely they are in violation of any US law.)
This is the CIA's team to invent some charges against Wikileaks.
Everyone needs to read this. It's before the CIA's announcement, but it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on with that.
How would you stop a sober moron from doing the same?
If you do that enough to annoy 'the public', you're a 'public nuisance'.
Laws that punish people for merely being drunk in public are idiotic. As long as they aren't endangering themselves or others, or doing the sort of stuff that should get them locked up anyway, like wandering up and down the street yelling at people, the idea that they should be punished is absurd.
Frankly, there are some constitutional issues there the court needs to look into WRT to outlawing drunkenness. You have a right to be in public, it's called 'the right to peaceable assemble'. You do not lose that right simply because you are drunk.
Likewise, you also have the 'right to movement', which is not in the constitution but the courts have constantly upheld exists. You have the right to move from place to place, which is usually applied on a larger scale, like the right to actually relocate and travel from one state to another, but you have to also have the right to move from one place to a place down the street. (Or you couldn't do larger moves.)
Yes, the courts have ruled that you don't have to be allowed to do it in a specific manner, (Which was a constitutional argument against the No Fly list.), so they could likewise ban drunk driving...but the ban on public drunkenness appears to ban all movement.
Yes, yes, in theory you have to something else besides be drunk to be charged with 'public drunkenness', but, at least in my state, that can be simply having 'vulgar, profane, loud, or unbecoming language', whatever the hell the police decides is 'loud' or 'unbecoming'.
Which is a rather strange way to avoid the constitutional issue by...um...using another thing that's unconstitutional. Last I checked, you have a first amendment right to use unbecoming or even vulgar language. (And, no, that is not, in itself, a public nuisance. That has to be a pattern of some sort, that actually bothers at least a few actual people, not just a cop.)
Or the cop can simply claim you were 'boisterous', which literally means that you have energy. (Presumably, if you didn't have energy, you'd be arrested for sleeping public.)
Serious question: What's this? [usps.com] A lot of people say the USPS is totally self-funded but then why do they request funding from Congress every year? Is that considered a separate organization within the USPS or something?
The blind and oversea voting and Revenue Forgone Reform Act (Which is lower postal rates for charities) are stuff that, for whatever reason, Congress has decided the post office should do for free or cheap, and Congress pays them each year for that. The Post Office is only self-supporting for normal stuff, Congress had it do charity work that Congress pays for.
The 'reconciliation' stuff is them getting their money back from money they had left over at the end of previous years and 'loaned' to the government. Presumably because there's a recession and it needs the money because profits are down. And, as the article points out, it doesn't have a lot money left 'in the bank'.
Half the stuff people do there can be done on the automated machines they now have, instead of wasting time in line.
Assuming the damn automated machines work. Or even exist
At my local post office, the stamp vending machines have disappeared. Or, rather, we had perfectly functional stamp vending machines, and they were removed for some reason, and another vending machine was added, then it broke, then it was removed.
Now the only way to buy stamps is to stand in line.
And I could have sworn, at some point, we had a scale too. You could weigh your package, buy stamps, and mail it. Now you have to get in line. it's just idiotic.
Seriously, next time you sit in line at the PO, listen to all the stupid, inane questions people ask, like they've never been to a post office before in their lives.
I end up having to mail stuff out of my company sometimes, and, like I said, pretty much everyone who doesn't have a stamp has to get in line, so I end up behind them. (It's not their fucking fault, half the time the damn post office changed the rates on them so they just need 3 more damn cents on their envelope. If I was them I'd just use two stamps.)
And, yeah, a lot of the questions do seem very inane. There are all sorts of things you could read in line about different options, but people apparently are unable to do that.
Actually, no.
The post office can deliver onto private property.
In fact, believe it or not, it can't be kept out by property owners if a resident wants their mail delivered somewhere. If someone wants their mail delivered inside of a locked apartment building, or even a college dorm that doesn't allow non-residents, and the post office wants to deliver there, the owner of the building cannot keep them out.
In short, if they have a letter for you, and you want them to deliver it to you at a location, and they want to deliver it at that location, they technically can demand to be let through whatever locked doors they want to deliver it to that location, regardless of whose property that is.
This is all mostly moot because the post office doesn't want to deliver mail in such a manner, though, that would be insane. It will often demand that people put up mailboxes on the public right away if they want delivery, and would certainly look long and hard before deciding to deliver mail on private property against someone's wishes.
But it raises an interesting legal point if postal employees are used for anything else while delivering mail.
But we're talking about putting them on postal vehicles, which operate 99.99999% on public roads, and it would be a simple matter to leave them off any vehicles that leave them.
No, not five cents, damnit.
They should raise postage rates to the next highest five cents, and then raise them again by five cents when those get too low.
The idiotic 'raise them random amounts' is part of what's reducing the amount of stuff people mail. First class letters should always be a multiple of 5 cents, so you just throw another 5 cents on there if they raised the rate.
Which means the next rate raise should be to 50 cents, because it's 44 cents right now.
In fact, all rates should be a multiple of five cents. Mailing a DVD? Pre-stamped envelope should cost 85 cents or whatever. Postcard? 30 cents. Even the weight tables for stuff should be rounded up.
The only time it should be anything else is stuff like bulk rates, which are not done via stamps.
And at some point, they should entirely get rid of any stamps lower than 5 cents. They should have 5 cent stamps, 1 dollar stamps, and whatever-amount-the-first-class-rate-is stamp. Maybe a 25 also, I dunno. Maybe a 90 cent stamp for the large envelope base rate.
I'm not trying to say what they can and can't do, but at some point the entire thing got out of control...do we really need 1 cent stamps? 2 cent stamps? 8 cent stamps? Just operate the entire postal system in increments of 5 cents, and stop wasting everyone's time. (It's worth mentioning the retail universe operates in increments of 10 at the minimum. All items at a store will either end in 5 cents or 9 cents, depending on the store, and most items over five dollars end in either 95 or 99.)
Otherwise, yes, I entirely agree with your post. The USPS is the cheapest postal service, and incredibly efficient, and I'm sure FedEx and UPS would really like them to stop.
That's a serious problem in any study that looks at environmental factors for sickness.
Poor people generally live in much crappier conditions than non-poor, and have much poorer health.
Some of their poor health is almost certainly from their living conditions, but some of it is is instead from the poor nutrition, some from their lack of medical care, some from the less-safe jobs they work, and some is just from their general stress.
Often, looking at other countries can help, because the poor, while still having crappy living conditions and nutrition there, often have different crappy living conditions and nutrition. (For example, the poor in Asian countries often live almost entirely off rice, whereas the poor in the US live almost entirely off fat and sugar. Neither of those diets are good for you, but they cause different medical issues.) And sometimes they actually do have medical care, and you usually can find different types of jobs they work.
Hard to account for their stress levels, though, which medicine is discovering more and more contributes to bad health...it doesn't usually 'make you sick', but it makes it much harder to fight off sickness. People who are living paycheck to paycheck seem to be inherently sicker than those who are in the exact same situation but have six months pay in the bank.
No, that's silly. If a couple has 17.6 more kids, then they'll just have 20 full kids instead of the weird partial 2.4 kids.
They are causally related.
More adults cause the installation of more cell phone towers, and higher birth rates cause more adults.
So higher birth cause more cell phone towers, although with a 20 year lag or so. If a place has X births, and another place has 3X births, in 20 years the second place will have probably added 3X times more cell towers as the first added. (Obviously, other population-affecting variables could happen also.)
There is a logical error in using these results, to prove that though, because, right now, cell towers are the result of birth rates 20-60 years ago.
Although, if you did that study, people obviously wouldn't come to the erroneous conclusion the study is trying to get people to leap to. (They would, instead, come to an even more erroneous one that cell phone radiation travels backwards in time to cause more fertility.)
And for normal readers, the error is just the same as anyone believing a rumor.
Wikipedia is an entirely useful place if you treat it as some random person telling you things. It's like if you went to a room with every human in it and stood up and yelled 'Does anyone understand quantum mechanics' or 'Does anyone know the winners of the 1994 Nobel prizes?' and someone came up to you and asserted that they did and told you about those things.
They're supposed to also be carrying the books to back up their claims, but you generally only check those if it's a controversial issue or you have some other reason to think they might be lying. This is entirely reasonable, and it's entirely reasonable for people to get tricked by others, just like people can get tricked any conversation.
The actual problem here is news organizations getting tricked, because they aren't supposed to rely on asking people stuff. They might learn stuff from random people, but they must then go and check it out.
When did 'Muslim' become 'racial data'? And perhaps more importantly, when the fuck did 'tinted skin' mean Muslim?
The reason the media didn't say the crime was done by 'immigrants' is the reason it always doesn't says that...because no one can fucking tell someone's an immigrant without knowing who they are. It's the same reason they don't say 'Their last name started with an R'.
Take your idiotic racist blather and conspiracy theories somewhere else.
I'm tempted to pour water all over your stuff and see how you feel about it then.
Or, for even more fun, submerge you in 10 feet of it.
Just because something is a natural part of the environment doesn't mean it won't cause massive problems if we change the amount.
The spammer^Wfelony computer hijack (Let's call them by their worse crime) crowd have always had a 'we're being censored' mentality, so it makes sense they'd decided to host a mirror of a site that actually is being censored by various governments. (Admitted, not censored well.)
Then they can imply their 'censorship' (aka, the fact no sysadmin wants anything to do with them at all because they harm other computers on the internet, both via spam and felony computer hijack, so sysadmin quite sanely stop their users from reaching those places and vis versa) is the same as Wikileaks censorship (aka, the fact that various governments are actually putting pressure on their host to take them them down and removing their domain names, and forcing them to relocate.)
And then, thanks to Anon's goddamn fucking stupid DDoS, the criminal gangs of felony computer hijackers can even attack people who are 'censoring' them and people blame it on Anon. This despite the fact that Spamhaus, even if it was actually anti-Wikileaks in position, which they've made clear they are not, has not actually done anything to harm Wikileaks in the slightest way.
Um, no there isn't. Child-like and childish are entirely distinguished by whether or not you approve of the action. Childish means 'like a child', as does child-like. There is no definitional difference between them, just the connotation of one being bad, and one being good.
What you mean is that there is a difference between childish/child-like and irresponsible. Building cushion forts is not irresponsible. Randomly attacking people on the internet is.
Spamhaus are not vigilantes, they are the Better Business Bureau.
They do not attack people, they publish opinions as to whether or not someone's a person you want to do business with.
Interesting, I had not heard of this. Good to see someone's actually figured it out.
And, yeah, their prices aren't very competitive. We have one where I am, and I usually end up buying shampoo and stuff at the local grocery store while there, and going to the gas station for quick things.