Start with a picture of the cardholder on the card. Some banks already do that.
And yet it goes nowhere. There's a myriad of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that it makes little difference. Very little credit card fraud is perpetrated by people who are using someone else's physical card. The main security system on that fraud is purchase pattern/auditing systems and the ability to kill off the card.
Most credit card fraud is online and/or via altered cards (like with the criminal's name and if you really insist, face, but the magnetic stripe with completely different information.)
Having said that, the photographs on credit cards started off as a service to the card holder so that they could have an extra form of ID on them. (I have a 1967 advertisement from an Ohio bank that offered a Mastercard with a polaroid photo...so that check cashing would be easier. In time, I believe the credit card companies did not want people using their cards for check cashing purposes. I also remember Citibank advertisements from the early 1990s offering their cards with photos for the same reason...second form of ID.)
But for the bank, it's a costly pain in the ass (as you noted) and with little benefit for the bank (especially since it prevents little fraud.) Today the photocards are basically sold as a false security benefit in the competitive credit card industry. I believe that cards will be less likely to have photos in the future..
Interesting fact: it is indisputed that it is easier to identify people with a black and white photograph than with a color photograph. As an actor, my headshots are in black and white, as is the case with most actor's headshots for NY based actors...the features of the face pop up better in black and white than in color. If a person presents a passport to an immigration official, and the official isn't sure if it's the same person or not, often they will photograph the person in black and white, and then compare the black and white photograph with the color photograph. Black and white photographs are superior to color when it comes to identification. They would make it much harder for people to use others' ID cards.
Yet, every state and province (except for Alberta) issues a driver's license with a color photograph. (And Alberta used to, their black and white photograph is based on the technology they use to create their license, not based on a preference for black and white.) In fact, if you read state legislative codes, it will say, in nearly all instances, that there shall be a "color photograph" on the driver's license. Historically, in all the states I have known and read the legal code, the word color was there from the very beginning (Ohio for instance had it in 1967 when they codified the mandatory photo license law.) The only exceptions are Colorado and California, who issued black and white photo licenses from about 1957-1965, at which point they switched to color and codified the color requirement (those two states admittedly blow my argument a bit.)
At any rate, that all seems too purposeful to me, which brings me to the timing issue. A lot of states started codifying photo licenses in the late 1960s. Polaroid developed color instant photography in 1964...and was the leader for at least 10 years in photo ID card issuance systems (in fact, it was their only profitable business from the 1990s on. It was spun-off when Polaroid entered bankruptcy.) As a cultural thing, we were crazy about photography in the 1960s...I've seen newspaper advertisements for general stores where a pack of flash bulbs was just as expensive as men's shoes. But color instant photography was fantastically expensive, and out of reach for the average person...so I hypothesize that Polaroid was searching for something to do with the technology other than sell it to people directly. (I've got an advertisement in my possession of a local Columbus bank issuing credit cards with polaroid photos from 1967...offering it as a good ID for cashing checks. They did go out of their way to mention that it was with Polaroid photos.)
Perhaps even more key than the color requirement and the timing is the fact that every state has always and still does...takes the picture for you. Compare to a passport--you bring your photo in, and it's incorporated into the document. In fact, there are countries in which you bring your photo for your license or ID card...countries which have had photos on their licenses or ID cards for much longer than in the US. Remember this from a historical perspective...it would have been cheaper for a person to bring any old photograph of themself, than to pay the state to take a color instant photo for them. But clearly if that were to occur that would shortchange the revenue stream for the company wanting a very lucrative photo ID contract. It's essential that the state takes the photograph.
So if you look at it in that context...you could say that vendor driven documents are those in which the photo is taken of you (many ID cards, driver's licenses, et cetera.) Documents that were created for reasons other than vendor lobbying you take the photo yourself (passports.)
With more time and research, I can probably string together more arguments. One thing I've been wanting is Polaroid annual reports from the mid to late 1960s.
Forgive me if I am missing the point, but is not the purpouse of biometrics to REMOVE potentially compromised security keys, like ID cards? Biometrics, as I understand the science, allows an individual to use their body as a form of ID.
No! No security expert worth their salt proposes that biometrics be used to ID...it's too easy to fake and you leave biometric trails everywhere. Biometrics may have some use as a second form of a password. Biometrics may also be used as ID in non-security applications (such as at my local grocery store, where employees use their fingerprint to sign in and out of the timeclock.)
Only vendors are pushing biometrics as both a form of ID and a password.
That's not clear, but that's the history of ID cards and other photo based documents.
The photo based driver's license was justified as an all purpose ID card, but my research has indicated that no one could justify a strong need for it...nor was there driver's licensing fraud that would be eliminated with the photo. I hypothesize that the photo driver's license was essentially a way of photograph companies to sell expensive instant color photographic equipment. (Those interested in my reasoning can ask.)
The photo based passport really became vogue during World War I, when european nations were afraid that spies would be crossing border. (Hello! Counterfeiting? I'm glad people were as dumb then as they are now.) With new regulations US citizens won't be able to return to the US after 2006 without a passport, even in the western hemisphere. US Citizens were not required to travel with a passport until 1941 (and during World War I and the Civil War.) For reasons not clear to me, the restriction was only rolled back to hemisphere travel after World War II.
So the lesson is, mandatory identification is either vendor driven, or war/terrorism/fear driven, or, as is most likely the case, both.
I'm hoping (and frankly, expecting) some pretty strong negative reaction from the French citizenry. They have a bad history with ID cards (for reasons I shall respectfully not mention) and I dare say that the French are more alarmed by ID cards than citizens in anglo countries. They have a more intense concept of anonymity vis a vis the state.
Even here in North America, New Brunswick and Quebec have some of the most lenient driver's licensing laws. Unless things have changed, neither province requires the photo on the license, and Quebec is the only jurisdiction in, possibly the world, which issues a driver's license with a digital photograph and the photograph is not archived. That's a level of freedom that's been lost to most of the world's citizens in just 10-15 years.
Well, your experience as an "actor" hardly qualifies you to judge the productivity of New Yorkers.
More or less agreed. I do however hold a degree in Economics, and analyzing economic issues is a passion for me, though I am not employed professionally to do it.:-)
And the idea that "making something" is the only productivity is only worthwhile for selfserving manufacturers and self-hating "service" workers (like some actors).
I incidentally tried my best to avoid implying that only raw product producers are "productive" since clearly that's not the case. I did anyway, but that wasn't my goal.
. I'm not going to get into yet another debate about how to measure "productivity" - until we have a better one that enough of us agree on that we can have meaningful discussions, I use the standard "cost of goods/services produced" as the rough measure, emphasized by the unparalleled instrumental role in global production of the workers.
That is a reasonable goal. My contention is that there is quite a lot of high cost issues with the New York economy...the cost of goods/services are inflated because the cost of those inputs are inflated...already you have to begin set back because you're comparing an employee in New York who has to get paid 10-15% more than just about anyone else. If you bring in the cost of other inputs like office space, utilities, taxes et cetera, that further drives up the cost of your basic inputs. Quite a lot of New Yorkers exist to simply maintain the uniqueness of New York, which costs money. So if you define productivity as some sorta relation between the cost of the inputs and the resultant outputs, I think New York does badly.
On the other hand, New York has quite a lot of high-powered individuals, in particular in the financial and media sectors. It's hard to measure what their productivity output is...is a CEO directly responsible for an entire company's contribution to the economy? Is an investment banker directly responsible for the value of his trades on the economy...or just his profits? So if you were to measure productivity as based on some sorta per capita financial contribution to GDP, I think you would find a high value of New Yorker productivity (I believe that's what you your prefferred algorithim is like) but that's not necessarily a good way to do it. After all, many of those people don't need to be in New York (except for people in particular networking industries, like media. There's a certain amount of historical intertia to some of these industries...some are slowly moving to Jersey City, which is basically New York, but some can and are making a bigger plunge and are leaving the area) I wonder about the cost of having an investment banker in New York who could do his job perfectly well from just about anywhere else, and the cost of maintaining him in New York (in particular because that extra pay differential for being in New York gets really expensive on them six figure investment bankers.) Is it possible that a person learns more about a particular industry simply because they are in New York, and that type of knowledge translates to a productivity that is unique...perhaps, but with today's ability to spread knowledge around, I suspect that there is a dramatically lower benefit to this than there once was (except to those networking industries I mentioned above.)
I can think of aggregate efficiencies of the New York economy (the biggest is transportation of course. All those people on public transport are probably reasonably more resource-efficient than if they were spread all over the US driving in cars. Though there's a lot of people sitting around waiting in traffic, which is not an efficiency.) On the other hand, I think I saw quite a lot of inefficiencies and waste that troubled me...waste that was unique to just maintaining so many people with the restrictions that are unique to New York.
At any rate if you used the standard productivity measurement of output per unit of labor, you probably are looking at some pretty good numbers. If you used an adjusted measurement, with opportunity cost, labor costs and efficiencies thrown in, you're looking at some bad numbers. Take your pick.:-)
Let's do what was done in the former USSR in order to make sure that only the ones who can go on to get more education when it comes to public schools.
Also keep in mind that this shakedown system made good sense for an economy that didn't have very much pay differential...the students who went on in the educational system were doing it for the pride and honor...once they became doctors or engineers, they didn't actually end up making any more money than anyone else.
To replicate the system here would cause the entirety of a person's career and financial livelyhood to be dependent on what they did up to the age of 14 or 15. I've certainly met a lot of precocious individuals of that age range, but even then a lot of students that age are on parental auto-pilot anyway (and it's defendable that some of the brightest aren't on parental auto pilot and are doing poorly, at least in the eyes of the educational system.) There are quite a lot of bright and successful people in this world who didn't do jack shit until the 20s, 30s or even later. If anything one of the major failures of the educational system that we've put together is that it is so difficult to go back. If anything, we need to make entry/exit in the educational system easier not harder.
A great example (mostly realated) of that...my mother and father pay huge quantities of property tax to the local school district, but have no children in the system. Let's say my mother wanted to brush up on her French skills, and take the French 3 class at the local high school. As far as I would know, they wouldn't let her...but honestly...why? Would it be that disruptive? Would it be that much of a resource drain (it shouldn't be...they're paying out the ass for that class to be there.) The system just has this peculiar idea that certain people should be at certain places in time, and deviating from that is bad...I argue in our knowledge based economy, deviation is exactly what we need.
wasting millions of hours of America's most productive workforce
I cringed when I saw this line. I've lived and worked in New York. I'm not saying that New Yorkers aren't hard working (they have to be, otherwise they couldn't afford rent on any place closer than Delaware) but between the taxes, inconvenience and complexity of New York, the fact that many individuals are in occupations that don't make anything, per se (media for instance...hell, I was in New York for acting myself, so I don't pretend to be productive) or they are just financial/CEO types which are not directly productive...I think it's hard to say that New Yorkers are honestly per capita more productive than people who, you know, make things.
New York rapes the young. People who love the city but are willing to go through so much working hell to maintain it. I don't necessarily consider that productive.
(I do incidentally agree with you on the automated realtime subway info. However, many of the systems I've seen run off of GPS, and that wouldn't work for the MTA.)
The pharmacist verifies the finished prescription, uses his thumbprint to indicate he approves it, and a label is printed. With a password system it's far too easy for anyone to print out the approval label, and that's what would happen.
Essentially...biometrics is useful when security isn't important. (I think that will be the biggest uses of biometrics for years to come...non-security applications...like at my local grocery store where employees use their thumbrpint to sign into a time-clock. It is only loosely a security application, it's more of an application of convenience.)
In the end, there is no security and privacy tradeoff, the main tradeoff is between privacy and convenience, and security and convenience. Biometrics is very convenient, but it's not very private and it's arguably not secure.
In that case why don't we always use DST? Arizona, Puerto Rico, some of Indiana, etc. all seem to be doing just fine without seasonal time changes.
Jurisdictions closer to the equator (all the above, plus Hawaii, except for the odd-man which is Indiana) have less of a use for DST, as their sunlight per day is more static than those places farther from the equator.
Yes it's possible to forge a passport, but with 50 differnet formats and much lower security, dirvers licenses are much easier to get and to forge.
One of the interesting psychological failures of photo ID cards is the assumption that the higher the government issuing the document, the more likely it is to be valid. Passport fraud is easier to pull off, and the passport is about average in counterfeit difficult, in comparison with US and Canadian licenses. Keep in mind however that, while it may be the same in complexity to forge a passport, the knowledge is easier to obtain.
For the most part, the only people who counterfeit Ohio driver's licenses are Ohio counterfeiters. The California license is several times more complex than the Ohio license, however California would have, simply by virtue of its population, 3 times as many counterfeiters specializing in the California license than Ohioans specializing in the Ohio license. In spite of the higher difficulty, the networking of the California fraudsters makes the California license a more easily obtainable document at higher qualities than the Ohio document.
Simply apply these networking synergies to the US passport. While there is a small need for US counterfeiters to forge the US passport, there is a high (and increasing) return on investment for foreigner counterfeiters. Assuming they network (and that's a safe assumption, even partial networking will do) the counterfeit difficulty of the passport, regardless of its complexity, will be no match to the unified counterfeiting effort. (Use the same arguments with a National ID card, except that a National ID card will be counterfeited by all the professionals here in the US as well.)
Also, passport fraud is sensitive to gateway documents...(arguably more sensitive than driver's licenses) so if you're successful in getting a photo driver's license, you're 85% of the way to getting a passport.
If you leave one gaping hole in US border patrol, like the entire northern border, then you may as well not patrol the other borders.
They used to say this with regards to Puerto Rico...a relatively poor, hispanic country which, by an odd sequence of geopolitical events, is a US territory with Americans. Puerto Ricans cross freely. After an influx of economic migrants, things cooled down and border crossing numbers are stable. From a security point of view economic migrants are just not a big priority, so focusing our energies away from the southern and norther borders makes sense.
You don't have any "right" to travel to another country and then re-enter without a passport.
Right...well, perhaps not. But history has been on the side of paperless travel, in particular with regards to Canada. They only began immigration checks on the US-Canada border in the 1950s (I remember reading somewhere that there were riots when this started, it was very controversial.) Since about the 1980s Congress has mandated a passport for Americans travelling from countries from outside of the Western Hemisphere. A lot of that rule still stands...I can go to just about any Carribbean country with my birth certificate, and even my home country of Costa Rica decided to cash in on the tourist dollars and allow Americans to travel there with just a birth certificate. It's possible that, if the US never required Americans to have a passport for re-entry, than neither would have the Japanese for your trips.
On a side note, apparently, the passport was created during World War I as a temporary document intended to prevent spies from crossing european borders. It was not a document viewed well...europeans were horrified by the idea that they would require documentation to go across borders. I'm amused by the bogus reasoning for its creation...it gives me a little satisfaction to know that people were as dumb then as they are now.
There are certainly people stopped from going one way or another on the US-Canadian border, but it still has not been proven that there's an aggregate security increase from documented crossing than without documented crossings. It's possible our time would be better spent doing different types of security checks than documentation checks.
Your "Black's law" dictionnary is only a subset of the english language which is only useful in the purpose of courtroom deliberations. Slashdot not being a courtroom, I would venture to say that it is woefully irrelevant here.
You will also find that other English language dictionaries don't make much of a big deal between "right" and "privilege". I'm happy to not talk about Black's law definitions on Slashdot, however, 'driving is a privilege, not a right" is a legal argument, and, being that you brought it up as the first line of your reply implies that it was terribly important. (It actually isn't. But you insisted on making it.)
I believe your Black is only relevant in the US
It's a book of definition used and based on anglo-saxon common law. It will have commonalities in all the common law countries.
But what you're doing is laywery pussyfooting, and anglo-saxon law was not ever intended to further the cause of humanity, but rather to protect and allow private despotism. Such arrogance is frowned upon in most of the world.
I disagree. However, that's basically a political discussion. Does your response here imply that you think I'm incorrect in what I said, or you just don't like what I said? With regards to rest of the world, I don't disagree that there are different values.
However, I don't hear people in civil law countries arguing about what is a right or a privilege. It's an even smaller difference in a civil law country because civil law is built on the premise that the state grants rights...which is not an assumption of the common law system. If you desire to talk about civil law countries, that's fine, but we were talking about a proposal in Texas.
As a citizen, I have the expectation that the State will do the utmost to insure my safety whenever I go out of my house.
But to what point? To the ad absurdum point of locking you permanently in a padded cell?
In France, the police will revoke your license on the spot for reckless driving, which includes running a red light. Yet, despite that, France is **THE** beacon of human rights.
On the spot revocations are simply a peculiarity of a country's way of doing business and don't necessarily imply anything to me about how safe they are. Latin American countries tend to arrest everyone and all the vehicles involved in an accident...I don't believe this aids in motor vehicle safety (in fact, it does the precise opposite, because, no matter who was at fault in the accident, no one wants go through the hassle of being arrested/impouded, so everyone flees the accident scene.) However, they think the system has merit which I don't see.
France is **THE** beacon of human rights.
This is a statement based on values...certain values are clearly more important to you than others. I think of France highly actually, though they have this way of dealing with immigrants/non-french that I think is ugly. My political values are anathema to the state dictating that people can name their children only from a list of pre-approved French names.
I think very highly of Canada myself (your response indicated that you could be.)
This is a problem that was solely caused by the anglo-saxon cultural fear of the State that makes a compulsory standard form of identification an anathema.
One shared with many other nations of the world. Check out Palestine and Japan. (My sig should have indicated that this is a big topic to me.)
I don't believe France has a compulsory ID card...in fact, the French and French-Canadians are far more disdaining of national ID cards than any other group in the world. (check out ID laws in Quebec, easily the best in the world.)
You will also be fascinted to know that ID card laws are almost entirely vendor driven...the history of photo ID cards in the US was that of photo ID card vendors needing to shill a product and convincing rather dumb state legislatures that they n
This statement is more or less meaningless. Black's law dictionary's definition for "privilege" is "right." The US Supreme Court did indeed have a case where this question was asked, and they didn't exactly say there was a difference, only that the difference was irrelevant. (Can't find case right now.)
I did historical research on this...the Ohio driving license was created in 1936. Remember, that's quite some time into the automotive revolution...millions of Ohioans had driven without licenses till that point. To them, it was plainly obvious that driving was a right--all they had to do was meet certain criteria (age, physical characteristics, et cetera) and get into a car and go. The driving license did not change that...it only served as a mechanism for tracking violations. The word "privilege" did not appear in Ohio law, with regards to driving, until the late 1950s. I have hypothesized that motor vehicle safety proponents, in order to convince the public to accept auto safety laws, reinvented the concept of the driving license as a permission based concept (as opposed to one of contract and registration) and in doing so, invented a connotation for the word "privilege" which did not previously exist. "Privilege" is a word of power...you will note that a company will say things like "we retain the right to X" and never "we retain the privilege to X." (Regardless if they truly have that "right" or not.)
Clearly a driving license is not a pure "privilege"--the state could not restrict licenses to people of a certain race, for instance, as that would interfere with quite a lot of established rights. (I think that's the thinking the Supreme Court was going with when they argued that there difference is irrelevant.)
I like to say that the state has the ability to dictate reasonable restrictions on the driving license contract. These restrictions have to be directly related to auto safety and taxation (a great example...courts have ruled that the photograph on the license was not related to auto safety, and those with religious objections to being photographed could not be compelled to have a photo license.)
So a better argument for you, in lieu of, Privileges can be revoked if you abuse them would be there are certain contractural obligations that, if not met, could terminate the contract.
People driving on PUBLIC roads have absolutely, positively NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY.
You actually meant right to privacy here. If they had no expectation of privacy, then people wouldn't be making such a fuss about things.:-) Clearly there are individuals who have certain privacy preferences. Interestingly, nations like England, who are very very lax about privacy protections for citizens in public, are very protective of celebrities from papparazzi. Clearly that's a privacy preference in a slightly different direction that, say, in the US. It is not entirely true that there are no privacy rights in public.
Historically, certainly. Though today the connotation of the word "Midwest" has shifted westward away from Ohio.... and in doing so, the term has begun to carry a strong agricultural implication that doesn't reflect Ohio's population/industry. (Why the term should apply to both Kansas and Ohio makes the term entirely absurd.) I believe that, if you gave the average American a map of the US, without state borders on it, and ask them to draw lines indicating where the "Midwest" is, they will draw the lines west of Ohio.
Anecdotally it seems to me that easterners are most likely to call Ohio "Midwest" (but a New Yorker considers anything west of New Jersey and east of California as "Midwest" and, regrettably, New York attitudes toward the rest of the country translate into the media.)
Cleveland is only 6 hours by car to New York, sits nearly 10 hours from the Mississippi river, and is at least 250 miles from Central Time. I can't tell you how many New Yorkers assume Ohio is in Central time, when we're comfortably in Eastern.
I was raised in Cleveland, and would never have dreamt calling Ohio "Midwest." Cleveland has always been an Eastern city in my mind (in fact I always found myself very comfortable in New Jersey because it reminded me of the people and places I was raised with in Cleveland.) I have found that the farther south you go in Ohio the more comfortable people are with the term Midwest (which is odd, because the farther south you go in Ohio, the more Southern people become. I like to say that Ohio is a mix of an Eastern state like New Jersey and a Southern state, like Tennessee.
For me, the term "Midwest" is a pejorative that I disassociate with Ohio, and I believe in time Ohio will be reevaluated into an Eastern state. (The only time "Midwest" is not a pejorative is when it's applied to Chicago.)
For those who are not fully comfortable calling Ohio an Eastern state, I've come up with the handy term "near-east".:-)
There's been a lot of condemnation of this, but it sounds OK to me. A lot of people who live in NJ (for example) commute to NYC to work. It's understood that they pay taxes.
They do not get to vote in NY, but they pay taxes because that's where they make the money. Everyone is OK with that.
Your argument should not necessarily be built on what is and what is not accepted. I would not agree with the idea that everyone is OK with the setup; I would say most people are irritated with it, but the percentage of NYC tax is low enough to be a nuisance and not a severe annoyance. (For some reason, I have found that New Jerseyans who work and pay Philadelphia city income tax are significantly more irritated than New Jerseyans paying NYC income tax.)
Another post earlier in the thread accurately said that the employer should just remove the employee from NYS payroll and stick them onto a payroll based in the state they live. There is nothing stopping your hypothetical New Jerseyan from receiving 4/5th of his income from an NJ payroll account, and 1/5th from a New York payroll account, as that would be both legal and appropriate.
Ohio cities have a city income tax; it too is levyed based on where you work. If my company is based in Columbus, but I work 3 days of my week in Cincinnati and 2 days in Cleveland, then my city income tax is most accurately paid 3/5th to Cincinnati and 2/5th to Cleveland.
I've never seen a cop show or heard about a court case where they convicted someone based on what their SSN was, but they use fingerprints for that all the time. Why should this be any different.
Actually the SSN is a major piece in US criminal records, you just don't hear about it because it's not as sexy as forensics is.
Fingerprinting is a bit on the overblown side, you hear about it a lot more often than it is used.
am subject to the inaninties of Ohio's brand of Midwestern legislating.
The weird thing is...Ohio's brand of politics is not "Midwestern" at all. (The term "Midwest" is misapplied to Ohio regularly.)
Ohio is an odd mix of easterners in Northeast Ohio (think New Jersey, and if you're from Jersey, think Central Jersey plus Newark) southerners in the Southeast part of the state (think Virginia) and a healthy mix of Appalachians people all over (think West Virginia.)
Ohio politics from the 1950s to the 1990s was dominated by an odd alliance of the Appalachians and the northeast Ohio "New Jerseyans." (Democrat controlled.) Today it's dominated by the Virginians and the Appalachians...who, in addition to running things the way they want, aren't entirely sure what to do with the state that was created by all them democrats from the previous 40 or so years.
. It is true that they are poor compared to many nations and may have some slightly unorthodox ways of making money (For example, they charge a $26 exit tax when tourists leave the country
The tax itself is not unorthodox...it's just the implementation that's rudely stupid. Other countries just have similar taxes rolled into price of the airline ticket.
I suspect that the reason they haven't done something similar is because there is a different pricing tier based on nationality...but it's something that I believe needs to be looked at someday.
As a US Government employee (US Air Force to be precise) I can tell you that Bank of America is regarded by most of us (us = gov't employees) as a faceless entity that cares nothing for customer service.
Frankly, I've never met anyone who has had much good to say large banks. What type of company would rely on its poorest customers fucking up for 50% of its profit? (Applies to many large banks, including my old bank of Fifth Third.)
I humbly recommend, to all/.ers, to visit a credit union. Since I've gone to a credit union, I feel so much better about the banking experience, and I'm treated like a real person, and the credit union doesn't want to screw me.
they are the gadgets that are now part of our everyday life and of course they are extremely useful
Under the definition of the word "gadget" at m-w.com a gadget is "an often small mechanical or electronic device with a practical use but often thought of as a novelty."
If the product is "extremely useful" then it technically isn't a gadget. For this reason, vacuum tubes, transitors, the telephone and the abacus have no place being classified as gadgets.
By the time you are old enough to want to make a list of things to tell young people they need to do to be happy, you are too old to relate to any young person in a meaningful or influential way.
Regrettably, this is due to age discrimination. Thanks to the public schooling (which has setup this concept of people of the same age range, all from a very early age, doing the exact same thing as everyone else, and worse, socializing with people of a very small age range.)
So people grow up with this bizarrely narrow view of the world...people who are 19 do X, people 24 do Y, people 36 do Z.
As I like to say, if you're over 14 and half your friends are within 5 years of your own age, you're doing something wrong. Widsom and expertise will come to you from a wide range of people.
Slashdot Mirror
Start with a picture of the cardholder on the card. Some banks already do that.
And yet it goes nowhere. There's a myriad of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that it makes little difference. Very little credit card fraud is perpetrated by people who are using someone else's physical card. The main security system on that fraud is purchase pattern/auditing systems and the ability to kill off the card.
Most credit card fraud is online and/or via altered cards (like with the criminal's name and if you really insist, face, but the magnetic stripe with completely different information.)
Having said that, the photographs on credit cards started off as a service to the card holder so that they could have an extra form of ID on them. (I have a 1967 advertisement from an Ohio bank that offered a Mastercard with a polaroid photo...so that check cashing would be easier. In time, I believe the credit card companies did not want people using their cards for check cashing purposes. I also remember Citibank advertisements from the early 1990s offering their cards with photos for the same reason...second form of ID.)
But for the bank, it's a costly pain in the ass (as you noted) and with little benefit for the bank (especially since it prevents little fraud.) Today the photocards are basically sold as a false security benefit in the competitive credit card industry. I believe that cards will be less likely to have photos in the future..
ageofconsent.com isn't bad, but a bit more of an authoritative list can be found in the Hawaii Age of Consent Task Force Report pages 65-68.
The graphs on those pages indicate very specifically the "pure" age of consent, and the stepping age of consents for different age ranges.
With pleasure.
Interesting fact: it is indisputed that it is easier to identify people with a black and white photograph than with a color photograph. As an actor, my headshots are in black and white, as is the case with most actor's headshots for NY based actors...the features of the face pop up better in black and white than in color. If a person presents a passport to an immigration official, and the official isn't sure if it's the same person or not, often they will photograph the person in black and white, and then compare the black and white photograph with the color photograph. Black and white photographs are superior to color when it comes to identification. They would make it much harder for people to use others' ID cards.
Yet, every state and province (except for Alberta) issues a driver's license with a color photograph. (And Alberta used to, their black and white photograph is based on the technology they use to create their license, not based on a preference for black and white.) In fact, if you read state legislative codes, it will say, in nearly all instances, that there shall be a "color photograph" on the driver's license. Historically, in all the states I have known and read the legal code, the word color was there from the very beginning (Ohio for instance had it in 1967 when they codified the mandatory photo license law.) The only exceptions are Colorado and California, who issued black and white photo licenses from about 1957-1965, at which point they switched to color and codified the color requirement (those two states admittedly blow my argument a bit.)
At any rate, that all seems too purposeful to me, which brings me to the timing issue. A lot of states started codifying photo licenses in the late 1960s. Polaroid developed color instant photography in 1964...and was the leader for at least 10 years in photo ID card issuance systems (in fact, it was their only profitable business from the 1990s on. It was spun-off when Polaroid entered bankruptcy.) As a cultural thing, we were crazy about photography in the 1960s...I've seen newspaper advertisements for general stores where a pack of flash bulbs was just as expensive as men's shoes. But color instant photography was fantastically expensive, and out of reach for the average person...so I hypothesize that Polaroid was searching for something to do with the technology other than sell it to people directly. (I've got an advertisement in my possession of a local Columbus bank issuing credit cards with polaroid photos from 1967...offering it as a good ID for cashing checks. They did go out of their way to mention that it was with Polaroid photos.)
Perhaps even more key than the color requirement and the timing is the fact that every state has always and still does...takes the picture for you. Compare to a passport--you bring your photo in, and it's incorporated into the document. In fact, there are countries in which you bring your photo for your license or ID card...countries which have had photos on their licenses or ID cards for much longer than in the US. Remember this from a historical perspective...it would have been cheaper for a person to bring any old photograph of themself, than to pay the state to take a color instant photo for them. But clearly if that were to occur that would shortchange the revenue stream for the company wanting a very lucrative photo ID contract. It's essential that the state takes the photograph.
So if you look at it in that context...you could say that vendor driven documents are those in which the photo is taken of you (many ID cards, driver's licenses, et cetera.) Documents that were created for reasons other than vendor lobbying you take the photo yourself (passports.)
With more time and research, I can probably string together more arguments. One thing I've been wanting is Polaroid annual reports from the mid to late 1960s.
Forgive me if I am missing the point, but is not the purpouse of biometrics to REMOVE potentially compromised security keys, like ID cards? Biometrics, as I understand the science, allows an individual to use their body as a form of ID.
No! No security expert worth their salt proposes that biometrics be used to ID...it's too easy to fake and you leave biometric trails everywhere. Biometrics may have some use as a second form of a password. Biometrics may also be used as ID in non-security applications (such as at my local grocery store, where employees use their fingerprint to sign in and out of the timeclock.)
Only vendors are pushing biometrics as both a form of ID and a password.
That's not clear, but that's the history of ID cards and other photo based documents.
The photo based driver's license was justified as an all purpose ID card, but my research has indicated that no one could justify a strong need for it...nor was there driver's licensing fraud that would be eliminated with the photo. I hypothesize that the photo driver's license was essentially a way of photograph companies to sell expensive instant color photographic equipment. (Those interested in my reasoning can ask.)
The photo based passport really became vogue during World War I, when european nations were afraid that spies would be crossing border. (Hello! Counterfeiting? I'm glad people were as dumb then as they are now.) With new regulations US citizens won't be able to return to the US after 2006 without a passport, even in the western hemisphere. US Citizens were not required to travel with a passport until 1941 (and during World War I and the Civil War.) For reasons not clear to me, the restriction was only rolled back to hemisphere travel after World War II.
So the lesson is, mandatory identification is either vendor driven, or war/terrorism/fear driven, or, as is most likely the case, both.
I'm hoping (and frankly, expecting) some pretty strong negative reaction from the French citizenry. They have a bad history with ID cards (for reasons I shall respectfully not mention) and I dare say that the French are more alarmed by ID cards than citizens in anglo countries. They have a more intense concept of anonymity vis a vis the state.
Even here in North America, New Brunswick and Quebec have some of the most lenient driver's licensing laws. Unless things have changed, neither province requires the photo on the license, and Quebec is the only jurisdiction in, possibly the world, which issues a driver's license with a digital photograph and the photograph is not archived. That's a level of freedom that's been lost to most of the world's citizens in just 10-15 years.
Well, your experience as an "actor" hardly qualifies you to judge the productivity of New Yorkers.
:-)
:-)
More or less agreed. I do however hold a degree in Economics, and analyzing economic issues is a passion for me, though I am not employed professionally to do it.
And the idea that "making something" is the only productivity is only worthwhile for selfserving manufacturers and self-hating "service" workers (like some actors).
I incidentally tried my best to avoid implying that only raw product producers are "productive" since clearly that's not the case. I did anyway, but that wasn't my goal.
. I'm not going to get into yet another debate about how to measure "productivity" - until we have a better one that enough of us agree on that we can have meaningful discussions, I use the standard "cost of goods/services produced" as the rough measure, emphasized by the unparalleled instrumental role in global production of the workers.
That is a reasonable goal. My contention is that there is quite a lot of high cost issues with the New York economy...the cost of goods/services are inflated because the cost of those inputs are inflated...already you have to begin set back because you're comparing an employee in New York who has to get paid 10-15% more than just about anyone else. If you bring in the cost of other inputs like office space, utilities, taxes et cetera, that further drives up the cost of your basic inputs. Quite a lot of New Yorkers exist to simply maintain the uniqueness of New York, which costs money. So if you define productivity as some sorta relation between the cost of the inputs and the resultant outputs, I think New York does badly.
On the other hand, New York has quite a lot of high-powered individuals, in particular in the financial and media sectors. It's hard to measure what their productivity output is...is a CEO directly responsible for an entire company's contribution to the economy? Is an investment banker directly responsible for the value of his trades on the economy...or just his profits? So if you were to measure productivity as based on some sorta per capita financial contribution to GDP, I think you would find a high value of New Yorker productivity (I believe that's what you your prefferred algorithim is like) but that's not necessarily a good way to do it. After all, many of those people don't need to be in New York (except for people in particular networking industries, like media. There's a certain amount of historical intertia to some of these industries...some are slowly moving to Jersey City, which is basically New York, but some can and are making a bigger plunge and are leaving the area) I wonder about the cost of having an investment banker in New York who could do his job perfectly well from just about anywhere else, and the cost of maintaining him in New York (in particular because that extra pay differential for being in New York gets really expensive on them six figure investment bankers.) Is it possible that a person learns more about a particular industry simply because they are in New York, and that type of knowledge translates to a productivity that is unique...perhaps, but with today's ability to spread knowledge around, I suspect that there is a dramatically lower benefit to this than there once was (except to those networking industries I mentioned above.)
I can think of aggregate efficiencies of the New York economy (the biggest is transportation of course. All those people on public transport are probably reasonably more resource-efficient than if they were spread all over the US driving in cars. Though there's a lot of people sitting around waiting in traffic, which is not an efficiency.) On the other hand, I think I saw quite a lot of inefficiencies and waste that troubled me...waste that was unique to just maintaining so many people with the restrictions that are unique to New York.
At any rate if you used the standard productivity measurement of output per unit of labor, you probably are looking at some pretty good numbers. If you used an adjusted measurement, with opportunity cost, labor costs and efficiencies thrown in, you're looking at some bad numbers. Take your pick.
Let's do what was done in the former USSR in order to make sure that only the ones who can go on to get more education when it comes to public schools.
Also keep in mind that this shakedown system made good sense for an economy that didn't have very much pay differential...the students who went on in the educational system were doing it for the pride and honor...once they became doctors or engineers, they didn't actually end up making any more money than anyone else.
To replicate the system here would cause the entirety of a person's career and financial livelyhood to be dependent on what they did up to the age of 14 or 15. I've certainly met a lot of precocious individuals of that age range, but even then a lot of students that age are on parental auto-pilot anyway (and it's defendable that some of the brightest aren't on parental auto pilot and are doing poorly, at least in the eyes of the educational system.) There are quite a lot of bright and successful people in this world who didn't do jack shit until the 20s, 30s or even later. If anything one of the major failures of the educational system that we've put together is that it is so difficult to go back. If anything, we need to make entry/exit in the educational system easier not harder.
A great example (mostly realated) of that...my mother and father pay huge quantities of property tax to the local school district, but have no children in the system. Let's say my mother wanted to brush up on her French skills, and take the French 3 class at the local high school. As far as I would know, they wouldn't let her...but honestly...why? Would it be that disruptive? Would it be that much of a resource drain (it shouldn't be...they're paying out the ass for that class to be there.) The system just has this peculiar idea that certain people should be at certain places in time, and deviating from that is bad...I argue in our knowledge based economy, deviation is exactly what we need.
wasting millions of hours of America's most productive workforce
I cringed when I saw this line. I've lived and worked in New York. I'm not saying that New Yorkers aren't hard working (they have to be, otherwise they couldn't afford rent on any place closer than Delaware) but between the taxes, inconvenience and complexity of New York, the fact that many individuals are in occupations that don't make anything, per se (media for instance...hell, I was in New York for acting myself, so I don't pretend to be productive) or they are just financial/CEO types which are not directly productive...I think it's hard to say that New Yorkers are honestly per capita more productive than people who, you know, make things.
New York rapes the young. People who love the city but are willing to go through so much working hell to maintain it. I don't necessarily consider that productive.
(I do incidentally agree with you on the automated realtime subway info. However, many of the systems I've seen run off of GPS, and that wouldn't work for the MTA.)
The pharmacist verifies the finished prescription, uses his thumbprint to indicate he approves it, and a label is printed. With a password system it's far too easy for anyone to print out the approval label, and that's what would happen.
Essentially...biometrics is useful when security isn't important. (I think that will be the biggest uses of biometrics for years to come...non-security applications...like at my local grocery store where employees use their thumbrpint to sign into a time-clock. It is only loosely a security application, it's more of an application of convenience.)
In the end, there is no security and privacy tradeoff, the main tradeoff is between privacy and convenience, and security and convenience. Biometrics is very convenient, but it's not very private and it's arguably not secure.
In that case why don't we always use DST? Arizona, Puerto Rico, some of Indiana, etc. all seem to be doing just fine without seasonal time changes.
Jurisdictions closer to the equator (all the above, plus Hawaii, except for the odd-man which is Indiana) have less of a use for DST, as their sunlight per day is more static than those places farther from the equator.
Yes it's possible to forge a passport, but with 50 differnet formats and much lower security, dirvers licenses are much easier to get and to forge.
One of the interesting psychological failures of photo ID cards is the assumption that the higher the government issuing the document, the more likely it is to be valid. Passport fraud is easier to pull off, and the passport is about average in counterfeit difficult, in comparison with US and Canadian licenses. Keep in mind however that, while it may be the same in complexity to forge a passport, the knowledge is easier to obtain.
For the most part, the only people who counterfeit Ohio driver's licenses are Ohio counterfeiters. The California license is several times more complex than the Ohio license, however California would have, simply by virtue of its population, 3 times as many counterfeiters specializing in the California license than Ohioans specializing in the Ohio license. In spite of the higher difficulty, the networking of the California fraudsters makes the California license a more easily obtainable document at higher qualities than the Ohio document.
Simply apply these networking synergies to the US passport. While there is a small need for US counterfeiters to forge the US passport, there is a high (and increasing) return on investment for foreigner counterfeiters. Assuming they network (and that's a safe assumption, even partial networking will do) the counterfeit difficulty of the passport, regardless of its complexity, will be no match to the unified counterfeiting effort. (Use the same arguments with a National ID card, except that a National ID card will be counterfeited by all the professionals here in the US as well.)
Also, passport fraud is sensitive to gateway documents...(arguably more sensitive than driver's licenses) so if you're successful in getting a photo driver's license, you're 85% of the way to getting a passport.
If you leave one gaping hole in US border patrol, like the entire northern border, then you may as well not patrol the other borders.
They used to say this with regards to Puerto Rico...a relatively poor, hispanic country which, by an odd sequence of geopolitical events, is a US territory with Americans. Puerto Ricans cross freely. After an influx of economic migrants, things cooled down and border crossing numbers are stable. From a security point of view economic migrants are just not a big priority, so focusing our energies away from the southern and norther borders makes sense.
You don't have any "right" to travel to another country and then re-enter without a passport.
Right...well, perhaps not. But history has been on the side of paperless travel, in particular with regards to Canada. They only began immigration checks on the US-Canada border in the 1950s (I remember reading somewhere that there were riots when this started, it was very controversial.) Since about the 1980s Congress has mandated a passport for Americans travelling from countries from outside of the Western Hemisphere. A lot of that rule still stands...I can go to just about any Carribbean country with my birth certificate, and even my home country of Costa Rica decided to cash in on the tourist dollars and allow Americans to travel there with just a birth certificate. It's possible that, if the US never required Americans to have a passport for re-entry, than neither would have the Japanese for your trips.
On a side note, apparently, the passport was created during World War I as a temporary document intended to prevent spies from crossing european borders. It was not a document viewed well...europeans were horrified by the idea that they would require documentation to go across borders. I'm amused by the bogus reasoning for its creation...it gives me a little satisfaction to know that people were as dumb then as they are now.
There are certainly people stopped from going one way or another on the US-Canadian border, but it still has not been proven that there's an aggregate security increase from documented crossing than without documented crossings. It's possible our time would be better spent doing different types of security checks than documentation checks.
Your "Black's law" dictionnary is only a subset of the english language which is only useful in the purpose of courtroom deliberations. Slashdot not being a courtroom, I would venture to say that it is woefully irrelevant here.
You will also find that other English language dictionaries don't make much of a big deal between "right" and "privilege". I'm happy to not talk about Black's law definitions on Slashdot, however, 'driving is a privilege, not a right" is a legal argument, and, being that you brought it up as the first line of your reply implies that it was terribly important. (It actually isn't. But you insisted on making it.)
I believe your Black is only relevant in the US
It's a book of definition used and based on anglo-saxon common law. It will have commonalities in all the common law countries.
But what you're doing is laywery pussyfooting, and anglo-saxon law was not ever intended to further the cause of humanity, but rather to protect and allow private despotism. Such arrogance is frowned upon in most of the world.
I disagree. However, that's basically a political discussion. Does your response here imply that you think I'm incorrect in what I said, or you just don't like what I said? With regards to rest of the world, I don't disagree that there are different values.
However, I don't hear people in civil law countries arguing about what is a right or a privilege. It's an even smaller difference in a civil law country because civil law is built on the premise that the state grants rights...which is not an assumption of the common law system. If you desire to talk about civil law countries, that's fine, but we were talking about a proposal in Texas.
As a citizen, I have the expectation that the State will do the utmost to insure my safety whenever I go out of my house.
But to what point? To the ad absurdum point of locking you permanently in a padded cell?
In France, the police will revoke your license on the spot for reckless driving, which includes running a red light. Yet, despite that, France is **THE** beacon of human rights.
On the spot revocations are simply a peculiarity of a country's way of doing business and don't necessarily imply anything to me about how safe they are. Latin American countries tend to arrest everyone and all the vehicles involved in an accident...I don't believe this aids in motor vehicle safety (in fact, it does the precise opposite, because, no matter who was at fault in the accident, no one wants go through the hassle of being arrested/impouded, so everyone flees the accident scene.) However, they think the system has merit which I don't see.
France is **THE** beacon of human rights.
This is a statement based on values...certain values are clearly more important to you than others. I think of France highly actually, though they have this way of dealing with immigrants/non-french that I think is ugly. My political values are anathema to the state dictating that people can name their children only from a list of pre-approved French names.
I think very highly of Canada myself (your response indicated that you could be.)
This is a problem that was solely caused by the anglo-saxon cultural fear of the State that makes a compulsory standard form of identification an anathema.
One shared with many other nations of the world. Check out Palestine and Japan. (My sig should have indicated that this is a big topic to me.)
I don't believe France has a compulsory ID card...in fact, the French and French-Canadians are far more disdaining of national ID cards than any other group in the world. (check out ID laws in Quebec, easily the best in the world.)
You will also be fascinted to know that ID card laws are almost entirely vendor driven...the history of photo ID cards in the US was that of photo ID card vendors needing to shill a product and convincing rather dumb state legislatures that they n
Driving is NOT a right, but a PRIVILEGE.
:-) Clearly there are individuals who have certain privacy preferences. Interestingly, nations like England, who are very very lax about privacy protections for citizens in public, are very protective of celebrities from papparazzi. Clearly that's a privacy preference in a slightly different direction that, say, in the US. It is not entirely true that there are no privacy rights in public.
This statement is more or less meaningless. Black's law dictionary's definition for "privilege" is "right." The US Supreme Court did indeed have a case where this question was asked, and they didn't exactly say there was a difference, only that the difference was irrelevant. (Can't find case right now.)
I did historical research on this...the Ohio driving license was created in 1936. Remember, that's quite some time into the automotive revolution...millions of Ohioans had driven without licenses till that point. To them, it was plainly obvious that driving was a right--all they had to do was meet certain criteria (age, physical characteristics, et cetera) and get into a car and go. The driving license did not change that...it only served as a mechanism for tracking violations. The word "privilege" did not appear in Ohio law, with regards to driving, until the late 1950s. I have hypothesized that motor vehicle safety proponents, in order to convince the public to accept auto safety laws, reinvented the concept of the driving license as a permission based concept (as opposed to one of contract and registration) and in doing so, invented a connotation for the word "privilege" which did not previously exist. "Privilege" is a word of power...you will note that a company will say things like "we retain the right to X" and never "we retain the privilege to X." (Regardless if they truly have that "right" or not.)
Clearly a driving license is not a pure "privilege"--the state could not restrict licenses to people of a certain race, for instance, as that would interfere with quite a lot of established rights. (I think that's the thinking the Supreme Court was going with when they argued that there difference is irrelevant.)
I like to say that the state has the ability to dictate reasonable restrictions on the driving license contract. These restrictions have to be directly related to auto safety and taxation (a great example...courts have ruled that the photograph on the license was not related to auto safety, and those with religious objections to being photographed could not be compelled to have a photo license.)
So a better argument for you, in lieu of, Privileges can be revoked if you abuse them would be there are certain contractural obligations that, if not met, could terminate the contract.
People driving on PUBLIC roads have absolutely, positively NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY.
You actually meant right to privacy here. If they had no expectation of privacy, then people wouldn't be making such a fuss about things.
Is CLEVELAND the Midwest?
:-)
Historically, certainly. Though today the connotation of the word "Midwest" has shifted westward away from Ohio.... and in doing so, the term has begun to carry a strong agricultural implication that doesn't reflect Ohio's population/industry. (Why the term should apply to both Kansas and Ohio makes the term entirely absurd.) I believe that, if you gave the average American a map of the US, without state borders on it, and ask them to draw lines indicating where the "Midwest" is, they will draw the lines west of Ohio.
Anecdotally it seems to me that easterners are most likely to call Ohio "Midwest" (but a New Yorker considers anything west of New Jersey and east of California as "Midwest" and, regrettably, New York attitudes toward the rest of the country translate into the media.)
Cleveland is only 6 hours by car to New York, sits nearly 10 hours from the Mississippi river, and is at least 250 miles from Central Time. I can't tell you how many New Yorkers assume Ohio is in Central time, when we're comfortably in Eastern.
I was raised in Cleveland, and would never have dreamt calling Ohio "Midwest." Cleveland has always been an Eastern city in my mind (in fact I always found myself very comfortable in New Jersey because it reminded me of the people and places I was raised with in Cleveland.) I have found that the farther south you go in Ohio the more comfortable people are with the term Midwest (which is odd, because the farther south you go in Ohio, the more Southern people become. I like to say that Ohio is a mix of an Eastern state like New Jersey and a Southern state, like Tennessee.
For me, the term "Midwest" is a pejorative that I disassociate with Ohio, and I believe in time Ohio will be reevaluated into an Eastern state. (The only time "Midwest" is not a pejorative is when it's applied to Chicago.)
For those who are not fully comfortable calling Ohio an Eastern state, I've come up with the handy term "near-east".
There's been a lot of condemnation of this, but it sounds OK to me. A lot of people who live in NJ (for example) commute to NYC to work. It's understood that they pay taxes.
They do not get to vote in NY, but they pay taxes because that's where they make the money. Everyone is OK with that.
Your argument should not necessarily be built on what is and what is not accepted. I would not agree with the idea that everyone is OK with the setup; I would say most people are irritated with it, but the percentage of NYC tax is low enough to be a nuisance and not a severe annoyance. (For some reason, I have found that New Jerseyans who work and pay Philadelphia city income tax are significantly more irritated than New Jerseyans paying NYC income tax.)
Another post earlier in the thread accurately said that the employer should just remove the employee from NYS payroll and stick them onto a payroll based in the state they live. There is nothing stopping your hypothetical New Jerseyan from receiving 4/5th of his income from an NJ payroll account, and 1/5th from a New York payroll account, as that would be both legal and appropriate.
Ohio cities have a city income tax; it too is levyed based on where you work. If my company is based in Columbus, but I work 3 days of my week in Cincinnati and 2 days in Cleveland, then my city income tax is most accurately paid 3/5th to Cincinnati and 2/5th to Cleveland.
All this will do is convince companies to move their headquarters outside of NY.
This is not without precedent. In the early 20th century companies fled from New York City to New Jersey for similar reasons.
I've never seen a cop show or heard about a court case where they convicted someone based on what their SSN was, but they use fingerprints for that all the time. Why should this be any different.
Actually the SSN is a major piece in US criminal records, you just don't hear about it because it's not as sexy as forensics is.
Fingerprinting is a bit on the overblown side, you hear about it a lot more often than it is used.
am subject to the inaninties of Ohio's brand of Midwestern legislating.
The weird thing is...Ohio's brand of politics is not "Midwestern" at all. (The term "Midwest" is misapplied to Ohio regularly.)
Ohio is an odd mix of easterners in Northeast Ohio (think New Jersey, and if you're from Jersey, think Central Jersey plus Newark) southerners in the Southeast part of the state (think Virginia) and a healthy mix of Appalachians people all over (think West Virginia.)
Ohio politics from the 1950s to the 1990s was dominated by an odd alliance of the Appalachians and the northeast Ohio "New Jerseyans." (Democrat controlled.) Today it's dominated by the Virginians and the Appalachians...who, in addition to running things the way they want, aren't entirely sure what to do with the state that was created by all them democrats from the previous 40 or so years.
. It is true that they are poor compared to many nations and may have some slightly unorthodox ways of making money (For example, they charge a $26 exit tax when tourists leave the country
The tax itself is not unorthodox...it's just the implementation that's rudely stupid. Other countries just have similar taxes rolled into price of the airline ticket.
I suspect that the reason they haven't done something similar is because there is a different pricing tier based on nationality...but it's something that I believe needs to be looked at someday.
As a US Government employee (US Air Force to be precise) I can tell you that Bank of America is regarded by most of us (us = gov't employees) as a faceless entity that cares nothing for customer service.
/.ers, to visit a credit union. Since I've gone to a credit union, I feel so much better about the banking experience, and I'm treated like a real person, and the credit union doesn't want to screw me.
Frankly, I've never met anyone who has had much good to say large banks. What type of company would rely on its poorest customers fucking up for 50% of its profit? (Applies to many large banks, including my old bank of Fifth Third.)
I humbly recommend, to all
they are the gadgets that are now part of our everyday life and of course they are extremely useful
Under the definition of the word "gadget" at m-w.com a gadget is "an often small mechanical or electronic device with a practical use but often thought of as a novelty."
If the product is "extremely useful" then it technically isn't a gadget. For this reason, vacuum tubes, transitors, the telephone and the abacus have no place being classified as gadgets.
If you happen to be around Ohio this coming fall...
I love Ohio but not a chance this year...I only show up there in fall to overvote for Bush.
By the time you are old enough to want to make a list of things to tell young people they need to do to be happy, you are too old to relate to any young person in a meaningful or influential way.
Regrettably, this is due to age discrimination. Thanks to the public schooling (which has setup this concept of people of the same age range, all from a very early age, doing the exact same thing as everyone else, and worse, socializing with people of a very small age range.)
So people grow up with this bizarrely narrow view of the world...people who are 19 do X, people 24 do Y, people 36 do Z.
As I like to say, if you're over 14 and half your friends are within 5 years of your own age, you're doing something wrong. Widsom and expertise will come to you from a wide range of people.