If you don't like AIDS research, elect a candidate who will remove funding for AIDS research.
This is a non-solution, and you know it. Since there are too many competing opinions about whether we should be taxed for something and how much, special interests exclusively control federal outlays by organizing large groups of people to vote for particular parties/politicians.
I want control over my own money, and I *don't* want control over anyone else's. Is that too much to ask?
Better yet, vote for someone who'll cut the defecit so we don't have so many decisions that involve cutting funding for one thing to fund another slightly more important thing.
Sure. We can cut the deficit by cutting all government health research grants, and letting the private sector do it. So, you see, we do agree. Steve Forbes for president!
Um... I pay my share of taxes, too. I support part of those taxes going to pay for AIDS research.
Right, but you're not only volunteering $0.10 of your own income taxes, but $0.10 or $0.05 or $0.50 or $10 of someone else's taxes, depending on how much they make in relation to you. You should only have control over than $0.10 of yours, and that's where my beef is.
Not sure about the figures under the Bush Administration, but as of 1998 cancer got more research money than AIDS.
For FY1998, NIH is allocating a total of $1.61 billion for AIDS research, or 12% of the $13.6 billion total NIH budget.
That's $1.61 billion more that could be spent on cancer research, increasing by more than 50% the federal grants to a disease that strikes 50x more people in the US.
I also support AIDS research because, while it may affect 1% of our population here, it affects something like 50% of Africa's.
Let's be honest here: *you* don't support it. You want *other* people to support it through their taxes.
As far as I am concerned, if it's Africa's problem, let them pay for it, with the help of *voluntary* Western charity. That money is better spent on diseases that strike US citizens at a high rate, and AIDS isn't one of those.
Agreed that it isn't smart to run up a huge deficit. OTOH, there's something to be said for not spending a huge surplus in the good times so it can pay for the bad times. Just as a typical household has credit, the government does also and should use it wisely.
You know, if you oppose handouts for the poor, you should oppose handouts for failing businesses like many of the airlines and the telcos get.
Absolutely. I am a huge opponent of any welfare, the corporate kind included. But why people decry the corrupting influence of corporate welfare and not that of personal welfare is beyond me: they both send the signal that government has something for sale, and all you need to do is buy it with votes/campaign contributions. They are the same thing.
I sure hope that wasn't ment to be a reference to Bush. He seems to be doing everything in his power to pass FDR as the man responible for the largest expansion in government power.
Agreed. I am not a Bush cheerleader. But at least he's willing to let me keep more of my own money. That's something none of the Democrats will do.
I wouldn't typically wish ill against someone, but I hope you end up broke and destitute someday so you get to see how the "other half" lives.
Talk about a heartless motherfucker....
Yes, you are. You, sir, are a complete asshole if you think I have no compassion. A *complete* *asshole*. Arrogance and ignorance, together. It's amazing to me how Slashdot has become the home of the self-righteous Socialists of America.
Listen, *asshole*: I never said that coverage would be cheaper. I never said it would be more expensive. What I *did* say was that it would reduce profit margins to medical firms and bleed their R&D budgets dry.
And then you know what happens? The only one funding medical research is the government, which will inevitably spend most of the money on the Disease Fad of the Day instead of spending that money most efficiently.
Case in point: AIDS. There is no reason to spend money on AIDS research. Why? Because it's a *behavioral disease*. Now that we test blood supplies for it, people only get it by *fucking around* and *doing drugs stupidly* (along with some other statistically insignificant ways of getting it). The right way to approach the problem is to inject some *personal responsibility* into peoples' lives: AIDS can be eradicated simply by altering behavior. But nooooo... there's a powerful AIDS lobby in the US, so lots of money gets funneled to that research even though it won't directly benefit more than 1% of the population.
Why isn't all that money going into cancer research, a disease that strikes 30% of our population at some point in their lives, and in most cases strikes seemingly randomly? Why?? I'll tell you why: because guv'mint money is controlled by special interests. It isn't allocated efficiently: it's allocated for *political reasons*.
What evidence is there of this? If anything, the economy is recovering at a record pace. I don't think it's any coincidence that it started almost to the day that dividend tax relief went into effect.
Paying taxes is the price you pay to be a part of our society.
Only because you've been conditioned to believe this. Paying taxes is the price you pay for common defense and the enforcement of property rights. Nearly everything else has been added through, ah, shall we say, creative interpretation of the Constitution.
Don't you give a fuck about the legacy - our country, our world, our oceans, our sky - you leave for your kids?
Yeah, I do. Don't think you leftists have a monopoly on the moral high ground. You don't. Just because I don't agree with your methods for achieving a happy, prosperous world doesn't mean I'm against it. Such a statement is incredibly insulting, and demonstrates both arrogance and tremendous ignorance.
You recall that there was a vote on military action in Iraq and it passed, right? That in fact many of the Democrat presidential candidates themselves voted for it, right?
So you disapprove of President Bush's asking for $87 billion of MY money to support his war in Iraq, correct?
No, because that's arguably national defense. Even if you don't agree with the action (and lots of reasonable people are on both sides of the question), national defense is one of those things that the Constitution explicitly allows (and, in fact, obligates) the federal government to do.
In fact, id be happy to have them take more if it would buy single payer health care to help alot of those non-geeks I know who struggle just to make a living and for whom carrying health insurance takes a signifigant portion of their meager wage.
At the same time a single-payer system saves the present, it destroys the future: a single-payer can dictate prices to providers, reducing profit margins to the point where no research can be done. I'm not willing to give up the chance to find a cure for cancer or heart disease just so people who didn't earn it can get free health care on my back. You'd be stupid to support this as well.
Besides, why should I support paying more for less? I have good health care. I don't want to step down to GuvmintCare, and would fight tooth and nail to keep that from happening.
If you're feeling so giving, why don't you buy health care for your starving friends? Too expensive? That's right: good health care is expensive! Imagine that! But instead of volunteering your own money dollar-for-dollar to pay for it, you're volunteering $0.05 of your own money and $0.95 of someone else's money. How noble of you!
The only reason you're willing to raise taxes to pay for all this crap is that you know you wouldn't be hit that hard by it, owing to the injustice of the progressive income tax system. If you had to pay 38% of your weekly paycheck in federal tax (in addition to 15% for FICO, plus ~5% in state tax, not to mention sales taxes, wealth/property taxes, etc.) and truly understood the downsides of government funding, I guarantee you'd be much less likely to support it.
And I certainly would not be happy to see yet more checks go out to people that are too small to actually make any difference in their lives, aside from maybe helping them make a single car payment, just to have a purely symbpolic tax cut to helps someones aproval rating while the deficit goes up again.
(1) Pay people more for doing nothing. (2) ?? (3) Profit!
I looked at your homepage, and although you're a libertarian, I highly doubt you benefitted or will benefit from the Bush tax cuts.
Already have. Not much, but the tax cuts haven't fully phased in yet. But every extra dollar from my paycheck that I get to keep is an extra dollar I get to spend the way I want, whether it's for consumption, investment, or philanthropy.
If cutting taxes magically stimulates the economy the government grows from growth in tax revenue in other sectors (sales taxes, taxes on businesses, etc.)
All taxes should be cut, along with all social programs. The only things the federal government should be funding are the military and the courts. Everything else should be handled by private industry and state/local governments.
I feel so inclined towards libertarian beliefs, but when I see a dude in a tie died t-shirt talking about how great tax-cuts would be I go into paroxysms of laughter.
I'm guessing I make more money than you do.
Do you have some large estate (>$250,000) that's going to be passed onto you that you don't want to be cut in half by estate taxes? I doubt it.
No, and if I did, you'd be conducting class warfare against me instead. You can't have it both ways.
So he'll probably raise taxes on the wealthier to help the poor, undoing the tax cut that Bush passed that gave massive tax breaks to the very wealthy. After seeing a report recently that said that almost 10% of Americans live on less than $8000 a year, it is hard for me to whine about my high taxes.
You're always free to donate that difference to the charity of your choice, or even to the government if you wish. Don't make that choice for me. I do not happen to agree with you, and don't appreciate you putting your hand in my wallet.
Besides, you are incredibly naive if you think wealth transfer schemes are effective at helping the poor. What they actually do is help some poor, make many more dependent on handouts, and feed the ravenous maw of an enormous, cancerous bureaucracy that dedicates the majority of its resources not to actually helping those in need, but to ensuring its own continued existence.
Private charity is always more efficient than government social programs; private charity lets people feel good about giving instead of resentful that their pocket is being robbed every Friday; private charity enables people to choose methods of giving that are most to their liking.
But, most of all, private charity lets people make their own choices about whether they actually need that extra money at the moment or not, because they are clearly the most informed people about their own needs.
I'd much rather have a president who knew what the GPL was and raised my taxes than a president who didn't know the difference between a computer and a calculator, but cut taxes blindly.
I'd much rather have a president who obeyed his oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and stopped enforcing unconstitutional laws providing for confiscation and redistribution of my wealth to those who didn't earn it.
It does beg the question--will a Dean presidency be geek friendly?
Ignoring the misuse of the phrase "beg[ging] the question" for the moment...
A related question is whether Dean will roll back the high tax rates that disproportionately confiscate the earnings of geeks, who have a median income significantly higher than the national average.
Just because Dean's campaign promotes GPL'ed software doesn't mean he's going to fight for your interests: at most this is just pandering to the web-connected crowd, but is more likely just someone's pet project that got blown out of proportion.
The terms of the GPL are that, upon distribution of a binary constructed partially from GPL'ed code, you need to offer the source code of everything that links with GPL'ed code. If you can't do that and simultaneously satisfy your other contracts/commitments, then you can't release the product. Period.
The only two resolutions as far as I can tell that will be acceptable to the kernel development team are to release the missing code and violate your contract with the third-party, or to remove the product from the market.
Can someone explain how this is "informative"? It looks to me more like "trolling": Bush's tax cuts have nothing to do with the states vastly overestimating their future revenue by planning on a the late 90's bubble never bursting.
Personally, I'd like to see the states look less for new taxes and new revenue and more for ways to cut their bloated budgets. Enumerate all the programs that were added since 1995, cut them all out of the budget, and then see how far into the hole you are!
The rest of your post is irrelevant to me, since I don't subscribe to much of Rand's philosophy, nor do I think she was a very good writer. However, in the one area I explained in the parent post, I believe she was right, mainly because she bought into the philosophy of earlier thinkers and contemporaries like Friedman. I'll just say that:
Here you go again. Making the ridiculous assertion that these Randian truths are self evident. This is the sort of argument one would use if someone were disputing the existence of gravity.
I never even implied Randian truths were self-evident, much less said it. In the parent post, I clearly implied that being ignorant of Rand's basic philosophy while trying to argue against it is stupid. If you know her philosophy and continue to argue against it, then fine; but it is clear that anyone not familiar with the basics of her opinions on selfishness shouldn't be arguing against them.:)
This has nothing to do with intellectual property. If you'd read anything by her, or even anything about her, you'd know that the basics of her philosophy are based on Adam Smith/Milton Friedman-style selfish individual/free market theory. That's what I was referring to.
Yet again, some Randian monkey spunks in his pants over how great the "Free market" is.
So, I'm not actually a great fan of most of Rand's philosophy; I just think she expressed the facts about Friedman/Smith free market economics in a very eloquent way. The rest of it I don't really care about.
NewsFlash: HP don't care about you. The wouldn't even care about you if you purchased a computer from them. HP are not a warm and fuzzy bunny come to save you from the big bad scary Darl.
That was exactly Rand's point: that while selfishness isn't a virtue, it leads to maximal outcomes. That's the whole reason the market works, and what my post was trying to point out. I'm especially sorry I have to take the hammer approach with you to get you to understand a reference that a learned person should be aware of.
The only reason HP is doing this is to attract more consumers to their own platform/hardware. And you know what? Who cares. The result is the same: indemnification for potential new users means SCO's FUD will have less of an effect on Linux adoption.
There is a perfectly good technical solution to the spam problem: HashCash. Can you please stop advocating that the government stick its finger up my ass even farther? I mean, if you like that, more power to you, but as for me...
...but it's a good example of Ayn Rand's philosophy, which is that selfishness leads to practical efficiency and maximal outcomes. My hat's off to SBC for doing the right thing, whether it's for the right or wrong reasons.
...is a phone that keeps other people from hearing your conversations. It's really annoying when you're sitting next to someone on the commuter rail, and they insist on spending the entire trip gabbing to no particular end at about 10dB higher than they need to.
An acceptable alternative would be to designate one car as a "cellphone car," and let the rest of us read in peace.
You know that gas prices in the US are not even near historical highs, right? Inflation-adjusted historical highs are $2.74/gallon. Five years ago when gas was $1.00/gallon was the lowest real price for gasoline EVER.
Which part of that don't you understand? You buy insurance to protect you financially against errors in judgment, of which I consider this one. McDonald's is not at fault for providing a product that many millions of customers love. Can't you see the weight of numbers against your argument? As far as I am concerned, the same goes for cigarettes, although an argument can be made for fraud in that instance.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like AIDS research, elect a candidate who will remove funding for AIDS research.
This is a non-solution, and you know it. Since there are too many competing opinions about whether we should be taxed for something and how much, special interests exclusively control federal outlays by organizing large groups of people to vote for particular parties/politicians.
I want control over my own money, and I *don't* want control over anyone else's. Is that too much to ask?
Better yet, vote for someone who'll cut the defecit so we don't have so many decisions that involve cutting funding for one thing to fund another slightly more important thing.
Sure. We can cut the deficit by cutting all government health research grants, and letting the private sector do it. So, you see, we do agree. Steve Forbes for president!
Um... I pay my share of taxes, too. I support part of those taxes going to pay for AIDS research.
Right, but you're not only volunteering $0.10 of your own income taxes, but $0.10 or $0.05 or $0.50 or $10 of someone else's taxes, depending on how much they make in relation to you. You should only have control over than $0.10 of yours, and that's where my beef is.
Not sure about the figures under the Bush Administration, but as of 1998 cancer got more research money than AIDS.
For FY1998, NIH is allocating
a total of $1.61 billion for AIDS research, or 12% of the
$13.6 billion total NIH budget.
That's $1.61 billion more that could be spent on cancer research, increasing by more than 50% the federal grants to a disease that strikes 50x more people in the US.
I also support AIDS research because, while it may affect 1% of our population here, it affects something like 50% of Africa's.
Let's be honest here: *you* don't support it. You want *other* people to support it through their taxes.
As far as I am concerned, if it's Africa's problem, let them pay for it, with the help of *voluntary* Western charity. That money is better spent on diseases that strike US citizens at a high rate, and AIDS isn't one of those.
Agreed that it isn't smart to run up a huge deficit. OTOH, there's something to be said for not spending a huge surplus in the good times so it can pay for the bad times. Just as a typical household has credit, the government does also and should use it wisely.
You know, if you oppose handouts for the poor, you should oppose handouts for failing businesses like many of the airlines and the telcos get.
Absolutely. I am a huge opponent of any welfare, the corporate kind included. But why people decry the corrupting influence of corporate welfare and not that of personal welfare is beyond me: they both send the signal that government has something for sale, and all you need to do is buy it with votes/campaign contributions. They are the same thing.
I sure hope that wasn't ment to be a reference to Bush. He seems to be doing everything in his power to pass FDR as the man responible for the largest expansion in government power.
Agreed. I am not a Bush cheerleader. But at least he's willing to let me keep more of my own money. That's something none of the Democrats will do.
I wouldn't typically wish ill against someone, but I hope you end up broke and destitute someday so you get to see how the "other half" lives.
Talk about a heartless motherfucker....
Yes, you are. You, sir, are a complete asshole if you think I have no compassion. A *complete* *asshole*. Arrogance and ignorance, together. It's amazing to me how Slashdot has become the home of the self-righteous Socialists of America.
Listen, *asshole*: I never said that coverage would be cheaper. I never said it would be more expensive. What I *did* say was that it would reduce profit margins to medical firms and bleed their R&D budgets dry.
And then you know what happens? The only one funding medical research is the government, which will inevitably spend most of the money on the Disease Fad of the Day instead of spending that money most efficiently.
Case in point: AIDS. There is no reason to spend money on AIDS research. Why? Because it's a *behavioral disease*. Now that we test blood supplies for it, people only get it by *fucking around* and *doing drugs stupidly* (along with some other statistically insignificant ways of getting it). The right way to approach the problem is to inject some *personal responsibility* into peoples' lives: AIDS can be eradicated simply by altering behavior. But nooooo... there's a powerful AIDS lobby in the US, so lots of money gets funneled to that research even though it won't directly benefit more than 1% of the population.
Why isn't all that money going into cancer research, a disease that strikes 30% of our population at some point in their lives, and in most cases strikes seemingly randomly? Why?? I'll tell you why: because guv'mint money is controlled by special interests. It isn't allocated efficiently: it's allocated for *political reasons*.
Do you *fucking understand yet* you troglodite?
drives us further into recession
What evidence is there of this? If anything, the economy is recovering at a record pace. I don't think it's any coincidence that it started almost to the day that dividend tax relief went into effect.
Paying taxes is the price you pay to be a part of our society.
Only because you've been conditioned to believe this. Paying taxes is the price you pay for common defense and the enforcement of property rights. Nearly everything else has been added through, ah, shall we say, creative interpretation of the Constitution.
Don't you give a fuck about the legacy - our country, our world, our oceans, our sky - you leave for your kids?
Yeah, I do. Don't think you leftists have a monopoly on the moral high ground. You don't. Just because I don't agree with your methods for achieving a happy, prosperous world doesn't mean I'm against it. Such a statement is incredibly insulting, and demonstrates both arrogance and tremendous ignorance.
You recall that there was a vote on military action in Iraq and it passed, right? That in fact many of the Democrat presidential candidates themselves voted for it, right?
Right?
So you disapprove of President Bush's asking for $87 billion of MY money to support his war in Iraq, correct?
No, because that's arguably national defense. Even if you don't agree with the action (and lots of reasonable people are on both sides of the question), national defense is one of those things that the Constitution explicitly allows (and, in fact, obligates) the federal government to do.
In fact, id be happy to have them take more if it would buy single payer health care to help alot of those non-geeks I know who struggle just to make a living and for whom carrying health insurance takes a signifigant portion of their meager wage.
At the same time a single-payer system saves the present, it destroys the future: a single-payer can dictate prices to providers, reducing profit margins to the point where no research can be done. I'm not willing to give up the chance to find a cure for cancer or heart disease just so people who didn't earn it can get free health care on my back. You'd be stupid to support this as well.
Besides, why should I support paying more for less? I have good health care. I don't want to step down to GuvmintCare, and would fight tooth and nail to keep that from happening.
If you're feeling so giving, why don't you buy health care for your starving friends? Too expensive? That's right: good health care is expensive! Imagine that! But instead of volunteering your own money dollar-for-dollar to pay for it, you're volunteering $0.05 of your own money and $0.95 of someone else's money. How noble of you!
The only reason you're willing to raise taxes to pay for all this crap is that you know you wouldn't be hit that hard by it, owing to the injustice of the progressive income tax system. If you had to pay 38% of your weekly paycheck in federal tax (in addition to 15% for FICO, plus ~5% in state tax, not to mention sales taxes, wealth/property taxes, etc.) and truly understood the downsides of government funding, I guarantee you'd be much less likely to support it.
And I certainly would not be happy to see yet more checks go out to people that are too small to actually make any difference in their lives, aside from maybe helping them make a single car payment, just to have a purely symbpolic tax cut to helps someones aproval rating while the deficit goes up again.
(1) Pay people more for doing nothing.
(2) ??
(3) Profit!
I looked at your homepage, and although you're a libertarian, I highly doubt you benefitted or will benefit from the Bush tax cuts.
Already have. Not much, but the tax cuts haven't fully phased in yet. But every extra dollar from my paycheck that I get to keep is an extra dollar I get to spend the way I want, whether it's for consumption, investment, or philanthropy.
If cutting taxes magically stimulates the economy the government grows from growth in tax revenue in other sectors (sales taxes, taxes on businesses, etc.)
All taxes should be cut, along with all social programs. The only things the federal government should be funding are the military and the courts. Everything else should be handled by private industry and state/local governments.
I feel so inclined towards libertarian beliefs, but when I see a dude in a tie died t-shirt talking about how great tax-cuts would be I go into paroxysms of laughter.
I'm guessing I make more money than you do.
Do you have some large estate (>$250,000) that's going to be passed onto you that you don't want to be cut in half by estate taxes? I doubt it.
No, and if I did, you'd be conducting class warfare against me instead. You can't have it both ways.
So he'll probably raise taxes on the wealthier to help the poor, undoing the tax cut that Bush passed that gave massive tax breaks to the very wealthy. After seeing a report recently that said that almost 10% of Americans live on less than $8000 a year, it is hard for me to whine about my high taxes.
You're always free to donate that difference to the charity of your choice, or even to the government if you wish. Don't make that choice for me. I do not happen to agree with you, and don't appreciate you putting your hand in my wallet.
Besides, you are incredibly naive if you think wealth transfer schemes are effective at helping the poor. What they actually do is help some poor, make many more dependent on handouts, and feed the ravenous maw of an enormous, cancerous bureaucracy that dedicates the majority of its resources not to actually helping those in need, but to ensuring its own continued existence.
Private charity is always more efficient than government social programs; private charity lets people feel good about giving instead of resentful that their pocket is being robbed every Friday; private charity enables people to choose methods of giving that are most to their liking.
But, most of all, private charity lets people make their own choices about whether they actually need that extra money at the moment or not, because they are clearly the most informed people about their own needs.
I'd much rather have a president who knew what the GPL was and raised my taxes than a president who didn't know the difference between a computer and a calculator, but cut taxes blindly.
I'd much rather have a president who obeyed his oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and stopped enforcing unconstitutional laws providing for confiscation and redistribution of my wealth to those who didn't earn it.
It does beg the question--will a Dean presidency be geek friendly?
Ignoring the misuse of the phrase "beg[ging] the question" for the moment...
A related question is whether Dean will roll back the high tax rates that disproportionately confiscate the earnings of geeks, who have a median income significantly higher than the national average.
Just because Dean's campaign promotes GPL'ed software doesn't mean he's going to fight for your interests: at most this is just pandering to the web-connected crowd, but is more likely just someone's pet project that got blown out of proportion.
The terms of the GPL are that, upon distribution of a binary constructed partially from GPL'ed code, you need to offer the source code of everything that links with GPL'ed code. If you can't do that and simultaneously satisfy your other contracts/commitments, then you can't release the product. Period.
The only two resolutions as far as I can tell that will be acceptable to the kernel development team are to release the missing code and violate your contract with the third-party, or to remove the product from the market.
Can someone explain how this is "informative"? It looks to me more like "trolling": Bush's tax cuts have nothing to do with the states vastly overestimating their future revenue by planning on a the late 90's bubble never bursting.
Personally, I'd like to see the states look less for new taxes and new revenue and more for ways to cut their bloated budgets. Enumerate all the programs that were added since 1995, cut them all out of the budget, and then see how far into the hole you are!
- Here you go again. Making the ridiculous assertion that these Randian truths are self evident. This is the sort of argument one would use if someone were disputing the existence of gravity.
I never even implied Randian truths were self-evident, much less said it. In the parent post, I clearly implied that being ignorant of Rand's basic philosophy while trying to argue against it is stupid. If you know her philosophy and continue to argue against it, then fine; but it is clear that anyone not familiar with the basics of her opinions on selfishness shouldn't be arguing against them.This has nothing to do with intellectual property. If you'd read anything by her, or even anything about her, you'd know that the basics of her philosophy are based on Adam Smith/Milton Friedman-style selfish individual/free market theory. That's what I was referring to.
- Yet again, some Randian monkey spunks in his pants over how great the "Free market" is.
So, I'm not actually a great fan of most of Rand's philosophy; I just think she expressed the facts about Friedman/Smith free market economics in a very eloquent way. The rest of it I don't really care about.- NewsFlash: HP don't care about you. The wouldn't even care about you if you purchased a computer from them. HP are not a warm and fuzzy bunny come to save you from the big bad scary Darl.
That was exactly Rand's point: that while selfishness isn't a virtue, it leads to maximal outcomes. That's the whole reason the market works, and what my post was trying to point out. I'm especially sorry I have to take the hammer approach with you to get you to understand a reference that a learned person should be aware of.The only reason HP is doing this is to attract more consumers to their own platform/hardware. And you know what? Who cares. The result is the same: indemnification for potential new users means SCO's FUD will have less of an effect on Linux adoption.
Yet again, Ayn Rand is shown to be correct.
There is a perfectly good technical solution to the spam problem: HashCash. Can you please stop advocating that the government stick its finger up my ass even farther? I mean, if you like that, more power to you, but as for me...
...but it's a good example of Ayn Rand's philosophy, which is that selfishness leads to practical efficiency and maximal outcomes. My hat's off to SBC for doing the right thing, whether it's for the right or wrong reasons.
...is a phone that keeps other people from hearing your conversations. It's really annoying when you're sitting next to someone on the commuter rail, and they insist on spending the entire trip gabbing to no particular end at about 10dB higher than they need to.
An acceptable alternative would be to designate one car as a "cellphone car," and let the rest of us read in peace.
You know that gas prices in the US are not even near historical highs, right? Inflation-adjusted historical highs are $2.74/gallon. Five years ago when gas was $1.00/gallon was the lowest real price for gasoline EVER.
All I have to say is:
IN-SUR-ANCE
Which part of that don't you understand? You buy insurance to protect you financially against errors in judgment, of which I consider this one. McDonald's is not at fault for providing a product that many millions of customers love. Can't you see the weight of numbers against your argument? As far as I am concerned, the same goes for cigarettes, although an argument can be made for fraud in that instance.