It's probably either "photoshopped" so they're not showing what's really on it. Or they have some pre-configured "guests without clearance are here" screen that they can change all the monitors to with the push of a button.
" I don't believe in marriage between gay couples either. Marriage has become, in my opinion, a Christian religious institute, and as long as that particular religion says no to gay marriages, I think that's something we all must either accept - and work to change within that particular religion if one feels strongly enough to do so. ( I figure if 'your' religion says gay marriage is a no-no and you believe otherwise, then maybe you don't quite align with that particular religion.)
However, I do strongly believe in legal partnerships between gay people with any and *all* rights (and responsibilities) that a marriage would give. That includes tax provisions, insurance provisions, benefits, adoption rights, and so forth and so on. All too often a legal partnership does not even come close to having the same rights (or responsibilities) that a marriage does, and that is truly a travesty that delineates once more the lack of separation of state and church (in many nations that claim to have or support such separation)."
Marriage, as an institution, predates Christianity. It is present in virtually every single culture and religion worldwide and has broad social and legal implications.
Now, if you want to make the argument that "redefining" marriage is outside of the jurisdiction of government and should be left up to those members of faith who want to define it based on their personal beliefs then, fine. I can accept that. However, under that premise government needs to stop licensing marriage, and using the term "marriage" in legal proceedings. Every single "marriage" should become a "civil union", as far as the law is concerned, and every "civil union" must be given the same rights and privileges as married couples have today.
It ignores investment because the only way that investment can pay off is through labour. The risk taker fronts his labour (since money is the promise of labour) with the expectation that he will be payed back with interest (interest being one of two ways that investment can ever enrich anyone - the other being the collection of collateral). The reality is that thanks to the addition of interest all debt can never be repayed because there isn't enough money in circulation (which is why we view investment as being risk). It's also why we have perpetual inflation.
When you consider that there simply is not enough money in circulation to repay all debt it becomes clear that investment is a scheme to exploit labour. It pays off for some people but it is not viable long term. The only reason that investment banks create the illusion of viability is thanks to the fractional reserve system and the safety net of the central bank (which both lead to perpetual inflation). The reality is that investment banks don't actually risk anything. They create money out of thin air (inflation) when they lend and they seize property when the loans are defaulted on. When the economy goes sour and banks stop lending the central banks cut interest rates, increasing their lending to commercial banks and more people end up in debt. Those people then seek employment/labour to repay it.
This isn't to say that banks never collapse due to poor investment practices. It happened as recently as 2008. It just means that in order for investment to pay off someone, somewhere has to loose.
They never controlled reproduction, and to this day it's still WAY cheaper for the Big 5 to print CDs (massive bulk discounts) than the home musician. That's not to say that it's expensive, though. I printed 1,000 copies of my album in '06 and I'm far from rich.
What the big 5 provided was distribution and promotion. THAT's where they're being hit today thanks to the Internet. I did my album as a fun project. A way to get songs that I had written over the last 5 years "out there", just for fun. Not expecting huge gains or anything. I spend absolutely ZERO time and money promoting it and yet I'm still selling copies from people who find me on last.fm or cdbaby etc. Not anywhere near enough to support myself on, but it's awesome that I'm slowly recouping my investment and not having to work at it.
That's the real issue that I take with the RIAA. As someone who has a passive interest in economics, the RIAA's business model is the same fallacy that you see all over the place where people think that they can get something for nothing. Money is credit, credit is debt and debt is the promise of labour. If you don't produce something of value (labour when you come down to it) then people simply aren't willing to give you their labour in exchange for it. It's extremely simple but people are so caught up in our monetary system that they forget this. And thus they buy into the pipe dream that you can collect more labour for something than you put into it. There may be the odd case where people succeed at those schemes but in the long run the exchange of labour has to balance out or you have slavery.
AFAIK tabs are really just windows. The difference is how they're displayed by the GUI. But from a Javascript POV the tab is just another window. So if we start limiting the knowledge that javascript has over other windows then we prevent a lot of useful, legitimate things that can be done with other windows. For example: I have a few web-apps that use pop-up windows in a non-annoying way (ie: you click something to open the window that actually performs a useful task).
At first glance I like the idea of preventing cross-domain knowledge, but then you still run into problems across same-site domains like static.yourdomain.com and script.yourdomain.com etc.
I think the best defense against this attack is to use a separate browser session for banking. Banks should educate their users about this type of attack and make it very clear that they should close their browser and open up a new one, with no other sites open, just for their banking.
"The switch will be painful for lots of poor folks who can't afford new equipment or who are bedridden and can't go shopping, but delaying the transition won't change that cold reality."
I'm not arguing anything that you said, I'm just offering my own experience. I'm one of the people who still use rabbit ears. I'm not poor. I could easily afford cable/satellite if I wanted it. I could afford an HDTV if I wanted one, too.
Anyway I just got my converter box and I miss analog. I'm having issues with HD channels being converted to "standard def" resolution and my tv is making an extremely annoying "buzzing" noise on HD channels. It was snowing today and we lost our signal. Analog is ok since the quality simply degrades. The DTV picture got all pixelated and went entirely black periodically. I'm also not picking up any Canadian channels (I live on a border down inside of Canada and the majority of the stations we watch our US but we do like our Canadian channels too), though that one isn't a huge deal since we can turn off the converter box and it passes through the analog signal. But it's still a pain in the ass.
So now we've either got to live with it, pay for cable/satellite or see if an HD TV will fix the annoying sound problems. I don't really like any of those options. It wasn't broken before and it didn't need fixing. TV just isn't that important to me and I have better things to spend my hard earned cash on. That's not to say that I wouldn't miss being able to watch broadcast, though.
At least we can consider options to fix it. People who only use rabbit ears because they genuinely can't afford anything better are the ones who are going to be hit the hardest.
Just for the sake of discussion / argument, what kind of trouble are you genuinely afraid that your children will get into by surfing the net ?
My wife and I bought our children a computer for xmas last year (though they had surfed the 'net on our computers previously) and before I connected their computers I sat down and had a thorough lesson and discussion of the Internet. I began by giving them a technical lesson of what the Internet is by putting it in terms that made it interesting to them:
(here's a picture of Jane at her computer. With her computer she can play games and type of documents. Now lets say that Jane wants to play a game with Susan. We can connect their computers. Once we've done this it's called a network. Now imagine that Jane and Susan connect their computers with Peter's computer and so on and so on... )
Once they understood the basics of networking and what the Internet "is", we then spoke about the social implications of the Internet and how, just as in the real world, they will come into contact with people who are up to good and by others who are up to not so much good.
Their computer is in the family room but honestly the only thing that could possibly concern me is one of them setting up a real-life meeting with someone that we (their mother and I) don't know, and whom they don't truly know. However, we spoke about that and I didn't even have to point out to them that they don't really KNOW who they're talking to and what that person's intentions are. They told me that all by themselves (they were 6 and 7 years-old at the time, if you're wondering).
There's a documentary circulating right now called Zeitgeist Addendum. It's a sequel to the 2007 documentary called Zeitgeist. I'm not saying that I agree with all of it's conclusions, and it does ignore a lot of facts that don't support it's message, but it is informative and interesting. The first part is an overview of the fractional reserve banking system and points out how money gets created by banks out of thin air via loans. (You can also read the Wiki page on fractional reserve banking for a good overview as well).
What the first part of the documentary points out is that since money is created by banks via loans (and the initial deposits making those loans possible in the first place are central bank loans), all money is debt. Thanks to interest there simply isn't enough money in circulation to repay all loans. When people are in debt they seek employment to repay those debts. And thus the fractional reserve system becomes a form of enslavement. Only people don't realize that they're being enslaved.
Whether or not it's actual enslavement is up to your own interpretation of the system and it's intents (there's many other arguments in favour of fractional reserve and central banking). However, I think this is a good example of the carrot method of controlling people. You can argue that it still boils down to fear (fear of not having the income and not being able to repay debts), but money in general is a good way of getting people to do something by offering them something that they want or need rather than threatening them directly.
So there are other ways of controlling people. Though maybe at some psychological level it still boils down to the fear of not having the carrot.
I'm self employed and have often worked 12 hours / day. While the idea of taking 3 days / week off is appealing (and I've done it), I find that when I work 12 hours / day my productivity goes down the drain incrementally with each hour. I get extremely tired by the end of the shift and my brain turns to mush.
I get way more work done doing a standard 8 hour work day with weekends off. Of course that's just me, though.
I watched the first 4 seasons of House and, truth be told, I just got bored of it. It was a great show but after a while I lost interest. I'm not saying that TSC > House. Just that House got old, TSC hasn't (yet), and I only have so much time to spend doing nothing.
There's some diamonds in the rough on broadcast. The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, Chuck and The Sarah Connor Chronicles come to mind. House and Bones aren't terrible either though I don't watch them anymore since I don't like to watch a ton of tv (I just calculated that I watch 3 1/2 - 5 hours / week. For some reason that seems like a lot, though I know people who watch that much / day).
Take your car back and ask for a refund. Even if you don't get it at least you will have made it very clear to the dealership that you are extremely unhappy and want to take back your business.
Also try to get in touch with someone fairly high up in Toyota's management / marketing at their corporate HQ and explain to them that you will never buy Toyota again and why. In the mean time keep complaining on the Internet and contact the local business / consumer watch-dogs (Better Business Bureau or whatever) and tell them that it was not made clear to you that your information would be used this way and that you are outraged.
It's a lot of work but this crap has to stop.
I'm self-employed and actually work as an advertiser (and I expect to wake up next to a dead horse tomorrow for admitting that here on/.) but I've never been tempted to think up ways to annoy users like this. In fact, I'm of the mind that making customers happy is the best road to success. I know. It's a pretty radical way to think. Give customers what they want, customers pay you and, *gasp*, come back!
I guess I'm old fashioned. I watch all of my colleagues come out with all of these flash ads and flash pop-ups etc. and I scratch my head wondering how these things catch on. I've had good success sticking to clean, simple, non-obtrusive ads and have never received a single complaint. Consequently my web-site user-base and my bottom line grow month after month (who'd'a thunk it!?). I will never understand why people think there is money in pissing people off.
"Absolutely! But, back in the 1990s there was a statistic that was floating about that indicated that 90% of all small businesses fail in the first five years. That's why bank, at that time, were loath to loan to a small business that had not been around for at least five years."
I'm a small business owner myself. In fact, this past year marked my 5 year mile-stone:) I understand this fact quite well.
First of all, lets use the appropriate terminology. We're not talking about money we're talking about credit. A creditor takes risk by lending capital to an entrepreneur and expects to collect interest. However, there is the very real risk that the loan may be defaulted on. Let's assume that happens. The creditor is definitely out the capital, but where did it go ? Again, we're being short-sighted by thinking of the poor creditor who made the bad risk and is now out the money and may even lose his job. However, the question still remains. Where did the money go ?
Did it vanish ? No.
It went to pay the wages of the business owner's employees. It went to pay for equipment and leasing and licenses. The money was put back into the system. The net effect on the economy is nil. You can make a point that in this case jobs were relocated, just as government relocates jobs. Yet my point was not that it doesn't happen in private industry. It happens all the time. My point was that government, despite all of it's power, does not have the power to alter the laws of economics and thus can not "create" jobs.
"Hell, even Alaska's famous "Bridge to Nowhere" created some jobs during construction. It actually created ONE real job that persists."
Here we go using that word "create" again. It did not create that job. If that woman is being paid by the government the tax payers are using money that they could use to hire their own hypothetical employee for their own hypothetical business. Every government dollar spent is a tax dollar taken. Every government job "created" is a job destroyed somewhere else. I'm not saying that this is always bad. There are services we demand of the government. We want to have our garbage collected and a fire department to put out our fires and for various reasons we've decided the government will do a better job of these tasks than private enterprise. The point is that these aren't jobs created. They've been taken from somewhere else and put where they are now. Whether or not they persist after the government cancels it's original program is irrelevant.
I have to assume that your point was that "sometimes the government makes choices that aren't so bad". That's certainly true but it's still like throwing darts at a dart-board while blind-folded and hitting the board sooner or later. The economy is complex and totally intertwined. Thinking that the government can somehow control it and get it to produce results that it wants is absurd. Economics is a social study of human behaviour. If we trust the government to control the economy we trust the government to control people and when you put it like that I don't think anyone would ever go along with it. Yet people do because they want a magic bullet to solve all of their financial troubles.
This is total fallacy. First of all, most people don't hoard their cash, contrary to popular belief. Furthermore, the people who pay the VAST MAJORITY of taxes (the ultra-rich top 1%) don't hoard their money. Just look at the way they live.
Now, stop being short-sighted and follow the trail of money. You have $1 to spend, you choose to buy a chocolate bar. The store you bought the chocolate bar from is now $1 richer (over simplification as their profit margin isn't 100% but you get the idea). That money either goes to pay wages or goes to buy the store owner a chocolate bar of his own etc. but at every single point in the chain that dollar ends up in someone's pocket and what are jobs if not earnings ?
You trust the government, who spends money that is not their own, and doesn't really suffer in the short-term if their spending fails to be more responsible with capital than small business owners who put their lives on the line because they truly believe in the viability of their business ? Please.
As to your argument that the hypothetical dollar may not stay inside the US this is another extremely outdated mercantilist concept. The belief that we should somehow magically maximize exports while minimizing imports (which is impossible because in the long run imports and exports must be equal) in order to keep jobs in the US. The reality is that we don't import for the sake of giving money to people outside of the country. We import because other countries make those products more efficiently than we do. So by trying to keep things entirely domestic you raise everyone's prices and people have less money to spend on the things that they really need. Not to mention that you're promoting inefficient business which will cause the country's GDP to decline since people are not going to be buying your exports because they are more expensive. You are effectively promoting inefficiency which will ultimately lead to jobs being sent to more healthy economies. Way to go.
Yes the money is still in the system, however, you have not CREATED any jobs. You have only relocated jobs.
The problem with government "creating" jobs this way (aside from the fact that it's misleading and a good way to get votes by promising an ignorant public jobs that will not actually be created, just moved from elsewhere) is that government does not risk with it's own money. If you take money out of private enterprise you can pretty much guarantee that the money will not be used efficiently. Thus more jobs get "created" by leaving matters up to the free market rather than redistributing it for the government's perceived benefits.
If a small business owner fails he loses everything he fronted to create his business. There is very powerful incentive to succeed. If government fails they just pass on the blame to everything they possibly can and move on. The tax payers are out money that would have been used much more responsibly in the open market.
Government usually follows the path of "creating jobs" by "investing in infrastructure" because it's a good way to get the public to STFU. Most people are short-sighted. They will see the jobs as a results of the government spending. They see the metaphorical bridge that was built. They see the wages. What they don't see are all the jobs and wages that had to be taken away in the form of taxes to "create" those things.
There is no creation of jobs by government. Government is not a wealth generator. They are not sitting on some pile of magical capital that they can tap into. Every government dollar spent is capital taken out of the economy in the form of taxes. Every government job created is a job taken from somewhere else. Like the GP said, there is no net surplus of jobs as a result of government spending.
Past few years ? It's the oldest trick in the book. Do whatever you want, classify the evidence and protect it by claiming that releasing the information poses risks to national security. By the time the documents finally are declassified you'll be long dead so who cares.
A 1990 episode of Star Trek TNG titled "The Hunted" touched on this issue.
Picard: "A matter of internal security: the age-old cry of the oppressor.
"It took close to a year to get him evicted and the loss of legal fees and rent was a stunning lesson to that landlord."
IANAL but I do watch an unhealthy amount of people's court. A great bulk of those cases deals with the landlord / tenant relationship and rent. While I have no doubt that it could have taken close to a year to go through the process, everything that I have ever heard on the subject tells me that the tenant would have to pay the landlord rent for all of those months that he was staying there.
What I am willing to buy is that, if the lease agreement or state law says that the landlord was, in fact, responsible for the repairs to the septic tank then the judge could have (and probably would have) deducted the cost of the repair from the amount of rent owed. It's certainly possible that the cost of the repair equaled or was greater than the amount owing in which case the landlord would have collected nothing and may have actually had to pay the tenant something if the tenant had a counter-claim. However, the tenant would have had to prove that he paid for the septic repair, that he did so because the landlord refused to and the judge still could have dismissed all cases due to the fact that both parties broke the lease agreement or state laws.
If anyone with more direct knowledge wants to chime in or correct me please do.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably either "photoshopped" so they're not showing what's really on it. Or they have some pre-configured "guests without clearance are here" screen that they can change all the monitors to with the push of a button.
"so did the artists themselves see at 25% increase as well, or are they being screwed on all sides now?"
I sold $50 worth of CDs in 2008. I can't remember how much I sold in '07 (too much weed) but I'm sure it was at least a 25% increase.
As for being screwed ... no my wife is pretty much doing it from the same side she always was.
" I don't believe in marriage between gay couples either. Marriage has become, in my opinion, a Christian religious institute, and as long as that particular religion says no to gay marriages, I think that's something we all must either accept - and work to change within that particular religion if one feels strongly enough to do so. ( I figure if 'your' religion says gay marriage is a no-no and you believe otherwise, then maybe you don't quite align with that particular religion.)
However, I do strongly believe in legal partnerships between gay people with any and *all* rights (and responsibilities) that a marriage would give. That includes tax provisions, insurance provisions, benefits, adoption rights, and so forth and so on. All too often a legal partnership does not even come close to having the same rights (or responsibilities) that a marriage does, and that is truly a travesty that delineates once more the lack of separation of state and church (in many nations that claim to have or support such separation)."
Marriage, as an institution, predates Christianity. It is present in virtually every single culture and religion worldwide and has broad social and legal implications.
Now, if you want to make the argument that "redefining" marriage is outside of the jurisdiction of government and should be left up to those members of faith who want to define it based on their personal beliefs then, fine. I can accept that. However, under that premise government needs to stop licensing marriage, and using the term "marriage" in legal proceedings. Every single "marriage" should become a "civil union", as far as the law is concerned, and every "civil union" must be given the same rights and privileges as married couples have today.
It ignores investment because the only way that investment can pay off is through labour. The risk taker fronts his labour (since money is the promise of labour) with the expectation that he will be payed back with interest (interest being one of two ways that investment can ever enrich anyone - the other being the collection of collateral). The reality is that thanks to the addition of interest all debt can never be repayed because there isn't enough money in circulation (which is why we view investment as being risk). It's also why we have perpetual inflation.
When you consider that there simply is not enough money in circulation to repay all debt it becomes clear that investment is a scheme to exploit labour. It pays off for some people but it is not viable long term. The only reason that investment banks create the illusion of viability is thanks to the fractional reserve system and the safety net of the central bank (which both lead to perpetual inflation). The reality is that investment banks don't actually risk anything. They create money out of thin air (inflation) when they lend and they seize property when the loans are defaulted on. When the economy goes sour and banks stop lending the central banks cut interest rates, increasing their lending to commercial banks and more people end up in debt. Those people then seek employment/labour to repay it.
This isn't to say that banks never collapse due to poor investment practices. It happened as recently as 2008. It just means that in order for investment to pay off someone, somewhere has to loose.
"When did we move from High-Fidelity (HiFi) to iPod?"
Apparently on October 23, 2001
They never controlled reproduction, and to this day it's still WAY cheaper for the Big 5 to print CDs (massive bulk discounts) than the home musician. That's not to say that it's expensive, though. I printed 1,000 copies of my album in '06 and I'm far from rich.
What the big 5 provided was distribution and promotion. THAT's where they're being hit today thanks to the Internet. I did my album as a fun project. A way to get songs that I had written over the last 5 years "out there", just for fun. Not expecting huge gains or anything. I spend absolutely ZERO time and money promoting it and yet I'm still selling copies from people who find me on last.fm or cdbaby etc. Not anywhere near enough to support myself on, but it's awesome that I'm slowly recouping my investment and not having to work at it.
That's the real issue that I take with the RIAA. As someone who has a passive interest in economics, the RIAA's business model is the same fallacy that you see all over the place where people think that they can get something for nothing. Money is credit, credit is debt and debt is the promise of labour. If you don't produce something of value (labour when you come down to it) then people simply aren't willing to give you their labour in exchange for it. It's extremely simple but people are so caught up in our monetary system that they forget this. And thus they buy into the pipe dream that you can collect more labour for something than you put into it. There may be the odd case where people succeed at those schemes but in the long run the exchange of labour has to balance out or you have slavery.
AFAIK tabs are really just windows. The difference is how they're displayed by the GUI. But from a Javascript POV the tab is just another window. So if we start limiting the knowledge that javascript has over other windows then we prevent a lot of useful, legitimate things that can be done with other windows. For example: I have a few web-apps that use pop-up windows in a non-annoying way (ie: you click something to open the window that actually performs a useful task).
At first glance I like the idea of preventing cross-domain knowledge, but then you still run into problems across same-site domains like static.yourdomain.com and script.yourdomain.com etc.
I think the best defense against this attack is to use a separate browser session for banking. Banks should educate their users about this type of attack and make it very clear that they should close their browser and open up a new one, with no other sites open, just for their banking.
"The switch will be painful for lots of poor folks who can't afford new equipment or who are bedridden and can't go shopping, but delaying the transition won't change that cold reality."
I'm not arguing anything that you said, I'm just offering my own experience. I'm one of the people who still use rabbit ears. I'm not poor. I could easily afford cable/satellite if I wanted it. I could afford an HDTV if I wanted one, too.
Anyway I just got my converter box and I miss analog. I'm having issues with HD channels being converted to "standard def" resolution and my tv is making an extremely annoying "buzzing" noise on HD channels. It was snowing today and we lost our signal. Analog is ok since the quality simply degrades. The DTV picture got all pixelated and went entirely black periodically. I'm also not picking up any Canadian channels (I live on a border down inside of Canada and the majority of the stations we watch our US but we do like our Canadian channels too), though that one isn't a huge deal since we can turn off the converter box and it passes through the analog signal. But it's still a pain in the ass.
So now we've either got to live with it, pay for cable/satellite or see if an HD TV will fix the annoying sound problems. I don't really like any of those options. It wasn't broken before and it didn't need fixing. TV just isn't that important to me and I have better things to spend my hard earned cash on. That's not to say that I wouldn't miss being able to watch broadcast, though.
At least we can consider options to fix it. People who only use rabbit ears because they genuinely can't afford anything better are the ones who are going to be hit the hardest.
Just for the sake of discussion / argument, what kind of trouble are you genuinely afraid that your children will get into by surfing the net ?
My wife and I bought our children a computer for xmas last year (though they had surfed the 'net on our computers previously) and before I connected their computers I sat down and had a thorough lesson and discussion of the Internet. I began by giving them a technical lesson of what the Internet is by putting it in terms that made it interesting to them:
(here's a picture of Jane at her computer. With her computer she can play games and type of documents. Now lets say that Jane wants to play a game with Susan. We can connect their computers. Once we've done this it's called a network. Now imagine that Jane and Susan connect their computers with Peter's computer and so on and so on ... )
Once they understood the basics of networking and what the Internet "is", we then spoke about the social implications of the Internet and how, just as in the real world, they will come into contact with people who are up to good and by others who are up to not so much good.
Their computer is in the family room but honestly the only thing that could possibly concern me is one of them setting up a real-life meeting with someone that we (their mother and I) don't know, and whom they don't truly know. However, we spoke about that and I didn't even have to point out to them that they don't really KNOW who they're talking to and what that person's intentions are. They told me that all by themselves (they were 6 and 7 years-old at the time, if you're wondering).
(This may appear OT at first but bare with me).
There's a documentary circulating right now called Zeitgeist Addendum. It's a sequel to the 2007 documentary called Zeitgeist. I'm not saying that I agree with all of it's conclusions, and it does ignore a lot of facts that don't support it's message, but it is informative and interesting. The first part is an overview of the fractional reserve banking system and points out how money gets created by banks out of thin air via loans. (You can also read the Wiki page on fractional reserve banking for a good overview as well).
What the first part of the documentary points out is that since money is created by banks via loans (and the initial deposits making those loans possible in the first place are central bank loans), all money is debt. Thanks to interest there simply isn't enough money in circulation to repay all loans. When people are in debt they seek employment to repay those debts. And thus the fractional reserve system becomes a form of enslavement. Only people don't realize that they're being enslaved.
Whether or not it's actual enslavement is up to your own interpretation of the system and it's intents (there's many other arguments in favour of fractional reserve and central banking). However, I think this is a good example of the carrot method of controlling people. You can argue that it still boils down to fear (fear of not having the income and not being able to repay debts), but money in general is a good way of getting people to do something by offering them something that they want or need rather than threatening them directly.
So there are other ways of controlling people. Though maybe at some psychological level it still boils down to the fear of not having the carrot.
I'm self employed and have often worked 12 hours / day. While the idea of taking 3 days / week off is appealing (and I've done it), I find that when I work 12 hours / day my productivity goes down the drain incrementally with each hour. I get extremely tired by the end of the shift and my brain turns to mush.
I get way more work done doing a standard 8 hour work day with weekends off. Of course that's just me, though.
"This wasn't news when Bush was in office and he used a cell phone and a PDA too."
That is simply not true.
Everyone knows that Bush was incapable of operating a cellphone and a PDA. You insensitive clod!
Male: "Another lonely night. Another reason I'm glad I have a hand."
9 months later ...
Hand: "Yeah, err, remember that one night we both got a little drunk ... "
Um, no thanks.
I watched the first 4 seasons of House and, truth be told, I just got bored of it. It was a great show but after a while I lost interest. I'm not saying that TSC > House. Just that House got old, TSC hasn't (yet), and I only have so much time to spend doing nothing.
"Fun the coupon"
I agree. Coupons these days are so boring :(
There's some diamonds in the rough on broadcast. The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, Chuck and The Sarah Connor Chronicles come to mind. House and Bones aren't terrible either though I don't watch them anymore since I don't like to watch a ton of tv (I just calculated that I watch 3 1/2 - 5 hours / week. For some reason that seems like a lot, though I know people who watch that much / day).
Take your car back and ask for a refund. Even if you don't get it at least you will have made it very clear to the dealership that you are extremely unhappy and want to take back your business.
Also try to get in touch with someone fairly high up in Toyota's management / marketing at their corporate HQ and explain to them that you will never buy Toyota again and why. In the mean time keep complaining on the Internet and contact the local business / consumer watch-dogs (Better Business Bureau or whatever) and tell them that it was not made clear to you that your information would be used this way and that you are outraged.
It's a lot of work but this crap has to stop.
I'm self-employed and actually work as an advertiser (and I expect to wake up next to a dead horse tomorrow for admitting that here on /.) but I've never been tempted to think up ways to annoy users like this. In fact, I'm of the mind that making customers happy is the best road to success. I know. It's a pretty radical way to think. Give customers what they want, customers pay you and, *gasp*, come back!
I guess I'm old fashioned. I watch all of my colleagues come out with all of these flash ads and flash pop-ups etc. and I scratch my head wondering how these things catch on. I've had good success sticking to clean, simple, non-obtrusive ads and have never received a single complaint. Consequently my web-site user-base and my bottom line grow month after month (who'd'a thunk it!?). I will never understand why people think there is money in pissing people off.
And even with all that aside, you're still in some kind of state. Be it Idaho or the nation state of Australia.
Some people just don't understand anything. Sheesh.
"No one got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM"
One of the happiest moments of my life was when I was given the opportunity to fire an NT admin, you insensitive clod! :p
"Absolutely! But, back in the 1990s there was a statistic that was floating about that indicated that 90% of all small businesses fail in the first five years. That's why bank, at that time, were loath to loan to a small business that had not been around for at least five years."
I'm a small business owner myself. In fact, this past year marked my 5 year mile-stone :) I understand this fact quite well.
First of all, lets use the appropriate terminology. We're not talking about money we're talking about credit. A creditor takes risk by lending capital to an entrepreneur and expects to collect interest. However, there is the very real risk that the loan may be defaulted on. Let's assume that happens. The creditor is definitely out the capital, but where did it go ? Again, we're being short-sighted by thinking of the poor creditor who made the bad risk and is now out the money and may even lose his job. However, the question still remains. Where did the money go ?
Did it vanish ? No.
It went to pay the wages of the business owner's employees. It went to pay for equipment and leasing and licenses. The money was put back into the system. The net effect on the economy is nil. You can make a point that in this case jobs were relocated, just as government relocates jobs. Yet my point was not that it doesn't happen in private industry. It happens all the time. My point was that government, despite all of it's power, does not have the power to alter the laws of economics and thus can not "create" jobs.
"Hell, even Alaska's famous "Bridge to Nowhere" created some jobs during construction. It actually created ONE real job that persists."
Here we go using that word "create" again. It did not create that job. If that woman is being paid by the government the tax payers are using money that they could use to hire their own hypothetical employee for their own hypothetical business. Every government dollar spent is a tax dollar taken. Every government job "created" is a job destroyed somewhere else. I'm not saying that this is always bad. There are services we demand of the government. We want to have our garbage collected and a fire department to put out our fires and for various reasons we've decided the government will do a better job of these tasks than private enterprise. The point is that these aren't jobs created. They've been taken from somewhere else and put where they are now. Whether or not they persist after the government cancels it's original program is irrelevant.
I have to assume that your point was that "sometimes the government makes choices that aren't so bad". That's certainly true but it's still like throwing darts at a dart-board while blind-folded and hitting the board sooner or later. The economy is complex and totally intertwined. Thinking that the government can somehow control it and get it to produce results that it wants is absurd. Economics is a social study of human behaviour. If we trust the government to control the economy we trust the government to control people and when you put it like that I don't think anyone would ever go along with it. Yet people do because they want a magic bullet to solve all of their financial troubles.
This is total fallacy. First of all, most people don't hoard their cash, contrary to popular belief. Furthermore, the people who pay the VAST MAJORITY of taxes (the ultra-rich top 1%) don't hoard their money. Just look at the way they live.
Now, stop being short-sighted and follow the trail of money. You have $1 to spend, you choose to buy a chocolate bar. The store you bought the chocolate bar from is now $1 richer (over simplification as their profit margin isn't 100% but you get the idea). That money either goes to pay wages or goes to buy the store owner a chocolate bar of his own etc. but at every single point in the chain that dollar ends up in someone's pocket and what are jobs if not earnings ?
You trust the government, who spends money that is not their own, and doesn't really suffer in the short-term if their spending fails to be more responsible with capital than small business owners who put their lives on the line because they truly believe in the viability of their business ? Please.
As to your argument that the hypothetical dollar may not stay inside the US this is another extremely outdated mercantilist concept. The belief that we should somehow magically maximize exports while minimizing imports (which is impossible because in the long run imports and exports must be equal) in order to keep jobs in the US. The reality is that we don't import for the sake of giving money to people outside of the country. We import because other countries make those products more efficiently than we do. So by trying to keep things entirely domestic you raise everyone's prices and people have less money to spend on the things that they really need. Not to mention that you're promoting inefficient business which will cause the country's GDP to decline since people are not going to be buying your exports because they are more expensive. You are effectively promoting inefficiency which will ultimately lead to jobs being sent to more healthy economies. Way to go.
Yes the money is still in the system, however, you have not CREATED any jobs. You have only relocated jobs.
The problem with government "creating" jobs this way (aside from the fact that it's misleading and a good way to get votes by promising an ignorant public jobs that will not actually be created, just moved from elsewhere) is that government does not risk with it's own money. If you take money out of private enterprise you can pretty much guarantee that the money will not be used efficiently. Thus more jobs get "created" by leaving matters up to the free market rather than redistributing it for the government's perceived benefits.
If a small business owner fails he loses everything he fronted to create his business. There is very powerful incentive to succeed. If government fails they just pass on the blame to everything they possibly can and move on. The tax payers are out money that would have been used much more responsibly in the open market.
Government usually follows the path of "creating jobs" by "investing in infrastructure" because it's a good way to get the public to STFU. Most people are short-sighted. They will see the jobs as a results of the government spending. They see the metaphorical bridge that was built. They see the wages. What they don't see are all the jobs and wages that had to be taken away in the form of taxes to "create" those things.
There is no creation of jobs by government. Government is not a wealth generator. They are not sitting on some pile of magical capital that they can tap into. Every government dollar spent is capital taken out of the economy in the form of taxes. Every government job created is a job taken from somewhere else. Like the GP said, there is no net surplus of jobs as a result of government spending.
See Economics in 1 lesson - Chapter 4 - Public Works Mean Taxes for more info.
Past few years ? It's the oldest trick in the book. Do whatever you want, classify the evidence and protect it by claiming that releasing the information poses risks to national security. By the time the documents finally are declassified you'll be long dead so who cares.
A 1990 episode of Star Trek TNG titled "The Hunted" touched on this issue.
Picard: "A matter of internal security: the age-old cry of the oppressor.
"The relationship always had a "fatherly" element that stopped it going too far and getting in the way of the show."
Getting in the way of the show ? Have you actually bothered to LOOK at Rose ? IMO the show is getting in the way of the porn.
"It took close to a year to get him evicted and the loss of legal fees and rent was a stunning lesson to that landlord."
IANAL but I do watch an unhealthy amount of people's court. A great bulk of those cases deals with the landlord / tenant relationship and rent. While I have no doubt that it could have taken close to a year to go through the process, everything that I have ever heard on the subject tells me that the tenant would have to pay the landlord rent for all of those months that he was staying there.
What I am willing to buy is that, if the lease agreement or state law says that the landlord was, in fact, responsible for the repairs to the septic tank then the judge could have (and probably would have) deducted the cost of the repair from the amount of rent owed. It's certainly possible that the cost of the repair equaled or was greater than the amount owing in which case the landlord would have collected nothing and may have actually had to pay the tenant something if the tenant had a counter-claim. However, the tenant would have had to prove that he paid for the septic repair, that he did so because the landlord refused to and the judge still could have dismissed all cases due to the fact that both parties broke the lease agreement or state laws.
If anyone with more direct knowledge wants to chime in or correct me please do.