Put this into perspective. In 1970 a man earning $35,000 a year could afford to own a home, a car, and afford to have his wife stay at home to raise the kids. If the wife worked too then they probably had a second summer cabin somewhere.
in 2010 a man earning $35,000 is barely living above the poverty line.(depending on location) you can't support a wife to raise the kids, let alone anything else.
The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20
In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70
In 1970 the average CEO earned $500,000
in 2010 the average CEO earned $5,000,000
Now tell me what is wrong with that picture? Circuit city is my favorite example. in 2008 after a year of bad sales the CEO of circuit city came up with a plan to save $10 million over 3 years. He fired the top 3,000 highest paid non mangers and rehired new people in their place earning minimum wage. Wall street was happy, and he and the board paid themselves $5 million in bonuses immediately.
With in a year Circuit city was gone completely. why? because he fired the top 3000 sales people. He could have saved $10 million dollars immediately that year by cutting his and the rest of the executive boards salaries. They weren't doing anything anyways.
executive and upper level bonuses have gone out of control. Goldman Sachs had to borrow money from he US Government so it could pay bonuses. I always thought that if the company did poorly bonuses were to be cut first not last, but for the rich they payout bonuses and then close the company down.
While this is exaggerated quite a bit it does still have one major point that I see. The people at the bottom that spend all their income and save very little because they can't afford to are being squeezed whereas the people at the top who don't spend all of their income get to save even more. While saving money is good in general this is not true for an economy based on consumption as someone at the bottom will spend the money so another person/company will benefit.
The wealthy take the extra money and while some spend it on lavish things such as houses, cars, Yachts, many invest it and this is the big change that has happened since the 70s, the internet has made it where a wealthy person does not need to pay huge fees anymore for investing in the market. In the past some fees were as high as 15% for investing large amounts of money in the market but in today’s internet they tend to have a fixed low cost. This has made the one fee the wealthy paid (and kept low earners out of the market) disappear. So you have rising incomes at the top with less expenses for investing not to mention less taxes on those investments.
Last point I'll make is that I don't see an issue with high CEO pay but the market has forced CEOs to look at short term gains (month to month) instead of long term gains 5-10 years down the road and this has caused the issues we are seeing today when someone has no real interest in the long term growth of a company but instead focuses on short term gains it can cause a person to do really well at first but implode over the long run.
I feel that way about cable.
Too much content I don't want, advertising, and shows are played via some schedule instead of streamed when I want. Sure there are workarounds like DVRs, but that is just a bandaid on a huge gaping wound.
I love the DVR you pay the cable company more each month so you can watch shows when you want because they like money!
This is why I cancelled cable TV and purchased a $40 antenna for my house and now use Amazon Prime for streaming service.
I had a Geologist come into my class once and state "We will never run out of oil, but it will become so expensive to extract that no one will pay for it." I think this quote is fairly true eventually oil will become so expensive that we will only use it when necessary and we will never be able to pull it all out of the ground.
Granted this could happen centuries from now but it does not mean we should not be looking to other ways of producing power so we can use oil in other ways after all we are using over 80 million barrels a day (last time I checked) and we can't support that type of production forever.
p>What this all means is that if someone were to bring an astronomical amount of computing power to bear on mining bitcoins, the difficulty of mining bitcoins would automatically compensate, and the addition of new bitcoins into the marketplace would proceed at the same rate. Granted, the person at the head of all this computing power would be the recipient of most new bitcoins, but the currency would not be destabilized (at least through computing power alone.) There would be other things said person could do to destabilize bitcoins, though, through either Financial or Technical means. They could hoard all BTC they mine, causing the price of BTC to rise. They could sell BTC they mine at ridiculously low prices, causing the price of BTC to plummet. If they comprise more than 60% or so of all computing directed at bitcoin mining, they could hijack the blockchain, and would be able to spend bitcoins they don't own, or double spend their own bitcoins.
I'm fairly sure that anyone who attempts to hijack bitcoins through raw computing power would end up spending more on said computing power than they would earn from bitcoins. So unless a malicious billionaire or an intrepid hacker organization with a few supercomputers in their botnet decide one day that they really don't like bitcoins, it doesn't seem likely to happen.
I have to say this is the one thing that does worry me about bitcoins. The way transactions are added is when the block chain is solved which is dependant on computing power and it resets every 2010 blocks (or something like that). Well what would happen if a couple of Governments brought a few supercomputers on to the network and greatly increased the difficulty and then dropped out?
This would make it where the current network would not be able to get to the next link in the chain for say a few months and the blocks would slow to a crawl. I have seen a few other ideas where they should have the network recalculate the chains differently which might help reassure some people.
I have to admit I'm curious as to how they bypass certain laws if they do licence these pictures to advertisers.
As an example if I take a photo of a friend I cannot just sell the photo without a model release form. I highly doubt instagram can just bypass this same form and sell a picture of someone I took for advertising purposes If you really want to challenge this take lots of pictures of places whos images are trademarked such as the Flatiron building in NYC and I'm sure one will be used without paying the building which from what I understand cannot be used without the owners permission.
Granted taking a picture of your food would be something that they could use without much issue as long as no person is visible.
If Samsung can find all these examples of prior art, how is it that Apple was granted patents in the first place? These are hardly the only examples of Apple being given patents on things that were obviously done by others well before they "innovated" them.
As my father-in-law was a patent clerk he said they stopped checking into prior art when he left in the 90s and they seemed to rubber stamp multiple things. He tended to take pride in searching for prior art as he didn't want a company to get patents on existing things. This was lost as they brought in managers who went with quotas rather then actually vetting everything thoroughly.
This has absolutely nothing to do with light, and instead has absolutely incredible implications for power generation. Graphene geothermal probes for more efficiency, graphene cooling tubes for maximum gas/oil/coal electric power generation, nuclear power (bonus: extra radiation protection)... Hell, strap graphene to just about any process that involves waste heat and get power for "free!"
This would be perfect in a car if they could use it to cool the engine as well as generate elecity without a generator.
They did the same thing with oil. Look it up. Government fostering new technology is NOT a bad thing.
What do you mean "did", they give Oil companieslarge tax breaks as well as using the US military to protect interests in the Middle East the cost of which is in the billions.
I agree it would show that the people in the USPTO have no idea how to research a patent. This is why some of the people I know in the patent office quit and why some worked till they were medically unable to (afraid patents would get through that have prior work or are unworkable).
It stinks that GM is losing money on these, but they're putting the effort into it, and I have to applaud them for it. Then again, didn't the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost more to make at launch time than they were selling for? Maybe GM is on to something...
(emphasis mine)
Oh, they're on to something, alright. GM is "too big to fail". This makes it easy for them to start risky, costly ventures, because they'll either succeed and make GM rich, or the gov't will bail GM out with more loans until GM is profitable again.
I have to chime in the reason PS3 and Xbox 360 were sold at a loss was to bring in customers as they made money from the games being sold.
GM made this car not for sales but to bring people into the dealerships and hopefully purchase a Cruze which they do make a profit on. This is no different then the Halo cars that some car companies have to get people excited about the brand. It is the same as what Toyota did with the Prius and what Honda failed to do with the Insight.
I'm hoping this works out so people will buy Chevy products that are profitable but only time will tell.
Also for those mad that GM was bailed out you think the economy is bad now imagine how bad it would be with a few million extra people unemployeed and never mind the issues this would have caused with all the other automotive companies with how they all use the same suppliers. Toyota, Ford, BMW,...etc would have all had massive problems as suppliers went under and the development money GM supplied dried up. GM was too big to fail and I do feel they need to shink down. My other thought was that Chrysler should have died and been sold off which would have helped all the other car companies out but I guess you can't pick favorites in the auto world unlike finance.
I don't think most folks are shocked at the remote wipe capability - they just expected that it would be confined to the exchange data only, not the MP3's, games, photos, etc.
I agree I know someone this happened to where as soon as she left the company they wiped her phone and removed everything including her personal photos and contacts.
This is a problem as it was her phone on her plan and while I do feel the company should be able to wipe out any email they do not have a right to the entire phone.
My wife just had this setup on her Droid 2 and she didn't see anything about this. The phone was handed to the IT person he set it up and handed it back. No documents or warnings have been given and I'm guessing this can be done on an android phone as well.
I have to say I think this is a very large problem and part of the reason why a Bachelors degree doesn't mean as much as it did in the past.
While I didn't cheat (although I was tempted at times) I had numerous friends who did. They had more free time then I did, had more fun but also didn't really learn anything from the classes they had signed up for. I think in the long run this leads to longer education times as people are forced to go for a Masters (where cheating can still happen). At the same time colleges are becoming less about learning and more about taking a students money and giving them a degree so they can get the next cash cow in.
I bought Fallout 3 when it first came out. Had a blast, but was occupied at the time and didn't buy the DLC. In the intrim the GOTY edition came out, with all the DLC, for $50. Only problem is, the DLC hasn't dropped in price -- and there is $50 of it. Now I can either buy $50 of DLC, or $50 for the GOTY edition. Either way they want me to spend $100 on the game, and I can't justify that. Something is wrong here!
Now I just wait for the GOTY edition to come out.
I agree this is what I'm starting to do as well.
I think DLC is fine if it adds something to the game or in the case of multiplayer where the original purchaser gets it for free but a used copy needs to buy a code.
However to require that I purchase DLC to get online or an extra map after you purchase the game new seems stupid because at that point you are helping the used game market even more as people will wait for the price to drop so as they know they will have to purchase the DLC to play it.
I'm using a PS3 that goes through Wifi I'm guessing the disk would work fine if I was not connected but I was shocked that a message came up saying downloading a trailer.
I could disconnect it but that is a pain.
That is still better then the new Blu-ray disks that download an ad from the net when you put the disk in. I didn't give the company the right to use my internet connection to download an ad that they force me to watch when I purchased a disk from the store. If my connection was metered I would send them a bill for what I think the download cost on my end.
More importantly, ever wake up next to her the next morning and seen the reality of the same face without makeup? Can be a scary thing sometimes, perhaps best left unseen.
However, you will have to agree, inside the freaking Pentagon is a pretty understandable place to ban photography.
Oh yes although I was shocked at how nice the guards were inside and outside the Pentagon. Growing up near a military base some of the members seemed to think they didn't need to be polite. It seems the military has changed from when I was a kid or maybe its the people that join.
The only time I have would ever have been afraid to take a picture was when my Dad worked at the Pentagon and he took me in for a tour. I was searched before entering and they guard stationed at the door looked through my camera bag (he even found a hidden pocket I didn't know about) then said "I'll let you take your camera in but if it leaves the bag we will have to confiscate it."
Now I didn't remove the camera from my bag as I could see they had cameras nearly everywhere we walked.
It's the corporations that are most harmful to your freedom.
If you want to learn something about corporations, and why you should fear them, then watch "The Corporation". It's a movie-documentary... and at least when I last watched it, it said it was a free download... so the fact that the 7 websites were taken down at least shouldn't affect your education:-)
Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience.
I agree this was a terrific movie and even my wife who seems to side with corporations most of the time realized that many of them act only in the interest of themselves without a care for anyone else including those they hurt (physically or financially).
This is especially true with the current BP leak that is destroying the lives of those living on the gluf coast.
I agree the big problem with the Post Office near my house is that they are terrible. They loose 5% of the mail they send from my calculations of sending 100 wedding invitations and then later I sent 100 Thank you cards I found they lost 5 each time which was unacceptable in my book. What is amazing though is some Post Offices are terrific and do a great job and I know use those to send mail rather then use my own mailbox.
So I think they do need to run it like a business and close down the locations that have terrible service or move the Post office from external buildings into either Malls or Grocery Stores which will help lower costs.
I don't claim to know all the problems they are having but I don't think eliminating Saturday delivery is a good idea.
The automakers, yea they should have bailed them out, the got screwed because the banks screwed with their borrowing money.
The banks, well too big to fail is just full of fail.
No, the automakers are kind of strategic assets and the domino effect from their failure would have pushed the US and the industrialized world into a depression.
This is true the automakers only ran into issues because the banks stopped lending money as they were.
The Banks needed to be bailed out because of the idiotic decisions they made due to deregulation that started during the Clinton years and more deregulation with Bush. This allowed the Banks to get top heavy with debt. The only problem is if we didn't help them out the entire system may have failed causing a worse situation then what we went through.
I agree they should tax the news organizations that lie. After watching the documentary "The Corporation" I'm also for passing a law saying that an organization or show that presents itself as a news show must present non biased true information.
I think they should fine these news companies when they push their own agendas and care more about advertising then telling the truth. Watch the documentary I mentioned above to see what I mean.
This can affect politicians as well so they can't go a make up a bunch of crap and put it on TV.
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Put this into perspective. In 1970 a man earning $35,000 a year could afford to own a home, a car, and afford to have his wife stay at home to raise the kids. If the wife worked too then they probably had a second summer cabin somewhere.
in 2010 a man earning $35,000 is barely living above the poverty line.(depending on location) you can't support a wife to raise the kids, let alone anything else.
The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20 In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70
In 1970 the average CEO earned $500,000 in 2010 the average CEO earned $5,000,000
Now tell me what is wrong with that picture? Circuit city is my favorite example. in 2008 after a year of bad sales the CEO of circuit city came up with a plan to save $10 million over 3 years. He fired the top 3,000 highest paid non mangers and rehired new people in their place earning minimum wage. Wall street was happy, and he and the board paid themselves $5 million in bonuses immediately.
With in a year Circuit city was gone completely. why? because he fired the top 3000 sales people. He could have saved $10 million dollars immediately that year by cutting his and the rest of the executive boards salaries. They weren't doing anything anyways.
executive and upper level bonuses have gone out of control. Goldman Sachs had to borrow money from he US Government so it could pay bonuses. I always thought that if the company did poorly bonuses were to be cut first not last, but for the rich they payout bonuses and then close the company down.
While this is exaggerated quite a bit it does still have one major point that I see. The people at the bottom that spend all their income and save very little because they can't afford to are being squeezed whereas the people at the top who don't spend all of their income get to save even more. While saving money is good in general this is not true for an economy based on consumption as someone at the bottom will spend the money so another person/company will benefit.
The wealthy take the extra money and while some spend it on lavish things such as houses, cars, Yachts, many invest it and this is the big change that has happened since the 70s, the internet has made it where a wealthy person does not need to pay huge fees anymore for investing in the market. In the past some fees were as high as 15% for investing large amounts of money in the market but in today’s internet they tend to have a fixed low cost. This has made the one fee the wealthy paid (and kept low earners out of the market) disappear. So you have rising incomes at the top with less expenses for investing not to mention less taxes on those investments.
Last point I'll make is that I don't see an issue with high CEO pay but the market has forced CEOs to look at short term gains (month to month) instead of long term gains 5-10 years down the road and this has caused the issues we are seeing today when someone has no real interest in the long term growth of a company but instead focuses on short term gains it can cause a person to do really well at first but implode over the long run.
I feel that way about cable. Too much content I don't want, advertising, and shows are played via some schedule instead of streamed when I want. Sure there are workarounds like DVRs, but that is just a bandaid on a huge gaping wound.
I love the DVR you pay the cable company more each month so you can watch shows when you want because they like money!
This is why I cancelled cable TV and purchased a $40 antenna for my house and now use Amazon Prime for streaming service.
I had a Geologist come into my class once and state "We will never run out of oil, but it will become so expensive to extract that no one will pay for it." I think this quote is fairly true eventually oil will become so expensive that we will only use it when necessary and we will never be able to pull it all out of the ground.
Granted this could happen centuries from now but it does not mean we should not be looking to other ways of producing power so we can use oil in other ways after all we are using over 80 million barrels a day (last time I checked) and we can't support that type of production forever.
p>What this all means is that if someone were to bring an astronomical amount of computing power to bear on mining bitcoins, the difficulty of mining bitcoins would automatically compensate, and the addition of new bitcoins into the marketplace would proceed at the same rate. Granted, the person at the head of all this computing power would be the recipient of most new bitcoins, but the currency would not be destabilized (at least through computing power alone.) There would be other things said person could do to destabilize bitcoins, though, through either Financial or Technical means. They could hoard all BTC they mine, causing the price of BTC to rise. They could sell BTC they mine at ridiculously low prices, causing the price of BTC to plummet. If they comprise more than 60% or so of all computing directed at bitcoin mining, they could hijack the blockchain, and would be able to spend bitcoins they don't own, or double spend their own bitcoins.
I'm fairly sure that anyone who attempts to hijack bitcoins through raw computing power would end up spending more on said computing power than they would earn from bitcoins. So unless a malicious billionaire or an intrepid hacker organization with a few supercomputers in their botnet decide one day that they really don't like bitcoins, it doesn't seem likely to happen.
I have to say this is the one thing that does worry me about bitcoins. The way transactions are added is when the block chain is solved which is dependant on computing power and it resets every 2010 blocks (or something like that). Well what would happen if a couple of Governments brought a few supercomputers on to the network and greatly increased the difficulty and then dropped out?
This would make it where the current network would not be able to get to the next link in the chain for say a few months and the blocks would slow to a crawl. I have seen a few other ideas where they should have the network recalculate the chains differently which might help reassure some people.
I have to admit I'm curious as to how they bypass certain laws if they do licence these pictures to advertisers.
As an example if I take a photo of a friend I cannot just sell the photo without a model release form. I highly doubt instagram can just bypass this same form and sell a picture of someone I took for advertising purposes If you really want to challenge this take lots of pictures of places whos images are trademarked such as the Flatiron building in NYC and I'm sure one will be used without paying the building which from what I understand cannot be used without the owners permission.
Granted taking a picture of your food would be something that they could use without much issue as long as no person is visible.
If Samsung can find all these examples of prior art, how is it that Apple was granted patents in the first place? These are hardly the only examples of Apple being given patents on things that were obviously done by others well before they "innovated" them.
As my father-in-law was a patent clerk he said they stopped checking into prior art when he left in the 90s and they seemed to rubber stamp multiple things. He tended to take pride in searching for prior art as he didn't want a company to get patents on existing things. This was lost as they brought in managers who went with quotas rather then actually vetting everything thoroughly.
This has absolutely nothing to do with light, and instead has absolutely incredible implications for power generation. Graphene geothermal probes for more efficiency, graphene cooling tubes for maximum gas/oil/coal electric power generation, nuclear power (bonus: extra radiation protection)... Hell, strap graphene to just about any process that involves waste heat and get power for "free!"
This would be perfect in a car if they could use it to cool the engine as well as generate elecity without a generator.
They did the same thing with oil. Look it up. Government fostering new technology is NOT a bad thing.
What do you mean "did", they give Oil companieslarge tax breaks as well as using the US military to protect interests in the Middle East the cost of which is in the billions.
I agree it would show that the people in the USPTO have no idea how to research a patent. This is why some of the people I know in the patent office quit and why some worked till they were medically unable to (afraid patents would get through that have prior work or are unworkable).
It stinks that GM is losing money on these, but they're putting the effort into it, and I have to applaud them for it. Then again, didn't the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost more to make at launch time than they were selling for? Maybe GM is on to something...
(emphasis mine) Oh, they're on to something, alright. GM is "too big to fail". This makes it easy for them to start risky, costly ventures, because they'll either succeed and make GM rich, or the gov't will bail GM out with more loans until GM is profitable again.
I have to chime in the reason PS3 and Xbox 360 were sold at a loss was to bring in customers as they made money from the games being sold.
GM made this car not for sales but to bring people into the dealerships and hopefully purchase a Cruze which they do make a profit on. This is no different then the Halo cars that some car companies have to get people excited about the brand. It is the same as what Toyota did with the Prius and what Honda failed to do with the Insight.
I'm hoping this works out so people will buy Chevy products that are profitable but only time will tell.
Also for those mad that GM was bailed out you think the economy is bad now imagine how bad it would be with a few million extra people unemployeed and never mind the issues this would have caused with all the other automotive companies with how they all use the same suppliers. Toyota, Ford, BMW,...etc would have all had massive problems as suppliers went under and the development money GM supplied dried up. GM was too big to fail and I do feel they need to shink down. My other thought was that Chrysler should have died and been sold off which would have helped all the other car companies out but I guess you can't pick favorites in the auto world unlike finance.
I don't think most folks are shocked at the remote wipe capability - they just expected that it would be confined to the exchange data only, not the MP3's, games, photos, etc.
I agree I know someone this happened to where as soon as she left the company they wiped her phone and removed everything including her personal photos and contacts.
This is a problem as it was her phone on her plan and while I do feel the company should be able to wipe out any email they do not have a right to the entire phone.
My wife just had this setup on her Droid 2 and she didn't see anything about this. The phone was handed to the IT person he set it up and handed it back. No documents or warnings have been given and I'm guessing this can be done on an android phone as well.
I have to say I think this is a very large problem and part of the reason why a Bachelors degree doesn't mean as much as it did in the past.
While I didn't cheat (although I was tempted at times) I had numerous friends who did. They had more free time then I did, had more fun but also didn't really learn anything from the classes they had signed up for. I think in the long run this leads to longer education times as people are forced to go for a Masters (where cheating can still happen). At the same time colleges are becoming less about learning and more about taking a students money and giving them a degree so they can get the next cash cow in.
This is why I already have this movie in my queue to see.
I bought Fallout 3 when it first came out. Had a blast, but was occupied at the time and didn't buy the DLC. In the intrim the GOTY edition came out, with all the DLC, for $50. Only problem is, the DLC hasn't dropped in price -- and there is $50 of it. Now I can either buy $50 of DLC, or $50 for the GOTY edition. Either way they want me to spend $100 on the game, and I can't justify that. Something is wrong here!
Now I just wait for the GOTY edition to come out.
I agree this is what I'm starting to do as well.
I think DLC is fine if it adds something to the game or in the case of multiplayer where the original purchaser gets it for free but a used copy needs to buy a code.
However to require that I purchase DLC to get online or an extra map after you purchase the game new seems stupid because at that point you are helping the used game market even more as people will wait for the price to drop so as they know they will have to purchase the DLC to play it.
I'm using a PS3 that goes through Wifi I'm guessing the disk would work fine if I was not connected but I was shocked that a message came up saying downloading a trailer. I could disconnect it but that is a pain.
That is still better then the new Blu-ray disks that download an ad from the net when you put the disk in. I didn't give the company the right to use my internet connection to download an ad that they force me to watch when I purchased a disk from the store. If my connection was metered I would send them a bill for what I think the download cost on my end.
Ever seen a woman wear makeup...?
More importantly, ever wake up next to her the next morning and seen the reality of the same face without makeup? Can be a scary thing sometimes, perhaps best left unseen.
I have and I now only have one arm!
You both completely failed at learning jack, and resorted to the threat of violence. NERD FAIL.
Learn social skills. THAT'S the lesson. They aren't hard and a handful of social cues makes all the difference.
Rule #1 when a girl comes to talk to you she probably doesn't care about your D&D character.
But tonight I'm going to Party like its 1999!!!
However, you will have to agree, inside the freaking Pentagon is a pretty understandable place to ban photography.
Oh yes although I was shocked at how nice the guards were inside and outside the Pentagon. Growing up near a military base some of the members seemed to think they didn't need to be polite. It seems the military has changed from when I was a kid or maybe its the people that join.
The only time I have would ever have been afraid to take a picture was when my Dad worked at the Pentagon and he took me in for a tour. I was searched before entering and they guard stationed at the door looked through my camera bag (he even found a hidden pocket I didn't know about) then said "I'll let you take your camera in but if it leaves the bag we will have to confiscate it."
Now I didn't remove the camera from my bag as I could see they had cameras nearly everywhere we walked.
It's the corporations that are most harmful to your freedom.
If you want to learn something about corporations, and why you should fear them, then watch "The Corporation". It's a movie-documentary... and at least when I last watched it, it said it was a free download... so the fact that the 7 websites were taken down at least shouldn't affect your education :-)
Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience.
source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/plotsummary
I agree this was a terrific movie and even my wife who seems to side with corporations most of the time realized that many of them act only in the interest of themselves without a care for anyone else including those they hurt (physically or financially).
This is especially true with the current BP leak that is destroying the lives of those living on the gluf coast.
I agree the big problem with the Post Office near my house is that they are terrible. They loose 5% of the mail they send from my calculations of sending 100 wedding invitations and then later I sent 100 Thank you cards I found they lost 5 each time which was unacceptable in my book. What is amazing though is some Post Offices are terrific and do a great job and I know use those to send mail rather then use my own mailbox.
So I think they do need to run it like a business and close down the locations that have terrible service or move the Post office from external buildings into either Malls or Grocery Stores which will help lower costs.
I don't claim to know all the problems they are having but I don't think eliminating Saturday delivery is a good idea.
The automakers, yea they should have bailed them out, the got screwed because the banks screwed with their borrowing money.
The banks, well too big to fail is just full of fail.
No, the automakers are kind of strategic assets and the domino effect from their failure would have pushed the US and the industrialized world into a depression.
This is true the automakers only ran into issues because the banks stopped lending money as they were.
The Banks needed to be bailed out because of the idiotic decisions they made due to deregulation that started during the Clinton years and more deregulation with Bush. This allowed the Banks to get top heavy with debt. The only problem is if we didn't help them out the entire system may have failed causing a worse situation then what we went through.
Put a tax on lying.
I agree they should tax the news organizations that lie. After watching the documentary "The Corporation" I'm also for passing a law saying that an organization or show that presents itself as a news show must present non biased true information.
I think they should fine these news companies when they push their own agendas and care more about advertising then telling the truth. Watch the documentary I mentioned above to see what I mean.
This can affect politicians as well so they can't go a make up a bunch of crap and put it on TV.