The law entirely disagrees with you, and beside that, the judgement wasn't against the photo the defendant took, it was against the defendant and the photo was part of the evidence against him. The judge determined that the defendant's purpose in taking the photo was a direct attempt to circumvent copyright so that he could avoid paying licensing fees. He was actually using the original photo for commercial purposes and only took his own when he was told he couldn't do that without paying a fee to the original photographer. On top of that the photo he took was obviously derivative of the original, even down to the same method of postprocessing, with minor changes to again try to sidestep the copyright. In the absence of all of this, I doubt the judge would have considered the case, but it rarely gets this blatant so the defendant got burned.
The thing I see here that makes it fly isn't the amount of effort but the obvious duplication of effort. The defendant tried to use the plaintiff's photo commercially and was called to task for it. They couldn't come to an agreement about licensing fees for that photo, so the defendant went out and made an obvious effort to reproduce the photo himself, for the express purpose of circumventing the copyright. It's that duplication of effort to evade copyright that leads me to view this as infringement. If the defendant had simply made a similar photo without first laying the groundwork for motive to evade paying licensing fees, then I'd feel that it was overstepping (and the law agrees which is why proof that you've never seen the original is a complete defense against infringment charges), but in this particular case it's pretty plain why he made and processed the photo as he did.
Can you supply some verifiable citation of any of this stuff? You make an awful lot of assertions but I haven't seen any proof of any of the things you've said from any credible source. "My sister said..." and "Some info did not make it out to the general press..." are the hallmarks of the tinfoil hat set. Back it up or pack it up, please.
The point you missed is in "Anyone born to an Israeli citizen in Israel is an Israeli citizen." Is everyone born to an Israeli citizen in Israel Jewish? If not, then reconcile this with consistently describing Israel as a Jewish state and then doing the same comparison as you did above with Greece and England. That's where it breaks down. There are plenty of Jewish people who aren't Israeli (and, as you stated elsewhere, plenty of Israelis who don't practice Judaism), but there aren't any Greek people who aren't Greek, by definition. You're not the first person I've seen who uses the word Jewish to mean "Israeli" and "of the faith of Judaism" interchangeably as it suits your needs, but they're not one and the same. You said in a different post, "Still, many voice opinions that, if you peel all of the layers, boil down to stating that every ethnic group of people in the world deserve self governance except the Jews." Do you mean "Jews" in this statement to represent those of the faith of Judaism, or of the state of Israel, or what? Does an Israeli citizen who's Islamic count in this use of the word "Jews" and does that make any sense at all to you? I think this makes it pretty clear what point you're missing.
Here we go with the "clearly stated falsifiable" stuff again. OK, since clearly stating it at least once doesn't do it, here it is again, in bullet points for easy consumption.
- Observations that do not line up with a climate model with a component for human-generated greenhouse gases would serve as falsifying data. I haven't found a climate model yet that works without calculating in the increase in CO2 from the Industrial Revolution forward.
- Observations that would prove for an external model against a greenhouse model would serve as falsifying data. Observations of a cooling stratosphere point to greenhouse effects, not external warming as from increased solar activity.
- Observations of average temperatures that showed cooling or no increase when human factors are incorporated would serve as falsifying evidence. As stated above, models that don't consider human-generated greenhouse gases slide away from observed data and models that include it match well with observation.
Do I really need to keep going? Here are three clearly stated falsifiable hypotheses that haven't been falsified (and have been reinforced) by observable data. Now, how willing are you to "play that game" in the face of such evidence?
You must be right; after all, death rates in war are always 1:1, and it's not like 19 assholes with nothing more than boxcutters could kill over 3000 people.
This is disingenuous. A surprise attack can easily shift the odds for a specific conflict, but that's not what we're discussing. If you add up the casualties over the course of the whole struggle we've had with al-Qaeda, the numbers shift quite a bit. Also, you're changing the definition of the phrase. Death rates in war aren't always 1:1 because not all wars are wars of attrition and not all conflicts are balanced.
I'm certain the British Empire was thinking the same thing, circa 1760.
You'd most certainly be wrong, then. The Brits in their empire days were fighting wars of conquest, not attrition. There was never a time when the British plan for fighting a war was "dig in and wear them down" (barring the Battle of Britain, and that was more "hold out until the Yanks get their butts in gear"), it was always a plan of overwhelming force and technology. In fact, it was attrition that finally did them in, with opponents that could afford vastly unbalanced losses and still come out ahead.
I think I'll skip going around the barn again on your definition of credit versus mine, but I will address the one factual error here that jumped out.
Charging your card and writing a check are synonymous steps in the process...
No, they're not. As I said above, a check is a negotiable instrument. A credit card payment isn't, and that's the reason why you'll never face fraud charges for charging something you can't afford. The synonymous event to a check is when the merchant bank transfers the money from their account to the seller during the settlement. Charging your card is requesting that transfer, but it's the credit card issuer that makes the (criminally prosecutable) statement that they have the funds available when they approve it. That's why you can never face fraud charges for the money transfer like you can with a check, where you personally state with your check that the funds are available. If you then fail to pay your debt to the credit card issuer, then you don't face fraud charges or other criminal action, you face civil action for the failure to uphold your payment contract.
Yes, it is. Why do you think it is called a credit card? There's a very real chance you will not pay your debt. Whether it's a card issuing bank or a service provider, they are giving you short-term credit.
It's called a credit card because you're allowed to revolve the debt if you choose. To use your own argument against you, an American Express card allows you to pay at the end of the month, but it's not called a credit card, it's called a charge card. If giving someone time after the transaction to pay is "short term credit", then why don't they call it a credit card? The answer is that this isn't considered credit.
That's different. If you write a check and it bounces, you could be criminally charged for fraud. That doesn't happen with credit.
That's because fraud and nonpayment of debt aren't the same thing, and a check is a negotiable instrument whereas a credit card isn't. Debt is a civil matter, not criminal. Commit fraud with the card and you could also go to prison.
If you're given a due date to repay, it is credit. If payment is demanded right away, it is not.
This doesn't match up to the usual definitions for credit at all. Nobody in the financial world considers "net 30" to be credit. If you're going to redefine words to make your argument, then it's pointless to continue.
Keep your sigh to yourself. The definition of credit doesn't incorporate float, so you're simply redefining the word in different way than the entire financial world. If you don't like it, take it up with the entire financial industry.
The cost of card transactions are a savings over the loss of business for not taking the cards, else I'd suspect that your wife wouldn't take credit cards. The fact that she can't charge extra for credit cards is indeed a small price to pay. If you disagree, tell her to stop accepting them and then check her books after a month to see if she's gained or lost.
You're not allowed to change the definition of a word to make your argument work. Just because you call "float" by the word "credit" doesn't make it so for the people who discuss credit. AMEX cards are called charge cards because they don't allow you to revolve the debt through a payment cycle, but that doesn't make the money "credit" by the usual definition, it's float that they allow you because you're paying a membership fee to them for the service.
If you really want to know whether something is credit, as what happens if you don't pay it. A bounced check can land you in jail for committing fraud. That can't happen with an American Express card, because they are extending you short-term credit.
I'll have to address this mess of logic in pieces. Firstly, you're trying to define "debt" as "credit", and we discussed changing definitions above. Secondly, bouncing a check can only get you arrested for fraud if the court can demonstrate intent to defraud, so accidentally bouncing a check does not result in prosecution. Moreover, the act of writing a bad check and the debt that it represents are separate things in the court (check fraud is a crime but debt is a civil matter), so even while you'd face criminal charges for purposely writing a bad check, you'd still have to handle the debt owed by some means and that's exactly the same as not paying a bill to AmEx for the card. To say it a different way, the reason you can't land in jail for not paying your AmEx bill has nothing to do with whether it's credit, it's because debt is a civil matter, not criminal.
For every person out there who "carelessly" over-spends and digs themselves into debt, then glibly declares bankruptcy, we have several thousand people out there who've seen virtually no increase in pay over the last decade. Been repeatedly laid off, only to endure extended periods of unemployment. Get's hit with a medical bill of catastrophic proportions while having their health insurance eliminated by their employer. All the while sinking slowing into credit card debt just paying for the necessities of life. The average American, lost 15% of their real net wealth over the last 10 years, while the top 1% saw their personal wealth explode in value.
While it sucks that many people are taking a financial hit these days, this argument is the reason why a lot of people ignore you. Say what you will about how everyone is suffering, but at its worst a tenth of the population lost their jobs and the number of people bankrupted by medical bills falls far short of the people who bankrupt on cunsomer debt, so your argument starts to sound like "the sky is falling!". Also, what point does talking about the top 1% serve to your argument, other than to throw in a tangential dig at the wealthy?
Sixty years ago, a man could go to virtually any school in the country with a GI loan, get a good job, buy a home, raise a family and put his kids through college.
Sixty years ago, the average household had one car and they paid nothing for things like TV service. When I've had people assess what's truly necessary to live, things like unlimited minutes tend to fall by the wayside, and once you realize that you'll find that it's not nearly as dire for most people as you imply. Oh, and the GI bill can still get you a good education, and you could never go to an Ivy League level school on the GI bill alone, so that's another argument shot down.
The only places in the U.S that have houses that are affordable are in depressed economic communities.
Okay, this is just nonsensical, based on the fact that foreclosure rates in the worst places for such things don't approach one percent of housing and on average for the U.S. was 0.2% last year.
So the consumer is naked, unprotected in a wilderness of ravening financial institutions, and when they raise their rates, its because they simply want more of your money for doing the same old thing.
Oh, woe betide! Of course, at issue here is living on credit in the first place, which you seem to think is a necessity of life but really isn't, and that's the crux of the problem. I've never met a bank that would force you to open a loan at gunpoint, and one would hope that someone who had just declared bankruptcy would be well informed about the dangers of overusing credit.
If the banks are issuing credit cards 6 months after a bankruptcy, its because they won't stop bleeding you until your dead.
If you're opening a credit card (that isn't a secured account) six months after you declared bankruptcy, then you've got a bigger problem than a predatory bank.
If your credit card company did this, then they were foolish. They make money on customers who don't carry debt, so such a scenario makes no business sense.
Why not consider day cares in these giant megaplexes. Just saying it'd be an interesting approach.
Massive liability. There's no way it would turn out to be profitable to run such a facility because of the cost of insurance and having to have trained and vetted employees. That says nothing about the possibility of lawsuits if Junior got hurt or there was suspicion of molestation or someone checked out the kid to someone non-custodial or whatever. Add to that the fact that people won't pay extra to put Junior in the daycare (they'll just take the kids into the theater with them which defeats the purpose) and you can see why nobody's doing it.
There's a cost to run a film, payable back to the publisher. So they have to earn more in concessions than they're paying for that license fee plus the cost to operate. The trick is that the license fee for second-run movies is vastly cheaper than first-run, so getting it back on profits from the concessions is very easy on high volume (which the free admission generates).
In the northeast US, there's a chain of cinema pubs called Chunky's. They seat for movies at tables, and there's beer and other adult libations available along with full meals of pretty decent food. It's a great way to see a movie, I'll definitely agree.
I'd say the break point for me would be the price where I could attend the movie with my family (four people) with a drink for each of us and a bucket of popcorn to share, for the same cost as buying the DVD at a store. So, $30-40 or thereabouts. The problem I encounter now is that, even at matinee prices, I'm at that cost by the time I've bought the tickets, and four drinks and a bucket of popcorn costs (at the cheapest theater in my area) $30. If a ticket to a good movie was five bucks, and the concessions cost another five, I'd go a whole lot more often and so would a lot of people I know. But for our last visit to see How To Train Your Dragon in the theater, it cost a total of $78.00, and I just can't afford that any more. The funniest part is that, at half the price, I'd probably be going more than twice as often because forty bucks is the "mad" money we set aside for the week and we very rarely "plan" to see a movie rather than just deciding that it would be fun, and it's pretty much always turned down when we consider it because by the time we've saved for two weeks for a movie, we've decided to do something else like a restaurant meal instead.
You can fix too-high volume yourself with a set of fifty cent earplugs. You can't do anything about image-induced headaches other than avoid the movie. I can't watch most 3D movies because I can't fit the glasses over my eyeglasses, and I can't see the film without my eyeglasses. So, I have a choice of blurry or not attending. Guess which one I've chosen many, many times, at the cost of a family of four in the cinema seats (since they'll stay home with me rather than leave me home alone)?
It's not nostalgia, either. It's a genuine like of the stuff you saw as a young adult. Even your one-off example of Aliens actually proves my point - I was young when that came out and I think it was awesome (saw it before I saw Alien, too). But I was old enough already to read reviews, and I distinctly remember the reviews of the day - some of them, at least - complaining that they'd taken the masterfully suspenseful Alien, done a lame sequel to it and filled it with action sequences so that you wouldn't notice what a bad movie it was.
I've seen a number of good arguments that the backlash was a genre flip rather than "get off my lawn" type stuff. Many of the people who really liked Alien were fans of horror films, and Alien was a good horror film. The problem is that Aliens was not a horror film, it was an action film, so it didn't appeal to the exact same audience. I've found even today that the only people who really, really like both movies tend to be fans of sci-fi films in general.
Well, in our world, for one. Not paying a debt until it's due doesn't constitute credit, it's called "float" in financial circles. If someone sells you a good or service and doesn't require payment until the end of the month, then it's not "buying on credit" to hold off paying until that date. So, in short, you're right that it's not length of repayment that's a factor, but whether you're being extended credit (buying something for the promise of repayment against future income) or whether you're being given a float to allow you to gather the funds in the form agreed upon (which is why so many businesses started offering due dates for purchases in the first place).
If accident rates go down, payouts go down, which means premiums go down, which means profits go down.
This doesn't make any sense. If payouts go down more than premiums go down, then there's profit in the difference, and I can guarantee that a company that gets its daily bread from playing percentages will be able to work this out to their advantage.
Insurance companies aren't in business to keep you safe, they're in business to sell you their product; which you are required to buy.
Firstly, they are in the business of keeping you safe, because that reduces the chance of paying out on the policy. Secondly, it's not mandatory everywhere. You sound awfully bitter about insurance.
Your comparison falls short. Kamikaze pilots weren't suicide bombers by any stretch, they were a good bit more "do or die" combatants. They were attacking military targets in a declared and ongoing war, and they were only supposed to ram ships if they failed to achieve their goal by conventional means. If they managed to successfully attack their target with the weapons they had, they were to return to base for refit. Many of them couldn't sink the ships they were sent to attack with the means they had, so they rammed them to try to finish the job. That's not terrorism, that's war, and it's just as honorable as the guy who stays on the ground laying down cover fire so the evac chopper can get away.
Well, you failed at least the first aspect of it. Nobody who went through it had problems with the conversation when it was held with the driving instructor. And my test didn't involve challenging math and stuff like theirs did, it involved getting directions, which is something that quite a few people do in the car. Also, the way to fail the speed test was to go too fast or slow on a straight road with no cars, so there goes that idea too.
It fails to surprise me that you'd justify yourself this way because the people I talked into it were a lot like you, and when they were done several of them were taken aback by the results because it wasn't a big challenge obstacle course, it was reasonably close to regular driving. None of them thought that talking about what to get from the store would cause them to drift over lane markers but three of them did exactly that.
Like I said, try it, with an uninterested third party judging you. Make up your own course, or do it on the way to work for all I care. What's important is that there's someone there who can watch your performance behind the wheel, preferably with some kind of proof because I can guarantee from your post here that you won't believe them when they tell you how badly you really did. Do your level best to make it as realistic as possible so you'll believe the results, and then you can judge how well you did. But until you do, you're just like those eight people who were positive that they could handle it but had no real idea whether it's true.
And the studies about being on a phone is as dangerous as being drunk are just plain junk science. Sorry.
I dare you to try it, then. Do it right, where you have someone in the car with you, evaluating your performance. Do things like they did on the Mythbusters episode, like trying to drive 35 MPH for a span of time, and navigating a course (do it in a parking lot if you have one available). I've convinced eight real-life people to do this, with a pro driving instructor. They all thought they were just dandy with a cell phone and most of them did it hands-free because they believed just like you do.
Not a single one of them passed the test. Not one. Chew on that. You talk big, but until you actually do it, you don't realize. So I dare you to try it in real life, under controlled conditions, and I suspect you'll fail just like all the rest of the people who actually do it and don't just talk the talk. Then maybe, just maybe, you'll realize how special you aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
The law entirely disagrees with you, and beside that, the judgement wasn't against the photo the defendant took, it was against the defendant and the photo was part of the evidence against him. The judge determined that the defendant's purpose in taking the photo was a direct attempt to circumvent copyright so that he could avoid paying licensing fees. He was actually using the original photo for commercial purposes and only took his own when he was told he couldn't do that without paying a fee to the original photographer. On top of that the photo he took was obviously derivative of the original, even down to the same method of postprocessing, with minor changes to again try to sidestep the copyright. In the absence of all of this, I doubt the judge would have considered the case, but it rarely gets this blatant so the defendant got burned.
Virg
The thing I see here that makes it fly isn't the amount of effort but the obvious duplication of effort. The defendant tried to use the plaintiff's photo commercially and was called to task for it. They couldn't come to an agreement about licensing fees for that photo, so the defendant went out and made an obvious effort to reproduce the photo himself, for the express purpose of circumventing the copyright. It's that duplication of effort to evade copyright that leads me to view this as infringement. If the defendant had simply made a similar photo without first laying the groundwork for motive to evade paying licensing fees, then I'd feel that it was overstepping (and the law agrees which is why proof that you've never seen the original is a complete defense against infringment charges), but in this particular case it's pretty plain why he made and processed the photo as he did.
Virg
Can you supply some verifiable citation of any of this stuff? You make an awful lot of assertions but I haven't seen any proof of any of the things you've said from any credible source. "My sister said..." and "Some info did not make it out to the general press..." are the hallmarks of the tinfoil hat set. Back it up or pack it up, please.
Virg
The point you missed is in "Anyone born to an Israeli citizen in Israel is an Israeli citizen." Is everyone born to an Israeli citizen in Israel Jewish? If not, then reconcile this with consistently describing Israel as a Jewish state and then doing the same comparison as you did above with Greece and England. That's where it breaks down. There are plenty of Jewish people who aren't Israeli (and, as you stated elsewhere, plenty of Israelis who don't practice Judaism), but there aren't any Greek people who aren't Greek, by definition. You're not the first person I've seen who uses the word Jewish to mean "Israeli" and "of the faith of Judaism" interchangeably as it suits your needs, but they're not one and the same. You said in a different post, "Still, many voice opinions that, if you peel all of the layers, boil down to stating that every ethnic group of people in the world deserve self governance except the Jews." Do you mean "Jews" in this statement to represent those of the faith of Judaism, or of the state of Israel, or what? Does an Israeli citizen who's Islamic count in this use of the word "Jews" and does that make any sense at all to you? I think this makes it pretty clear what point you're missing.
Virg
Here we go with the "clearly stated falsifiable" stuff again. OK, since clearly stating it at least once doesn't do it, here it is again, in bullet points for easy consumption.
- Observations that do not line up with a climate model with a component for human-generated greenhouse gases would serve as falsifying data. I haven't found a climate model yet that works without calculating in the increase in CO2 from the Industrial Revolution forward.
- Observations that would prove for an external model against a greenhouse model would serve as falsifying data. Observations of a cooling stratosphere point to greenhouse effects, not external warming as from increased solar activity.
- Observations of average temperatures that showed cooling or no increase when human factors are incorporated would serve as falsifying evidence. As stated above, models that don't consider human-generated greenhouse gases slide away from observed data and models that include it match well with observation.
Do I really need to keep going? Here are three clearly stated falsifiable hypotheses that haven't been falsified (and have been reinforced) by observable data. Now, how willing are you to "play that game" in the face of such evidence?
Virg
You must be right; after all, death rates in war are always 1:1, and it's not like 19 assholes with nothing more than boxcutters could kill over 3000 people.
This is disingenuous. A surprise attack can easily shift the odds for a specific conflict, but that's not what we're discussing. If you add up the casualties over the course of the whole struggle we've had with al-Qaeda, the numbers shift quite a bit. Also, you're changing the definition of the phrase. Death rates in war aren't always 1:1 because not all wars are wars of attrition and not all conflicts are balanced.
I'm certain the British Empire was thinking the same thing, circa 1760.
You'd most certainly be wrong, then. The Brits in their empire days were fighting wars of conquest, not attrition. There was never a time when the British plan for fighting a war was "dig in and wear them down" (barring the Battle of Britain, and that was more "hold out until the Yanks get their butts in gear"), it was always a plan of overwhelming force and technology. In fact, it was attrition that finally did them in, with opponents that could afford vastly unbalanced losses and still come out ahead.
Virg
Charging your card and writing a check are synonymous steps in the process...
No, they're not. As I said above, a check is a negotiable instrument. A credit card payment isn't, and that's the reason why you'll never face fraud charges for charging something you can't afford. The synonymous event to a check is when the merchant bank transfers the money from their account to the seller during the settlement. Charging your card is requesting that transfer, but it's the credit card issuer that makes the (criminally prosecutable) statement that they have the funds available when they approve it. That's why you can never face fraud charges for the money transfer like you can with a check, where you personally state with your check that the funds are available. If you then fail to pay your debt to the credit card issuer, then you don't face fraud charges or other criminal action, you face civil action for the failure to uphold your payment contract.
Virg
Yes, it is. Why do you think it is called a credit card? There's a very real chance you will not pay your debt. Whether it's a card issuing bank or a service provider, they are giving you short-term credit.
It's called a credit card because you're allowed to revolve the debt if you choose. To use your own argument against you, an American Express card allows you to pay at the end of the month, but it's not called a credit card, it's called a charge card. If giving someone time after the transaction to pay is "short term credit", then why don't they call it a credit card? The answer is that this isn't considered credit.
That's different. If you write a check and it bounces, you could be criminally charged for fraud. That doesn't happen with credit.
That's because fraud and nonpayment of debt aren't the same thing, and a check is a negotiable instrument whereas a credit card isn't. Debt is a civil matter, not criminal. Commit fraud with the card and you could also go to prison.
If you're given a due date to repay, it is credit. If payment is demanded right away, it is not.
This doesn't match up to the usual definitions for credit at all. Nobody in the financial world considers "net 30" to be credit. If you're going to redefine words to make your argument, then it's pointless to continue.
Virg
Keep your sigh to yourself. The definition of credit doesn't incorporate float, so you're simply redefining the word in different way than the entire financial world. If you don't like it, take it up with the entire financial industry.
Virg
The cost of card transactions are a savings over the loss of business for not taking the cards, else I'd suspect that your wife wouldn't take credit cards. The fact that she can't charge extra for credit cards is indeed a small price to pay. If you disagree, tell her to stop accepting them and then check her books after a month to see if she's gained or lost.
Virg
If you really want to know whether something is credit, as what happens if you don't pay it. A bounced check can land you in jail for committing fraud. That can't happen with an American Express card, because they are extending you short-term credit.
I'll have to address this mess of logic in pieces. Firstly, you're trying to define "debt" as "credit", and we discussed changing definitions above. Secondly, bouncing a check can only get you arrested for fraud if the court can demonstrate intent to defraud, so accidentally bouncing a check does not result in prosecution. Moreover, the act of writing a bad check and the debt that it represents are separate things in the court (check fraud is a crime but debt is a civil matter), so even while you'd face criminal charges for purposely writing a bad check, you'd still have to handle the debt owed by some means and that's exactly the same as not paying a bill to AmEx for the card. To say it a different way, the reason you can't land in jail for not paying your AmEx bill has nothing to do with whether it's credit, it's because debt is a civil matter, not criminal.
Virg
For every person out there who "carelessly" over-spends and digs themselves into debt, then glibly declares bankruptcy, we have several thousand people out there who've seen virtually no increase in pay over the last decade. Been repeatedly laid off, only to endure extended periods of unemployment. Get's hit with a medical bill of catastrophic proportions while having their health insurance eliminated by their employer. All the while sinking slowing into credit card debt just paying for the necessities of life. The average American, lost 15% of their real net wealth over the last 10 years, while the top 1% saw their personal wealth explode in value.
While it sucks that many people are taking a financial hit these days, this argument is the reason why a lot of people ignore you. Say what you will about how everyone is suffering, but at its worst a tenth of the population lost their jobs and the number of people bankrupted by medical bills falls far short of the people who bankrupt on cunsomer debt, so your argument starts to sound like "the sky is falling!". Also, what point does talking about the top 1% serve to your argument, other than to throw in a tangential dig at the wealthy?
Sixty years ago, a man could go to virtually any school in the country with a GI loan, get a good job, buy a home, raise a family and put his kids through college.
Sixty years ago, the average household had one car and they paid nothing for things like TV service. When I've had people assess what's truly necessary to live, things like unlimited minutes tend to fall by the wayside, and once you realize that you'll find that it's not nearly as dire for most people as you imply. Oh, and the GI bill can still get you a good education, and you could never go to an Ivy League level school on the GI bill alone, so that's another argument shot down.
The only places in the U.S that have houses that are affordable are in depressed economic communities.
Okay, this is just nonsensical, based on the fact that foreclosure rates in the worst places for such things don't approach one percent of housing and on average for the U.S. was 0.2% last year.
So the consumer is naked, unprotected in a wilderness of ravening financial institutions, and when they raise their rates, its because they simply want more of your money for doing the same old thing.
Oh, woe betide! Of course, at issue here is living on credit in the first place, which you seem to think is a necessity of life but really isn't, and that's the crux of the problem. I've never met a bank that would force you to open a loan at gunpoint, and one would hope that someone who had just declared bankruptcy would be well informed about the dangers of overusing credit.
If the banks are issuing credit cards 6 months after a bankruptcy, its because they won't stop bleeding you until your dead.
If you're opening a credit card (that isn't a secured account) six months after you declared bankruptcy, then you've got a bigger problem than a predatory bank.
Virg
If your credit card company did this, then they were foolish. They make money on customers who don't carry debt, so such a scenario makes no business sense.
Virg
Wanna bet a free copy of it that it'll be out on DVD in time for Easter 2012?
Price you pay for holiday-themed movies.
Virg
Why not consider day cares in these giant megaplexes. Just saying it'd be an interesting approach.
Massive liability. There's no way it would turn out to be profitable to run such a facility because of the cost of insurance and having to have trained and vetted employees. That says nothing about the possibility of lawsuits if Junior got hurt or there was suspicion of molestation or someone checked out the kid to someone non-custodial or whatever. Add to that the fact that people won't pay extra to put Junior in the daycare (they'll just take the kids into the theater with them which defeats the purpose) and you can see why nobody's doing it.
Virg
There's a cost to run a film, payable back to the publisher. So they have to earn more in concessions than they're paying for that license fee plus the cost to operate. The trick is that the license fee for second-run movies is vastly cheaper than first-run, so getting it back on profits from the concessions is very easy on high volume (which the free admission generates).
Virg
In the northeast US, there's a chain of cinema pubs called Chunky's. They seat for movies at tables, and there's beer and other adult libations available along with full meals of pretty decent food. It's a great way to see a movie, I'll definitely agree.
Virg
I'd say the break point for me would be the price where I could attend the movie with my family (four people) with a drink for each of us and a bucket of popcorn to share, for the same cost as buying the DVD at a store. So, $30-40 or thereabouts. The problem I encounter now is that, even at matinee prices, I'm at that cost by the time I've bought the tickets, and four drinks and a bucket of popcorn costs (at the cheapest theater in my area) $30. If a ticket to a good movie was five bucks, and the concessions cost another five, I'd go a whole lot more often and so would a lot of people I know. But for our last visit to see How To Train Your Dragon in the theater, it cost a total of $78.00, and I just can't afford that any more. The funniest part is that, at half the price, I'd probably be going more than twice as often because forty bucks is the "mad" money we set aside for the week and we very rarely "plan" to see a movie rather than just deciding that it would be fun, and it's pretty much always turned down when we consider it because by the time we've saved for two weeks for a movie, we've decided to do something else like a restaurant meal instead.
Virg
You can fix too-high volume yourself with a set of fifty cent earplugs. You can't do anything about image-induced headaches other than avoid the movie. I can't watch most 3D movies because I can't fit the glasses over my eyeglasses, and I can't see the film without my eyeglasses. So, I have a choice of blurry or not attending. Guess which one I've chosen many, many times, at the cost of a family of four in the cinema seats (since they'll stay home with me rather than leave me home alone)?
Virg
It's not nostalgia, either. It's a genuine like of the stuff you saw as a young adult. Even your one-off example of Aliens actually proves my point - I was young when that came out and I think it was awesome (saw it before I saw Alien, too). But I was old enough already to read reviews, and I distinctly remember the reviews of the day - some of them, at least - complaining that they'd taken the masterfully suspenseful Alien, done a lame sequel to it and filled it with action sequences so that you wouldn't notice what a bad movie it was.
I've seen a number of good arguments that the backlash was a genre flip rather than "get off my lawn" type stuff. Many of the people who really liked Alien were fans of horror films, and Alien was a good horror film. The problem is that Aliens was not a horror film, it was an action film, so it didn't appeal to the exact same audience. I've found even today that the only people who really, really like both movies tend to be fans of sci-fi films in general.
Virg
Well, in our world, for one. Not paying a debt until it's due doesn't constitute credit, it's called "float" in financial circles. If someone sells you a good or service and doesn't require payment until the end of the month, then it's not "buying on credit" to hold off paying until that date. So, in short, you're right that it's not length of repayment that's a factor, but whether you're being extended credit (buying something for the promise of repayment against future income) or whether you're being given a float to allow you to gather the funds in the form agreed upon (which is why so many businesses started offering due dates for purchases in the first place).
Virg
If accident rates go down, payouts go down, which means premiums go down, which means profits go down.
This doesn't make any sense. If payouts go down more than premiums go down, then there's profit in the difference, and I can guarantee that a company that gets its daily bread from playing percentages will be able to work this out to their advantage.
Insurance companies aren't in business to keep you safe, they're in business to sell you their product; which you are required to buy.
Firstly, they are in the business of keeping you safe, because that reduces the chance of paying out on the policy. Secondly, it's not mandatory everywhere. You sound awfully bitter about insurance.
Virg
Your comparison falls short. Kamikaze pilots weren't suicide bombers by any stretch, they were a good bit more "do or die" combatants. They were attacking military targets in a declared and ongoing war, and they were only supposed to ram ships if they failed to achieve their goal by conventional means. If they managed to successfully attack their target with the weapons they had, they were to return to base for refit. Many of them couldn't sink the ships they were sent to attack with the means they had, so they rammed them to try to finish the job. That's not terrorism, that's war, and it's just as honorable as the guy who stays on the ground laying down cover fire so the evac chopper can get away.
Virg
Well, you failed at least the first aspect of it. Nobody who went through it had problems with the conversation when it was held with the driving instructor. And my test didn't involve challenging math and stuff like theirs did, it involved getting directions, which is something that quite a few people do in the car. Also, the way to fail the speed test was to go too fast or slow on a straight road with no cars, so there goes that idea too.
It fails to surprise me that you'd justify yourself this way because the people I talked into it were a lot like you, and when they were done several of them were taken aback by the results because it wasn't a big challenge obstacle course, it was reasonably close to regular driving. None of them thought that talking about what to get from the store would cause them to drift over lane markers but three of them did exactly that.
Like I said, try it, with an uninterested third party judging you. Make up your own course, or do it on the way to work for all I care. What's important is that there's someone there who can watch your performance behind the wheel, preferably with some kind of proof because I can guarantee from your post here that you won't believe them when they tell you how badly you really did. Do your level best to make it as realistic as possible so you'll believe the results, and then you can judge how well you did. But until you do, you're just like those eight people who were positive that they could handle it but had no real idea whether it's true.
Virg
And the studies about being on a phone is as dangerous as being drunk are just plain junk science. Sorry.
I dare you to try it, then. Do it right, where you have someone in the car with you, evaluating your performance. Do things like they did on the Mythbusters episode, like trying to drive 35 MPH for a span of time, and navigating a course (do it in a parking lot if you have one available). I've convinced eight real-life people to do this, with a pro driving instructor. They all thought they were just dandy with a cell phone and most of them did it hands-free because they believed just like you do.
Not a single one of them passed the test. Not one. Chew on that. You talk big, but until you actually do it, you don't realize. So I dare you to try it in real life, under controlled conditions, and I suspect you'll fail just like all the rest of the people who actually do it and don't just talk the talk. Then maybe, just maybe, you'll realize how special you aren't.
Virg