First off, I want to be clear that I am not at all defending Verizon's practices here. I think it's awful and ridiculous, and I don't think they should try to force people into auto billpay or any other payment method. I'm just addressing your point about whether billpay is useful.
I still fail to see the benefit of an automatic bill pay. If you're still going through and verifying your bill every month before allowing the automatic charge, what have you gained by allowing the automatic charge in the first place?
It still saves me time. Why? Because I don't have to navigate to some random page to pay a bill or write out a check and mail it. I see the email, most of the bills I have set up for autopay display the amount in the email, and most of the services I have it set up for tend to bill for the same amount every month (give or take a few cents, except for heating bills and such). It takes me maybe a few seconds to glance at the email, check to see the amount looks about right, and then I'm done. I don't need to remember to go somewhere before date X and enter in amounts or billing information or login or click through ten screens.
Does it save a lot of time? Of course not. But it is less of a hassle. And it does have the added benefit of ensuring that my bill will be paid on time. If I happen to be busy during a particular week, I don't need to make sure I go and pay a bill before date X. Instead, the email comes in, I know it's paid, and that's it.
But frankly, it doesn't do a huge amount for me. I just find it a little more convenient. On the other hand, it is really useful for some friends I have who are very bad about remembering to pay bills on various dates. Before auto bill pay, they would typically get late fees a number of times each year for various accounts -- now they don't.
And the amount of time spent resolving a dispute in your case seems, in a best case scenario, to be equivalent to my own, and at worst, far exceeding the amount of hassle one would have to go through had the charge been manual and just not made.
I don't know about that. I've taken half a dozen complaints against various companies to government agencies and the BBB over the past decade, and the companies who put up the greatest fight were ones where I hadn't yet paid the bill. I think this depends more on the company and how evil they are than whether you've paid a bill that you disputed before it was even paid.
Any professional IT manager should be capable of understanding technical matters raised by his colleagues (the word "underlings" is not something you should use in an IT environment) and how to present that information to non technical people in words or graphs that they can understand.
It sounds like this is almost what the GP was describing. Perhaps the guy could have used a little more technical knowledge, but apparently he still could present the important recommendations to the management from his staff in a coherent way that got results. First and foremost, a technical manager needs to be a "translator" to the other management who actually control money and policy. To do that, he needs to have a certain level of technical knowledge, it is true. But it sounds like this guy had enough of that -- he just wasn't a deep technical problem-solver.
Personally an IT manager in a suit is someone I would look down on since casual clothing is much more practical
You start out by saying that you shouldn't use the word "underlings" and then you say you'd "look down on someone" just because of how he dresses? First off, I didn't get the impression from the GP that the manager wore a suit all the time, but he showed up to meetings with the senior management wearing a suit, just as they wore a suit. You may not think suits are practical, but wearing clothing appropriate to a situation is how you get everyone else to think of you as a real person and a peer.
And as for "practical," I think that's all a matter of current style and values. Both of my grandfathers were blue-collar workers, and they wore dark (usually wool) trousers and button-down shirts to work, just as almost everyone did at the time. They didn't wear ties, because they could be caught in machinery. My great uncle, who was a crane operator at a steel plant, didn't have that problem, so he wore a suit to work everyday. A lot of folks used to. Jeans were for farmers, prisoners, and manual laborers.
Styles change, though. These days, you'd be eccentric for wearing a suit if you didn't need to, but I'd only care if it hurt your work in some way. I don't look down on what people wear, as long as it doesn't interfere with their work. If you look down on someone for wearing a suit, maybe you're the arrogant one who thinks of others as "underlings."
I went into IT after deciding I didn't want to get a masters to teach disinterested children when I could teach disinterested adults with just a bachelors.
This is not meant to be snarky at all -- but I think you mean "uninterested."
"Disinterested" means "objective" or "neutral" (as in a "disinterested party" to a lawsuit, who has nothing to gain from either side), or sometimes "ambivalent."
You mean "Quae seminaveris metes" maybe? The second word comes from "semina," which means "seeds," like in English "seminal," which refers to important work that bears fruit. (Ultimately from "semen," of course, i.e., "seed" in Latin....)
If I come up a little short one month and I have a cable bill and a rent check to write, you better fucking believe the rent check is getting written first.
If you commonly run out of money each month and need to choose which bills to pay, you're absolutely right: automatic bill pay is not for you. I think that's kind of clear from the definition of what the service is.
Based on how hard it is to get a bill corrected that I haven't paid yet with most large companies, allowing them to take the money up front seems like lunacy to me.
You don't let them take the money until you've reviewed the bill. Duh. The same as you would if you wrote a check. EVERY automatic bill pay I have going out sends me an email in advance letting me know that it will be debited soon. That's the default behavior for almost all companies that do this, and I wouldn't have auto bill pay with any company that wouldn't offer this.
So, when I check my email (as I do at least once every day), I see what bills will be going out. If I see something out of the ordinary, I can call them up, dispute it, whatever. If they refuse to deal with me and even refuse to cancel the autopay, I still have on record an early complaint, and I can inform my credit card company that I dispute the charge. I can also, if necessary, contact the BBB, state utility commissions, etc., all in ADVANCE of the paying of the bill, even if they refuse to stop the auto-payment.
Since they have to go through the buffer of my credit card (note that I would not direct debit from my bank account except for truly important fixed payments like loans and such, which I basically have to pay on time or else ruin my credit), they're not getting the money, and I have complaints all registered even if they still try to make the charge. That money isn't going anywhere until they resolve the issue. (And yes, I've contacted state utilities boards and the BBB in a number of different states to resolve bill disputes I've had over the years -- I always get the matter sorted out, generally with a letter or even a phone call of apology.)
The 10 days will pass and the money will be gone, and you will be left with no options.
"No options"? Hardly. Back in the days before electronic autopays were common, I had to get my money back twice from utility companies I had already sent checks to. (The circumstances were weird, and one of them was when I was young and stupid and paid a bill not realizing I didn't have recourse.) It took a couple reports to the BBB and the state utilities commissions that governed these businesses, and I not only got my money back, but also an actual person calling to apologize.
Disputing bills after you've paid them is harder, but with utility companies, there is generally a state agency who will get the work done for you and get your money back.
For me, autopay worked great until payroll was messed up and I was accidentally deleted instead of the person that was supposed to be terminated. Payday came with no direct deposit followed by all those wonderful autopays triggering.
Which is why the few autopayments I have set up must send an email in advance to my primary email account that I read everyday. Yes, it increases the traffic in my inbox slightly, but I never move those messages from my box without reviewing the bills and the amounts.
I get the convenience of autopay, but money never goes out of my account without an explicit reminder in advance.
I'm not sure how you blame autopay for your mishaps. If you knew your paycheck was screwed up, you should have canceled the autopays the moment you found out. If you didn't know your paycheck was screwed up, you probably would have written checks which would have racked up overdraft fees and whatnot anyway.
I'd be more likely to believe the $2 fees they collect from people paying by phone or online are put into a trust in the event of a data breach.
Are you serious? You look at the way most big companies today play fast and loose with finances, and you think any of them are going to sock a truckload of money away in a "trust fund" for a specific event that shouldn't even happen?
Companies may have some funds available to deal with emergencies, but this isn't some emergency fund. It's a sudden planned increase in income for them -- this money is going directly to profits. Or, rather, they are going to claim it's being used "to finance the payment systems," and then they're going to siphon all of the money that used to finance those payment systems into profits....
Just to clarify, what I meant to say was that August (Sextilis) had 31 days before Augustus even became emperor, and it was of irregular length before Augustus was born. Before Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, it had 29 days, as did many months.
The old calendar was mostly an irregular pattern of 31 and 29 day months, excepting February. The year was way too short, resulting in an extra month added between February and March every few years "as needed." Anyhow, Julius Caesar kept most of the old irregular pattern of longer and shorter months, simply adding on days at the end of most 29-day months (making them 30 or 31) to bring the total to 365 days.
So when Julius Cesear came to power he renamed the 5th Month July after himself. Then they also changed the order so it started with January.
The Roman political calendar was shifted to begin with January 1 about a century before Julius Caesar made his calendar reforms. However, in the early years of Rome, the year did begin with March, and for most purposes in many countries, the year continued to begin in March in medieval Europe until the 1500s or 1600s (depending on the country).
Then Augustus came to power and took the 6th month. But he didn't want his month to be shorter so he changed it to 31 days and changed the rest of the months
to alternate from 30 to 31.
Yeah, this is just a 800-year-old urban legend. August (Sextilis) had 31 days before Augustus was even born. The lengths of most of the months were set and irregular before Julius Caesar reformed the calendar:
For answering the specific question, "How hot (or cold) is it outside?" Fahrenheit is damn near perfect. 0F isn't just cold... it's the point where it genuinely starts to become *dangerously* cold.
No, Fahrenheit is just what you're used to. 0F is no more "the point" than 5F, -5F, 3.42F, etc.
Correct. But 0 F is much closer to the mark than 32 F, which is a temperature that most people can still do a good deal of work outside without worrying about frostbite and things like that. Except in unusual circumstances, extended human outdoor activity generally starts getting significantly harder (and requires more care) somewhere around -10F to +10F. 0 F is a reasonable approximation.
In weather terms, 0C is almost meaningless...
Well, it means water will freeze. There's quite a lot of it outside, it freezing marks an important change in the weather as far as I'm concerned.
Again, you're absolutely right. From a meteorological standpoint, 0 C makes a lot of sense as an important number. From a human standpoint trying to do things outdoors, it also is significant, but so are many other temperatures. 37 degrees C is pretty significant too, because temperatures above that tend to signal when humans' cooling systems fail. Body temperature is almost exactly 100 F.
As an abstract measure, Celsius makes sense. I do see the GP's point about the "human-ness" of the Fahrenheit scale, though.
It's the other way around. When snow does not melt on the grass but turns into a morass on the street - I know it's about -1 to +1 C. In other words I can use nature as a thermometer because nature consists of a lot of water.
Umm, so what? The point of temperature measurement for most people is to tell them something useful about what to expect, not for them to derive abstract numbers from phenomena.
My goal in having a temperature scale (outside of a lab or something) is so that someone can say, "It's X degrees," and I know whether to put on my light coat or my heavy one and things like that. If I can look outside and see that it's about freezing, I know which coat to put on. (What number that corresponds to in some abstract scale is beside the point.) In that context, the temperature scale is useless, because I can directly observe the information I need.
I'm not a huge defender of Fahrenheit, but arguing for Celsius simply because you might be able to say, "Wow -- it's +/- 1 degree out!" on a few random days seems to me a pretty ridiculous reason to choose a temperature scale.
The 1990s desktop paradigm is dead in the mainstream, and Linux software developers are trying to progress computing forward by appealing to people outside of tech forums. That means reducing the insane amount of configurability and feature-itis that often ails Linux desktop software.
There can never be too much configurability, and there is no reason to disable it. You want to make a mickey-mouse interface that will appeal better to idiots who don't know anything? Fine. But hidden away on that "advanced settings" menu or whatever should be a way that allows you to continue to configure things as you wish and return the system to something with the features you might actually want as a more advanced user.
You can put all sorts of warnings on that "advanced" menu ("DANGER! CLICKING BEYOND THIS POINT MAY REQUIRE YOU TO KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT HOW A COMPUTER WORKS!!), but there's no excuse for removing it.
To do so is to adopt the fascist Apple ideal of a lowest common denominator user who is forced to use something with limited options and features. Apple has done a great deal of good work in making slick and usable interfaces that are very intuitive for most people to use (and I'm a fan of many of them) -- but I don't believe that such things should justify the removal of choice.
Summarizing republicans as "against big government" is a bit misleading. It's more of a "Against big government, except where it pleases us, our sponsors or enforces our belief system".
Yes, it seems people confuse Republicans with libertarians a lot. (I'm not necessarily referencing the Libertarian Party here, just the general idea that government should keep itself to a minimum to allow individual liberty.)
Both Democrats and Republicans in their official platforms are completely inconsistent when it comes to when government should be smaller or when government should intervene.
That said, with the current Tea Party antics and a general movement against the recent huge federal spending programs, a lot of people who call themselves "Republicans" are generally more against a bigger and interventionist government than the other side... a lot of these folks are even trending toward libertarianism (make marijuana legal, leave questions like abortion and gay marriage up to individuals or at least to states rather than federal gov., etc.).
Nope. Once a couple are separated, they can sleep with whomever they want, and it's not the other party's business. Get over it.
You haven't given us enough information to make a good judgment, but on the facts presented, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what this guy did. In fact, if he was still married and not separated in some official legal way, it was very much still his business in many municipalities, where adultery is considered important in deciding divorce settlements.
If they were legally separated, then it may no longer be "his business," but he is perfectly within his rights to observe something from a public street. If they expected more privacy, they can draw the blinds.
But then you bring up "stalking" in your responses. That requires a "victim" of the stalking. If the wife complains to the police, then they should warn him. If he doesn't obey, there are restraining orders. If that is indeed the situation, then the husband should have been asked to leave by the police.
But the way you presented the story originally, it sounds like no one complained, and a man was sitting observing something from a public street. THAT IS NOT -- NOR SHOULD IT BE -- ILLEGAL.
In general, the anti-loitering hysteria is out of control. If there is a matter of people congregating in a way that threatens public safety, or if there is a pattern of repeated harassment that generates complaints, by all mean, tell the person to leave (and even forcibly remove him), but your story doesn't seem to have any of these elements. As far as I'm concerned, without more facts, this sounds like a case of police harassment to me.
You obviously never lived in a city. If you leave enough space for the two second rule to apply, some asswipe will actually cut you off and insert his Hummer between you and the driver in front of you.
So? I think you need to chill out. Driving normally on the street should not be a race. Pay attention to aggressive drivers who change lanes, cut people off, etc. continuously. In light traffic, they often gain some distance. But in heavy traffic, driving aggressively generally doesn't get you there any faster, and in fact it often contributes to further delays.
If you spend any time looking into literature on traffic patterns, you'll realize that allowing extra space not only prevents accidents but also generally allows better traffic flow (and, for that matter, decreases wear-and-tear on vehicles who don't do as much sudden braking and accelerating).
Traffic has transition densities, sort of similar to the difference between laminar and turbulent flow in fluid dynamics. Safe following distances are essential for efficient traffic flow. Driving aggressively to "win the race" by beating out that Hummer is actually helping to maintain the traffic jams that everyone is driving aggressively to avoid.
But knowing that drivers do what they do, are you willing to risk a collision (and your safety, along with your passengers' safety) when you see someone is following too closely? Or would you risk the ticket?
Seriously? You justify running red lights because someone behind you might be following just close enough and might not react quickly enough to stop within the same distance you are able to stop in?
I generally am good at stopping at yellows. On the rare occasion where I speed through a light that I feel is too close to red, I pay attention to what happens behind me, and I inevitably see three or four more cars going through after me when the light is clearly red. All of those cars are generally following very close to each other.
Therefore, by your logic, none of them should ever stop. The whole stream of cars, which are so close together, should just keep going through the red light until there's a break in the stream.
I worry a lot about what cars do behind me. But I would never use them as an excuse to break laws and endanger other cars and pedestrians (i.e., the people on the other street at the light who are assuming you will act as if the light is red).
Give it a few years, and the tablets will be attached to a keyboard. Thus it will be a laptop/netbook that can be turned sideways and used for taking notes like a tablet. Then it can be set on keyboad side and used as a notebook.
Umm, these things have been around for many years. They're called "convertibles." Generally, the screen rotates and then folds in flat on top of the keyboard to use the "tablet" features with a touch screen.
I bought one over five years ago. Lots of doctors and other people who needed a small light computer with a proper keyboard as well as a tablet to take handwritten notes had them... but they were generally a bit pricey. The cheaper ones today still tend to cost about twice as much as an iPad.
The iPad completely killed the mass netbook market. Now it's little more than a niche.
Have any facts to support this?
Tablet sales only overtook netbook sales in the SECOND QUARTER OF THIS YEAR (2011). Netbook sales continued at roughly 2010 levels until recent months, when they have started to drop (along with PC sales in general).
In the long run, you may be right. But millions of netbooks have been sold this year. Their sales are currently trending down a bit, while tablet sales have really taken off. But it's weird to say that a product that sold many millions of units this year is now a "niche market."
So... your argument for "you don't really own your property" is that the government can confiscate it? Good goat, no one owns anything then.
No, my argument is that one doesn't really own property when one is required to satisfy conditions to continue "owning" it. I'm not talking about eminent domain here (though I referenced it at the end of my post regarding the ultimate powers of the government) -- I'm talking about the fact that unless you have an alloidal title, you are subject to the whims of the government to require you to do various things each year or month or whatever or else they will take it away from you.
Powers of eminent domain, etc., are part of extraordinary actions of the government that require specific conditions to be met to take property (though recent court decisions have eroded these things a bit). But the seizing of property here has nothing to do with the landowner or what he/she is required to do to keep the land.
Whereas, if I am required to satisfy certain conditions simply to retain the land each year or whatever, like pay taxes, I don't actually own the property outright. I am merely leasing it, in a sense.
As an example, let's say I own a car. The car is worth $25,000. I fall into debt, and in order to deal with my excessive debt, I seek to declare bankruptcy.
You don't get it. In your example, you're involving all sorts of third parties -- your creditors, the government who enforces bankruptcy policy, etc. You have become indebted to them, or you have asked them to intercede on your behalf or whatever... and thus they can take your property. Duh.
The point of true ownership is that if you just want to sit on your property and be left alone, you can do it, and no one can arbitrarily take it away from you because of some private action or inaction on your part that you did (or did not do) on your private property. The government can ultimately take it through eminent domain, but that has nothing to do with whether you satisfied some conditions.
If you don't have an alloidal title, you can't just sit on your property and take no action and expect that the government won't come in and take your property. They will, if you refuse to pay taxes and/or satisfy various other random conditions they place on your behavior. In my opinion, that is a much, much weaker form of "ownership," since most places it requires you to pay fees every year to the government. Most people would consider that a form of lease, ultimately... and moreover, a lease that you don't have to agree to. The government can change the terms of it at its own will, raising your taxes, etc.
Your local city/county/state/country holds true ownership of your land.
As with all hard questions, the answer is actually "it depends".
Depends on what? Unless you are one of the rare owners of an alloidal title, which basically doesn't exist in most countries today, your land is ultimately owned by the government, who can confiscate it or restrict its use for a variety of reasons (nonpayment of taxes, etc.).
The vast majority of land in common law countries (like the U.S.) only allows deeds to be granted in fee simple, essentially the way that lower nobility were generally subject to their feudal lords in days gone by. If the lord wants use of your manor, or wants you to pay him taxes or whatever each year, you have to do it, or he takes your land away.
There are some limited alloidal concepts in Texas and Nevada within the U.S., but they are still ultimately subject to the whims of the federal government regarding eminent domain, etc.
Of course once you get a laptop working expect updates to constantly break things until you just get tired of rolling back failed updates and just stop, only taking critical security updates you can't live without.
Is this really your current experience? I have to say that 4 years ago, I'd have to agree with you regarding Linux for even common hardware, though even then I only had that experience when upgrading major versions of distros, not everyday package updates. Even 18 months ago, I still encountered some issues installing a few standard distros on popular laptops. But I haven't had any support issues since then.
I realize people have been saying that Linux is ready for the mainstream for over a decade, but I've noticed a significant decrease in compatibility problems and hardware bugs in the past couple years. If you're still seeing things break periodically with normal updates, I think either (1) you have a system that has real compatibility problems with Linux, (2) you need a different distro, or (3) you need to be more careful about what sorts of updates you're putting on your system.
Linux Mint perhaps has the best reputation these days for "just works," and they rate upgrades in terms of how critical they are and the critical updates are generally vetted to be sure they won't break your system.
... Because I know when I walk down the Champs-Elysees in Paris, what I really want to be doing is looking at the world through the screen of my smartphone! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
I assume you're being sarcastic, but as an American who has spent a significant time living in touristy European cities (while doing research), I've had the opportunity to observe lots of people wandering around bumping into things because they're too busy looking through their videocamera or taking photos to notice anything actually going on... Even in the most beautiful or culturally significant places in the world.
The kind of person likely to buy a tee shirt in such a location is probably exactly the kind of person who will be wondering around viewing everything through a smart phone (perhaps running an AR app to translate street signs or who knows what else...)
"Forced education" has given most industrialized nations literacy rates far in excess of 90%. Stop talking hogwash.
Maybe some nations. Not really in the U.S. Actual functional literacy rates in the U.S. have been around 75-80% for the past century.
The "99%" rate cited in some sources for the U.S. is crap, usually based on census self-reporting (i.e., people get someone else to check a box for them). By the way, the same census figures said that over 90% of the U.S. (free) population was literate when such statistics were first taken in 1840. (Massachusetts was 98%, I think.) Look it up. That's before even primary schooling was compulsory in any state. Whether or not that number is accurate, a number of studies have suggested that somewhere around 80% literacy existed in the early U.S.
Don't believe me about the last century? Take a look at draft rejections during WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. And then take a look at recent detailed literacy surveys. The army can't lie about literacy. When it needs to draft soldiers, it drafts as many as it can -- it only rejects those who are truly functionally illiterate. In all of these wars, somewhere around 20% were rejected for being illiterate -- the numbers have not changed significantly. And recent literacy surveys agree with this number for functional literacy.
Between 1910 and 1970, high school graduation went from neither nothing to the vast majority of citizens. Literacy numbers didn't change significantly. That's what "forced education" got us.
Where does it state that a teacher can't lay hands on a child? They can't beat them, but I've never heard or seen any case where they can't grab you by the upper arm and drag your ass down to Administration to call your parents.
You obviously haven't been through a teacher education program, where they will bring in a lawyer to parade the results of a few ridiculous lawsuits in front of you (not only about physical abuse but sexual molestation, etc.) and end with the advice, "As a legal adviser, I would tell all teachers to never touch a student in any way, if at all possible."
A few lawsuits have led us in the preposterous situation that many schools have official policies that forbid teachers from ever restraining a student, even if that student is in the middle of beating the crap out of another student or teacher. As a high school teacher, I once very lightly pulled a kid back from a fight, where the other student was being restrained by a "trained" administrator, and afterward I was unofficially thanked by the administrator while officially told I should never do something like that again.
And now, some schools have even been sued for such policies, because, of course, some kid got the crap beat out of him while teachers stood by.
There's no way to win this. Parents will bring ridiculous lawsuits for action, inaction, whatever -- and schools can never keep ahead of them, but they create stupid policies to try.
If the anarchist tendencies among us said "hey if they don't want to go to school, don't make 'em" we're going to end up with half filled schools, and an even greater dependency class than we already have in society - because of course, the fact that you have achieved less or worked less doesn't mean you should receive less, the government should rob from the rich to help you.
The social harm done could hardly be underestimated.
Most states in the U.S. didn't have any mandatory public school for the first century of the U.S. or so. Somehow, by the 1820s and 1830s, though, European visitors were writing home about how literate Americans were. Even when individual states began introducing mandatory schooling in the mid 1800s, it was usually only 4-6 years.
It wasn't until the "dangerous communist and socialist radicals" became a concern in the 1920s through the 1950s that anyone really pushed kids to go to more than primary school. Only one of my four grandparents went to high school. Two of them only had a basic primary education. All of them had successful careers and, honestly, wrote better letters during WWII than many of the papers I grade from college students today.
If we suddenly removed mandatory schooling today, undoubtedly a lot of bad things would result. But please don't pretend that those things are necessarily part of societies without mandatory public school. Delinquents will often be delinquents, with or without forced schooling. Schooling might improve some, but you forget that it might make a lot of other kids worse. Consider how more advanced classes could be if only kids who really wanted to be in high school were there... and what impact all the delinquents have on the education of the public as a whole.
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First off, I want to be clear that I am not at all defending Verizon's practices here. I think it's awful and ridiculous, and I don't think they should try to force people into auto billpay or any other payment method. I'm just addressing your point about whether billpay is useful.
I still fail to see the benefit of an automatic bill pay. If you're still going through and verifying your bill every month before allowing the automatic charge, what have you gained by allowing the automatic charge in the first place?
It still saves me time. Why? Because I don't have to navigate to some random page to pay a bill or write out a check and mail it. I see the email, most of the bills I have set up for autopay display the amount in the email, and most of the services I have it set up for tend to bill for the same amount every month (give or take a few cents, except for heating bills and such). It takes me maybe a few seconds to glance at the email, check to see the amount looks about right, and then I'm done. I don't need to remember to go somewhere before date X and enter in amounts or billing information or login or click through ten screens.
Does it save a lot of time? Of course not. But it is less of a hassle. And it does have the added benefit of ensuring that my bill will be paid on time. If I happen to be busy during a particular week, I don't need to make sure I go and pay a bill before date X. Instead, the email comes in, I know it's paid, and that's it.
But frankly, it doesn't do a huge amount for me. I just find it a little more convenient. On the other hand, it is really useful for some friends I have who are very bad about remembering to pay bills on various dates. Before auto bill pay, they would typically get late fees a number of times each year for various accounts -- now they don't.
And the amount of time spent resolving a dispute in your case seems, in a best case scenario, to be equivalent to my own, and at worst, far exceeding the amount of hassle one would have to go through had the charge been manual and just not made.
I don't know about that. I've taken half a dozen complaints against various companies to government agencies and the BBB over the past decade, and the companies who put up the greatest fight were ones where I hadn't yet paid the bill. I think this depends more on the company and how evil they are than whether you've paid a bill that you disputed before it was even paid.
Any professional IT manager should be capable of understanding technical matters raised by his colleagues (the word "underlings" is not something you should use in an IT environment) and how to present that information to non technical people in words or graphs that they can understand.
It sounds like this is almost what the GP was describing. Perhaps the guy could have used a little more technical knowledge, but apparently he still could present the important recommendations to the management from his staff in a coherent way that got results. First and foremost, a technical manager needs to be a "translator" to the other management who actually control money and policy. To do that, he needs to have a certain level of technical knowledge, it is true. But it sounds like this guy had enough of that -- he just wasn't a deep technical problem-solver.
Personally an IT manager in a suit is someone I would look down on since casual clothing is much more practical
You start out by saying that you shouldn't use the word "underlings" and then you say you'd "look down on someone" just because of how he dresses? First off, I didn't get the impression from the GP that the manager wore a suit all the time, but he showed up to meetings with the senior management wearing a suit, just as they wore a suit. You may not think suits are practical, but wearing clothing appropriate to a situation is how you get everyone else to think of you as a real person and a peer.
And as for "practical," I think that's all a matter of current style and values. Both of my grandfathers were blue-collar workers, and they wore dark (usually wool) trousers and button-down shirts to work, just as almost everyone did at the time. They didn't wear ties, because they could be caught in machinery. My great uncle, who was a crane operator at a steel plant, didn't have that problem, so he wore a suit to work everyday. A lot of folks used to. Jeans were for farmers, prisoners, and manual laborers.
Styles change, though. These days, you'd be eccentric for wearing a suit if you didn't need to, but I'd only care if it hurt your work in some way. I don't look down on what people wear, as long as it doesn't interfere with their work. If you look down on someone for wearing a suit, maybe you're the arrogant one who thinks of others as "underlings."
I went into IT after deciding I didn't want to get a masters to teach disinterested children when I could teach disinterested adults with just a bachelors.
This is not meant to be snarky at all -- but I think you mean "uninterested."
"Disinterested" means "objective" or "neutral" (as in a "disinterested party" to a lawsuit, who has nothing to gain from either side), or sometimes "ambivalent."
"Uninterested" means "not interested."
Que seneveratis metes.
You mean "Quae seminaveris metes" maybe? The second word comes from "semina," which means "seeds," like in English "seminal," which refers to important work that bears fruit. (Ultimately from "semen," of course, i.e., "seed" in Latin....)
If I come up a little short one month and I have a cable bill and a rent check to write, you better fucking believe the rent check is getting written first.
If you commonly run out of money each month and need to choose which bills to pay, you're absolutely right: automatic bill pay is not for you. I think that's kind of clear from the definition of what the service is.
Based on how hard it is to get a bill corrected that I haven't paid yet with most large companies, allowing them to take the money up front seems like lunacy to me.
You don't let them take the money until you've reviewed the bill. Duh. The same as you would if you wrote a check. EVERY automatic bill pay I have going out sends me an email in advance letting me know that it will be debited soon. That's the default behavior for almost all companies that do this, and I wouldn't have auto bill pay with any company that wouldn't offer this.
So, when I check my email (as I do at least once every day), I see what bills will be going out. If I see something out of the ordinary, I can call them up, dispute it, whatever. If they refuse to deal with me and even refuse to cancel the autopay, I still have on record an early complaint, and I can inform my credit card company that I dispute the charge. I can also, if necessary, contact the BBB, state utility commissions, etc., all in ADVANCE of the paying of the bill, even if they refuse to stop the auto-payment.
Since they have to go through the buffer of my credit card (note that I would not direct debit from my bank account except for truly important fixed payments like loans and such, which I basically have to pay on time or else ruin my credit), they're not getting the money, and I have complaints all registered even if they still try to make the charge. That money isn't going anywhere until they resolve the issue. (And yes, I've contacted state utilities boards and the BBB in a number of different states to resolve bill disputes I've had over the years -- I always get the matter sorted out, generally with a letter or even a phone call of apology.)
The 10 days will pass and the money will be gone, and you will be left with no options.
"No options"? Hardly. Back in the days before electronic autopays were common, I had to get my money back twice from utility companies I had already sent checks to. (The circumstances were weird, and one of them was when I was young and stupid and paid a bill not realizing I didn't have recourse.) It took a couple reports to the BBB and the state utilities commissions that governed these businesses, and I not only got my money back, but also an actual person calling to apologize.
Disputing bills after you've paid them is harder, but with utility companies, there is generally a state agency who will get the work done for you and get your money back.
For me, autopay worked great until payroll was messed up and I was accidentally deleted instead of the person that was supposed to be terminated. Payday came with no direct deposit followed by all those wonderful autopays triggering.
Which is why the few autopayments I have set up must send an email in advance to my primary email account that I read everyday. Yes, it increases the traffic in my inbox slightly, but I never move those messages from my box without reviewing the bills and the amounts.
I get the convenience of autopay, but money never goes out of my account without an explicit reminder in advance.
I'm not sure how you blame autopay for your mishaps. If you knew your paycheck was screwed up, you should have canceled the autopays the moment you found out. If you didn't know your paycheck was screwed up, you probably would have written checks which would have racked up overdraft fees and whatnot anyway.
How is autopay at fault here?
... this is sure looks like a money grab.
Agreed.
I'd be more likely to believe the $2 fees they collect from people paying by phone or online are put into a trust in the event of a data breach.
Are you serious? You look at the way most big companies today play fast and loose with finances, and you think any of them are going to sock a truckload of money away in a "trust fund" for a specific event that shouldn't even happen?
Companies may have some funds available to deal with emergencies, but this isn't some emergency fund. It's a sudden planned increase in income for them -- this money is going directly to profits. Or, rather, they are going to claim it's being used "to finance the payment systems," and then they're going to siphon all of the money that used to finance those payment systems into profits....
The old calendar was mostly an irregular pattern of 31 and 29 day months, excepting February. The year was way too short, resulting in an extra month added between February and March every few years "as needed." Anyhow, Julius Caesar kept most of the old irregular pattern of longer and shorter months, simply adding on days at the end of most 29-day months (making them 30 or 31) to bring the total to 365 days.
So when Julius Cesear came to power he renamed the 5th Month July after himself. Then they also changed the order so it started with January.
The Roman political calendar was shifted to begin with January 1 about a century before Julius Caesar made his calendar reforms. However, in the early years of Rome, the year did begin with March, and for most purposes in many countries, the year continued to begin in March in medieval Europe until the 1500s or 1600s (depending on the country).
Then Augustus came to power and took the 6th month. But he didn't want his month to be shorter so he changed it to 31 days and changed the rest of the months to alternate from 30 to 31.
Yeah, this is just a 800-year-old urban legend. August (Sextilis) had 31 days before Augustus was even born. The lengths of most of the months were set and irregular before Julius Caesar reformed the calendar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Debunked_theory_on_month_lengths
I'm not a huge defender of Fahrenheit, but...
For answering the specific question, "How hot (or cold) is it outside?" Fahrenheit is damn near perfect. 0F isn't just cold... it's the point where it genuinely starts to become *dangerously* cold.
No, Fahrenheit is just what you're used to. 0F is no more "the point" than 5F, -5F, 3.42F, etc.
Correct. But 0 F is much closer to the mark than 32 F, which is a temperature that most people can still do a good deal of work outside without worrying about frostbite and things like that. Except in unusual circumstances, extended human outdoor activity generally starts getting significantly harder (and requires more care) somewhere around -10F to +10F. 0 F is a reasonable approximation.
In weather terms, 0C is almost meaningless...
Well, it means water will freeze. There's quite a lot of it outside, it freezing marks an important change in the weather as far as I'm concerned.
Again, you're absolutely right. From a meteorological standpoint, 0 C makes a lot of sense as an important number. From a human standpoint trying to do things outdoors, it also is significant, but so are many other temperatures. 37 degrees C is pretty significant too, because temperatures above that tend to signal when humans' cooling systems fail. Body temperature is almost exactly 100 F.
As an abstract measure, Celsius makes sense. I do see the GP's point about the "human-ness" of the Fahrenheit scale, though.
It's the other way around. When snow does not melt on the grass but turns into a morass on the street - I know it's about -1 to +1 C. In other words I can use nature as a thermometer because nature consists of a lot of water.
Umm, so what? The point of temperature measurement for most people is to tell them something useful about what to expect, not for them to derive abstract numbers from phenomena.
My goal in having a temperature scale (outside of a lab or something) is so that someone can say, "It's X degrees," and I know whether to put on my light coat or my heavy one and things like that. If I can look outside and see that it's about freezing, I know which coat to put on. (What number that corresponds to in some abstract scale is beside the point.) In that context, the temperature scale is useless, because I can directly observe the information I need.
I'm not a huge defender of Fahrenheit, but arguing for Celsius simply because you might be able to say, "Wow -- it's +/- 1 degree out!" on a few random days seems to me a pretty ridiculous reason to choose a temperature scale.
The 1990s desktop paradigm is dead in the mainstream, and Linux software developers are trying to progress computing forward by appealing to people outside of tech forums. That means reducing the insane amount of configurability and feature-itis that often ails Linux desktop software.
There can never be too much configurability, and there is no reason to disable it. You want to make a mickey-mouse interface that will appeal better to idiots who don't know anything? Fine. But hidden away on that "advanced settings" menu or whatever should be a way that allows you to continue to configure things as you wish and return the system to something with the features you might actually want as a more advanced user.
You can put all sorts of warnings on that "advanced" menu ("DANGER! CLICKING BEYOND THIS POINT MAY REQUIRE YOU TO KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT HOW A COMPUTER WORKS!!), but there's no excuse for removing it.
To do so is to adopt the fascist Apple ideal of a lowest common denominator user who is forced to use something with limited options and features. Apple has done a great deal of good work in making slick and usable interfaces that are very intuitive for most people to use (and I'm a fan of many of them) -- but I don't believe that such things should justify the removal of choice.
Summarizing republicans as "against big government" is a bit misleading. It's more of a "Against big government, except where it pleases us, our sponsors or enforces our belief system".
Yes, it seems people confuse Republicans with libertarians a lot. (I'm not necessarily referencing the Libertarian Party here, just the general idea that government should keep itself to a minimum to allow individual liberty.)
Both Democrats and Republicans in their official platforms are completely inconsistent when it comes to when government should be smaller or when government should intervene.
That said, with the current Tea Party antics and a general movement against the recent huge federal spending programs, a lot of people who call themselves "Republicans" are generally more against a bigger and interventionist government than the other side... a lot of these folks are even trending toward libertarianism (make marijuana legal, leave questions like abortion and gay marriage up to individuals or at least to states rather than federal gov., etc.).
Nope. Once a couple are separated, they can sleep with whomever they want, and it's not the other party's business. Get over it.
You haven't given us enough information to make a good judgment, but on the facts presented, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what this guy did. In fact, if he was still married and not separated in some official legal way, it was very much still his business in many municipalities, where adultery is considered important in deciding divorce settlements.
If they were legally separated, then it may no longer be "his business," but he is perfectly within his rights to observe something from a public street. If they expected more privacy, they can draw the blinds.
But then you bring up "stalking" in your responses. That requires a "victim" of the stalking. If the wife complains to the police, then they should warn him. If he doesn't obey, there are restraining orders. If that is indeed the situation, then the husband should have been asked to leave by the police.
But the way you presented the story originally, it sounds like no one complained, and a man was sitting observing something from a public street. THAT IS NOT -- NOR SHOULD IT BE -- ILLEGAL.
In general, the anti-loitering hysteria is out of control. If there is a matter of people congregating in a way that threatens public safety, or if there is a pattern of repeated harassment that generates complaints, by all mean, tell the person to leave (and even forcibly remove him), but your story doesn't seem to have any of these elements. As far as I'm concerned, without more facts, this sounds like a case of police harassment to me.
You obviously never lived in a city. If you leave enough space for the two second rule to apply, some asswipe will actually cut you off and insert his Hummer between you and the driver in front of you.
So? I think you need to chill out. Driving normally on the street should not be a race. Pay attention to aggressive drivers who change lanes, cut people off, etc. continuously. In light traffic, they often gain some distance. But in heavy traffic, driving aggressively generally doesn't get you there any faster, and in fact it often contributes to further delays.
If you spend any time looking into literature on traffic patterns, you'll realize that allowing extra space not only prevents accidents but also generally allows better traffic flow (and, for that matter, decreases wear-and-tear on vehicles who don't do as much sudden braking and accelerating).
Traffic has transition densities, sort of similar to the difference between laminar and turbulent flow in fluid dynamics. Safe following distances are essential for efficient traffic flow. Driving aggressively to "win the race" by beating out that Hummer is actually helping to maintain the traffic jams that everyone is driving aggressively to avoid.
But knowing that drivers do what they do, are you willing to risk a collision (and your safety, along with your passengers' safety) when you see someone is following too closely? Or would you risk the ticket?
Seriously? You justify running red lights because someone behind you might be following just close enough and might not react quickly enough to stop within the same distance you are able to stop in?
I generally am good at stopping at yellows. On the rare occasion where I speed through a light that I feel is too close to red, I pay attention to what happens behind me, and I inevitably see three or four more cars going through after me when the light is clearly red. All of those cars are generally following very close to each other.
Therefore, by your logic, none of them should ever stop. The whole stream of cars, which are so close together, should just keep going through the red light until there's a break in the stream.
I worry a lot about what cars do behind me. But I would never use them as an excuse to break laws and endanger other cars and pedestrians (i.e., the people on the other street at the light who are assuming you will act as if the light is red).
Give it a few years, and the tablets will be attached to a keyboard. Thus it will be a laptop/netbook that can be turned sideways and used for taking notes like a tablet. Then it can be set on keyboad side and used as a notebook.
Umm, these things have been around for many years. They're called "convertibles." Generally, the screen rotates and then folds in flat on top of the keyboard to use the "tablet" features with a touch screen.
I bought one over five years ago. Lots of doctors and other people who needed a small light computer with a proper keyboard as well as a tablet to take handwritten notes had them... but they were generally a bit pricey. The cheaper ones today still tend to cost about twice as much as an iPad.
The iPad completely killed the mass netbook market. Now it's little more than a niche.
Have any facts to support this?
Tablet sales only overtook netbook sales in the SECOND QUARTER OF THIS YEAR (2011). Netbook sales continued at roughly 2010 levels until recent months, when they have started to drop (along with PC sales in general).
In the long run, you may be right. But millions of netbooks have been sold this year. Their sales are currently trending down a bit, while tablet sales have really taken off. But it's weird to say that a product that sold many millions of units this year is now a "niche market."
So... your argument for "you don't really own your property" is that the government can confiscate it? Good goat, no one owns anything then.
No, my argument is that one doesn't really own property when one is required to satisfy conditions to continue "owning" it. I'm not talking about eminent domain here (though I referenced it at the end of my post regarding the ultimate powers of the government) -- I'm talking about the fact that unless you have an alloidal title, you are subject to the whims of the government to require you to do various things each year or month or whatever or else they will take it away from you.
Powers of eminent domain, etc., are part of extraordinary actions of the government that require specific conditions to be met to take property (though recent court decisions have eroded these things a bit). But the seizing of property here has nothing to do with the landowner or what he/she is required to do to keep the land.
Whereas, if I am required to satisfy certain conditions simply to retain the land each year or whatever, like pay taxes, I don't actually own the property outright. I am merely leasing it, in a sense.
As an example, let's say I own a car. The car is worth $25,000. I fall into debt, and in order to deal with my excessive debt, I seek to declare bankruptcy.
You don't get it. In your example, you're involving all sorts of third parties -- your creditors, the government who enforces bankruptcy policy, etc. You have become indebted to them, or you have asked them to intercede on your behalf or whatever... and thus they can take your property. Duh.
The point of true ownership is that if you just want to sit on your property and be left alone, you can do it, and no one can arbitrarily take it away from you because of some private action or inaction on your part that you did (or did not do) on your private property. The government can ultimately take it through eminent domain, but that has nothing to do with whether you satisfied some conditions.
If you don't have an alloidal title, you can't just sit on your property and take no action and expect that the government won't come in and take your property. They will, if you refuse to pay taxes and/or satisfy various other random conditions they place on your behavior. In my opinion, that is a much, much weaker form of "ownership," since most places it requires you to pay fees every year to the government. Most people would consider that a form of lease, ultimately... and moreover, a lease that you don't have to agree to. The government can change the terms of it at its own will, raising your taxes, etc.
Your local city/county/state/country holds true ownership of your land.
As with all hard questions, the answer is actually "it depends".
Depends on what? Unless you are one of the rare owners of an alloidal title, which basically doesn't exist in most countries today, your land is ultimately owned by the government, who can confiscate it or restrict its use for a variety of reasons (nonpayment of taxes, etc.).
The vast majority of land in common law countries (like the U.S.) only allows deeds to be granted in fee simple, essentially the way that lower nobility were generally subject to their feudal lords in days gone by. If the lord wants use of your manor, or wants you to pay him taxes or whatever each year, you have to do it, or he takes your land away.
There are some limited alloidal concepts in Texas and Nevada within the U.S., but they are still ultimately subject to the whims of the federal government regarding eminent domain, etc.
Of course once you get a laptop working expect updates to constantly break things until you just get tired of rolling back failed updates and just stop, only taking critical security updates you can't live without.
Is this really your current experience? I have to say that 4 years ago, I'd have to agree with you regarding Linux for even common hardware, though even then I only had that experience when upgrading major versions of distros, not everyday package updates. Even 18 months ago, I still encountered some issues installing a few standard distros on popular laptops. But I haven't had any support issues since then.
I realize people have been saying that Linux is ready for the mainstream for over a decade, but I've noticed a significant decrease in compatibility problems and hardware bugs in the past couple years. If you're still seeing things break periodically with normal updates, I think either (1) you have a system that has real compatibility problems with Linux, (2) you need a different distro, or (3) you need to be more careful about what sorts of updates you're putting on your system.
Linux Mint perhaps has the best reputation these days for "just works," and they rate upgrades in terms of how critical they are and the critical updates are generally vetted to be sure they won't break your system.
... Because I know when I walk down the Champs-Elysees in Paris, what I really want to be doing is looking at the world through the screen of my smartphone! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
I assume you're being sarcastic, but as an American who has spent a significant time living in touristy European cities (while doing research), I've had the opportunity to observe lots of people wandering around bumping into things because they're too busy looking through their videocamera or taking photos to notice anything actually going on... Even in the most beautiful or culturally significant places in the world.
The kind of person likely to buy a tee shirt in such a location is probably exactly the kind of person who will be wondering around viewing everything through a smart phone (perhaps running an AR app to translate street signs or who knows what else...)
"Forced education" has given most industrialized nations literacy rates far in excess of 90%. Stop talking hogwash.
Maybe some nations. Not really in the U.S. Actual functional literacy rates in the U.S. have been around 75-80% for the past century.
The "99%" rate cited in some sources for the U.S. is crap, usually based on census self-reporting (i.e., people get someone else to check a box for them). By the way, the same census figures said that over 90% of the U.S. (free) population was literate when such statistics were first taken in 1840. (Massachusetts was 98%, I think.) Look it up. That's before even primary schooling was compulsory in any state. Whether or not that number is accurate, a number of studies have suggested that somewhere around 80% literacy existed in the early U.S.
Don't believe me about the last century? Take a look at draft rejections during WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. And then take a look at recent detailed literacy surveys. The army can't lie about literacy. When it needs to draft soldiers, it drafts as many as it can -- it only rejects those who are truly functionally illiterate. In all of these wars, somewhere around 20% were rejected for being illiterate -- the numbers have not changed significantly. And recent literacy surveys agree with this number for functional literacy.
Between 1910 and 1970, high school graduation went from neither nothing to the vast majority of citizens. Literacy numbers didn't change significantly. That's what "forced education" got us.
Where does it state that a teacher can't lay hands on a child? They can't beat them, but I've never heard or seen any case where they can't grab you by the upper arm and drag your ass down to Administration to call your parents.
You obviously haven't been through a teacher education program, where they will bring in a lawyer to parade the results of a few ridiculous lawsuits in front of you (not only about physical abuse but sexual molestation, etc.) and end with the advice, "As a legal adviser, I would tell all teachers to never touch a student in any way, if at all possible."
A few lawsuits have led us in the preposterous situation that many schools have official policies that forbid teachers from ever restraining a student, even if that student is in the middle of beating the crap out of another student or teacher. As a high school teacher, I once very lightly pulled a kid back from a fight, where the other student was being restrained by a "trained" administrator, and afterward I was unofficially thanked by the administrator while officially told I should never do something like that again.
And now, some schools have even been sued for such policies, because, of course, some kid got the crap beat out of him while teachers stood by.
There's no way to win this. Parents will bring ridiculous lawsuits for action, inaction, whatever -- and schools can never keep ahead of them, but they create stupid policies to try.
If the anarchist tendencies among us said "hey if they don't want to go to school, don't make 'em" we're going to end up with half filled schools, and an even greater dependency class than we already have in society - because of course, the fact that you have achieved less or worked less doesn't mean you should receive less, the government should rob from the rich to help you.
The social harm done could hardly be underestimated.
Most states in the U.S. didn't have any mandatory public school for the first century of the U.S. or so. Somehow, by the 1820s and 1830s, though, European visitors were writing home about how literate Americans were. Even when individual states began introducing mandatory schooling in the mid 1800s, it was usually only 4-6 years.
It wasn't until the "dangerous communist and socialist radicals" became a concern in the 1920s through the 1950s that anyone really pushed kids to go to more than primary school. Only one of my four grandparents went to high school. Two of them only had a basic primary education. All of them had successful careers and, honestly, wrote better letters during WWII than many of the papers I grade from college students today.
If we suddenly removed mandatory schooling today, undoubtedly a lot of bad things would result. But please don't pretend that those things are necessarily part of societies without mandatory public school. Delinquents will often be delinquents, with or without forced schooling. Schooling might improve some, but you forget that it might make a lot of other kids worse. Consider how more advanced classes could be if only kids who really wanted to be in high school were there... and what impact all the delinquents have on the education of the public as a whole.