In my experience, someone for whom English is not a first language would be more likely to use the contraction correctly. Second languages are generally learned as written, rather than spoken. Nobody who learned to write English at the same time as they learned to speak it (as opposed to writing years after speaking) would make that mistake unless they were educated by idiots.
It's there since 1804, and you can find it worded about the same in the roman law before it. May I add that most european countries have exactly the same principle?
The detritus of Roman (and Napoleonic) law across the Continent - and its absence from British common law (and its descendants) - may reliably be said to explain nearly any mutually maddening legal disputes between Europeans and native English speakers.
If you really want to see Americans' draws drop, explain how European courts (both civil and criminal) work.
Ah, yes, those third parties that are unable to be heard among 435 voices will be absolutely crystal-clear among over 4000. I'm quite certain that things won't immediately devolve into strict party-line votes.
In case you hadn't noticed, the only third-party or independent in Congress to exert any power in recent years was Jim Jeffords, during the 2001-03 Congress, and that only because he was the 51st vote for the Democrats. In the Senate, no less, where one vote actually means something.
You really don't understand limited liability if you think bankruptcy is a way to "make a fresh start".
If you get rid of limited liability, every single shareholder - even Grandma that owns 10 shares because Grandpa worked for the company for one year ages ago - may be personally responsible for all the debts of the corp. Still have debts after liquidating the corp's assets? Now you have to sell off personal assets up to the point where every single shareholder is personally completely out of assets - house, clothes, food, bank accounts, IRA's, everything. This is why corps, and limited liability, exist. Otherwise, there's absolutely no way to raise the kind of money that is necessary to fund anything bigger than a candy store.
Man, I wish I lived by you. Bellsouth charges me $30 a month for a plain landline; caller ID is another $9.
But you're fighting a losing battle; the US-unaware portion of the European contingent on/. has focused on the two weaknesses of the American mobile market - you have to pay for incomings, and the lack of standards severely limits phone choices - and totally ignored all the reasons that make our market great.
For those who wish to know - I pay $35.61 a month (after all taxes, fees, etc.) for 300 anytime minutes from anywhere on Sprint's network(sorry, the map sucks), which has coverage of all major cities and highways, though coverage is nonexistent in the boonies, to anywhere in the US. Free nights (9pm-7am) and weekends. My wife and I recently traveled about 1000 miles away for a wedding. Used the phone all weekend. It worked, and it didn't cost a cent more than doing it at home. Her parents could call us for free. Try doing that while vacationing from the UK to, say, Austria.
Of course, that's the long view. You could accurately point out that Europe had roughly the same service it has now about 10 years ago, which was definitely not the case in the US.
BTW, you can get long distance a lot cheaper than 5c/minute. I pay about 3.5c a minute after taxes, for service from Primus. And my dialup Net service is $9.95 a month, unlimited. Hard to beat that, really.
Please mod parent through roof. Incidentally, if you have carpets and want to avoid the sugar, feel free. It works fairly well if they just walk through it some time - it abrades the joints, and then is readily absorbed. It's very low toxicity - toxic dose is 200-500 mg/kg body weight for small mammals, so even a Chihuahua can take a gram or so.
You really needed to live somewhere else. I used to go out in high school with my friends and shoot in the floodplain along the river (conveniently accessed from one friend's back yard). We only involved adults when we needed somebody to buy more ammo.
Point taken. I am an idiot, at least as re: electricity. I submit. Oh, and whoever modded me Troll, what's up with that? How about -1, Clueless? That, at least, would be honest.
You do know, don't you, that computers are particularly inefficient electrical heaters? It'd be cheaper just to use a real electric heater (or, if you have it, gas/oil).
As a number of people have pointed out across time, analog distortion often produces pleasing results - the "warm" sound that LP's are often claimed to have. Digital distortion, OTOH, results in stuff that sounds like static. The hard part is getting a way to massage the digital info so it sounds like it's gone through an analog system. People just didn't want to imagine that the CD is what it actually sounds like.
I don't think that, except in extraordinary (and essentially criminal) cases that Americans live in real poverty. Many of them have a lot less money than the rest of us, but as long as "poverty" is defined as below a certain percentile on the income-distribution graph, we'll never get rid of it.
And there are, frankly, student loans to pay for college (as well as programs, like I mentioned in parent, that will pay tuition if you will work x years in y underserved field). I didn't say it was easy, or that there aren't people who deserve a hand up. But I did say that one minimum wage job a week isn't enough to pay for dependents (so you're saving, more or less, the full second income a week). Hormonal mistakes at 16? I'm sorry. Have an abortion or give the child up for adoption. It's heartrending, but you owe it to yourself and to that child to do so. This is by far the most common way people end up stuck, and it's one of the easiest to avoid.
Anyway, you're quite right - it's much easier to climb from middle class to upper middle class than it is to climb from underclass to working class, or from working class to middle. I was reacting against the parent, who basically said, "They're stuck, no way out." There is a way out, just not an easy one.
Just because someone has a boring repetitive job and might be potnetially locked into it due to circumstances in their life they are not very intelligent and "don't have a lot of insight into the future?"
As a generalization, absolutely. Starting out in bad circumstances won't do it: I've met people who started out in Podunk, Missibamuckyseesas, won junior college scholarships, studied hard, and went to medical school. They lived in a shoeboxes on campus the whole time they were there. They didn't go out and party, because they didn't have the money. But they won't be poor like their (single teenage mom) parents.
The urban kids - those are the most likely to be doomed. Come up with a good idea for fixing that, I'm all ears. But most poor people are poor because they don't plan ahead. What else would you like me to call it, if you can't foresee the (entirely predictable) consequences of your actions? ADD?
Maybe it's where I live. Nonetheless, I grew up in a solidly middle middle class existence - my parents owned the house, and we always had cars (though only my mom got new ones). My mom made some of my clothes when I was young. Lots and lots of people are poorer than that.
I was overly harsh in calling it the median person; actually, now that I look up the numbers, 84% of Americans over age 25 have high school diplomas, though only 27% have bachelor's degrees.
Your average American, then, probably isn't your plumber, your electrician, or other high-paying blue collar service pro (he's probably in the 23% between median and college). But I did exaggerate a bit. Still, I hedged to 1/3, and I think I'm probably right about that.
Anyway, try out a new Wal-Mart supercenter in an area not likely to attract scummy people, and you'll be surprised at the stuff they offer, both quality and price. I still don't buy my clothes there, but you can't beat it for a great price on staples that you don't want in Sam's quantities.
But, what do they have that people buy so much of? Whatever it is that people buy a lot of, of course.
I don't go to Wal*Mart much because their locations aren't terribly nearby. Every time I do, though, I find that their grocery has managed to undercut Kroger by 5-20% on 95% of the items they sell (and I'm not just buying WM brand). Doesn't sound like much, and isn't worth the drive every time. But then I don't have, say, kids.
When you're buying diapers by the crate, paper towels by the truckload, and food to fill up three teenage boys, that 5% starts to be a LOT of money. So they go to WM.
Besides, think about the median person in life. This isn't something most/.ers ever do. In all likelihood, they've met very few of them in their life. Before I got into health care, I had met very few of them - the people, for example, who gut chickens, package screws, can vegetables. The people who do the millions of boring, repetitive, miserable jobs out there. They don't have a lot of money, and they're not very bright (or they'd be doing something else). They don't have a lot of insight into the future, and though they can follow a train of thought laying out consequences, they can't come up with it on their own. All of these add up to "not a lot of disposable cash". So when they go to WM, they find a large selection of very cheaply priced and surprisingly well-made (really, compared to what they had access to before) items.
There are lots and lots of them. Probably a third of the US population has a life not terribly different from this. It doesn't matter that you don't get much money from each one - there are a hundred million of them. Make $10 off every one of them and you've got a billion.
How do you go to college if you are working minimum wage, already living in the cheapest place in the city, and eating the cheapest things you can find? This reflects a very strange idea that needs to go: the minimum wage should be enough to support yourself and one or more dependents while you work only 40 hours a week. (I don't know if that's a belief you actually hold. I'm just saying it sounds similar.)
It's not. It will, at that rate, get you about $190 in take-home pay a week, or just under $10k/yr. You can QUITE EASILY afford to pay all your bills with that if you live frugally and don't have dependents. If you want to get ahead, go get another job. I don't mean change jobs - I mean work more than one. If your skills are so low that you are worth only minimum wage, why do you expect to be able to succeed while working only eight hours a day, five days a week?
So if you're that poor kid, go all out. Work a twelve-hour shift every day you can. You'll probably have to get two different jobs to do that (they don't want to pay you that much overtime). Work 70+ hours a week. If you have a day off, use some of the money you've saved to buy a lawnmower/rake/snow shovel and get out there and start working. Call a local skilled-trade union and find out who's taking on apprentices (in many places, they're dying for them). Call your state's department of education and find out what sorts of scholarships are available (my state, for example, will provide free tuition to anyone willing to commit to four years of teaching in an underserved area, leaving you only with the fairly modest cost of room and board to pay or borrow).
Is that rough? Yeah. But if you want to get ahead, there are LOTS of ways to do it. They just involve a lot of work and willpower.
The ultimate danger is not that you can't contest a debit-as-credit (i.e., non-PIN) transaction. It's that you'll have written, say, your monthly rent check yesterday. The thief wipes your balance today. Your landlord deposits the check tomorrow. Presto, you have written a bad check. Good luck getting that wiped off every credit bureau report in the future. It's theoretically possible, but every case I've ever heard of has been a flaming pain in the backside to fix, especially if you've sent multiple checks out (like paying your bills).
A simple blood test is all we need to know if you need antibiotics. In fact, sometimes we don't even need that.
Though I am glad to hear you've taken on a healthy lifestyle, please don't be stupid. Not that you have been, or seem likely to do so in the future. Just a warning for others who read the post.
You are aware, are you not, that tomatoes are a native New World food not seen in Europe until the Age of Exploration? And that 22 of the 26 on the "bin Laden plane" (3 were bodyguards) were, in fact, interviewed by the FBI? Not allowed to leave the country, in fact, until September 20, a full week after commercial air travel had returned?
But no, you're right. OK to stick you in jail for a while if it turns out the next Ted Bundy just happens to be your brother?
Please, there are plenty - plenty - of reasons to think the Saudis aren't our friends. Don't recycle wrong ones.
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In my experience, someone for whom English is not a first language would be more likely to use the contraction correctly. Second languages are generally learned as written, rather than spoken. Nobody who learned to write English at the same time as they learned to speak it (as opposed to writing years after speaking) would make that mistake unless they were educated by idiots.
The detritus of Roman (and Napoleonic) law across the Continent - and its absence from British common law (and its descendants) - may reliably be said to explain nearly any mutually maddening legal disputes between Europeans and native English speakers.
If you really want to see Americans' draws drop, explain how European courts (both civil and criminal) work.
In case you hadn't noticed, the only third-party or independent in Congress to exert any power in recent years was Jim Jeffords, during the 2001-03 Congress, and that only because he was the 51st vote for the Democrats. In the Senate, no less, where one vote actually means something.
If you get rid of limited liability, every single shareholder - even Grandma that owns 10 shares because Grandpa worked for the company for one year ages ago - may be personally responsible for all the debts of the corp. Still have debts after liquidating the corp's assets? Now you have to sell off personal assets up to the point where every single shareholder is personally completely out of assets - house, clothes, food, bank accounts, IRA's, everything. This is why corps, and limited liability, exist. Otherwise, there's absolutely no way to raise the kind of money that is necessary to fund anything bigger than a candy store.
But you're fighting a losing battle; the US-unaware portion of the European contingent on /. has focused on the two weaknesses of the American mobile market - you have to pay for incomings, and the lack of standards severely limits phone choices - and totally ignored all the reasons that make our market great.
For those who wish to know - I pay $35.61 a month (after all taxes, fees, etc.) for 300 anytime minutes from anywhere on Sprint's network(sorry, the map sucks), which has coverage of all major cities and highways, though coverage is nonexistent in the boonies, to anywhere in the US. Free nights (9pm-7am) and weekends. My wife and I recently traveled about 1000 miles away for a wedding. Used the phone all weekend. It worked, and it didn't cost a cent more than doing it at home. Her parents could call us for free. Try doing that while vacationing from the UK to, say, Austria.
Of course, that's the long view. You could accurately point out that Europe had roughly the same service it has now about 10 years ago, which was definitely not the case in the US.
BTW, you can get long distance a lot cheaper than 5c/minute. I pay about 3.5c a minute after taxes, for service from Primus. And my dialup Net service is $9.95 a month, unlimited. Hard to beat that, really.
Fair enough, can't argue there.
Please mod parent through roof. Incidentally, if you have carpets and want to avoid the sugar, feel free. It works fairly well if they just walk through it some time - it abrades the joints, and then is readily absorbed. It's very low toxicity - toxic dose is 200-500 mg/kg body weight for small mammals, so even a Chihuahua can take a gram or so.
You really needed to live somewhere else. I used to go out in high school with my friends and shoot in the floodplain along the river (conveniently accessed from one friend's back yard). We only involved adults when we needed somebody to buy more ammo.
Point taken. I am an idiot, at least as re: electricity. I submit. Oh, and whoever modded me Troll, what's up with that? How about -1, Clueless? That, at least, would be honest.
Solar power is, unfortunately, extremely unlikely to be available in the kind of weather that results in power outages.
You do know, don't you, that computers are particularly inefficient electrical heaters? It'd be cheaper just to use a real electric heater (or, if you have it, gas/oil).
As a number of people have pointed out across time, analog distortion often produces pleasing results - the "warm" sound that LP's are often claimed to have. Digital distortion, OTOH, results in stuff that sounds like static. The hard part is getting a way to massage the digital info so it sounds like it's gone through an analog system. People just didn't want to imagine that the CD is what it actually sounds like.
And there are, frankly, student loans to pay for college (as well as programs, like I mentioned in parent, that will pay tuition if you will work x years in y underserved field). I didn't say it was easy, or that there aren't people who deserve a hand up. But I did say that one minimum wage job a week isn't enough to pay for dependents (so you're saving, more or less, the full second income a week). Hormonal mistakes at 16? I'm sorry. Have an abortion or give the child up for adoption. It's heartrending, but you owe it to yourself and to that child to do so. This is by far the most common way people end up stuck, and it's one of the easiest to avoid.
Anyway, you're quite right - it's much easier to climb from middle class to upper middle class than it is to climb from underclass to working class, or from working class to middle. I was reacting against the parent, who basically said, "They're stuck, no way out." There is a way out, just not an easy one.
As a generalization, absolutely. Starting out in bad circumstances won't do it: I've met people who started out in Podunk, Missibamuckyseesas, won junior college scholarships, studied hard, and went to medical school. They lived in a shoeboxes on campus the whole time they were there. They didn't go out and party, because they didn't have the money. But they won't be poor like their (single teenage mom) parents.
The urban kids - those are the most likely to be doomed. Come up with a good idea for fixing that, I'm all ears. But most poor people are poor because they don't plan ahead. What else would you like me to call it, if you can't foresee the (entirely predictable) consequences of your actions? ADD?
I was overly harsh in calling it the median person; actually, now that I look up the numbers, 84% of Americans over age 25 have high school diplomas, though only 27% have bachelor's degrees.
Your average American, then, probably isn't your plumber, your electrician, or other high-paying blue collar service pro (he's probably in the 23% between median and college). But I did exaggerate a bit. Still, I hedged to 1/3, and I think I'm probably right about that.
Anyway, try out a new Wal-Mart supercenter in an area not likely to attract scummy people, and you'll be surprised at the stuff they offer, both quality and price. I still don't buy my clothes there, but you can't beat it for a great price on staples that you don't want in Sam's quantities.
Indeed. It's hard to describe an era when you could read the words faster than the computer could transmit them.
Mr. Rather, why the hell would you dispute the content of a fake memo? I mean, it's fake.
It doesn't take 2 minutes to pass out with CO2. More like 15-20 seconds. It's quite toxic at high concentrations (due to acid/base effects).
Whatever it is that people buy a lot of, of course.
I don't go to Wal*Mart much because their locations aren't terribly nearby. Every time I do, though, I find that their grocery has managed to undercut Kroger by 5-20% on 95% of the items they sell (and I'm not just buying WM brand). Doesn't sound like much, and isn't worth the drive every time. But then I don't have, say, kids.
When you're buying diapers by the crate, paper towels by the truckload, and food to fill up three teenage boys, that 5% starts to be a LOT of money. So they go to WM.
Besides, think about the median person in life. This isn't something most /.ers ever do. In all likelihood, they've met very few of them in their life. Before I got into health care, I had met very few of them - the people, for example, who gut chickens, package screws, can vegetables. The people who do the millions of boring, repetitive, miserable jobs out there. They don't have a lot of money, and they're not very bright (or they'd be doing something else). They don't have a lot of insight into the future, and though they can follow a train of thought laying out consequences, they can't come up with it on their own. All of these add up to "not a lot of disposable cash". So when they go to WM, they find a large selection of very cheaply priced and surprisingly well-made (really, compared to what they had access to before) items.
There are lots and lots of them. Probably a third of the US population has a life not terribly different from this. It doesn't matter that you don't get much money from each one - there are a hundred million of them. Make $10 off every one of them and you've got a billion.
This reflects a very strange idea that needs to go: the minimum wage should be enough to support yourself and one or more dependents while you work only 40 hours a week. (I don't know if that's a belief you actually hold. I'm just saying it sounds similar.)
It's not. It will, at that rate, get you about $190 in take-home pay a week, or just under $10k/yr. You can QUITE EASILY afford to pay all your bills with that if you live frugally and don't have dependents. If you want to get ahead, go get another job. I don't mean change jobs - I mean work more than one. If your skills are so low that you are worth only minimum wage, why do you expect to be able to succeed while working only eight hours a day, five days a week?
So if you're that poor kid, go all out. Work a twelve-hour shift every day you can. You'll probably have to get two different jobs to do that (they don't want to pay you that much overtime). Work 70+ hours a week. If you have a day off, use some of the money you've saved to buy a lawnmower/rake/snow shovel and get out there and start working. Call a local skilled-trade union and find out who's taking on apprentices (in many places, they're dying for them). Call your state's department of education and find out what sorts of scholarships are available (my state, for example, will provide free tuition to anyone willing to commit to four years of teaching in an underserved area, leaving you only with the fairly modest cost of room and board to pay or borrow).
Is that rough? Yeah. But if you want to get ahead, there are LOTS of ways to do it. They just involve a lot of work and willpower.
The ultimate danger is not that you can't contest a debit-as-credit (i.e., non-PIN) transaction. It's that you'll have written, say, your monthly rent check yesterday. The thief wipes your balance today. Your landlord deposits the check tomorrow. Presto, you have written a bad check. Good luck getting that wiped off every credit bureau report in the future. It's theoretically possible, but every case I've ever heard of has been a flaming pain in the backside to fix, especially if you've sent multiple checks out (like paying your bills).
Though I am glad to hear you've taken on a healthy lifestyle, please don't be stupid. Not that you have been, or seem likely to do so in the future. Just a warning for others who read the post.
Mods on acid here. Parent is utterly wrong.
NUKE A GODLESS COMMUNIST GAY BABY SEAL FOR CHRIST
Though I think that one was actually on a T-shirt.
But no, you're right. OK to stick you in jail for a while if it turns out the next Ted Bundy just happens to be your brother?
Please, there are plenty - plenty - of reasons to think the Saudis aren't our friends. Don't recycle wrong ones.