First, the ebook market is only a tiny portion of the *book* market. This "censorship" will not have any noticeable impact on what people read and whether they can read it. These books are still available, people will just have to buy them from someone other than Amazon, even if they have to resort to buying paper books. Oh no, people might have to give their money to someone other than Amazon if they want a specific book! The world is ending!
Second, while Amazon currently holds most of the ebook market, analysts expect Amazon's share of this market to drop drastically - for example, one analyst thinks it will drop to 35% over the next five years. This will be true regardless of whether they sell gay rape fantasy books, but the market share drop will not come because a dozen customers are mad that they can't buy gay rape fantasy ebooks for their Kindle. No, the drop will come because of competition, one one of the things they will compete on is what books are available.
I don't think there's any evidence to support the notion that Amazon has enough control over the ebook market that their decision to stop selling gay rape fantasy books will have any impact on the freedom people have to read gay rape fantasy.
I think your definition of "an entire class of titles" is different from mine. There can't have been that many gay rape fantasy books... and if there were, I don't really want to know about them.
Or is it your opinion that Barnes & Noble is not a "general interest" bookstore because they don't carry rape fantasy books in their brick and mortar stores? Is it your opinion that a bookstore must carry books from every conceivable genre before they can be considered a "general interest" bookstore?
The term "general interest" merely refers to "stuff most of the population would be interested in." I have a hard time believing gay rape fantasy falls into that category.
So the gay rape fantasy ebooks were the only set of books making Amazon's selection larger than your local independent bookstore? That must have been a large building.
This isn't a law, it's a single company deciding not to sell a small number of books. Hardly the same thing. There's no "human freedom" being lost. Unless you think there is somehow an inherent "human freedom" to be allowed to buy specific books from Amazon, but that would be absurd.
Sorry, but Amazon does not control the market for what anybody reads. There are a large number of competing e-book stores, and let's not forget all the stores selling ink-laden dead trees.
Amazon is not demanding that those books not be published. They are simply not selling them in their own store.
My point was that while Amazon's definition meets the technical definition of "censorship", it doesn't meet the OMG EVIL CENSORSHIP meaning that most people have in mind when they say it. Using the former without clarifying is practically a deliberate attempt to rile people up about the latter.
So your opinion is that a bookstore should be morally obligated to carry every single book that has ever been presented to them to consider for sale, and that if they decline to carry a book or genre or some other set of books they're engaging in evil censorship?
Is it evil censorship for a bookstore to decide that a certain segment of books is damaging its image in the eyes of the bulk of its customers, thus decreasing sales, and that it will therefore no longer sell those books?
considering that the negative backlash is more perceived directly from their main customer targets
You'll forgive me for scoffing; I find it absurd to pretend that Amazon's main customer demographic cares for even a split second that Amazon stopped selling gay rape fantasy books. I would venture to say that most of Amazon's customers, if they even hear about it (which is doubtful), would simply shrug and say "Good, now I won't accidentally stumble on one."
There's the plain old strict definition of censorship and there's the evil freedom-of-speech-suppressing information-hiding most-commonly-used definition of censorship. We really only need to worry about the latter.
Would you be okay with your local grocery store not serving blacks, or Jews, since they're not the only place to purchase groceries?
If Amazon were refusing to sell to certain customers, then that analogy would be appropriate, but since they're not, the analogy is irrelevant.
I don't see why this is a big deal. It looks like Amazon does not want to sell books with the word "rape" in the title. I fail to see how this is "censorship" any more than it would be censorship for Barnes & Noble to decide it does not want to carry magazines with photos of naked people on the cover. They have a store image to maintain, and if they don't want naked people as part of that image, there's nothing wrong with that.
Amazon also has a store image to maintain (albeit a digital one), and they don't want the word "rape" in their store listings. Suddenly they're the big bad censorship machine?
The word "censorship" is loaded with meaning beyond what is found in Wikipedia or Webster's, and you know it. It implies malicious intent and a desire to suppress the freedom of speech. Clearly that is not Amazon's intent; it seems quite obvious that they are merely trying to clean the list of titles found in their store so that they can maintain their desired appearance. Amazon is not trying to suppress publication of these books, they have merely decided that they do not want to carry those particular books in their store.
A single company choosing to not sell or stop selling a product in their own store is not censorship in any meaningful way.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is not relevant to private companies. Amazon is not required to wait until its user is convicted of $CRIME before deciding the user needs to be booted off of Amazon's servers because of it.
Under 18 USC 793, persons convicted of gathering defense information with the intent or reason to believe the information will be used against the United States or to the benefit of a foreign nation may be fined or sentenced to no more than 10 years imprisonment. Persons who disclose that information to any person not entitled to receive it are subject to the same penalty. Classified documents may remain within the ambit of the statute even if information contained therein is made public by an unauthorized leak.
Amazon should not have to wait until a user has been convicted of violating US law before deciding that user has violated the "do not break US law" portion of the terms of service, especially when there are clear sections of US law that the user is violating. Otherwise, they would be unable to remove users who e.g. distribute child pornography until those users are convicted in court.
You may disagree about whether 18 USC 793 applies. That's fine. Your disagreement has no consequences. Amazon bears some risk as a result of their understanding of this law whichever way they interpret it, so it should not be surprising that they choose the safer interpretation.
At any rate, this entire argument is stupid. Wikileaks was offline for no more than a day or two as a result of Amazon's action, and they suffered no harm. Why get mad at Amazon for choosing a less risky interpretation of the law, when no harm was caused to Wikileaks as a result?
Nowhere did I say or imply that I think I'm better than them. What I said was, if people want companies to pay more money, taking extremely low-paying jobs is the wrong way to do it.
This has nothing to do with 12 hour work weeks or "eating your own dog food" (which I assume you meant metaphorically, though I can't see how it applies). A 12 hour work week sounds like a part time job, and there are plenty of those around, but that has little to do with how much employees are paid per hour.
You are where you are thanks to people actively changing things instead of accepting the non-choice between life in extreme poverty (and/or starvation) and life in poverty with a horrible job.
You do realize that you're defending my point, right? As you yourself point out, it's not a choice between "poverty" and "poverty with horrible low-paying job". They have other choices. But sharing your attitude - "if they could, they would" -- is what leaves them in that situation.
The government has all sorts of programs available for people with little or no money, not to mention there are independent food banks, soup kitchens, and so on. These are meant to be relied upon while people find decent jobs.
See, these people who take low-paying jobs without complaint are the cause of the problem. Yes, it would be difficult for a while. No, they would not starve, unless they're too stubborn and proud to ask for help. But the biggest reason this will never actually work is this: everyone has to be willing to do it at the same time, and hold out until companies relent. It's the same reason strikes and boycotts really only work if everyone does it.
Of course, most everyone has your attitude, that they have no choice, and that is the reason these low-paying employers don't raise wages.
As for "I am where I am thanks to people actively changing things", well, yes, I am. Perhaps if you read up on how the Mormons ended up building a city in the middle of the desert, you'll understand why my definition of "actively change" may include choosing to live in poverty for a time.
A bald-faced lie? They said Wikileaks was violating several of the terms of service. One of the terms of service is "don't use our service to break US law". It's pretty clear that Wikileaks was violating US law. Ergo, not a lie.
At any rate, you're nitpicking over the wording used by the Amazon representative. Perhaps "doesn't own or otherwise control the rights to the classified content" was not the clearest way to put it, but unless you're deliberately being dense, the meaning is clear: Wikileaks is not permitted by US law to distribute these documents. Clearly, distributing documents in violation of US law qualifies under "don't use our service to break US law".
They did not say that Wikileaks has published 250,000 documents, they said that Wikileaks is publishing 250,000 documents. That does not contradict your statement; "is publishing" is clearly present tense and indicates an ongoing process. Furthermore, just because you are convinced that the redaction and review process that Wikileaks is using is sufficient and won't miss anything does not mean Amazon must also be convinced the process is sufficient.
Anyone who takes a moment to actually read Amazon's terms of service will see that Amazon didn't need government pressure to kick Wikileaks off of AWS.
Do you really think Wikileaks should be allowed to agree to terms of service, and then intentionally violate those terms of service? If so, then you must also permit any entity to do so, which of course invalidates the entire concept of terms of service. I really hope that is not your goal.
My objection was that it's not "unconscionable exploitation" to provide a job in exchange for money, even if those wages are low. Companies pay what people are willing to work for.
If people want higher wages, they should start by not taking low-paying jobs.
They employ people if and only if they can skim off of their labor.
I think what you mean is, an employer only hires someone if hiring that person earns more than they cost. I'm awed by your "insight".
That's called making a profit, not "skimming off their labor", and it's a fundamental component of economics. I challenge you to show how any employer could stay in business despite paying employees more than the employer earns from their employment, or even paying the same as what their employment earns -- non-profits don't count (the economy wouldn't work very well if *everyone* were a non-profit!).
I had a health insurance provider who did this. It was a non-employer-provided policy that I had personally set up, but they required the oldest spouse to be the named policy holder, so I had to put my wife as the policy holder.
Every single time I had to call in about something, they made me go find my wife so she could tell them I was authorized to access the account. No matter how many times she told them that I was authorized to do anything and everything, and that they should put a note to that effect on the account, they never did, even though they always said they had.
That's why I am never getting married. My stuff is MY stuff and it's not going to suddenly belong to somebody else like that. I don't need somebody opening my mail, thinking for me, choosing what I watch on TV or what I eat for dinner, or what I get to spend my money on.
There's no rule saying your spouse has to think for you, choose what you watch on TV or what you eat for dinner, or what you spend your money on, and as you have pointed out, that attitude from either spouse will do great harm to the relationship. This is doubly true if either partner has this attitude before the marriage even begins - and based on your comments, you already think that every potential spouse will treat you this way. You are not doing yourself any favors with that attitude.
It is not the case that one partner must take precedence over the other. The fact is, you can choose a spouse who will hold you in as high a regard as you hold her, who will treat your happiness as if it is just as important, if not more so, than her own. I know this is true because my wife and I treat each other this way. We both strive to make the other happy. That is one of the most important cornerstones of any successful relationship, married or not.
Don't avoid marriage just because you have friends who suck at choosing good spouses. All it means is that you should choose more carefully than they did. Yes, the divorce rate is disturbingly high, but that does not mean marriage itself is inherently flawed. In reality the two biggest reasons couples get divorced are as follows: either they disagree on financial issues, or one spouse has some habit or engages in some other activity that they know the other finds distasteful, but refuses to change or compromise at all. Both are issues that should have been worked out before marriage was considered in the first place. If all couples discussed these things before deciding to get married, the divorce rate would plummet.
The modern marriage mindset seems to be "if it doesn't work out, we can just get divorced". This encourages people to marry too soon, to give up rather than work together to fix problems, discourages relationship-building, and cheapens the concept of marriage entirely. Indeed, the most successful marriages are marriages where neither spouse views divorce as an acceptable solution.
I'm going to say this again, because it bears repeating: these are all issues that can and should be resolved before marriage.
Difficult to see the upside honestly.
You only have difficulty seeing the upside because you can't fathom the possibility that you might find a spouse that won't treat you like dirt. Perhaps you're finding your relationships in the wrong place.
Surely you can see the benefits of a marriage where both spouses treat each other equally?
No, but "two become one" does not require love either. The concept is simply that two people become unified in purpose and intent, and that's largely what marriage law is based on. If that's not what you want, you shouldn't be getting married, whether or not you're in love.
Marriage is a legal arrangement. If you feel you must marry to show or "proof" your love, you're in the wrong relationship.
Marriage is indeed a legal arrangement, but that does not mean "legal arrangement" is the only way in which it should be viewed. Indeed, many view marriage in a religious or spiritual light as well. You may not personally view religion in this light, but do not pretend it is an invalid motivation for marriage.
I decided to marry my wife not because of any perceived legal or social benefits, but because I want to be with her forever, and I would argue that that is a far better reason for marriage than "we got married because we wanted the legal benefits associated with it". Your opinion on whether it's possible to be with someone forever is not relevant.
If the majority of the populace of a city or state wants things done differently than it is being done, then maybe they should try to make that happen, rather than skipping ten steps all the way to secession.
The best solution is not secession, it's for people to, you know, run for office themselves and get things changed. It's how the government is designed to work. If nobody in that majority is willing to run for office, what makes you think things would be any better after a secession?
So despite the context being an initiative for the state of Alaska to secede from the Union, you were actually referring to two attempts by small areas in entirely different areas of the country to secede from the cities they were currently in?
It should be noted that state secession from the Union is an entirely separate issue from that of an area trying to secede from a city without seceding from the state or country.
I think you need to figure out how to communicate.
Interesting to note that where the populace voted in majority FOR secession, the local government blocked those decisions.
Where did you get that idea? It certainly wasn't from Wikipedia:
[T]he Alaska Supreme Court held that secession was illegal, [...] and refused to permit an initiative to be presented to the people of Alaska for a vote.
Did you even read the sentence you quoted? It could not have been voted for by the majority, because it was never put to vote in the first place.
You clearly did not even read the article you linked to. Secession has never been "perfectly" legal, and by most accounts, it's unconstitutional. In 1869, the Supreme Court held that secession from the Union by a state is not legal. This was one of the causes of the Civil War - the North was enforcing the idea that it was not legal for the South to secede.
They didn't have enough power to make a wormhole back to the Milky Way. They repeated that pretty much every episode. SGU had a lot of problems, but "why can't they get home yet" was not one of them.
If you want an example of a show that really had that problem, take a look at Star Trek Voyager. In the very first episode they could have gone home without stranding themselves and without handing the station over to the Kazon (I guess they forgot about timers in the 24th century?), and offhand I can think of three or four other episodes where they could have gotten home much, much quicker, but didn't because they're morons. The SGU characters haven't had a chance to get home yet, that I can recall.
The signed fax copy serves to speed the process up. The actual signed copy is then mailed afterward. This saves the cost of overnight delivery and keeps a business from having to wait 2 or 3 days for the mail to arrive.
This may be true in some cases, but it is not universally true. Some health insurance companies, for example, accept coverage denial appeals (which must be signed by the policy holder) by fax or mail, but not by internet. If you send it by fax they do not ask for the original. As another example, many organizations accept direct deposit or direct debit applications by fax without asking for the original.
Furthermore, you seem to be pretending that you couldn't mail the actual signed copy after sending a scan by e-mail. Clearly you can, so I'm not really sure why you're bringing this up as a reason companies still use fax.
Yes, you could scan the document and then email it, but that requires more steps, more training, more equipment, and takes longer than pressing a 10 digit number and send.
I don't know why you think that. Scanning and e-mailing is the same number of steps as faxing, it's just as fast if not faster, requires no more training than a fax machine, nor does it require "more equipment" - unless by that you mean "different equipment". Indeed, that "different equipment" can just be the secretary's computer if nothing else, which you will have already, so it's not like there's some big investment involved.
At work, we have a standalone scanner/printer/copier. If you want your scanned papers e-mailed, you don't even have to e-mail it yourself - you just enter the target e-mail address directly into the scanner, and it does everything for you. It feeds your source pages in just like a fax machine would. It takes no more time, training, or equipment than a fax machine. Therefore, those are not valid reasons for refusing scans and insisting on faxes.
E-mails also have other obvious benefits that faxes do not; they can be easily relayed to other people and duplicated without degrading the material further (have you ever seen a fax of a fax of a fax, or a photocopy of a fax of a fax of a photocopy?), they can be easily backed up in multiple locations, they can be easily encrypted and/or digitally signed, they can be sorted and filed without human intervention, e-mail addresses are virtually unlimited where fax numbers are not, allowing for greater granularity, and so on. Surely you wouldn't pretend these benefits are irrelevant...
A fax also prints confirmations that can be stored for years with the rest of your physical papers as is required by law in many situations.
You don't think we could have the receiving e-mail server send a reply with "we received this on mm/dd/yyyy, your confirmation number is 123456", and the sender could print that out? Auto-replies including specific confirmation numbers are quite common nowadays, you know. If you think receipt confirmations are only possible with fax machines, then clearly you're not very familiar with modern technology.
It's okay though, keep pretending that just because something is a few decades old that it's completely useless.
Did I mention the age of fax technology anywhere? Yes, the technology that I think should replace fax is newer, but I did not mention its age, and its age is not relevant to my opinion. Speed, quality, and convenience are the reasons behind my opinion that crisp high-resolution color scans are better than blurry low-resolution black-and-white faxes.
It's okay though, keep pretending that just because someone thinks there is a better alternative to some technology, then that technology's age is the only factor in that opinion.
Ageism is the new racism and you are proof that bigotry will never go away no matter how many times we try and outlaw it.
Slashdot Mirror
First, the ebook market is only a tiny portion of the *book* market. This "censorship" will not have any noticeable impact on what people read and whether they can read it. These books are still available, people will just have to buy them from someone other than Amazon, even if they have to resort to buying paper books. Oh no, people might have to give their money to someone other than Amazon if they want a specific book! The world is ending!
Second, while Amazon currently holds most of the ebook market, analysts expect Amazon's share of this market to drop drastically - for example, one analyst thinks it will drop to 35% over the next five years. This will be true regardless of whether they sell gay rape fantasy books, but the market share drop will not come because a dozen customers are mad that they can't buy gay rape fantasy ebooks for their Kindle. No, the drop will come because of competition, one one of the things they will compete on is what books are available.
I don't think there's any evidence to support the notion that Amazon has enough control over the ebook market that their decision to stop selling gay rape fantasy books will have any impact on the freedom people have to read gay rape fantasy.
I think your definition of "an entire class of titles" is different from mine. There can't have been that many gay rape fantasy books... and if there were, I don't really want to know about them.
Or is it your opinion that Barnes & Noble is not a "general interest" bookstore because they don't carry rape fantasy books in their brick and mortar stores? Is it your opinion that a bookstore must carry books from every conceivable genre before they can be considered a "general interest" bookstore?
The term "general interest" merely refers to "stuff most of the population would be interested in." I have a hard time believing gay rape fantasy falls into that category.
and (formerly) wider selections.
So the gay rape fantasy ebooks were the only set of books making Amazon's selection larger than your local independent bookstore? That must have been a large building.
This isn't a law, it's a single company deciding not to sell a small number of books. Hardly the same thing. There's no "human freedom" being lost. Unless you think there is somehow an inherent "human freedom" to be allowed to buy specific books from Amazon, but that would be absurd.
Ugh. I meant, "while Amazon's action meets..."
Sorry, but Amazon does not control the market for what anybody reads. There are a large number of competing e-book stores, and let's not forget all the stores selling ink-laden dead trees.
Amazon is not demanding that those books not be published. They are simply not selling them in their own store.
My point was that while Amazon's definition meets the technical definition of "censorship", it doesn't meet the OMG EVIL CENSORSHIP meaning that most people have in mind when they say it. Using the former without clarifying is practically a deliberate attempt to rile people up about the latter.
Nope.
So your opinion is that a bookstore should be morally obligated to carry every single book that has ever been presented to them to consider for sale, and that if they decline to carry a book or genre or some other set of books they're engaging in evil censorship?
Is it evil censorship for a bookstore to decide that a certain segment of books is damaging its image in the eyes of the bulk of its customers, thus decreasing sales, and that it will therefore no longer sell those books?
considering that the negative backlash is more perceived directly from their main customer targets
You'll forgive me for scoffing; I find it absurd to pretend that Amazon's main customer demographic cares for even a split second that Amazon stopped selling gay rape fantasy books. I would venture to say that most of Amazon's customers, if they even hear about it (which is doubtful), would simply shrug and say "Good, now I won't accidentally stumble on one."
There's the plain old strict definition of censorship and there's the evil freedom-of-speech-suppressing information-hiding most-commonly-used definition of censorship. We really only need to worry about the latter.
Would you be okay with your local grocery store not serving blacks, or Jews, since they're not the only place to purchase groceries?
If Amazon were refusing to sell to certain customers, then that analogy would be appropriate, but since they're not, the analogy is irrelevant.
I don't see why this is a big deal. It looks like Amazon does not want to sell books with the word "rape" in the title. I fail to see how this is "censorship" any more than it would be censorship for Barnes & Noble to decide it does not want to carry magazines with photos of naked people on the cover. They have a store image to maintain, and if they don't want naked people as part of that image, there's nothing wrong with that.
Amazon also has a store image to maintain (albeit a digital one), and they don't want the word "rape" in their store listings. Suddenly they're the big bad censorship machine?
The word "censorship" is loaded with meaning beyond what is found in Wikipedia or Webster's, and you know it. It implies malicious intent and a desire to suppress the freedom of speech. Clearly that is not Amazon's intent; it seems quite obvious that they are merely trying to clean the list of titles found in their store so that they can maintain their desired appearance. Amazon is not trying to suppress publication of these books, they have merely decided that they do not want to carry those particular books in their store.
A single company choosing to not sell or stop selling a product in their own store is not censorship in any meaningful way.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is not relevant to private companies. Amazon is not required to wait until its user is convicted of $CRIME before deciding the user needs to be booted off of Amazon's servers because of it.
Care to cite a law which backs that up.
Sure.
Under 18 USC 793, persons convicted of gathering defense information with the intent or reason to believe the information will be used against the United States or to the benefit of a foreign nation may be fined or sentenced to no more than 10 years imprisonment. Persons who disclose that information to any person not entitled to receive it are subject to the same penalty. Classified documents may remain within the ambit of the statute even if information contained therein is made public by an unauthorized leak.
Statements taken from this document.
Amazon should not have to wait until a user has been convicted of violating US law before deciding that user has violated the "do not break US law" portion of the terms of service, especially when there are clear sections of US law that the user is violating. Otherwise, they would be unable to remove users who e.g. distribute child pornography until those users are convicted in court.
You may disagree about whether 18 USC 793 applies. That's fine. Your disagreement has no consequences. Amazon bears some risk as a result of their understanding of this law whichever way they interpret it, so it should not be surprising that they choose the safer interpretation.
At any rate, this entire argument is stupid. Wikileaks was offline for no more than a day or two as a result of Amazon's action, and they suffered no harm. Why get mad at Amazon for choosing a less risky interpretation of the law, when no harm was caused to Wikileaks as a result?
Did you read the middle paragraph of my post? I specifically addressed the "250,000 documents" portion of Amazon's statement.
Nowhere did I say or imply that I think I'm better than them. What I said was, if people want companies to pay more money, taking extremely low-paying jobs is the wrong way to do it.
This has nothing to do with 12 hour work weeks or "eating your own dog food" (which I assume you meant metaphorically, though I can't see how it applies). A 12 hour work week sounds like a part time job, and there are plenty of those around, but that has little to do with how much employees are paid per hour.
You are where you are thanks to people actively changing things instead of accepting the non-choice between life in extreme poverty (and/or starvation) and life in poverty with a horrible job.
You do realize that you're defending my point, right? As you yourself point out, it's not a choice between "poverty" and "poverty with horrible low-paying job". They have other choices. But sharing your attitude - "if they could, they would" -- is what leaves them in that situation.
The government has all sorts of programs available for people with little or no money, not to mention there are independent food banks, soup kitchens, and so on. These are meant to be relied upon while people find decent jobs.
See, these people who take low-paying jobs without complaint are the cause of the problem. Yes, it would be difficult for a while. No, they would not starve, unless they're too stubborn and proud to ask for help. But the biggest reason this will never actually work is this: everyone has to be willing to do it at the same time, and hold out until companies relent. It's the same reason strikes and boycotts really only work if everyone does it.
Of course, most everyone has your attitude, that they have no choice, and that is the reason these low-paying employers don't raise wages.
As for "I am where I am thanks to people actively changing things", well, yes, I am. Perhaps if you read up on how the Mormons ended up building a city in the middle of the desert, you'll understand why my definition of "actively change" may include choosing to live in poverty for a time.
A bald-faced lie? They said Wikileaks was violating several of the terms of service. One of the terms of service is "don't use our service to break US law". It's pretty clear that Wikileaks was violating US law. Ergo, not a lie.
At any rate, you're nitpicking over the wording used by the Amazon representative. Perhaps "doesn't own or otherwise control the rights to the classified content" was not the clearest way to put it, but unless you're deliberately being dense, the meaning is clear: Wikileaks is not permitted by US law to distribute these documents. Clearly, distributing documents in violation of US law qualifies under "don't use our service to break US law".
They did not say that Wikileaks has published 250,000 documents, they said that Wikileaks is publishing 250,000 documents. That does not contradict your statement; "is publishing" is clearly present tense and indicates an ongoing process. Furthermore, just because you are convinced that the redaction and review process that Wikileaks is using is sufficient and won't miss anything does not mean Amazon must also be convinced the process is sufficient.
Anyone who takes a moment to actually read Amazon's terms of service will see that Amazon didn't need government pressure to kick Wikileaks off of AWS.
Do you really think Wikileaks should be allowed to agree to terms of service, and then intentionally violate those terms of service? If so, then you must also permit any entity to do so, which of course invalidates the entire concept of terms of service. I really hope that is not your goal.
My objection was that it's not "unconscionable exploitation" to provide a job in exchange for money, even if those wages are low. Companies pay what people are willing to work for.
If people want higher wages, they should start by not taking low-paying jobs.
They employ people if and only if they can skim off of their labor.
I think what you mean is, an employer only hires someone if hiring that person earns more than they cost. I'm awed by your "insight".
That's called making a profit, not "skimming off their labor", and it's a fundamental component of economics. I challenge you to show how any employer could stay in business despite paying employees more than the employer earns from their employment, or even paying the same as what their employment earns -- non-profits don't count (the economy wouldn't work very well if *everyone* were a non-profit!).
I had a health insurance provider who did this. It was a non-employer-provided policy that I had personally set up, but they required the oldest spouse to be the named policy holder, so I had to put my wife as the policy holder.
Every single time I had to call in about something, they made me go find my wife so she could tell them I was authorized to access the account. No matter how many times she told them that I was authorized to do anything and everything, and that they should put a note to that effect on the account, they never did, even though they always said they had.
That's why I am never getting married. My stuff is MY stuff and it's not going to suddenly belong to somebody else like that. I don't need somebody opening my mail, thinking for me, choosing what I watch on TV or what I eat for dinner, or what I get to spend my money on.
There's no rule saying your spouse has to think for you, choose what you watch on TV or what you eat for dinner, or what you spend your money on, and as you have pointed out, that attitude from either spouse will do great harm to the relationship. This is doubly true if either partner has this attitude before the marriage even begins - and based on your comments, you already think that every potential spouse will treat you this way. You are not doing yourself any favors with that attitude.
It is not the case that one partner must take precedence over the other. The fact is, you can choose a spouse who will hold you in as high a regard as you hold her, who will treat your happiness as if it is just as important, if not more so, than her own. I know this is true because my wife and I treat each other this way. We both strive to make the other happy. That is one of the most important cornerstones of any successful relationship, married or not.
Don't avoid marriage just because you have friends who suck at choosing good spouses. All it means is that you should choose more carefully than they did. Yes, the divorce rate is disturbingly high, but that does not mean marriage itself is inherently flawed. In reality the two biggest reasons couples get divorced are as follows: either they disagree on financial issues, or one spouse has some habit or engages in some other activity that they know the other finds distasteful, but refuses to change or compromise at all. Both are issues that should have been worked out before marriage was considered in the first place. If all couples discussed these things before deciding to get married, the divorce rate would plummet.
The modern marriage mindset seems to be "if it doesn't work out, we can just get divorced". This encourages people to marry too soon, to give up rather than work together to fix problems, discourages relationship-building, and cheapens the concept of marriage entirely. Indeed, the most successful marriages are marriages where neither spouse views divorce as an acceptable solution.
I'm going to say this again, because it bears repeating: these are all issues that can and should be resolved before marriage.
Difficult to see the upside honestly.
You only have difficulty seeing the upside because you can't fathom the possibility that you might find a spouse that won't treat you like dirt. Perhaps you're finding your relationships in the wrong place.
Surely you can see the benefits of a marriage where both spouses treat each other equally?
And marriage does not require love.
No, but "two become one" does not require love either. The concept is simply that two people become unified in purpose and intent, and that's largely what marriage law is based on. If that's not what you want, you shouldn't be getting married, whether or not you're in love.
Marriage is a legal arrangement. If you feel you must marry to show or "proof" your love, you're in the wrong relationship.
Marriage is indeed a legal arrangement, but that does not mean "legal arrangement" is the only way in which it should be viewed. Indeed, many view marriage in a religious or spiritual light as well. You may not personally view religion in this light, but do not pretend it is an invalid motivation for marriage.
I decided to marry my wife not because of any perceived legal or social benefits, but because I want to be with her forever, and I would argue that that is a far better reason for marriage than "we got married because we wanted the legal benefits associated with it". Your opinion on whether it's possible to be with someone forever is not relevant.
If the majority of the populace of a city or state wants things done differently than it is being done, then maybe they should try to make that happen, rather than skipping ten steps all the way to secession.
The best solution is not secession, it's for people to, you know, run for office themselves and get things changed. It's how the government is designed to work. If nobody in that majority is willing to run for office, what makes you think things would be any better after a secession?
So despite the context being an initiative for the state of Alaska to secede from the Union, you were actually referring to two attempts by small areas in entirely different areas of the country to secede from the cities they were currently in?
It should be noted that state secession from the Union is an entirely separate issue from that of an area trying to secede from a city without seceding from the state or country.
I think you need to figure out how to communicate.
Interesting to note that where the populace voted in majority FOR secession, the local government blocked those decisions.
Where did you get that idea? It certainly wasn't from Wikipedia:
[T]he Alaska Supreme Court held that secession was illegal, [...] and refused to permit an initiative to be presented to the people of Alaska for a vote.
Did you even read the sentence you quoted? It could not have been voted for by the majority, because it was never put to vote in the first place.
Why don't you just secede? It's perfectly legal
You clearly did not even read the article you linked to. Secession has never been "perfectly" legal, and by most accounts, it's unconstitutional. In 1869, the Supreme Court held that secession from the Union by a state is not legal. This was one of the causes of the Civil War - the North was enforcing the idea that it was not legal for the South to secede.
They didn't have enough power to make a wormhole back to the Milky Way. They repeated that pretty much every episode. SGU had a lot of problems, but "why can't they get home yet" was not one of them.
If you want an example of a show that really had that problem, take a look at Star Trek Voyager. In the very first episode they could have gone home without stranding themselves and without handing the station over to the Kazon (I guess they forgot about timers in the 24th century?), and offhand I can think of three or four other episodes where they could have gotten home much, much quicker, but didn't because they're morons. The SGU characters haven't had a chance to get home yet, that I can recall.
The signed fax copy serves to speed the process up. The actual signed copy is then mailed afterward. This saves the cost of overnight delivery and keeps a business from having to wait 2 or 3 days for the mail to arrive.
This may be true in some cases, but it is not universally true. Some health insurance companies, for example, accept coverage denial appeals (which must be signed by the policy holder) by fax or mail, but not by internet. If you send it by fax they do not ask for the original. As another example, many organizations accept direct deposit or direct debit applications by fax without asking for the original.
Furthermore, you seem to be pretending that you couldn't mail the actual signed copy after sending a scan by e-mail. Clearly you can, so I'm not really sure why you're bringing this up as a reason companies still use fax.
Yes, you could scan the document and then email it, but that requires more steps, more training, more equipment, and takes longer than pressing a 10 digit number and send.
I don't know why you think that. Scanning and e-mailing is the same number of steps as faxing, it's just as fast if not faster, requires no more training than a fax machine, nor does it require "more equipment" - unless by that you mean "different equipment". Indeed, that "different equipment" can just be the secretary's computer if nothing else, which you will have already, so it's not like there's some big investment involved.
At work, we have a standalone scanner/printer/copier. If you want your scanned papers e-mailed, you don't even have to e-mail it yourself - you just enter the target e-mail address directly into the scanner, and it does everything for you. It feeds your source pages in just like a fax machine would. It takes no more time, training, or equipment than a fax machine. Therefore, those are not valid reasons for refusing scans and insisting on faxes.
E-mails also have other obvious benefits that faxes do not; they can be easily relayed to other people and duplicated without degrading the material further (have you ever seen a fax of a fax of a fax, or a photocopy of a fax of a fax of a photocopy?), they can be easily backed up in multiple locations, they can be easily encrypted and/or digitally signed, they can be sorted and filed without human intervention, e-mail addresses are virtually unlimited where fax numbers are not, allowing for greater granularity, and so on. Surely you wouldn't pretend these benefits are irrelevant...
A fax also prints confirmations that can be stored for years with the rest of your physical papers as is required by law in many situations.
You don't think we could have the receiving e-mail server send a reply with "we received this on mm/dd/yyyy, your confirmation number is 123456", and the sender could print that out? Auto-replies including specific confirmation numbers are quite common nowadays, you know. If you think receipt confirmations are only possible with fax machines, then clearly you're not very familiar with modern technology.
It's okay though, keep pretending that just because something is a few decades old that it's completely useless.
Did I mention the age of fax technology anywhere? Yes, the technology that I think should replace fax is newer, but I did not mention its age, and its age is not relevant to my opinion. Speed, quality, and convenience are the reasons behind my opinion that crisp high-resolution color scans are better than blurry low-resolution black-and-white faxes.
It's okay though, keep pretending that just because someone thinks there is a better alternative to some technology, then that technology's age is the only factor in that opinion.
Ageism is the new racism and you are proof that bigotry will never go away no matter how many times we try and outlaw it.
Actually, accusation of "ism"s is the new ra