Chome OS is competition to Windows in the same way a bicycle is competition to an automobile.
What you say is true, but maybe it doesn't make the point that you want it to make. They are both valid means of transportation, so they are in competition. Perhaps you mean to say is that because an automobile is so much faster and can carry more passengers and stuff than a bicycle, that the automobile will win any competition between the two methods of transportation. But different people have different needs at different times. For example, while I use my automobile to go to the supermarket, I take my bike to the train station because there is no place to park.
And I would never let my 11 year old daughter drive a car to school (even if it were legal), but a bike is perfectly fine.
The nature of corporations and that they are the primary benefactors of a bad law is always relevant when you're talking about the law.
The kind of firms that engage in HFT could easily be (and often are) set up as partnerships. The firms that are hurt generally have to be set up as corporations. So a law restricting HFT would be a net help to corporations.
Of course I read that part. However, I have read elsewhere there are problems with the potency of even the current versions of golden rice. So even though I do not believe what is in Wikipedia, I left in the last sentence because I felt that that would be potentially misleading, and not what the wikipedia writer would have wanted someone to quote.
So should I have taken that part out, and been accused of selective editing, or leave it in, and be accused of hypocrisy (or of not reading my own post)? I chose the latter. YMMV
Actually it's not a slam dunk. The concentration of vitamin A in golden rice is not high enough in and of itself to solve vitamin A deficiency. From Wikipedia:
The research that led to golden rice was conducted with the goal of helping children who suffer from vitamin A deficiency (VAD). In 2005, 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women, in 122 countries, were estimated to be affected by VAD.[18] VAD is responsible for 1–2 million deaths, 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness and millions of cases of xerophthalmia annually.[19] Children and pregnant women are at highest risk. Vitamin A is supplemented orally and by injection in areas where the diet is deficient in vitamin A. As of 1999, there were 43 countries that had vitamin A supplementation programs for children under 5; in 10 of these countries, two high dose supplements are available per year, which, according to UNICEF, could effectively eliminate VAD.[20] However, UNICEF and a number of NGOs involved in supplementation note more frequent low-dose supplementation should be a goal where feasible.[21]
Because many children in countries where there is a dietary deficiency in vitamin A rely on rice as a staple food, the genetic modification to make rice produce the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene is seen as a simple and less expensive alternative to vitamin supplements or an increase in the consumption of green vegetables or animal products. It can be considered as the genetically engineered equivalent of fluoridated water or iodized salt in that it helps to prevent disease, with the exception that fluoride is not an essential nutrient for survival.[22]
Initial analyses of the potential nutritional benefits of golden rice suggested consumption of golden rice would not eliminate the problems of vitamin A deficiency, but should be seen as a complement to other methods of vitamin A supplementation.[23][24] Since then, improved strains of golden rice have been developed containing sufficient provitamin A to provide the entire dietary requirement of this nutrient to people who eat about 75g of golden rice per day.[4]
Well what do you expect with an operating system in the hands of an advertising company? Next up..."Alert: Doctor's appointment at 2:00. This reminder brought to you by Johnson and Johnson"
You are correct, I don't run a 501c3. But in another life I worked on the calculation of tax deductibility for (among other entities) several 501c9's so I have a pretty good idea about how complex tax rules for nfp's can be, and how someone whose business is something other than filling out IRS paperwork can fail to have the information necessary to fill out a 990. The "Oh crap, can you help us recreate the last 3 year's books?" scenario, while rare, does occasionally happen.
I'll drop the tinfoil hat when the government stops spying on me (oops, I mean collecting my metadata) and IRS employees enforce the rules evenhandedly to all types of organizations. 2 years ago I would have thought this position was crazy too, but given all of the stuff that has come out recently, I think that the a priori assumption should be that the government is abusing its power and it should have to show that it is not. For example, if the IRS came out with a statement that said "We looked at a sample of 10,000 registered 501c3's, and found that 53 of them had not filed a return in the last 2 years. We revoked the 501c3 status on 51 of them, and are looking into assertions by 2 of them that they did file and we [the IRS] must have lost them." I'd look upon this action a lot more favorably.
The problem is that the rules are phenomenally complex. It's easy to say that they should have just followed the rules, but IRS rules are a serious PITA to satisfy. It is quite likely that no matter what Xorg had done, the IRS could have found some error in their compliance that would enable them to revoke 501c3 status.
So the real issue is that by making it so hard to comply with the rules, regulations, and laws, it raises the question of whether the government is using "selective enforcement" to punish people, organizations, and views that they don't like. Did this happen because of a general review of nonprofits, in which case this was a simple case of good enforcement, or are "hackers" being targeted by the government (for lots of reasons, e.g. resistance to NSA monitoring), and any one of a number of technical violations would have led to the IRS' actions? In that way it is similar to the Aaron Schwartz case, and is something that should be noted, if not actively resisted.
this isn't the grossest perversion of the language that I've seen.
The worst I know of is the fact that the prefix 'in-' means "not" or "the opposite of" and "flammable" means easily set on fire. So therefore, "inflammable" must mean "not easily set on fire." As in, "Don't worry about accidentally burning the house down, I coated the walls of the fireplace with inflammable material"
However, the "literally" thing is probably the most annoying perversion of the language.
but since they weren't there when it was written nobody would prosecute them for it
...but if they authorize the re-write, they could be held responsible for getting it right (especially if they don't use HIPAA-compliant encryption TM). Kind of the epilogue to an "I'll be gone, you'll be gone" strategy. As you point out, the main position of the typical middle manager is CYA, whether warranted or not.
Having software enforce unknown business rules is a recipe for failure.
This is the biggest problem with highly regulated businesses like insurance. Lots of business rules in that industry are ultimately derived from legal requirements, and the people who wrote the regulations generally don't care to make them clear and concise, or sometimes, consistent. So it is easy to say that all we have to do is tear it down, write the specs, and start from scratch, but are you 100% certain that you know how many hospital days North Dakota requires to be covered after a live birth? What about after a Cesarian? What does Ohio require for IVF treatment? How does Florida's motor vehicle insurance coordinate benefits for a hospital stay after an accident where the patient was not at fault? There are a million of these questions that somebody had to get the right answer to at some point in the past, and recreating it would be exceptionally difficult.
These rules were written by politicians and regulators to be read by and used by lawyers, not developers. And big companies actually like it that way because it prevents new entrants from coming in. I cannot wait for the day when all regulations need to be written in implementable code, such that companies just use that code and know that they will be in compliance.
Having said that, every insurance company can handle OOP maxes in their system. The issue that they claim is a problem is that you have one company manage hospitals and doctors visits, and another that does pharmaceuticals (PBMs). Why not just "reinterpret" the rule as 2 separate OOP maxes, one for the major medical, and another for the drugs? Regulators make that kind of regulatory interpretation all the time so postponing the whole thing seems much more political than operational
What if I just click on 'Print it', then go on with the rest of your life until it's printed?
You come back to it 3 hours later to find that the object has separated from the raft leaving you with $20 worth of extruded plastic spaghetti. But if you babysit it the success rate goes way up.
It might have something to do with the nearby body heat, or maybe a hidden camera that verifies a person is there, or just pissed off little elves that don't want to be lonely. But yes, you have to babysit it:(
Human behavior is complex enough that our current state-of-the art is not sufficient to fully measure or model it from a reductionist viewpoint. And yet holistic explanations based on simple observation have proven fairly successful over the centuries. I don't mean to be flippant, but you will get a better understanding of the motivations of man from great literature than you will from science and economic textbooks (and this is likely to be the case for another hundred years or so).
But they *are* a part of the "experiment" that AC claims to be "a fair way to run an unbiased experiment" which is what I am disagreeing with. There is almost certainly a bias there - the children who were not immunized had parents who made the decision not to immunize them.
If you could find children who were, say, placed for adoption where the ultimate home they lived with was random, and some had been immunized and others had not, then if you had a statistically significant number of autism diagnoses from that population, then you would have a nice unbiased experiment (but even then you aren't normalizing for genetic predisposition to these diseases that they might have inherited from their birth parents). But you probably don't have enough data from adoptions so the children who did not get vaccines were raised by parents who did not give them vaccines, and that type of parenting may be strongly correlated (positively or negatively) with autism diagnoses at later ages. Hence it will be very biased, and although statistical techniques can reduce that bias somewhat, one cannot expect conclusions coming out of this data to hold the same scientific rigor as a proper double bind study.
IIRC, it was poor experiment design that started this whole thing (yes that is an understated euphemism for the improper conduct that actually occurred), so I'm not just being pedantic - there are important distinctions to be made between the scientific method versus "statistics on a bunch of data I found."
I didn't read TFA, but I'm pretty sure that the parents chose to withhold the vaccine, not that doctors randomly gave some kinds a placebo while giving the real thing to others.
Some good statistics might be able to glean some information from this (multilevel regression model or such thing), but it will not be as good as an unbiased experiment.
They are each trying to shore up their known weaknesses. My dad might see people walking around with iDevices, and say to himself, "Hmm, these seem to be everywhere, but what do you actually do with one?" Apple commercials tell him. Trying to highlight how cool they are in commercials would only be counterproductive.
Similarly, when average people think of Microsoft, they think about sitting at their desk 8 hours a day in front of a computer doing mind-numbing work.So their commercials try to get people to associate Microsoft with fun (not unlike the quintessential beer commercial showing a bunch of happy young people at the beach or at a party to get you to associate good times with Budweiser). Telling people that computers can do lots of stuff doesn't help to change people's minds about Microsoft as a leisure company.
If you just want a couple good shows, you can buy them a la cart relatively inexpensively without HBO GO. Game of Thrones is on Amazon Instant Video for $3 per episode, and the box set dvd for the first season can be found online for about $40.
But back on topic, I thought the whole "A video player is illegal because it can infringe copyright" was settled a long time ago. Even if VLC can help infringe copyright, under current law they can't ban it. But if they are trying to change the legal answer to that question then that is the real problem here, not the outrageous cost of HBO GO, nor your inability to to find cheap and readily available, but not free, alternatives to torrent sites.
I guess if HBO GO was $10-15 per month you would happily give them your money while they make VLC use illegal?
Expanding on AC, the level to which a currency is democratized is the degree to which the people have control over the supply of the currency. And while anyone can mint a bitcoin, no one can change the trajectory of the bitcoin's money supply - that is a feature, not a bug. The reason a currency such as the US dollar is more democratic than a bitcoin is because the Federal Reserve has some (albeit tenous) connection to the people, through the nomination process for members of the FRB by the elected president. Sure it's among the least democratic institutions in the US, but people have more of a say (e.g., the pressure that is being brought to bear by tight money advocates in the Republican party is quite effective at staying the Fed's hand from further, much needed, loose money).
The fact that only the Fed can print a US dollar but anyone (with the proper equipment) can mint a bitcoin is irrelevant. No one has control over bitcoin; which I guess is degenerately democratic in the sense that no one has any more control over the currency than anybody else, but it is not really democratic in the sense that the will of the people cannot be expressed in changes to the currency's money supply. If tomorrow, everyone in the US were to decide that it would be better for the Fed to run a particular monetary policy (and voted that way), it would (eventually) become the new policy for the dollar.
That $0.75 looks like a lot to you because you are used to "free"* checking where it costs you nothing* to keep your money in the bank. For the unbanked population (unbanked because they don't have enough savings to qualify for free* checking, or are illegal immigrants), $0.75 is way cheaper than the check cashing services that you find throughout the inner city. And much safer than taking home a wad of cash on a predictable pattern.
Having said that, There needs to be some precautions that forbid an employer from forcing an employee into a particular card service (i.e., the one that gives the employer the biggest kickbacks). Maybe like a 401k, where the employee can pick from a menu of cards. Although even the 401k analogy is poor because while the underlying funds may come from different companies, in general, the 401k provider themselves are a monopoly chosen by the employer and if you don't like it, tough.
*There is (almost) no such thing as "free" checking. Almost every checking account has some way that, in theory, your bank can charge you minimum balance fees or overdraft fees, etc. It is not easy to always follow every rule in the agreement, and although most of us will blow off a $10 minimum balance fee or an overdraft line with a 20% interest rate, to the poor the $0.75 will cost them less over time than all of the nickel and diming that comes with a "free" checking account. At least the latest generation of prepaid cards is (mostly) honest and upfront about the fact that they are providing you a service (safe, convenient access to your money) and you pay for it directly instead of indirectly.
Pretty much. It wasn't exactly a nobility/peasant distinction as a cuisine/non-cuisine split. The French had good cooks (even then) and so the terms for the dishes "mutton," "pork" and "beef" come from French while the terms for the animals, "sheep," "pig" and "cow" retained the terms from English/German. The cuisine/non-cuisine breakout probably had elements of a high/low language thing, but if the Anglo-Saxons were better cooks we would probably be eating SLT's (sheep, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, where the sheep is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe), pig chops, and ground cow.
I tend to think of it more as a case of overnormalization. Just make an fk to table "gender_vals". Or better yet, make a many to many relationship with table "socially_constructed_characteristics".
The scary thing is that a few weeks ago I would have read this post and thought "Jeez put away the aluminum hat" and now I'm wishing I had mod points. What if the director of the NSA decides that he wants to run for president in 2016? And shockingly enough, no prominent politician is willing to run against him? I would love to say that if I had this kind of power that I would use it wisely and justly, but I don't really know what I would do. And so I can't possibly trust somebody else to avoid all abuses of this power
Slashdot Mirror
Chome OS is competition to Windows in the same way a bicycle is competition to an automobile.
What you say is true, but maybe it doesn't make the point that you want it to make. They are both valid means of transportation, so they are in competition. Perhaps you mean to say is that because an automobile is so much faster and can carry more passengers and stuff than a bicycle, that the automobile will win any competition between the two methods of transportation. But different people have different needs at different times. For example, while I use my automobile to go to the supermarket, I take my bike to the train station because there is no place to park.
And I would never let my 11 year old daughter drive a car to school (even if it were legal), but a bike is perfectly fine.
The nature of corporations and that they are the primary benefactors of a bad law is always relevant when you're talking about the law.
The kind of firms that engage in HFT could easily be (and often are) set up as partnerships. The firms that are hurt generally have to be set up as corporations. So a law restricting HFT would be a net help to corporations.
Of course I read that part. However, I have read elsewhere there are problems with the potency of even the current versions of golden rice. So even though I do not believe what is in Wikipedia, I left in the last sentence because I felt that that would be potentially misleading, and not what the wikipedia writer would have wanted someone to quote.
So should I have taken that part out, and been accused of selective editing, or leave it in, and be accused of hypocrisy (or of not reading my own post)? I chose the latter. YMMV
Actually it's not a slam dunk. The concentration of vitamin A in golden rice is not high enough in and of itself to solve vitamin A deficiency. From Wikipedia:
The research that led to golden rice was conducted with the goal of helping children who suffer from vitamin A deficiency (VAD). In 2005, 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women, in 122 countries, were estimated to be affected by VAD.[18] VAD is responsible for 1–2 million deaths, 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness and millions of cases of xerophthalmia annually.[19] Children and pregnant women are at highest risk. Vitamin A is supplemented orally and by injection in areas where the diet is deficient in vitamin A. As of 1999, there were 43 countries that had vitamin A supplementation programs for children under 5; in 10 of these countries, two high dose supplements are available per year, which, according to UNICEF, could effectively eliminate VAD.[20] However, UNICEF and a number of NGOs involved in supplementation note more frequent low-dose supplementation should be a goal where feasible.[21] Because many children in countries where there is a dietary deficiency in vitamin A rely on rice as a staple food, the genetic modification to make rice produce the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene is seen as a simple and less expensive alternative to vitamin supplements or an increase in the consumption of green vegetables or animal products. It can be considered as the genetically engineered equivalent of fluoridated water or iodized salt in that it helps to prevent disease, with the exception that fluoride is not an essential nutrient for survival.[22] Initial analyses of the potential nutritional benefits of golden rice suggested consumption of golden rice would not eliminate the problems of vitamin A deficiency, but should be seen as a complement to other methods of vitamin A supplementation.[23][24] Since then, improved strains of golden rice have been developed containing sufficient provitamin A to provide the entire dietary requirement of this nutrient to people who eat about 75g of golden rice per day.[4]
Screw you and your cross marketing opportunities.
Well what do you expect with an operating system in the hands of an advertising company? Next up..."Alert: Doctor's appointment at 2:00. This reminder brought to you by Johnson and Johnson"
Education in the most populous state is the 2nd worse of all 51 states.
Usually I can tell the difference between ignorance and sarcasm (or even meta-sarcasm), but I must admit, you have me stumped here. Well played.
You are correct, I don't run a 501c3. But in another life I worked on the calculation of tax deductibility for (among other entities) several 501c9's so I have a pretty good idea about how complex tax rules for nfp's can be, and how someone whose business is something other than filling out IRS paperwork can fail to have the information necessary to fill out a 990. The "Oh crap, can you help us recreate the last 3 year's books?" scenario, while rare, does occasionally happen.
I'll drop the tinfoil hat when the government stops spying on me (oops, I mean collecting my metadata) and IRS employees enforce the rules evenhandedly to all types of organizations. 2 years ago I would have thought this position was crazy too, but given all of the stuff that has come out recently, I think that the a priori assumption should be that the government is abusing its power and it should have to show that it is not. For example, if the IRS came out with a statement that said "We looked at a sample of 10,000 registered 501c3's, and found that 53 of them had not filed a return in the last 2 years. We revoked the 501c3 status on 51 of them, and are looking into assertions by 2 of them that they did file and we [the IRS] must have lost them." I'd look upon this action a lot more favorably.
The problem is that the rules are phenomenally complex. It's easy to say that they should have just followed the rules, but IRS rules are a serious PITA to satisfy. It is quite likely that no matter what Xorg had done, the IRS could have found some error in their compliance that would enable them to revoke 501c3 status.
So the real issue is that by making it so hard to comply with the rules, regulations, and laws, it raises the question of whether the government is using "selective enforcement" to punish people, organizations, and views that they don't like. Did this happen because of a general review of nonprofits, in which case this was a simple case of good enforcement, or are "hackers" being targeted by the government (for lots of reasons, e.g. resistance to NSA monitoring), and any one of a number of technical violations would have led to the IRS' actions? In that way it is similar to the Aaron Schwartz case, and is something that should be noted, if not actively resisted.
this isn't the grossest perversion of the language that I've seen.
The worst I know of is the fact that the prefix 'in-' means "not" or "the opposite of" and "flammable" means easily set on fire. So therefore, "inflammable" must mean "not easily set on fire." As in, "Don't worry about accidentally burning the house down, I coated the walls of the fireplace with inflammable material"
However, the "literally" thing is probably the most annoying perversion of the language.
but since they weren't there when it was written nobody would prosecute them for it
...but if they authorize the re-write, they could be held responsible for getting it right (especially if they don't use HIPAA-compliant encryption TM). Kind of the epilogue to an "I'll be gone, you'll be gone" strategy. As you point out, the main position of the typical middle manager is CYA, whether warranted or not.
Having software enforce unknown business rules is a recipe for failure.
This is the biggest problem with highly regulated businesses like insurance. Lots of business rules in that industry are ultimately derived from legal requirements, and the people who wrote the regulations generally don't care to make them clear and concise, or sometimes, consistent. So it is easy to say that all we have to do is tear it down, write the specs, and start from scratch, but are you 100% certain that you know how many hospital days North Dakota requires to be covered after a live birth? What about after a Cesarian? What does Ohio require for IVF treatment? How does Florida's motor vehicle insurance coordinate benefits for a hospital stay after an accident where the patient was not at fault? There are a million of these questions that somebody had to get the right answer to at some point in the past, and recreating it would be exceptionally difficult.
These rules were written by politicians and regulators to be read by and used by lawyers, not developers. And big companies actually like it that way because it prevents new entrants from coming in. I cannot wait for the day when all regulations need to be written in implementable code, such that companies just use that code and know that they will be in compliance.
Having said that, every insurance company can handle OOP maxes in their system. The issue that they claim is a problem is that you have one company manage hospitals and doctors visits, and another that does pharmaceuticals (PBMs). Why not just "reinterpret" the rule as 2 separate OOP maxes, one for the major medical, and another for the drugs? Regulators make that kind of regulatory interpretation all the time so postponing the whole thing seems much more political than operational
What if I just click on 'Print it', then go on with the rest of your life until it's printed?
You come back to it 3 hours later to find that the object has separated from the raft leaving you with $20 worth of extruded plastic spaghetti. But if you babysit it the success rate goes way up.
:(
It might have something to do with the nearby body heat, or maybe a hidden camera that verifies a person is there, or just pissed off little elves that don't want to be lonely. But yes, you have to babysit it
I think you mean 50% of the problems you have with USB. Or is it 45%?
Human nature? Free will?
Human behavior is complex enough that our current state-of-the art is not sufficient to fully measure or model it from a reductionist viewpoint. And yet holistic explanations based on simple observation have proven fairly successful over the centuries. I don't mean to be flippant, but you will get a better understanding of the motivations of man from great literature than you will from science and economic textbooks (and this is likely to be the case for another hundred years or so).
*blind
But they *are* a part of the "experiment" that AC claims to be "a fair way to run an unbiased experiment" which is what I am disagreeing with. There is almost certainly a bias there - the children who were not immunized had parents who made the decision not to immunize them.
If you could find children who were, say, placed for adoption where the ultimate home they lived with was random, and some had been immunized and others had not, then if you had a statistically significant number of autism diagnoses from that population, then you would have a nice unbiased experiment (but even then you aren't normalizing for genetic predisposition to these diseases that they might have inherited from their birth parents). But you probably don't have enough data from adoptions so the children who did not get vaccines were raised by parents who did not give them vaccines, and that type of parenting may be strongly correlated (positively or negatively) with autism diagnoses at later ages. Hence it will be very biased, and although statistical techniques can reduce that bias somewhat, one cannot expect conclusions coming out of this data to hold the same scientific rigor as a proper double bind study.
IIRC, it was poor experiment design that started this whole thing (yes that is an understated euphemism for the improper conduct that actually occurred), so I'm not just being pedantic - there are important distinctions to be made between the scientific method versus "statistics on a bunch of data I found."
I didn't read TFA, but I'm pretty sure that the parents chose to withhold the vaccine, not that doctors randomly gave some kinds a placebo while giving the real thing to others.
Some good statistics might be able to glean some information from this (multilevel regression model or such thing), but it will not be as good as an unbiased experiment.
They are each trying to shore up their known weaknesses. My dad might see people walking around with iDevices, and say to himself, "Hmm, these seem to be everywhere, but what do you actually do with one?" Apple commercials tell him. Trying to highlight how cool they are in commercials would only be counterproductive.
Similarly, when average people think of Microsoft, they think about sitting at their desk 8 hours a day in front of a computer doing mind-numbing work.So their commercials try to get people to associate Microsoft with fun (not unlike the quintessential beer commercial showing a bunch of happy young people at the beach or at a party to get you to associate good times with Budweiser). Telling people that computers can do lots of stuff doesn't help to change people's minds about Microsoft as a leisure company.
If you just want a couple good shows, you can buy them a la cart relatively inexpensively without HBO GO. Game of Thrones is on Amazon Instant Video for $3 per episode, and the box set dvd for the first season can be found online for about $40.
But back on topic, I thought the whole "A video player is illegal because it can infringe copyright" was settled a long time ago. Even if VLC can help infringe copyright, under current law they can't ban it. But if they are trying to change the legal answer to that question then that is the real problem here, not the outrageous cost of HBO GO, nor your inability to to find cheap and readily available, but not free, alternatives to torrent sites.
I guess if HBO GO was $10-15 per month you would happily give them your money while they make VLC use illegal?
Expanding on AC, the level to which a currency is democratized is the degree to which the people have control over the supply of the currency. And while anyone can mint a bitcoin, no one can change the trajectory of the bitcoin's money supply - that is a feature, not a bug. The reason a currency such as the US dollar is more democratic than a bitcoin is because the Federal Reserve has some (albeit tenous) connection to the people, through the nomination process for members of the FRB by the elected president. Sure it's among the least democratic institutions in the US, but people have more of a say (e.g., the pressure that is being brought to bear by tight money advocates in the Republican party is quite effective at staying the Fed's hand from further, much needed, loose money).
The fact that only the Fed can print a US dollar but anyone (with the proper equipment) can mint a bitcoin is irrelevant. No one has control over bitcoin; which I guess is degenerately democratic in the sense that no one has any more control over the currency than anybody else, but it is not really democratic in the sense that the will of the people cannot be expressed in changes to the currency's money supply. If tomorrow, everyone in the US were to decide that it would be better for the Fed to run a particular monetary policy (and voted that way), it would (eventually) become the new policy for the dollar.
That $0.75 looks like a lot to you because you are used to "free"* checking where it costs you nothing* to keep your money in the bank. For the unbanked population (unbanked because they don't have enough savings to qualify for free* checking, or are illegal immigrants), $0.75 is way cheaper than the check cashing services that you find throughout the inner city. And much safer than taking home a wad of cash on a predictable pattern.
Having said that, There needs to be some precautions that forbid an employer from forcing an employee into a particular card service (i.e., the one that gives the employer the biggest kickbacks). Maybe like a 401k, where the employee can pick from a menu of cards. Although even the 401k analogy is poor because while the underlying funds may come from different companies, in general, the 401k provider themselves are a monopoly chosen by the employer and if you don't like it, tough.
*There is (almost) no such thing as "free" checking. Almost every checking account has some way that, in theory, your bank can charge you minimum balance fees or overdraft fees, etc. It is not easy to always follow every rule in the agreement, and although most of us will blow off a $10 minimum balance fee or an overdraft line with a 20% interest rate, to the poor the $0.75 will cost them less over time than all of the nickel and diming that comes with a "free" checking account. At least the latest generation of prepaid cards is (mostly) honest and upfront about the fact that they are providing you a service (safe, convenient access to your money) and you pay for it directly instead of indirectly.
Pretty much. It wasn't exactly a nobility/peasant distinction as a cuisine/non-cuisine split. The French had good cooks (even then) and so the terms for the dishes "mutton," "pork" and "beef" come from French while the terms for the animals, "sheep," "pig" and "cow" retained the terms from English/German. The cuisine/non-cuisine breakout probably had elements of a high/low language thing, but if the Anglo-Saxons were better cooks we would probably be eating SLT's (sheep, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, where the sheep is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe), pig chops, and ground cow.
I tend to think of it more as a case of overnormalization. Just make an fk to table "gender_vals". Or better yet, make a many to many relationship with table "socially_constructed_characteristics".
The scary thing is that a few weeks ago I would have read this post and thought "Jeez put away the aluminum hat" and now I'm wishing I had mod points.
What if the director of the NSA decides that he wants to run for president in 2016? And shockingly enough, no prominent politician is willing to run against him?
I would love to say that if I had this kind of power that I would use it wisely and justly, but I don't really know what I would do. And so I can't possibly trust somebody else to avoid all abuses of this power