Well, it's true, I suppose, though my figures were strictly for gas (since it's gas price rises that are under discussion here). I didn't factor in the money we spent on car maintenance and insurance (though the car's long been paid off, so there's no payment to make).
I don't know where you live, but I kind of doubt that there is anywhere in the U.S. where 'make anything over $20/hour is quite literally impossible" for anyone of any education level. Doctors? Lawyers? Computer programmers? Really? If the wages there are so low, I'm guessing that (say) your mortgage or rent is significatnly lower than mine.
For the record, my wife makes $23.39/hr, working at a nonprofit. I'm freelance, so my income is all over the map. In the last 12 months, I made $59,096.85; not that I really work a 40 hour week (sometimes it's much more, sometimes it's a bit less), but pretending that I do, that works out to $30.78/hr. If that qualifies us as "rich" then it's news to me.
The actual gas figure for the last 12 months was $842.85. You can believe it or not, but I'm pretty meticulous about record keeping for that sort of thing. Guess we probably get better than 20 mpg average, on a 13 year old car?
I happened to be updating my money info in Quicken when this story popped up, so I thought I'd see how much gas prices really hit my pocketbook.
In the past 12 months, gas has constituted 0.81% of our family spending. For the 12 months before that, it was 0.66%. A good-sized bump in relative terms, I suppose, but one that can be absorbed without pain in relative terms because the number was so small to begin with.
My wife's office is only about five miles away from our house, but on the other hand, she does have to do a fair amount of driving for work-related reasons during the day, so I imagine her work-related driving isn't terribly outside the norm. I do work at home, though for non-gas-related reasons, but even if you double our gas spending to get to the more typical two-commute family, we'd still be at less than 2 percent of our family budget -- certainly not something that would put us in the poorhouse. And while we're not hurting for cash, we're certainly not wealthy -- between the two of us we make less than $100K a year, less than a lot of IT folks make with one salary.
My question is, are we some kind of freaks when it comes to gas use compared to most Americans? We live in a city neighborhood where we can walk to places for some basic errands and our grocery store is two-minute drive away; on the other hand, the city we live has a pretty lousy public transit system, so if we're doing things outside our neighborhood, we invariably drive. We don't drive a big SUV, but we don't drive a hybrid either: and our sedan is 13 years old, so I imagine it's not particularly fuel efficient when compared to new cars of the same size. Yet I feel like gas prices would have to triple before we'd be really forced to reorder our priorities to feed our car. Are we really so far outside the American norm when it comes to gas use? Or are gas prices just one of those things that you see two or three times a month and so you really notice when they go up, but it doesn't realy have as much of an impact on your life as you think?
To access account info for my AT&T Universal MasterCard, which is backed by Citibank, I need to go to a site in the accountonline.com domain.
To access account info for my wife's Fidelily Visa Card, I need to go to a site in the ibsnetaccess.com domain.
To access account info for my IRA, which I own through Citizens Funds, I need to go to a site in the websolcentral.com domain.
To access account info for my wife's 401K, which she owns through Fidelity Investments, I need to go to a site in the mysavingsatwork.com domain.
Honestly, it's like they're all trying to confuse people. Why should we expect anyone to recognize a phishing URL when the financial services companies won't host their own secure sites under their own domain names?
But there's nothing intrinsic to the blog form preventing a blogger from having the relevant educational background to get the job, of researching what would be an interesting story, of researching the story, of the story being edited by a professional, and of screening out the stories that don't belong. I certainly wouldn't claim my blog does that, but there's nothing stopping blogs from doing it.
Look, I have a blog, and I am pretty sick of people treating blogs, for good or for ill, as qualitatively different from other types of publications.
If you were a blogger and spent as much time ass-kissing/finessing/building relationships with Nortel as the traditional press does, and had readership numbers in the demographics Nortel wanted to reach, you'd get that press pass.
If you were a traditional publication and spent a lot of energy writing stuff that pissed Nortel off, you wouldn't get that press pass.
The fact that a blog is involved has nothing to do with anything.
My father in-law-lives in a densely populated, if not particularly affluent, Baltimore neighborhood. Not long after he moved in, he got DSL through Verizon (the local phone company). After a few weeks, it suddenly cut out. When he called their tech support, they informed him that Verizon did not offer DSL in his neighborhood, and never had.
After quite a bit of runaround, eventually, he got someone who said they'd fix it, and the it came back on again (without anyone ever coming out to the site, mind you). A few weeks later the same thing happened. And the same response -- "Oh, sir, we won't have DSL in that area until next year."
Came back eventually and stayed back, but it was a good illustration of perhaps one of the reasons they don't advertise their real coverage -- because they don't even understand it themselves.
The Global Surveyor probe completed its primary mission in 2001 and was in an "extended mission" phase. While its extended mission was to last until 2008, it was already essentially on bonus time. This is definitely still in the good luck category.
I'm very grateful for this whole hullabaloo, mostly because it taught me the word "pretexting". Can someone honestly explain to me how "pretexting" is different from "fraud" or "lying"?
Sorry to be nitpicky and jump into this discussion, but none of the behvior you're talking about re: clicks is illegal. It goes against the Google terms of service (which is why they try to stop it) and it means that Google misrepresents click-through rate to its customers if they can't account for it; the latter constitutes fraud.
In other words, it's not illegal for you to build an ad-block that does what you describe. It's illegal for Google to refer to the pageloads that result as a legitimate click-throughs when they aren't. The fact that it's really, really hard for Google to tell the difference is why they bring the hammer down on any site that they even vaguely suspect of fraud.
All current broadband providers hold their essentially monopolist positions by virtual of public franchising agreements. Where I live, only Comcast is allowed to supply cable to my door, and only Verizon is allowed to supply phone service. And these companies are happy for the regulation that has put them in this position -- witness Comcast's county-by-county holding action to try to stop Verizon from supplying cable TV via its new FIOS service.
Perhaps Congress wants to pass a law saying that any network provider is free to run a wire to my door. But if it doesn't, what we seem to have here is a group of government-sponsored monopolies claiming that if they leverage their monopoly to compete unfairly against nonmonopolists, it's the "market in action." Gimmie a break.
It's interesting because it's the only specific case he mentions in the intervew where he actually told the MS leadership that he thought that they were wrong.
In general, from the perspective of US consumers, corn is subsidized and sugar is tarriffed. This is why so many types food and drink in the US use corn syrup as a sweetener instead of sugar. Corn syrup is much less healthy, but much, much cheaper due to the subsidy/tarriff double whammy.
You know, I'd be a lot more willing to buy into these sorts of libertarian arguments if any company that wanted to could run wires out to my house and get me started with Internet connectivity. That way the big telecoms would never be able to get away with discarding network neutrality, because they'd just be slapped down by the invisible hand of the market.
But you know what? The reasons that telecoms are in their monopoloy or duopoloy positions today is because they have franchising agreements with local governments to provide their services. Where I live, only Comcast is allowed to run coaxial cable to my house, and only Verizon is allowed to run phone service, thanks to agreements with the city government. They are in essence state-sanctioned monopolies. For them to turn around and demand that they be able to "compete" and to "let the market do its work", when they are in a position of incredible power thanks to government legislation, is ridiculous.
I say, as long as you have accepted a government franchise to be the only cable or telephone carrier in a geographic area, you have to provide network neutrality.
Um, boy did you ever not get the point of the parent post. England spends nothing on its citizens because England has no government or tax-raising powers of its own. The UK spends money on English health care (and Socttish health care, and Welsh health care, and Northern Irish health care).
The whole point of the parent post was that the sentences "England spends nothing whatsoever on its citizens" and "The UK spends nothing whatsoever on its citizens" are not equivalents. The first sentence is true, the second false.
The Christian Science Monitor is an incredibly well-respected publication that nobody thinks of as a mouthpiece of the CS church. Pretty much anyone who knows anything about US media knows that.
Yeah, except that our elected govt. signed the treaty and now has to play by the rules we agreed to. We could always pull out... the WTO can't make us play by their rules, but they can kick us out of the club if we don't.
Which would be bad, since we benefit from being in the WTO in about a kajillion ways, mostly involving telling other countries how to run their economies. Or does your idea of "national sovreignty" only apply to the US?
1982: VIC-20 1985: Atari 800XL 1990: Mac Plus 1996: Power Computing 150 (that's a Mac clone, for those who remember those) 2000: Power Mac G4 dual processor 2001: HP Pavilion laptop 2004: IBM R51 Thinkpad 2005: Power Mac G5 dual processor
I met a white guy once whose name was Darius. About my age (early 30s now). His dad was a history buff and named him after the Persian king. He worked in IT.
Once, for his job, he had to go be a liason for a brief period at another company. As it happened, this other company was one where he had applied for a job but hadn't gotten an interview the previous year. He liked the job he ended up getting, so he had no hard feelings.
Somehow the fact that he had applied at this other company came up when he was on-site. The person he was working with was actually one of the people who had reviewed his resume. "Oh, yeah, I remember you!" he said. "See, we thought you were black because of your name. Ha ha! If we had know, we probably would have given you an interview."
It's only one data point, but... I'd say it still happens, yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
And by "kill" we mean "is used 25 percent more often than", according to one survey. But we might as well have a funeral now, right?
Well, it's true, I suppose, though my figures were strictly for gas (since it's gas price rises that are under discussion here). I didn't factor in the money we spent on car maintenance and insurance (though the car's long been paid off, so there's no payment to make).
I don't know where you live, but I kind of doubt that there is anywhere in the U.S. where 'make anything over $20/hour is quite literally impossible" for anyone of any education level. Doctors? Lawyers? Computer programmers? Really? If the wages there are so low, I'm guessing that (say) your mortgage or rent is significatnly lower than mine.
For the record, my wife makes $23.39/hr, working at a nonprofit. I'm freelance, so my income is all over the map. In the last 12 months, I made $59,096.85; not that I really work a 40 hour week (sometimes it's much more, sometimes it's a bit less), but pretending that I do, that works out to $30.78/hr. If that qualifies us as "rich" then it's news to me.
The actual gas figure for the last 12 months was $842.85. You can believe it or not, but I'm pretty meticulous about record keeping for that sort of thing. Guess we probably get better than 20 mpg average, on a 13 year old car?
Josh
I happened to be updating my money info in Quicken when this story popped up, so I thought I'd see how much gas prices really hit my pocketbook.
In the past 12 months, gas has constituted 0.81% of our family spending. For the 12 months before that, it was 0.66%. A good-sized bump in relative terms, I suppose, but one that can be absorbed without pain in relative terms because the number was so small to begin with.
My wife's office is only about five miles away from our house, but on the other hand, she does have to do a fair amount of driving for work-related reasons during the day, so I imagine her work-related driving isn't terribly outside the norm. I do work at home, though for non-gas-related reasons, but even if you double our gas spending to get to the more typical two-commute family, we'd still be at less than 2 percent of our family budget -- certainly not something that would put us in the poorhouse. And while we're not hurting for cash, we're certainly not wealthy -- between the two of us we make less than $100K a year, less than a lot of IT folks make with one salary.
My question is, are we some kind of freaks when it comes to gas use compared to most Americans? We live in a city neighborhood where we can walk to places for some basic errands and our grocery store is two-minute drive away; on the other hand, the city we live has a pretty lousy public transit system, so if we're doing things outside our neighborhood, we invariably drive. We don't drive a big SUV, but we don't drive a hybrid either: and our sedan is 13 years old, so I imagine it's not particularly fuel efficient when compared to new cars of the same size. Yet I feel like gas prices would have to triple before we'd be really forced to reorder our priorities to feed our car. Are we really so far outside the American norm when it comes to gas use? Or are gas prices just one of those things that you see two or three times a month and so you really notice when they go up, but it doesn't realy have as much of an impact on your life as you think?
To access account info for my AT&T Universal MasterCard, which is backed by Citibank, I need to go to a site in the accountonline.com domain.
To access account info for my wife's Fidelily Visa Card, I need to go to a site in the ibsnetaccess.com domain.
To access account info for my IRA, which I own through Citizens Funds, I need to go to a site in the websolcentral.com domain.
To access account info for my wife's 401K, which she owns through Fidelity Investments, I need to go to a site in the mysavingsatwork.com domain.
Honestly, it's like they're all trying to confuse people. Why should we expect anyone to recognize a phishing URL when the financial services companies won't host their own secure sites under their own domain names?
But there's nothing intrinsic to the blog form preventing a blogger from having the relevant educational background to get the job, of researching what would be an interesting story, of researching the story, of the story being edited by a professional, and of screening out the stories that don't belong. I certainly wouldn't claim my blog does that, but there's nothing stopping blogs from doing it.
Look, I have a blog, and I am pretty sick of people treating blogs, for good or for ill, as qualitatively different from other types of publications.
If you were a blogger and spent as much time ass-kissing/finessing/building relationships with Nortel as the traditional press does, and had readership numbers in the demographics Nortel wanted to reach, you'd get that press pass.
If you were a traditional publication and spent a lot of energy writing stuff that pissed Nortel off, you wouldn't get that press pass.
The fact that a blog is involved has nothing to do with anything.
My father in-law-lives in a densely populated, if not particularly affluent, Baltimore neighborhood. Not long after he moved in, he got DSL through Verizon (the local phone company). After a few weeks, it suddenly cut out. When he called their tech support, they informed him that Verizon did not offer DSL in his neighborhood, and never had.
After quite a bit of runaround, eventually, he got someone who said they'd fix it, and the it came back on again (without anyone ever coming out to the site, mind you). A few weeks later the same thing happened. And the same response -- "Oh, sir, we won't have DSL in that area until next year."
Came back eventually and stayed back, but it was a good illustration of perhaps one of the reasons they don't advertise their real coverage -- because they don't even understand it themselves.
jf
"...the prospects for Apple gaining market share in the corporation."
There's only one corporation now? Geez, all t his merger mania's been worse than I thought.
On the other hand, all Apple has to do is convince one CIO, and their in!
jf
The Global Surveyor probe completed its primary mission in 2001 and was in an "extended mission" phase. While its extended mission was to last until 2008, it was already essentially on bonus time. This is definitely still in the good luck category.
Apparently they aren't ranked?
Their input is considered irrelevant, apparently.
I'm very grateful for this whole hullabaloo, mostly because it taught me the word "pretexting". Can someone honestly explain to me how "pretexting" is different from "fraud" or "lying"?
Sorry to be nitpicky and jump into this discussion, but none of the behvior you're talking about re: clicks is illegal. It goes against the Google terms of service (which is why they try to stop it) and it means that Google misrepresents click-through rate to its customers if they can't account for it; the latter constitutes fraud.
In other words, it's not illegal for you to build an ad-block that does what you describe. It's illegal for Google to refer to the pageloads that result as a legitimate click-throughs when they aren't. The fact that it's really, really hard for Google to tell the difference is why they bring the hammer down on any site that they even vaguely suspect of fraud.
jf
All current broadband providers hold their essentially monopolist positions by virtual of public franchising agreements. Where I live, only Comcast is allowed to supply cable to my door, and only Verizon is allowed to supply phone service. And these companies are happy for the regulation that has put them in this position -- witness Comcast's county-by-county holding action to try to stop Verizon from supplying cable TV via its new FIOS service.
Perhaps Congress wants to pass a law saying that any network provider is free to run a wire to my door. But if it doesn't, what we seem to have here is a group of government-sponsored monopolies claiming that if they leverage their monopoly to compete unfairly against nonmonopolists, it's the "market in action." Gimmie a break.
It's interesting because it's the only specific case he mentions in the intervew where he actually told the MS leadership that he thought that they were wrong.
In general, from the perspective of US consumers, corn is subsidized and sugar is tarriffed. This is why so many types food and drink in the US use corn syrup as a sweetener instead of sugar. Corn syrup is much less healthy, but much, much cheaper due to the subsidy/tarriff double whammy.
jf
You know, I'd be a lot more willing to buy into these sorts of libertarian arguments if any company that wanted to could run wires out to my house and get me started with Internet connectivity. That way the big telecoms would never be able to get away with discarding network neutrality, because they'd just be slapped down by the invisible hand of the market.
But you know what? The reasons that telecoms are in their monopoloy or duopoloy positions today is because they have franchising agreements with local governments to provide their services. Where I live, only Comcast is allowed to run coaxial cable to my house, and only Verizon is allowed to run phone service, thanks to agreements with the city government. They are in essence state-sanctioned monopolies. For them to turn around and demand that they be able to "compete" and to "let the market do its work", when they are in a position of incredible power thanks to government legislation, is ridiculous.
I say, as long as you have accepted a government franchise to be the only cable or telephone carrier in a geographic area, you have to provide network neutrality.
jf
Um, boy did you ever not get the point of the parent post. England spends nothing on its citizens because England has no government or tax-raising powers of its own. The UK spends money on English health care (and Socttish health care, and Welsh health care, and Northern Irish health care).
The whole point of the parent post was that the sentences "England spends nothing whatsoever on its citizens" and "The UK spends nothing whatsoever on its citizens" are not equivalents. The first sentence is true, the second false.
jf
Like youtube, they don't make any money yet, but since investors are keen on putting money in, they must know what they're doing.
Where exactly were you between 1997 and 2000?
jf
From the dawn of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun. Hopefully this research will bring us one step closer.
jf
The Christian Science Monitor is an incredibly well-respected publication that nobody thinks of as a mouthpiece of the CS church. Pretty much anyone who knows anything about US media knows that.
jf
Yeah, except that our elected govt. signed the treaty and now has to play by the rules we agreed to. We could always pull out ... the WTO can't make us play by their rules, but they can kick us out of the club if we don't.
Which would be bad, since we benefit from being in the WTO in about a kajillion ways, mostly involving telling other countries how to run their economies. Or does your idea of "national sovreignty" only apply to the US?
jf
not that anyone cares, but:
1982: VIC-20
1985: Atari 800XL
1990: Mac Plus
1996: Power Computing 150 (that's a Mac clone, for those who remember those)
2000: Power Mac G4 dual processor
2001: HP Pavilion laptop
2004: IBM R51 Thinkpad
2005: Power Mac G5 dual processor
wow, it seems like there should be more....
I met a white guy once whose name was Darius. About my age (early 30s now). His dad was a history buff and named him after the Persian king. He worked in IT.
... I'd say it still happens, yeah.
Once, for his job, he had to go be a liason for a brief period at another company. As it happened, this other company was one where he had applied for a job but hadn't gotten an interview the previous year. He liked the job he ended up getting, so he had no hard feelings.
Somehow the fact that he had applied at this other company came up when he was on-site. The person he was working with was actually one of the people who had reviewed his resume. "Oh, yeah, I remember you!" he said. "See, we thought you were black because of your name. Ha ha! If we had know, we probably would have given you an interview."
It's only one data point, but
jf