Dear Trolling AC who pretends to be foreign or actually is:
Please recognize that overeating has little to do with actual mass intake and more to do with caloric intake, so the perception of overeating is very different from the reality. A plate of healthy eggs and bacon is usually better than a large muffin of relatively equal mass (carbohydrates add up quickly). As it stands the UK and western Europe is slightly thinner than the US but also has a slightly lower poverty rate. In a food-rich environment like the US the poverty level greatly affects the level of quality nutrition available. In other words: Your trolling failed miserably at the first sight of logic, now crawl back into whatever dank shit hole you live in and stop harping on weight as if it is some actual factor in the quality of a person's worth.
For every case you hear about having bad evidence hundreds have open-shut cases. Our system is meant to be inefficient but bureaucracies are inevitably going to try and make it more efficient.
I normally try and refrain from this sort of idiotic banter running rampant in slashdot because most are IT people and get their sense of world politics from regular news sources and rarely take the time to read government research. As it stands China without a major development still lacks major resources for most things. They have rare earth elements which is awesome, but so do the US and Russia (along with various other places). We choose not to exploit them for cost mainly. If rare earth keeps increasing in value we will begin to mine it as well. As for China holding major US debt, we've only developed this debt seriously in the last 30 years, over the course of the last 230+ years we've managed to pay off our debt several times. China holds around a 1/3 of it, another 1/3 by Americans, and another 1/3 by various countries around the world. China doesn't hold the cards as much as the news likes to spin it. The US holds more cards in respect to shutting down trade it just a refusal because in the 1950s free trade became the hallmark of the western world even as it now costs us because multi-national corporations are uninterested in the plight of the US (see Steve Jobs remarks on this). The most realistic answer of "is the US in decline?" is yes, but only so much as China is on the rise. The US isn't in a backslide as China with it's roughly 3 times our population is beginning to use them to exploit capitalism. By no means are we not yet weak enough that we couldn't fight a real war. A simple draft and our advanced air and sea supremacy can still easily destroy most any nation on the planet. But we're rather interested in keeping free trade open still so any real war with China is off the table for now.
Of course the blue laws just prove my point. They're an exception to the rule in the respect to the fact that people still work on Sundays regularly in the modern era (traditionally it was the one day off during agrarian times, sometimes it was a legal issue as a full extension of blue codes sometimes not, depended on the region). But that is the most pure difference between a theocracy and one with a very large majority of a singular religion. It's an argument of queer logic, where anything outside the norm is deemed unusual and undesirable but it doesn't necessarily require it to make sense or be a particular part of a religion or ethical code, it is merely customary to the point of absolution.
Not really, the FCC and FTC regulate most of this stuff. That's why contracts are standard state-to-state in the US. If anything this is clearly what Canowhoopass.com is writing about. I read the PDF quickly and it sounds like they want to go back to the old rules of if you break a contract you need to pay for your subsidy and a huge fee to offset its cost. This is clearly a grab-back move where they lost to the provinces and now want to grab back by having the federal government give them their old rules back. Ironic and sad at the same time.
Wild, in what state do you live that you're allowed a jury trial over a summary conviction? I've never heard of that one. I'm sure you're being honest I just want to know what state that is. Quite interesting they allow juries for that sort of action. In Pennsylvania summary convictions face a magistrate and then a judge at the seat of power, beyond that is the superior court. 80% of offenses that reach the seat of power get dropped but less than 10% get beyond the magistrate (most simply want a fine, not points). It's simply a cost of living issue for most municipalities. Their tax base is so small that in order for the police cost to be justified they have to maintain a constant stream of offenses.
I did have the pleasure of crushing a state cop on his legality to issue tickets from a broken vehicle. Hilarious to watch them fluster and struggle in front of the magistrate, needless to say he didn't show up to the seat of power hearing.
I honestly hate to go into this because you're right for the most part but most cases in the average metropolitan area have overwhelming evidence. The problem is is that the DA, the courts, and the Public Defender's office all have limited resources. So even if you have ten security cameras, three eye witnesses, prints on the weapon, and an arm's length rap sheet it could still take days into weeks to present it to a jury. So instead the DA gives a semi-lenient sentence to avoid having to waste valuable resources on a low-level crime (drugs, GTA, GTL, or a non-violent crime) while spending on the violent ones.
The hands full of people who get charged with criminal offenses who can afford real legal defenses are usually the ones that the DA does want to go after because they tend to be the more violent and society-threatening (business owner/pillar of community murders his wife). The source material reinforces what we've known about the system for years. The dramatic increase actually occurred with the rise of CCTV and security cameras. Ironically the police didn't get better so much as technology made it more feasible to catch even the most mundane crime that would have been unsolvable 30 years ago. Then again a large portion of our prison population should be in rehab centers and mental institutions not prisons but that's an argument for another day.
. ..It's not a theocratic nation. It is in fact a very large majority christian. The difference is it isn't coded into our laws versus into our moral structure. Though our judicial structure is based around enlightenment protestants who may or may not have believed in a traditional christian ideal of God or Christ. Welcome to the world of nuances.
Then start voting to change the agenda of public schools. Do you think private schools who have less authoritative controls are going to be different? I'm not sure where you're getting the numbers from and I honestly don't care at this point. You're trying to make it a cost effectiveness argument and I refuse to stand and let you. Where are you justifying it sucks? Give me a static point, one that accounts for poverty, lack of parental care, and general ambivalence due to the lack of opportunity with education. I'm almost 100% sure you can't simply because most inner-city schools suffer from those three more than anything else and still have run-down buildings and certainly less current infrastructure. Where suburban schools are teaching IT/Programming to High school students their inner-city counterparts are barely getting past basic office skills.
If anything I refer back to my point, vote to change your system before you hand over vouchers. The original intent of vouchers was for those who could afford proper private school to be able to draw their money out and help pay for it. Places that serve elite children will simply raise tuition to match that voucher while cut-rate schools will open and close nearly every school year to avoid being audited and accounted for. Go join your local school board if you're truly upset. I'm not quite tenured with my university but once I am and thus know I'll be here for the ensuing decades, I plan on doing just that.
I keep seeing this argument "we spend more at at-risk schools!" Yet I think people are mistakenly thinking they're reaching parity or exceeding the suburban schools. In inner-city districts they can have upwards of 20 times the children, so even if the state ponied up 5 times the difference it still wouldn't put them in parity. Competition has little to do with school lunches. It has to do with districts in poorer areas using the cheapest food service to get by. Food is not cheap and workers are not cheap to prepare it. Each school needs a small restaurant of workers to prepare it. These people don't just work for peanuts. This is why most districts outsourced it to get cheaper food to afford it on their meager budget. Thus why we have so much worse food.
More money isn't always the answer but to put it bluntly the average year of college is hovering around 10-20K depending on public or private. That includes nothing but teachers and the buildings. We're asking school districts to spend far less doing far more. With less intelligent children who may not be interested nearly as much as college kids.
You elect school boards, you can proposition new laws and changes. Just because you do not does not mean it can not be done. Private schools give you less control because they are effectively accountable to nobody. Sure they have to follow certain rules but the system isn't designed for oversight, in most of these charter schools any kind of abuse goes unreported because there are no people interested in the children simply because they're all employees of a company and the company controls them. It's a sad reality of free markets.
Every successful western nation disagrees with you. How does that make you feel? Perhaps you should move to a place where you can live freely off the land as king libertarian on libertarian island.
If you think ketchup and pizza are classified as vegetables as bad under charter schools these kids would face a far worse fate. Teacher salaries are far worse at Charter schools unless union-backed salaries are mandated and essentially charter school teacher turnover is much higher because they have no pension and no protection. Teaching children is good and all but teachers need professional protection like everybody else.
This being said: BRING SOME DAMN PROOF....Good lord, people claim this crap about unions shutting down charter schools and then never bring up any solid proof. Keep spouting the right wing talking points...
Ugh, I don't know where you're getting your numbers. Most states are still paying half that...But lets say this is average, since it is. Some schools are paying 9K per student, some are getting 27K per student. Lets take your 14 student average..Now divide it by 8 (approximately how many teachers/subjects they'll see in a day.) and we get a whopping 31.5K. It's not a matter of spending on average, it's a matter of spending at at-risk schools. The averages skew and hide the reality of the situation where enormous amounts of suburban schools bring the average up while dividing less per student. I pulled out a government graph showing less than half is spent on teacher salaries in NJ (around 7K with benefits) so in many instances that money also counts towards their lunches, school renovations, and an assortment of other things. All charter schools do are cherry pick students with good backgrounds or get applications from students with interested parents. In other words they have parental involvement so their numbers skew better by essentially gaming the system. Private industry cannot run anything more efficiently or cheaper than a public utility/service. They need to make a profit and a healthy one at that.
But I can't. Most if not all Slashdotters are not actual teachers. I see the occasional claim that they're a teacher and yet somehow miraculously hate their union, want vouchers, or some other crazy asinine thing that no actual teacher seems to want. In most cases the issue of education is something that scientists can't solve because frankly...they're scientists. I don't pretend to be a nuclear physicist so I don't stray into the nuclear research laboratory telling everybody how to do their job yet I see everyday non-teachers assuming they know how the system works and demand to make changes to it.
Simply put the issue in most cases is class size and level of community participation. Ideal class size is somewhere around 14 pupils. The average public classroom is closing in on 30. Doubling the student body over recommended size has a negative effect. Then through into the issue the lack of community participation through parents and support groups like neighbors and such and you're bond to have a greater issue. Too much of this discussion revolves around cost-effectiveness when we should be ideally looking at effectiveness period. As it stands most in-need education systems are exceptionally poor and suffer from low funding compared to their suburban rivals. This just combines with the overall issues of diversity and classism that runs rampant in society.
So we end up with people like Michelle Malkin strolling around claiming they know the answer when they don't and feed it to the simpletons who want to unravel unions in favor of privately owned schools that turn a profit for owners rather than publicly owned ones that are truly accountable.
Simple enough reason: Europe having overlapping countries and nationalism has allowed for diverse telephony to develop. The US dominated by the Bell System split the bells up into regional carriers who has now swallowed each other back up leaving East Bell (Verizon) and West Bell [AT&T (Formerly SBC)] as the de facto service providers. On top of that they own most of the spectrum and have been hoarding it to avoid competition. Basically we're screwed because we're a large country that is too lazy to unravel corporate control and offer comparable plans.
T-Mobile's CTO is merely pointing out subsidized phone plans hide the cost of ownership and if we look at marketing (specifically all the TV adverts) it focuses on the subsidized pricing scheme of the phone and almost never mentions the cost of the plan. Of course this favor's T-Mobile's value pricing on their contracts instead of their less top-tier selection of phones. In many cases I do agree but outfitting people with 600 dollar cell phones is a steep price to pay up front. I prefer the democratization of the subsidy.
Even 5 dollars into the system is minimal. I was merely going at the issue of slashdot's love affair with black-white arguments realizing that TF2 is a nuanced subject that went F2P after years of sales and remains profitable by selling visual upgrades. In essence this particular case is a great model for extending the life of a multiplayer game more than anything to do with "Freemium" models.
. ..Free players need only buy 1 item from the Mann Co. store to move up. I believe the cheapest item in the game hovers around.25 cents? Maybe 50 cents..It's still exceptionally cheap. Once again the upgrade weapons are accessible through crafting and achievements. Achievements can be done on achievement servers and would speed the play up all together. The argument is hollow because for some reason detractors desperately want to make this a greater ideological argument than it is. Valve made a great game and found the revenue stream propped up by giving it away and selling items there after.
Why would you assume that? Facebook is like a really large nightclub. You & your circle of friends are in the VIP room but if a fight breaks out the bouncers are going to come in and deal with it. If anybody had taken an US Political theory course would know that privacy exists in two places, in a private residence & between patient & doctor.
Slashdot tends to rattle on about privacy like you're all spies or horrible sex fiends hiding from the past. You're just not that unique, snowflake.
Define capitalism before I bother to go further because you're very clearly trying to strawman the argument. I was pointing out the natural institutionalization of government in the 20th and 21st century. You drew on the idea of socialism where I never mention it. If anything I am drawing a comparison to a mixed government versus a hard-core libertarian government.
Socialist! I would glare at you hard now in the most satirical of ways.
What you just described is a form of socialism where the government backs private corporations in order to gain a better product and advance society. We would be setting up these sorts of programs if the New Deal coalition had held together longer. Instead we have a party that is wholly uninterested in public research and a party that would support it but is afraid of being tarred for socialism that is beneficial to society.
Just like Republicans want to cut social security, interfere in healthcare on a personal level for women's reproductive rights, and generally force all government expenditures onto the backs of the poor. The democrats want to do....none of that surprisingly. The only think I learn from/. in terms of politics is that it is overwhelming populated with very smart people who have STEM or CS degrees but no nothing of basic politics and seem to follow Ron Paul more often than not. As a whole/. skews south park conservative (i.e. they hate corporations but they also hate hippies, ultimately though their corporate hate is put aside because they're fundamentally greedy and thus want to be rich like said corporations). I think I am one of the only PhD holders who regularly posts that has their doctorate in a social science.
I repeatedly see the "big government" argument trotted out but most people who use it here don't really understand how bad of a trope it really is. Modern governments are large by definition. They are required to regulate almost all aspects of business to keep the environment safe, workers safe, and produce a living wage. Ricardo over a 200 years ago realized that with surplus labor the value of said labor would collapse and thus the need to rise above subsistence became a job of the government. If these people wish to go back to a provisional government that allowed for market control a fair portion of the US population would die of starvation if not rebel in a civil war against those who still held money and power. This is just a simple example of the stupidity spouted around/. involving politics. It's why I try to not involve myself too often but really the sheer stupidity overwhelms my senses and I have to froth a little at times.
That actually sounds like an intriguing way of dealing with passports. Outlandish for sure and meant to be satirical but intriguing none the less. We get into most foreign countries with far less background check unless we're traveling far and need a visa and even then they don't check that far, usually criminal records. I know/. is a hardcore paranoia crowd about what they look at on the internet (I can only imagine they must all be looking at giraffe porn...such long necks). But imagine an instant background check that factored in your internet history and other quickly attainable information to be let into a country and issued a visa on the spot rather than waiting months. I know nobody is going to go to a country seeking a visa without one but it's an example of the power of our internet browsing history as an acceptable and fast tool for background checks.
To be fair it was not as sinister as it implies. It is the thinking that central banking has more affect on economics than legislature action. It isn't as if they could overrule the government on murder or control something in a deeper way. Also this is why in almost every modern western country the government has control of the money supply and sets policy from there...Including the US. We just simply choose to use a more autonomous system to avoid it being directly affected by short-term politics.
For the record most of your complaints are pretty standard.
1.) The EPA's numbers are consistently higher than real-world estimates simply because of altitude, grade, and driving habits. I live in a very mountainous region so I get less than advertised. Highway speeds to the EPA are far less than normal highway speeds.
2.) I'm not sure about this but is it supposed to? The internal mechanism may be broke and if so I'm sure it was under warranty.
3.) Sounds like too much travel or a gap, it can be a huge issue and I would have it checked out, not necessarily a manufacturing defect though.
4.) Meh, auto trans do that. Not all of them are perfect.
5.) bad seal on the sun roof. That is a fairly common issue amongst GM cars but it happens, again it should have been a warranty issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Trolling AC who pretends to be foreign or actually is:
Please recognize that overeating has little to do with actual mass intake and more to do with caloric intake, so the perception of overeating is very different from the reality. A plate of healthy eggs and bacon is usually better than a large muffin of relatively equal mass (carbohydrates add up quickly). As it stands the UK and western Europe is slightly thinner than the US but also has a slightly lower poverty rate. In a food-rich environment like the US the poverty level greatly affects the level of quality nutrition available. In other words: Your trolling failed miserably at the first sight of logic, now crawl back into whatever dank shit hole you live in and stop harping on weight as if it is some actual factor in the quality of a person's worth.
For every case you hear about having bad evidence hundreds have open-shut cases. Our system is meant to be inefficient but bureaucracies are inevitably going to try and make it more efficient.
I normally try and refrain from this sort of idiotic banter running rampant in slashdot because most are IT people and get their sense of world politics from regular news sources and rarely take the time to read government research. As it stands China without a major development still lacks major resources for most things. They have rare earth elements which is awesome, but so do the US and Russia (along with various other places). We choose not to exploit them for cost mainly. If rare earth keeps increasing in value we will begin to mine it as well. As for China holding major US debt, we've only developed this debt seriously in the last 30 years, over the course of the last 230+ years we've managed to pay off our debt several times. China holds around a 1/3 of it, another 1/3 by Americans, and another 1/3 by various countries around the world. China doesn't hold the cards as much as the news likes to spin it. The US holds more cards in respect to shutting down trade it just a refusal because in the 1950s free trade became the hallmark of the western world even as it now costs us because multi-national corporations are uninterested in the plight of the US (see Steve Jobs remarks on this). The most realistic answer of "is the US in decline?" is yes, but only so much as China is on the rise. The US isn't in a backslide as China with it's roughly 3 times our population is beginning to use them to exploit capitalism. By no means are we not yet weak enough that we couldn't fight a real war. A simple draft and our advanced air and sea supremacy can still easily destroy most any nation on the planet. But we're rather interested in keeping free trade open still so any real war with China is off the table for now.
Of course the blue laws just prove my point. They're an exception to the rule in the respect to the fact that people still work on Sundays regularly in the modern era (traditionally it was the one day off during agrarian times, sometimes it was a legal issue as a full extension of blue codes sometimes not, depended on the region). But that is the most pure difference between a theocracy and one with a very large majority of a singular religion. It's an argument of queer logic, where anything outside the norm is deemed unusual and undesirable but it doesn't necessarily require it to make sense or be a particular part of a religion or ethical code, it is merely customary to the point of absolution.
Not really, the FCC and FTC regulate most of this stuff. That's why contracts are standard state-to-state in the US. If anything this is clearly what Canowhoopass.com is writing about. I read the PDF quickly and it sounds like they want to go back to the old rules of if you break a contract you need to pay for your subsidy and a huge fee to offset its cost. This is clearly a grab-back move where they lost to the provinces and now want to grab back by having the federal government give them their old rules back. Ironic and sad at the same time.
Wild, in what state do you live that you're allowed a jury trial over a summary conviction? I've never heard of that one. I'm sure you're being honest I just want to know what state that is. Quite interesting they allow juries for that sort of action. In Pennsylvania summary convictions face a magistrate and then a judge at the seat of power, beyond that is the superior court. 80% of offenses that reach the seat of power get dropped but less than 10% get beyond the magistrate (most simply want a fine, not points). It's simply a cost of living issue for most municipalities. Their tax base is so small that in order for the police cost to be justified they have to maintain a constant stream of offenses.
I did have the pleasure of crushing a state cop on his legality to issue tickets from a broken vehicle. Hilarious to watch them fluster and struggle in front of the magistrate, needless to say he didn't show up to the seat of power hearing.
I honestly hate to go into this because you're right for the most part but most cases in the average metropolitan area have overwhelming evidence. The problem is is that the DA, the courts, and the Public Defender's office all have limited resources. So even if you have ten security cameras, three eye witnesses, prints on the weapon, and an arm's length rap sheet it could still take days into weeks to present it to a jury. So instead the DA gives a semi-lenient sentence to avoid having to waste valuable resources on a low-level crime (drugs, GTA, GTL, or a non-violent crime) while spending on the violent ones.
The hands full of people who get charged with criminal offenses who can afford real legal defenses are usually the ones that the DA does want to go after because they tend to be the more violent and society-threatening (business owner/pillar of community murders his wife). The source material reinforces what we've known about the system for years. The dramatic increase actually occurred with the rise of CCTV and security cameras. Ironically the police didn't get better so much as technology made it more feasible to catch even the most mundane crime that would have been unsolvable 30 years ago. Then again a large portion of our prison population should be in rehab centers and mental institutions not prisons but that's an argument for another day.
. . .It's not a theocratic nation. It is in fact a very large majority christian. The difference is it isn't coded into our laws versus into our moral structure. Though our judicial structure is based around enlightenment protestants who may or may not have believed in a traditional christian ideal of God or Christ. Welcome to the world of nuances.
Then start voting to change the agenda of public schools. Do you think private schools who have less authoritative controls are going to be different? I'm not sure where you're getting the numbers from and I honestly don't care at this point. You're trying to make it a cost effectiveness argument and I refuse to stand and let you. Where are you justifying it sucks? Give me a static point, one that accounts for poverty, lack of parental care, and general ambivalence due to the lack of opportunity with education. I'm almost 100% sure you can't simply because most inner-city schools suffer from those three more than anything else and still have run-down buildings and certainly less current infrastructure. Where suburban schools are teaching IT/Programming to High school students their inner-city counterparts are barely getting past basic office skills.
If anything I refer back to my point, vote to change your system before you hand over vouchers. The original intent of vouchers was for those who could afford proper private school to be able to draw their money out and help pay for it. Places that serve elite children will simply raise tuition to match that voucher while cut-rate schools will open and close nearly every school year to avoid being audited and accounted for. Go join your local school board if you're truly upset. I'm not quite tenured with my university but once I am and thus know I'll be here for the ensuing decades, I plan on doing just that.
I keep seeing this argument "we spend more at at-risk schools!" Yet I think people are mistakenly thinking they're reaching parity or exceeding the suburban schools. In inner-city districts they can have upwards of 20 times the children, so even if the state ponied up 5 times the difference it still wouldn't put them in parity. Competition has little to do with school lunches. It has to do with districts in poorer areas using the cheapest food service to get by. Food is not cheap and workers are not cheap to prepare it. Each school needs a small restaurant of workers to prepare it. These people don't just work for peanuts. This is why most districts outsourced it to get cheaper food to afford it on their meager budget. Thus why we have so much worse food.
More money isn't always the answer but to put it bluntly the average year of college is hovering around 10-20K depending on public or private. That includes nothing but teachers and the buildings. We're asking school districts to spend far less doing far more. With less intelligent children who may not be interested nearly as much as college kids.
You elect school boards, you can proposition new laws and changes. Just because you do not does not mean it can not be done. Private schools give you less control because they are effectively accountable to nobody. Sure they have to follow certain rules but the system isn't designed for oversight, in most of these charter schools any kind of abuse goes unreported because there are no people interested in the children simply because they're all employees of a company and the company controls them. It's a sad reality of free markets.
Every successful western nation disagrees with you. How does that make you feel? Perhaps you should move to a place where you can live freely off the land as king libertarian on libertarian island.
If you think ketchup and pizza are classified as vegetables as bad under charter schools these kids would face a far worse fate. Teacher salaries are far worse at Charter schools unless union-backed salaries are mandated and essentially charter school teacher turnover is much higher because they have no pension and no protection. Teaching children is good and all but teachers need professional protection like everybody else.
This being said: BRING SOME DAMN PROOF....Good lord, people claim this crap about unions shutting down charter schools and then never bring up any solid proof. Keep spouting the right wing talking points...
Ugh, I don't know where you're getting your numbers. Most states are still paying half that...But lets say this is average, since it is. Some schools are paying 9K per student, some are getting 27K per student. Lets take your 14 student average..Now divide it by 8 (approximately how many teachers/subjects they'll see in a day.) and we get a whopping 31.5K. It's not a matter of spending on average, it's a matter of spending at at-risk schools. The averages skew and hide the reality of the situation where enormous amounts of suburban schools bring the average up while dividing less per student. I pulled out a government graph showing less than half is spent on teacher salaries in NJ (around 7K with benefits) so in many instances that money also counts towards their lunches, school renovations, and an assortment of other things. All charter schools do are cherry pick students with good backgrounds or get applications from students with interested parents. In other words they have parental involvement so their numbers skew better by essentially gaming the system. Private industry cannot run anything more efficiently or cheaper than a public utility/service. They need to make a profit and a healthy one at that.
But I can't. Most if not all Slashdotters are not actual teachers. I see the occasional claim that they're a teacher and yet somehow miraculously hate their union, want vouchers, or some other crazy asinine thing that no actual teacher seems to want. In most cases the issue of education is something that scientists can't solve because frankly...they're scientists. I don't pretend to be a nuclear physicist so I don't stray into the nuclear research laboratory telling everybody how to do their job yet I see everyday non-teachers assuming they know how the system works and demand to make changes to it.
Simply put the issue in most cases is class size and level of community participation. Ideal class size is somewhere around 14 pupils. The average public classroom is closing in on 30. Doubling the student body over recommended size has a negative effect. Then through into the issue the lack of community participation through parents and support groups like neighbors and such and you're bond to have a greater issue. Too much of this discussion revolves around cost-effectiveness when we should be ideally looking at effectiveness period. As it stands most in-need education systems are exceptionally poor and suffer from low funding compared to their suburban rivals. This just combines with the overall issues of diversity and classism that runs rampant in society.
So we end up with people like Michelle Malkin strolling around claiming they know the answer when they don't and feed it to the simpletons who want to unravel unions in favor of privately owned schools that turn a profit for owners rather than publicly owned ones that are truly accountable.
Simple enough reason: Europe having overlapping countries and nationalism has allowed for diverse telephony to develop. The US dominated by the Bell System split the bells up into regional carriers who has now swallowed each other back up leaving East Bell (Verizon) and West Bell [AT&T (Formerly SBC)] as the de facto service providers. On top of that they own most of the spectrum and have been hoarding it to avoid competition. Basically we're screwed because we're a large country that is too lazy to unravel corporate control and offer comparable plans.
T-Mobile's CTO is merely pointing out subsidized phone plans hide the cost of ownership and if we look at marketing (specifically all the TV adverts) it focuses on the subsidized pricing scheme of the phone and almost never mentions the cost of the plan. Of course this favor's T-Mobile's value pricing on their contracts instead of their less top-tier selection of phones. In many cases I do agree but outfitting people with 600 dollar cell phones is a steep price to pay up front. I prefer the democratization of the subsidy.
Even 5 dollars into the system is minimal. I was merely going at the issue of slashdot's love affair with black-white arguments realizing that TF2 is a nuanced subject that went F2P after years of sales and remains profitable by selling visual upgrades. In essence this particular case is a great model for extending the life of a multiplayer game more than anything to do with "Freemium" models.
. . .Free players need only buy 1 item from the Mann Co. store to move up. I believe the cheapest item in the game hovers around .25 cents? Maybe 50 cents..It's still exceptionally cheap. Once again the upgrade weapons are accessible through crafting and achievements. Achievements can be done on achievement servers and would speed the play up all together. The argument is hollow because for some reason detractors desperately want to make this a greater ideological argument than it is. Valve made a great game and found the revenue stream propped up by giving it away and selling items there after.
Why would you assume that? Facebook is like a really large nightclub. You & your circle of friends are in the VIP room but if a fight breaks out the bouncers are going to come in and deal with it. If anybody had taken an US Political theory course would know that privacy exists in two places, in a private residence & between patient & doctor.
Slashdot tends to rattle on about privacy like you're all spies or horrible sex fiends hiding from the past. You're just not that unique, snowflake.
Define capitalism before I bother to go further because you're very clearly trying to strawman the argument. I was pointing out the natural institutionalization of government in the 20th and 21st century. You drew on the idea of socialism where I never mention it. If anything I am drawing a comparison to a mixed government versus a hard-core libertarian government.
Socialist! I would glare at you hard now in the most satirical of ways.
What you just described is a form of socialism where the government backs private corporations in order to gain a better product and advance society. We would be setting up these sorts of programs if the New Deal coalition had held together longer. Instead we have a party that is wholly uninterested in public research and a party that would support it but is afraid of being tarred for socialism that is beneficial to society.
Just like Republicans want to cut social security, interfere in healthcare on a personal level for women's reproductive rights, and generally force all government expenditures onto the backs of the poor. The democrats want to do....none of that surprisingly. The only think I learn from /. in terms of politics is that it is overwhelming populated with very smart people who have STEM or CS degrees but no nothing of basic politics and seem to follow Ron Paul more often than not. As a whole /. skews south park conservative (i.e. they hate corporations but they also hate hippies, ultimately though their corporate hate is put aside because they're fundamentally greedy and thus want to be rich like said corporations). I think I am one of the only PhD holders who regularly posts that has their doctorate in a social science.
I repeatedly see the "big government" argument trotted out but most people who use it here don't really understand how bad of a trope it really is. Modern governments are large by definition. They are required to regulate almost all aspects of business to keep the environment safe, workers safe, and produce a living wage. Ricardo over a 200 years ago realized that with surplus labor the value of said labor would collapse and thus the need to rise above subsistence became a job of the government. If these people wish to go back to a provisional government that allowed for market control a fair portion of the US population would die of starvation if not rebel in a civil war against those who still held money and power. This is just a simple example of the stupidity spouted around /. involving politics. It's why I try to not involve myself too often but really the sheer stupidity overwhelms my senses and I have to froth a little at times.
That actually sounds like an intriguing way of dealing with passports. Outlandish for sure and meant to be satirical but intriguing none the less. We get into most foreign countries with far less background check unless we're traveling far and need a visa and even then they don't check that far, usually criminal records. I know /. is a hardcore paranoia crowd about what they look at on the internet (I can only imagine they must all be looking at giraffe porn...such long necks). But imagine an instant background check that factored in your internet history and other quickly attainable information to be let into a country and issued a visa on the spot rather than waiting months. I know nobody is going to go to a country seeking a visa without one but it's an example of the power of our internet browsing history as an acceptable and fast tool for background checks.
To be fair it was not as sinister as it implies. It is the thinking that central banking has more affect on economics than legislature action. It isn't as if they could overrule the government on murder or control something in a deeper way. Also this is why in almost every modern western country the government has control of the money supply and sets policy from there...Including the US. We just simply choose to use a more autonomous system to avoid it being directly affected by short-term politics.
For the record most of your complaints are pretty standard.
1.) The EPA's numbers are consistently higher than real-world estimates simply because of altitude, grade, and driving habits. I live in a very mountainous region so I get less than advertised. Highway speeds to the EPA are far less than normal highway speeds.
2.) I'm not sure about this but is it supposed to? The internal mechanism may be broke and if so I'm sure it was under warranty.
3.) Sounds like too much travel or a gap, it can be a huge issue and I would have it checked out, not necessarily a manufacturing defect though.
4.) Meh, auto trans do that. Not all of them are perfect.
5.) bad seal on the sun roof. That is a fairly common issue amongst GM cars but it happens, again it should have been a warranty issue.