Sounds like she ought to be taking the bus, rather than taking on a major hunk of new debt.
Who's arguing?
My bone of contention is with people who object to the way these flakes are treated. They've already proven that they can't handle debt responsibly, so they go to near-prime lenders. Then they prove they can't handle that responsibly, so they go to sub-prime lenders who install tracking devices in their vehicles with remote kill switches. They're lucky to have a car at their disposal in the first place. (n.b. Many of these people don't have the credit card room available to put a deposit down on a rental car, nor do they typically have the cash on hand to leave a cash deposit)
with that said, couldn't said bad-credit-car-buyer just do a little research and disable the switch? or is it something that takes a lot of time and effort to do...
If they disable the device, they also disable their car. Further, the device either sends an SOS or, failing that, the system sends an alert that the device has gone offline and the lien holder immediately dispatches somebody to collect the vehicle.
Disclaimer; I'm a sales manager at a car dealership.
These guys are predatory lenders. They make loans they KNOW you can't repay with the intent of leaving you with nothing but debt. I say this because they want you to default. They make money when you do.
That all depends on how much money they get up front, how many payments you make, the age/mileage of the vehicle at the outset and what condition the vehicle is in once it's repossessed.
These lenders do need to make as much money as possible on every loan to cover the losses on the others. I've seen cars repossessed with more than $10k owing on them that are in such bad shape they get stripped for parts and net the lender between $200-1000. How do you expect them to absorb that loss if they haven't been making $3000+ on other clients?
You'd have to be stupid or desperate to agree to this, but there are enough of the latter that I have little sympathy for the lenders (and that's even though I realize there are plenty of people who are both).
Both are typically correct. To get themselves into the situation where these types of loans would be an option, one would have to argue that many of these customers lack a certain level of intelligence or, at the very least financial savvy. The desperation comes into play when you consider that these people typically have no other option. We just delivered a vehicle to a client a few days ago with one of these devices installed. It was difficult to get hold of this lady because the members of her household were screening calls to avoid the creditors who are still after her for unpaid debts. Had she not taken the high risk car loan we arranged for her she'd be taking the bus. Period.
You paid half the money for a new car, but what you have now is a used car which is likely to be worth considerably less.
After repossessing the car, the dealer will have to sell it on and the revenue derived from doing so may not cover your outstanding debt... If it does, then sure you *should* get the difference, or at least thats how it works when property is repossessed.
Not only that, but in most areas the tax laws stipulate that you can't recover the taxes from a car loan. Vis;
Original purchase price: $20000.
Freight, fees, tarrifs: $2000.
Sub-Total: $22000.
PST + GST (Ontario, Canada) @ 13% combined: $2860
Total to be financed: $24860.
To make things simple I'll use 0% APR financing on the loan. Supposing on this loan, let's make it a 60 month term, you're making payments of $414.34/month and you make the first 12 payments before your loan enters default status. So you've now paid $4972.08 towards your loan, leaving an outstanding balance of $19887.92 remaining. So now the financial institution repossesses the vehicle and needs to recover that amount of money. Using the 30% depreciation "rule of thumb" let's say the car is now worth $14000. That leaves the loan upside-down by $5887.92 that has to be collected somehow.
The beauty of the tax laws is that taxes will be paid once again by the new buyer so all in all the government wins, but we the consumers lose out because the financial institution has to jack up interest rates and service charges to make up for the shortfall of $6k that the original buyer is almost certainly not going to repay.
With the trend of ever increasing personal debt load on typical North American consumers, the trend towards longer terms, lower payments and less (or no) down payment, people are finding themselves in a negative equity situation on their car loans for longer and longer as they're paying the principal balances significantly slower than the depreciation curve of their vehicles. When financing first became commonplace it was normal to put upwards of 20-50% down and take a financing term that did not exceed 36 months. Granted, interest rates were often in the double digits, but with that much down and terms so short it wasn't really an issue. It was also quite common to pay off one's car loan before the end of the term and then {gasp!} drive it for several more years before trading it or making another purchase.
This allowed people to walk into their next loan with, again, 20-50% cash down plus equity in their trade resulting in upwards of 30-80% down on their next vehicle.
Alas, 84 month finance terms are becoming the norm, 96 month terms aren't as outrageous as they once were and consumers and banks keep talking seriously about 108 and 120 month terms. Welcome to the society where once you're in debt, you're always in debt. Buy now, pay later.
I, for one, am not on the debt treadmill, but I do take advantage of 0% finance offers wherever possible so the money I have in my savings account can earn between 3-8% while the store foots the cost of borrowing. Go on you debt whores; continue paying my way with your high interest payments.
If a car loses that much value as soon as it is driven off the lot, then perhaps it is over priced?
If you could convince consumers to pay 90% of the original retail price for a 1 year old car, it wouldn't depreciate so heavily now, would it?
The price and depreciation of cars is driven primarily by the consumers that purchase them second hand. When a consumer walks onto the lot and expects to pay 30-40% less for a 1 year old car than its original asking price, the car has thusly depreciated by 30-40%.
If the price of the car is reduced at source it causes accelerated depreciation, resulting in a further drop in resale value of the pre-owned vehicle.
Sorry, but I don't believe it, or at least not that this happened any time in the last 5 years.
Ok, I suppose you're free to have your beliefs but it happened about 2 months ago.
You, an experienced Linux system admin, couldn't find a compatible keyboard? That just stretches my credulity beyond the breaking point. My experience has been just the opposite. Any keyboard I've ever plugged in has "just worked". Some keys that required Windows software to function might not work, or have a different function under Linux, but entire keyboards failing to work multiple times in a row under any modern kernel? Nope. I don't believe it.
See, the keyboard isn't the problem, the configuration architecture and modular nature of the new X Windows System is the problem. Apparently you have to take steps(!!!) to ensure you have the proper support for basic input devices compiled into the system and configured in the config section in order to make it work.
My mouse worked, my keyboard and mouse both work at the console, however my keyboard does not work under X Windows.
Your claims of dependency hell also leave me doubting. What distro were you running, and how long ago did this supposedly happen?
{sigh} Denial of a long standing problem does not make the problem go away.
I used to scoff at people who would make these claims myself. Then I started working full time in a non-IT environment where suddenly the computer was a means to and end rather than the end itself. I no longer have the time to tinker, re-configure, re-compile, re-install or scour forums, FAQs, info pages and IRC channels to find the solutions to problems I encounter. In my day to day life I need my computers to Just Work and Linux does not accomplish this goal. The development is too scattered, dependencies change and it still happens far too often that a system will depend on multiple versions of a given dependency.
I'm sorry to say it but Linux will never grow or develop to take over in the corporate world. It's just spinning its wheels towards niche status.
That, to me, is more of a Linux quote than a Windows quote. I used to only use Linux. However, when I needed to install something, it wasn't just a pop in a CD, push Next a couple of times, and forget it. No, I had to search online for packages and files and go through message boards and discussion groups trying to find a hint as to why such and such a program is not working. So, a 10 minute install in Windows would equal out to about a 5 hour install in Linux. Linux is cheap if your time is worth nothing. That's why I pay for Windows. (It is also why I no longer use Linux. Everything I was using in Linux has a Windows alternative. Many times, that Windows alternative either came with Windows, or could be found for free/cheap online.)
I know you're going to catch even more flak for that comment than you already have, but I'll throw my $0.02CDN into the hat.
I've been a Linux user for well over a decade. I used to run/administer it on more machines than I could likely count today. My personal laptop, desktop(s) both at home and at work all ran Linux. I still have a server at home hosting my personal vanity domain that runs a Linux installation.
That being said, I'm no simpleton when it comes to Linux. I've rolled my own distro from the kernel, glibc and gcc on up, I've used half a dozen distributions, various package management systems including pre-compiled and those that require me to compile my individual apps and everything in between. I've gotten away from Linux on the desktop over the last few years (my new job is a Windows only environment and uses computers merely as tools) so I decided to try to awaken the Linux installation on my desktop at home.
Would you believe I spent hours getting it all up to date only to discover that my keyboard would not work under X Windows! I tried a PS/2 keyboard, a USB keyboard, a wireless USB keyboard; nothing. Best I ever got was to get the number pad at the right working, but that does not a usable environment make.
So I gave up. I banged my head against a wall long enough before I decided that if they can screw up a simple human interface, it's no longer fun.
BTW, even with a package management system I still had to fight dependancies and their collisions along the way. So you're 100% correct; Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.
I'm not often a Windows user, but I had just the opposite experience recently and it *really* pissed me off. Windows was doing its auto-updates in the background and I had already gone through a patch-reboot cycle, then it pops up a message saying that it will automatically restart in 10 minutes.
Hah! My personal favourite is the Windows XP method whereby it pops up a dialog box saying "Windows has sucessfully installed updates. Your computer needs to be restarted for these updates to take effect. Reboot Now, Reboot Later" with "Reboot Now" as the default option. If you're in the middle of, say, typing something when that nuisance of a dialog pops up and you hit space or enter you'll suddenly find yourself in the middle of a reboot cycle when it's least opportune; like in the middle of a sentence.
Well, yeah. That's really the whole point in this discussion - they don't know it's reliable enough. Therefore, throwing the switch on the whole center at this point is foolish at best. You don't do that until you're reasonably confident based on other smaller tests you've done first. Which I believe was exactly what was being stated. Sometimes you have to learn to read between the lines, and understand things without having every little detail explicitly spelled out for you.
Thank-you, but the point I was responding to which created this thread was thus;
The trouble with most UPS battery tests is they involve putting the stuff on battery... If you have a server with redundant power supplies- then you can have each power supply attached to a different UPS, then you can test each UPS one by one, hopefully without the server going down due to one UPS failing the battery test.
To which I responded about the need to stress test your entire setup to verify that it works. In point of fact, I'd still recommend that option to the person who asked the question in the first place because ultimately that's what's going to tell them where they need to investigate. The other options, as I see them, break down thusly;
Stall for time while they test and replace individual components which becomes quite expensive and time consuming and doesn't involve a comprehensive solution and typically leads to a spaghetti setup of mismatched components.
Wait for a power failure to tell them what's wrong (they never come at an opportune moment)
Plan a full-scale power-down test while nothing mission critical is happening and investigate and document the failures and come up with a comprehensive plan to attack the situation.
Do nothing and hope for the best.
The fact of the matter is this; every data centre worth its salt I've ever worked, visited or used as a client had the ability to tell me when was the last time they did a full power-down test, how long it lasted and what the results were. In almost all cases the results were "everything continued to function as normal".
Regardless whether there are 30 or 3000 employees at this company, it sounds as if this collection of servers is mission-critical and therefore people's livelihood depends on their uptime. If they don't take this power redundancy seriously now they're going to be in a world of hurt when the inevitable power failure hits them.
The power going out on Wednesday is why you run your test on Friday--you test your protection to ensure that you can recover from a mid-week power failure by Thursday morning, but you don't run the actual test on Wednesday. You set your test up so that a catastrophic failure causes the least disruption.
When I was in the Navy, we would run drills in the same manner--our response was the same whether the sub was running deep and fast or slow and shallow, so why run the drills in the riskier situation of deep and fast, where a catastrophic failure in response to the drill could cause very bad problems very quickly?
But in a data centre you don't face the risk of drowning and/or perishing. Also, it's really easy to convince yourself that your setup works because you've carefully and methodically powered down each backup source individually, but it's near impossible to determine the stress that would be placed on a network by a power failure unless you simulate one. Obviously you have to take steps before hand to make sure your stuff is reliable and you're not going to run a full shutdown while everyone is accessing the data (that, by the way, is a lovely strawman everyone is putting up).
The fact of the matter is, if you're not confident enough in your data centre's reliability to throw the switch, your data centre just isn't reliable enough.
I'd say that's the most rigorous, realistic way to test, but I'm not sure that it's the best way to test.
So, you pulled the main breaker and took out all of the production servers because there was a problem with your UPS configuration software? Oops. Why didn't you try it on one server today, then one rack tomorrow, and then pull the plug on the whole system after close on business on Friday?
The trouble with most UPS battery tests is they involve putting the stuff on battery...
If you have a server with redundant power supplies- then you can have each power supply attached to a different UPS, then you can test each UPS one by one, hopefully without the server going down due to one UPS failing the battery test.
The best way to test your power backup system is to throw the main switch and see what fails. How are you going to react in a power failure if you don't have that data? What good is your backup if it only works in carefully prepared, controlled and documented test scenarios?
Re:Were nerds here... use the f'ing metric system
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The 100 Degree Data Center
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Fahrenheit just makes more sense to most of us. 30s = cold, 40s = chilly, 50s = cool, 60s = decent/might need a windbreaker, 70s = nice, 80s = warm, 90s = hot, etc, etc. Celsius is no where near that intuitive and was as arbitrarily defined as Fahrenheit was.
Celsius, however, does not rely solely on memorization to "make sense". It's based on certain scientific principals that remain as yet unwavering. 0C is the freezing point of water, 100C is the boiling point of water. It's quite simple to deduce the relative levels of comfort in between; when you know that it's 0C outside the precipitation that's falling isn't going to be rain but instead the frozen variety. When it's 40C outside you know it's pretty damn warm, and when it pushes the 50s and 60s you start to get to holding temperature of food. Anybody who's ever made skin-on contact with a warming oven knows that this is neither pleasant nor comfortable for humans.
Had America been using a system of letters for the past two and a half centuries that would also "make sense" to you because you would have memorized the notion that C = cold, D = chilly, E = cool, F = decent/might need a windbreaker, G = nice, H = warm, I = hot, etc, etc.
Every person places a different value on the same thing. If the difference in pay in X dollars per week, and girl A values her self-respect at X + 100 dollars, it would be irrational for her to strip instead of waiting tables (assuming other values are the same). If girl B values it at X - 200 dollars a week, it wouldn't make sense for her not to strip.
Just because you would make a choice differently doesn't mean they're not participating in the choice.
Why are you making the assumption that strippers don't have self-respect? Strippers tend to be very confident, powerful women more in control of their situations and bodies than most professional women out there. Where do you think the cliche of "stripping her way through law school" came from? Many professional women have stripped in order to support themselves through professional development.
To quote an old friend of mine who stripped for many years; "Stripping isn't degrading to women, it's degrading to men."
Think about it; it only makes sense. Next time you're at a strip club, take a look at the behaviour of the audience and the behaviour of the girls. If you can, focus on their eyes, faces and body language.
Ummmmmmmm.....not quite. Depends on what you're selling and who you're selling it to. While Freakonomics covers crack dealers, crack isn't really all that lucrative. I personally know at least 5 different people -- none of whom know each other beyond acquaintance -- who at various times made a killing selling (primarily) marijuana. None of those people would have sold an ounce of crack, mostly for the reasons outlined in Freakonomics.
So do I. One such dealer wound up taking on a financial partner who wanted to sample just about as much as they were selling so the cut product was barely covering the cost of acquisition. Essentially they were snorting for free. Another infamous dealer in the same area who dealt only in marijuana had purchased several large, lavish luxury items and always had a large quantity of cash on hand. Then he got busted and lost everything he owned in the name of proceeds of crime. AFAIK he's still cooling his heels behind bars.
The biggest problem with your statement and the drug business in general is law enforcement, risk, and market factors. Believe it or not there are several very heavy market forces that affect the drug trade. Major busts drive the price up at the dealer level primarily because it's driven up at the supplier level. If you happened to be fortuitous enough to stock up large before a major bust and you cut and weigh your product smartly you can briefly cash in, but then the supply chain dries up and you spend all your money re-upping the next time anyways. Customers are also fickle creatures. As soon as you don't have product you stop being the go-to-guy. Next thing you know you're sitting on lots of product and the phone ain't ringing.
When you average out the income of a typical drug dealer and assume they can actually manage to operate for more than 5-10 years without being caught, I think you'll find they don't make too much more than a mid-level factory worker. Their biggest benefit is the fact that their money is all tax-free so they don't lose a cut to the gummint. Then again, most mid-level factory workers don't have to look over their shoulders as they punch the clock.:)
I find it interesting that any time somebody talks about "potentially damaging information" the only things that come up are pornography, Facebook and MySpace.
There are many things on the Internet that kids can and will find before they've developed or matured enough to view it in context. There's lots of info out there that teaches kids how to make explosives, drugs, how to aquire weapons, etc. There are pages that show real photos and videos of gruesome deaths, explain how to cause mayhem in your school, all the hate groups are represented so kids can learn how black people are bad, women are marginal and basically anything else some group wants to propagate.
Yes, I know, hate speech is protected speech; but in a public education system kids shouldn't be using government (taxpayer) provided equipment to research such things. If they are permitted to do so it should be within the confines of a learning environment that explains them and puts them in context so the students understand what they're seeing/reading.
That, and the principals are the final decision maker as to what content students are permitted to view. If they wanted to ban Star Trek websites, ultimately it's their call.
"Two foreign countries"? Would these be the USA and Canada? Oh wait, you're probably american and thus you assume that everyone else on TEH INTARWEBZ is also american and use the term "foreign" to describe something not from the US...
/Mikael
OR! It could be a simple, correct use of the English language. I'm Canadian. Every other country in the world is foreign to me.
Similarly; someone from Turkey who was educated in Germany could indicate that they received schooling in a foreign country.
BTW; the term is "the Internet". Your point, if you can call it that, was seriously diminished by your use of a childish meme.
In the real world employers don't and or legally can't force you to censor your personal PC's at home, where they are not paying for the Internet Service.
Too bad you posted AC, that's worth some mod points.
Reality is, the school has no jurisdiction over what the student does off school grounds. Including what they do on their computer.
Too bad they aren't the students' computers; they belong to the school until end of year/term when the students have an option to purchase. Only after the student has purchased the laptop should the restrictions come off but not before.
If the students want the freedom to do whatever they want they should purchase a personal computer and Internet connection, but shouldn't be at all surprised when the school forbids them to connect said laptops to the school network.
A lot of people are talking from a purely outside perspective on this issue which is totally understandable. OTOH, I was an administrator for a high school network so I understand the dilemma faced by the admins in this story. On one hand you have the notion that you just leave the computers wide open and trust in the maturity and good nature of the students and don't spend time and energy in finding and closing all the possible back doorways into the systems.
On the other hand you have a lot of immature students who feel a sense of entitlement with everything they touch. They "should" be able to use Facebook, MySpace, play all sorts of games, install whatever "cool software/screensaver" whatever that's recommended by their friend. This causes administrative headaches especially when little buglets come into the network and start wreaking havoc for the rest of the as-yet uninfected computers in the building/campus. Further, the laptops themselves become bogged down with popups, viruses, trojans and other malware and cease to be useful for the student to do the work for which it was intended and the admin find themselves in a situation where they need to devote time to diagnose the specific symptoms when they could instead be doing one of any number of more important tasks.
All our systems were tethered, desktop PCs. One of our primary tactics was to constantly find, diagnose, research and secure any/all holes discovered by the students, update our workstation image and re-image the entire school. That way if anything ever were to be installed/corrupted on one of the workstations it would be wiped atleast weekly so they'd have to try to do the damage all over again the following day/week. This also forced students to store all files in their home directory on the server (which was policy anyways) where we could quota the file storage (1000 students and 100 staff sharing a 50GB RAID array meant there wasn't too much to go around!) and investigate any delinquent behaviour.
The goals of personal freedom are all well and good, but when they're not reigned in with a deepened sense of the personal responsibility that should always accompany such freedom it's a dangerous situation. I venture to say that until most of you have been faced with administrating a network comprised almost entirely of immature students you should take and give advice with a suitable quantity of NaCL.
What I would like to see is the ability to simply send money to another bank account. I understand it's very easy to do this in Europe. In the States I can send money anywhere I want, but the transfer costs me $25 (regardless of size). With fees like that it would only make sense when transferring multiple thousands of dollars at once.
The big banks in Canada support something called an Interac E-Mail Money Transfer. Literally it sends an e-mail to an intended recipient (yourself, if you so choose) instructing them to log into their online bank, answer a security question of your choosing and select to deposit the money. Many (most) banking plans have an option to have 1-2 of these free each month but you can either upgrade to a more generous plan or pay something like $1.00-$1.50 per transaction which, IMHO, is quite reasonable for transfers up to $1000. I've found in my personal experience that the money can be transferred in as little as 10-20 minutes so it's quite a convenient option if you don't want to leave your home or office.
But is it really because people are stupid that they can't change a spark plug or oil, or is it because that knowledge is really no longer a necessity for some people? I know how to change a tire and to jump start a car because it is knowledge I have needed and will probably need in the future. However I've never changed my oil or a spark plug because those are things that I consider maintenance. I make enough money where I can pay professionals to maintain my car. Unless people stop providing car maintenance service and reasonable price, there is no necessity for me to learn such things. The extra cost I pay is soaked up by the time and hassle I save. To you, I guess I'm stupid. But to me, I'm just allowing myself more free time to do what I want.
I learned this lesson a long time ago. There are many things I'm capable of doing but that no longer make sense. Moreover, I'd rather support the person/people who "make the sandwiches" or change my oil or detail my car. My goal in life at this point is to make things simple for myself so I can enjoy life.
I'm perfectly capable of changing out a flat tire, however I have roadside assistance on speed dial and my phone has voice recognition. I simply press a button, instruct my phone to "Call Roadside Assistance" and give the respondant my VIN, plate number and location. Hey, it justifies their job as well as that of the dispatcher and the tow truck driver that's sent to change my tire.
You raise an excellent point. However, they (typically) stop sending paper bills in favor of email notices once you start paying them online. With postfix and spamassassin, email occasionally gets misflagged, misfoldered, or otherwise misrouted. Forgetting that a certain bill is due, or not receiving the email notice for some reason, is IMO even worse than having an automatic payment set up. The physical paper bill is just as much a part of my fiscal responsibility process as is the physical paper check.
Question; you know a bill is going to arrive every month, typically on the same day each month. You further know that you must pay said bill every month, typically the same amount at the same time. Why is it excusable to neglect to pay said bill not only once, but perchance to make a habit of not doing so?
In more than a decade of managing my finances I've managed to miss exactly two monthly payments. One was a miscommunication with the person with whom I shared the loan who believed I was supposed to be making the payment that month (which taught me to be more proactive) and the other was a simple confusion. See, my electric bill was the same amount as it had been two months prior and I had erroneously assumed I'd paid it when in fact I had not. So I paid two months' in full the following month. I swallowed the $1.25 late-pay penalty they applied to my account as a further lesson; pay more careful attention.:)
I've paid only enough interest on one of my credit cards to justify the cost of stamping and mailing the card to me only because I tried to game the system (while, I might add, still making my payments; just not enough to cover the purchases made outside my grace period).
I hear often where people complain that a particular company will neglect to take an instalment payment then take double the next time around and my question is always the same; is it a bad thing that this company has allowed you to clutch your money for an additional monthly/bi-weekly period before inevitably taking what is rightfully theirs in the end? Is it the fault of the company in question if you decide that this is now "free money" and opt to spend it such that the following payment bounces?
I'm one of those holdouts who still use paper checks, envelopes, and stamps to pay my bills. Once a month or so I'll bring the stack into the office and take care of it during downtime, and folks look at me like I'm transmitting morse code over a telegraph. I do bank online, but I don't do online bill pay.
Ugh! A stack of bills alone is enough to make me cringe in horror. I used to do that until I realized I'd collected an enormous 4" thick sheaf of stapled statements that required a physical filing system and manual parsing. Now I have everything organized chronologically going back several years in a sub-folder off my home directory which is backed up weekly.
Now every two weeks, on pay day, I sit at my computer, download all available PDF statements and update my budget spreadsheet with my cheque amount and update the amounts of all outstanding bills. I pay all that are possible with my credit card then pay the remainder through online payment. Once I've settled all debts I mark them as paid in my spreadsheet and forecast what my next billing cycle will bring and determine how much surplus I have available in my chequing account which I then transfer to my high interest savings account and I'm done. Thanks to the miracle of tabbed browsing and broadband Internet the entire process can be completed in as little as little as 5-10 minutes and I have no paper cuts, postage expenses or pesky mailbox visits to worry about.
The last time I actually snail-mailed something was to ensure my financial adviser had an original signature and it saved me a 50km round-trip at $0.90/litre to accomplish it.
When I opened my account some years ago they gave me ten cheques. I still have eight of them left.
"...there are far better choices for online payment processing."
Can you elaborate on that? What choices do you like and why?
Basically all the services I subscribe to here in Ontario, Canada support some form of online payment. Many (most) support payment by credit card which affords me the protections of my credit card while at the same time accruing reward points for the dollars spent. I then pay my credit cards from my online banking portal which employs three or four layers of security.
I find myself constantly amazed (amused?) by the apparent differences between Canadian and American business models. The check card versus debit card business was the first, now this. Am I correct in assuming that a significant portion of United States services/companies still require some sort of dead tree / cheque stock payment? I suppose my real question is this; is this actually an issue? Do you not have online bill payment through your conventional bank websites?
Point 1) We don't use black anymore, we use African. This is both PC and more accurate since it clarifies the difference between african "blacks" and native Australian "blacks".
If you ask most man-in-the-street black people if they want to be called "African-American" they'll either look at you funny or tell you off. Politically Correct terms are fictional entities designed to make white people feel good about ourselves for being so sensitive all the while coming off as condescending and ignorant.
Ask a Trini if they're African-American. Or a Jamaican, or an Australian Aborigine, or even a black person originally of African descent whose great, great grandparents were born on North American soil.
Quite frankly speaking, most American and Canadian blacks have more in common these days with their white compatriots than they ever will with African blacks. Different continents, different cultures, different worlds.
It's disgusting that in an effort to curb racism, sexism or whatever else ails the world it's become verboten to identify people by their most striking characteristic. When I was in elementary (grade) school I was taught that when I saw a person in a wheelchair if that was the first thing I identified about them then I was a bad, horrible person. Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows that when you meet someone who's sitting in a chair with large chrome wheels attached to either side that's the first thing you're going to notice about them. Second comes their skin tone, gender, hair colour, clothing and general appearance finally followed by minor physical attributes such as eye colour, facial features etc. Anybody who thinks otherwise is delusional at best.
So let's drop the charade and start treating race the same way we treat gender and hair colour. Nobody objects to being picked out of the crowd as "the tall brown haired guy" so why should anybody feel slighted if they're identified as the "short black woman with long hair"?
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like she ought to be taking the bus, rather than taking on a major hunk of new debt.
Who's arguing?
My bone of contention is with people who object to the way these flakes are treated. They've already proven that they can't handle debt responsibly, so they go to near-prime lenders. Then they prove they can't handle that responsibly, so they go to sub-prime lenders who install tracking devices in their vehicles with remote kill switches. They're lucky to have a car at their disposal in the first place. (n.b. Many of these people don't have the credit card room available to put a deposit down on a rental car, nor do they typically have the cash on hand to leave a cash deposit)
with that said, couldn't said bad-credit-car-buyer just do a little research and disable the switch? or is it something that takes a lot of time and effort to do...
If they disable the device, they also disable their car. Further, the device either sends an SOS or, failing that, the system sends an alert that the device has gone offline and the lien holder immediately dispatches somebody to collect the vehicle.
Disclaimer; I'm a sales manager at a car dealership.
These guys are predatory lenders. They make loans they KNOW you can't repay with the intent of leaving you with nothing but debt. I say this because they want you to default. They make money when you do.
That all depends on how much money they get up front, how many payments you make, the age/mileage of the vehicle at the outset and what condition the vehicle is in once it's repossessed.
These lenders do need to make as much money as possible on every loan to cover the losses on the others. I've seen cars repossessed with more than $10k owing on them that are in such bad shape they get stripped for parts and net the lender between $200-1000. How do you expect them to absorb that loss if they haven't been making $3000+ on other clients?
You'd have to be stupid or desperate to agree to this, but there are enough of the latter that I have little sympathy for the lenders (and that's even though I realize there are plenty of people who are both).
Both are typically correct. To get themselves into the situation where these types of loans would be an option, one would have to argue that many of these customers lack a certain level of intelligence or, at the very least financial savvy. The desperation comes into play when you consider that these people typically have no other option. We just delivered a vehicle to a client a few days ago with one of these devices installed. It was difficult to get hold of this lady because the members of her household were screening calls to avoid the creditors who are still after her for unpaid debts. Had she not taken the high risk car loan we arranged for her she'd be taking the bus. Period.
You paid half the money for a new car, but what you have now is a used car which is likely to be worth considerably less. After repossessing the car, the dealer will have to sell it on and the revenue derived from doing so may not cover your outstanding debt... If it does, then sure you *should* get the difference, or at least thats how it works when property is repossessed.
Not only that, but in most areas the tax laws stipulate that you can't recover the taxes from a car loan. Vis;
To make things simple I'll use 0% APR financing on the loan. Supposing on this loan, let's make it a 60 month term, you're making payments of $414.34/month and you make the first 12 payments before your loan enters default status. So you've now paid $4972.08 towards your loan, leaving an outstanding balance of $19887.92 remaining. So now the financial institution repossesses the vehicle and needs to recover that amount of money. Using the 30% depreciation "rule of thumb" let's say the car is now worth $14000. That leaves the loan upside-down by $5887.92 that has to be collected somehow.
The beauty of the tax laws is that taxes will be paid once again by the new buyer so all in all the government wins, but we the consumers lose out because the financial institution has to jack up interest rates and service charges to make up for the shortfall of $6k that the original buyer is almost certainly not going to repay.
With the trend of ever increasing personal debt load on typical North American consumers, the trend towards longer terms, lower payments and less (or no) down payment, people are finding themselves in a negative equity situation on their car loans for longer and longer as they're paying the principal balances significantly slower than the depreciation curve of their vehicles. When financing first became commonplace it was normal to put upwards of 20-50% down and take a financing term that did not exceed 36 months. Granted, interest rates were often in the double digits, but with that much down and terms so short it wasn't really an issue. It was also quite common to pay off one's car loan before the end of the term and then {gasp!} drive it for several more years before trading it or making another purchase.
This allowed people to walk into their next loan with, again, 20-50% cash down plus equity in their trade resulting in upwards of 30-80% down on their next vehicle.
Alas, 84 month finance terms are becoming the norm, 96 month terms aren't as outrageous as they once were and consumers and banks keep talking seriously about 108 and 120 month terms. Welcome to the society where once you're in debt, you're always in debt. Buy now, pay later.
I, for one, am not on the debt treadmill, but I do take advantage of 0% finance offers wherever possible so the money I have in my savings account can earn between 3-8% while the store foots the cost of borrowing. Go on you debt whores; continue paying my way with your high interest payments.
But I digress...
If a car loses that much value as soon as it is driven off the lot, then perhaps it is over priced?
If you could convince consumers to pay 90% of the original retail price for a 1 year old car, it wouldn't depreciate so heavily now, would it?
The price and depreciation of cars is driven primarily by the consumers that purchase them second hand. When a consumer walks onto the lot and expects to pay 30-40% less for a 1 year old car than its original asking price, the car has thusly depreciated by 30-40%.
If the price of the car is reduced at source it causes accelerated depreciation, resulting in a further drop in resale value of the pre-owned vehicle.
Sorry, but I don't believe it, or at least not that this happened any time in the last 5 years.
Ok, I suppose you're free to have your beliefs but it happened about 2 months ago.
You, an experienced Linux system admin, couldn't find a compatible keyboard? That just stretches my credulity beyond the breaking point. My experience has been just the opposite. Any keyboard I've ever plugged in has "just worked". Some keys that required Windows software to function might not work, or have a different function under Linux, but entire keyboards failing to work multiple times in a row under any modern kernel? Nope. I don't believe it.
See, the keyboard isn't the problem, the configuration architecture and modular nature of the new X Windows System is the problem. Apparently you have to take steps(!!!) to ensure you have the proper support for basic input devices compiled into the system and configured in the config section in order to make it work.
My mouse worked, my keyboard and mouse both work at the console, however my keyboard does not work under X Windows.
Your claims of dependency hell also leave me doubting. What distro were you running, and how long ago did this supposedly happen?
{sigh} Denial of a long standing problem does not make the problem go away.
I used to scoff at people who would make these claims myself. Then I started working full time in a non-IT environment where suddenly the computer was a means to and end rather than the end itself. I no longer have the time to tinker, re-configure, re-compile, re-install or scour forums, FAQs, info pages and IRC channels to find the solutions to problems I encounter. In my day to day life I need my computers to Just Work and Linux does not accomplish this goal. The development is too scattered, dependencies change and it still happens far too often that a system will depend on multiple versions of a given dependency.
I'm sorry to say it but Linux will never grow or develop to take over in the corporate world. It's just spinning its wheels towards niche status.
That, to me, is more of a Linux quote than a Windows quote. I used to only use Linux. However, when I needed to install something, it wasn't just a pop in a CD, push Next a couple of times, and forget it. No, I had to search online for packages and files and go through message boards and discussion groups trying to find a hint as to why such and such a program is not working. So, a 10 minute install in Windows would equal out to about a 5 hour install in Linux. Linux is cheap if your time is worth nothing. That's why I pay for Windows. (It is also why I no longer use Linux. Everything I was using in Linux has a Windows alternative. Many times, that Windows alternative either came with Windows, or could be found for free/cheap online.)
I know you're going to catch even more flak for that comment than you already have, but I'll throw my $0.02CDN into the hat.
I've been a Linux user for well over a decade. I used to run/administer it on more machines than I could likely count today. My personal laptop, desktop(s) both at home and at work all ran Linux. I still have a server at home hosting my personal vanity domain that runs a Linux installation.
That being said, I'm no simpleton when it comes to Linux. I've rolled my own distro from the kernel, glibc and gcc on up, I've used half a dozen distributions, various package management systems including pre-compiled and those that require me to compile my individual apps and everything in between. I've gotten away from Linux on the desktop over the last few years (my new job is a Windows only environment and uses computers merely as tools) so I decided to try to awaken the Linux installation on my desktop at home.
Would you believe I spent hours getting it all up to date only to discover that my keyboard would not work under X Windows! I tried a PS/2 keyboard, a USB keyboard, a wireless USB keyboard; nothing. Best I ever got was to get the number pad at the right working, but that does not a usable environment make.
So I gave up. I banged my head against a wall long enough before I decided that if they can screw up a simple human interface, it's no longer fun.
BTW, even with a package management system I still had to fight dependancies and their collisions along the way. So you're 100% correct; Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.
I'm not often a Windows user, but I had just the opposite experience recently and it *really* pissed me off. Windows was doing its auto-updates in the background and I had already gone through a patch-reboot cycle, then it pops up a message saying that it will automatically restart in 10 minutes.
Hah! My personal favourite is the Windows XP method whereby it pops up a dialog box saying "Windows has sucessfully installed updates. Your computer needs to be restarted for these updates to take effect. Reboot Now, Reboot Later" with "Reboot Now" as the default option. If you're in the middle of, say, typing something when that nuisance of a dialog pops up and you hit space or enter you'll suddenly find yourself in the middle of a reboot cycle when it's least opportune; like in the middle of a sentence.
Well, yeah. That's really the whole point in this discussion - they don't know it's reliable enough. Therefore, throwing the switch on the whole center at this point is foolish at best. You don't do that until you're reasonably confident based on other smaller tests you've done first. Which I believe was exactly what was being stated. Sometimes you have to learn to read between the lines, and understand things without having every little detail explicitly spelled out for you.
Thank-you, but the point I was responding to which created this thread was thus;
To which I responded about the need to stress test your entire setup to verify that it works. In point of fact, I'd still recommend that option to the person who asked the question in the first place because ultimately that's what's going to tell them where they need to investigate. The other options, as I see them, break down thusly;
The fact of the matter is this; every data centre worth its salt I've ever worked, visited or used as a client had the ability to tell me when was the last time they did a full power-down test, how long it lasted and what the results were. In almost all cases the results were "everything continued to function as normal".
Regardless whether there are 30 or 3000 employees at this company, it sounds as if this collection of servers is mission-critical and therefore people's livelihood depends on their uptime. If they don't take this power redundancy seriously now they're going to be in a world of hurt when the inevitable power failure hits them.
The power going out on Wednesday is why you run your test on Friday--you test your protection to ensure that you can recover from a mid-week power failure by Thursday morning, but you don't run the actual test on Wednesday. You set your test up so that a catastrophic failure causes the least disruption.
When I was in the Navy, we would run drills in the same manner--our response was the same whether the sub was running deep and fast or slow and shallow, so why run the drills in the riskier situation of deep and fast, where a catastrophic failure in response to the drill could cause very bad problems very quickly?
But in a data centre you don't face the risk of drowning and/or perishing. Also, it's really easy to convince yourself that your setup works because you've carefully and methodically powered down each backup source individually, but it's near impossible to determine the stress that would be placed on a network by a power failure unless you simulate one. Obviously you have to take steps before hand to make sure your stuff is reliable and you're not going to run a full shutdown while everyone is accessing the data (that, by the way, is a lovely strawman everyone is putting up).
The fact of the matter is, if you're not confident enough in your data centre's reliability to throw the switch, your data centre just isn't reliable enough.
I'd say that's the most rigorous, realistic way to test, but I'm not sure that it's the best way to test.
So, you pulled the main breaker and took out all of the production servers because there was a problem with your UPS configuration software? Oops. Why didn't you try it on one server today, then one rack tomorrow, and then pull the plug on the whole system after close on business on Friday?
What if the power goes out on Wednesday?
The trouble with most UPS battery tests is they involve putting the stuff on battery... If you have a server with redundant power supplies- then you can have each power supply attached to a different UPS, then you can test each UPS one by one, hopefully without the server going down due to one UPS failing the battery test.
The best way to test your power backup system is to throw the main switch and see what fails. How are you going to react in a power failure if you don't have that data? What good is your backup if it only works in carefully prepared, controlled and documented test scenarios?
Fahrenheit just makes more sense to most of us. 30s = cold, 40s = chilly, 50s = cool, 60s = decent/might need a windbreaker, 70s = nice, 80s = warm, 90s = hot, etc, etc. Celsius is no where near that intuitive and was as arbitrarily defined as Fahrenheit was.
Celsius, however, does not rely solely on memorization to "make sense". It's based on certain scientific principals that remain as yet unwavering. 0C is the freezing point of water, 100C is the boiling point of water. It's quite simple to deduce the relative levels of comfort in between; when you know that it's 0C outside the precipitation that's falling isn't going to be rain but instead the frozen variety. When it's 40C outside you know it's pretty damn warm, and when it pushes the 50s and 60s you start to get to holding temperature of food. Anybody who's ever made skin-on contact with a warming oven knows that this is neither pleasant nor comfortable for humans.
Had America been using a system of letters for the past two and a half centuries that would also "make sense" to you because you would have memorized the notion that C = cold, D = chilly, E = cool, F = decent/might need a windbreaker, G = nice, H = warm, I = hot, etc, etc.
Every person places a different value on the same thing. If the difference in pay in X dollars per week, and girl A values her self-respect at X + 100 dollars, it would be irrational for her to strip instead of waiting tables (assuming other values are the same). If girl B values it at X - 200 dollars a week, it wouldn't make sense for her not to strip.
Just because you would make a choice differently doesn't mean they're not participating in the choice.
Why are you making the assumption that strippers don't have self-respect? Strippers tend to be very confident, powerful women more in control of their situations and bodies than most professional women out there. Where do you think the cliche of "stripping her way through law school" came from? Many professional women have stripped in order to support themselves through professional development.
To quote an old friend of mine who stripped for many years; "Stripping isn't degrading to women, it's degrading to men."
Think about it; it only makes sense. Next time you're at a strip club, take a look at the behaviour of the audience and the behaviour of the girls. If you can, focus on their eyes, faces and body language.
So your saying rather than hoping to get bill gates credit card number I should just buy a lottery ticket?
Nope.
Ummmmmmmm.....not quite. Depends on what you're selling and who you're selling it to. While Freakonomics covers crack dealers, crack isn't really all that lucrative. I personally know at least 5 different people -- none of whom know each other beyond acquaintance -- who at various times made a killing selling (primarily) marijuana. None of those people would have sold an ounce of crack, mostly for the reasons outlined in Freakonomics.
So do I. One such dealer wound up taking on a financial partner who wanted to sample just about as much as they were selling so the cut product was barely covering the cost of acquisition. Essentially they were snorting for free. Another infamous dealer in the same area who dealt only in marijuana had purchased several large, lavish luxury items and always had a large quantity of cash on hand. Then he got busted and lost everything he owned in the name of proceeds of crime. AFAIK he's still cooling his heels behind bars.
The biggest problem with your statement and the drug business in general is law enforcement, risk, and market factors. Believe it or not there are several very heavy market forces that affect the drug trade. Major busts drive the price up at the dealer level primarily because it's driven up at the supplier level. If you happened to be fortuitous enough to stock up large before a major bust and you cut and weigh your product smartly you can briefly cash in, but then the supply chain dries up and you spend all your money re-upping the next time anyways. Customers are also fickle creatures. As soon as you don't have product you stop being the go-to-guy. Next thing you know you're sitting on lots of product and the phone ain't ringing.
When you average out the income of a typical drug dealer and assume they can actually manage to operate for more than 5-10 years without being caught, I think you'll find they don't make too much more than a mid-level factory worker. Their biggest benefit is the fact that their money is all tax-free so they don't lose a cut to the gummint. Then again, most mid-level factory workers don't have to look over their shoulders as they punch the clock. :)
I find it interesting that any time somebody talks about "potentially damaging information" the only things that come up are pornography, Facebook and MySpace.
There are many things on the Internet that kids can and will find before they've developed or matured enough to view it in context. There's lots of info out there that teaches kids how to make explosives, drugs, how to aquire weapons, etc. There are pages that show real photos and videos of gruesome deaths, explain how to cause mayhem in your school, all the hate groups are represented so kids can learn how black people are bad, women are marginal and basically anything else some group wants to propagate.
Yes, I know, hate speech is protected speech; but in a public education system kids shouldn't be using government (taxpayer) provided equipment to research such things. If they are permitted to do so it should be within the confines of a learning environment that explains them and puts them in context so the students understand what they're seeing/reading.
That, and the principals are the final decision maker as to what content students are permitted to view. If they wanted to ban Star Trek websites, ultimately it's their call.
"Two foreign countries"? Would these be the USA and Canada? Oh wait, you're probably american and thus you assume that everyone else on TEH INTARWEBZ is also american and use the term "foreign" to describe something not from the US...
/Mikael
OR! It could be a simple, correct use of the English language. I'm Canadian. Every other country in the world is foreign to me.
Similarly; someone from Turkey who was educated in Germany could indicate that they received schooling in a foreign country.
BTW; the term is "the Internet". Your point, if you can call it that, was seriously diminished by your use of a childish meme.
Too bad you posted AC, that's worth some mod points. Reality is, the school has no jurisdiction over what the student does off school grounds. Including what they do on their computer.
Too bad they aren't the students' computers; they belong to the school until end of year/term when the students have an option to purchase. Only after the student has purchased the laptop should the restrictions come off but not before.
If the students want the freedom to do whatever they want they should purchase a personal computer and Internet connection, but shouldn't be at all surprised when the school forbids them to connect said laptops to the school network.
A lot of people are talking from a purely outside perspective on this issue which is totally understandable. OTOH, I was an administrator for a high school network so I understand the dilemma faced by the admins in this story. On one hand you have the notion that you just leave the computers wide open and trust in the maturity and good nature of the students and don't spend time and energy in finding and closing all the possible back doorways into the systems.
On the other hand you have a lot of immature students who feel a sense of entitlement with everything they touch. They "should" be able to use Facebook, MySpace, play all sorts of games, install whatever "cool software/screensaver" whatever that's recommended by their friend. This causes administrative headaches especially when little buglets come into the network and start wreaking havoc for the rest of the as-yet uninfected computers in the building/campus. Further, the laptops themselves become bogged down with popups, viruses, trojans and other malware and cease to be useful for the student to do the work for which it was intended and the admin find themselves in a situation where they need to devote time to diagnose the specific symptoms when they could instead be doing one of any number of more important tasks.
All our systems were tethered, desktop PCs. One of our primary tactics was to constantly find, diagnose, research and secure any/all holes discovered by the students, update our workstation image and re-image the entire school. That way if anything ever were to be installed/corrupted on one of the workstations it would be wiped atleast weekly so they'd have to try to do the damage all over again the following day/week. This also forced students to store all files in their home directory on the server (which was policy anyways) where we could quota the file storage (1000 students and 100 staff sharing a 50GB RAID array meant there wasn't too much to go around!) and investigate any delinquent behaviour.
The goals of personal freedom are all well and good, but when they're not reigned in with a deepened sense of the personal responsibility that should always accompany such freedom it's a dangerous situation. I venture to say that until most of you have been faced with administrating a network comprised almost entirely of immature students you should take and give advice with a suitable quantity of NaCL.
What I would like to see is the ability to simply send money to another bank account. I understand it's very easy to do this in Europe. In the States I can send money anywhere I want, but the transfer costs me $25 (regardless of size). With fees like that it would only make sense when transferring multiple thousands of dollars at once.
The big banks in Canada support something called an Interac E-Mail Money Transfer. Literally it sends an e-mail to an intended recipient (yourself, if you so choose) instructing them to log into their online bank, answer a security question of your choosing and select to deposit the money. Many (most) banking plans have an option to have 1-2 of these free each month but you can either upgrade to a more generous plan or pay something like $1.00-$1.50 per transaction which, IMHO, is quite reasonable for transfers up to $1000. I've found in my personal experience that the money can be transferred in as little as 10-20 minutes so it's quite a convenient option if you don't want to leave your home or office.
But is it really because people are stupid that they can't change a spark plug or oil, or is it because that knowledge is really no longer a necessity for some people? I know how to change a tire and to jump start a car because it is knowledge I have needed and will probably need in the future. However I've never changed my oil or a spark plug because those are things that I consider maintenance. I make enough money where I can pay professionals to maintain my car. Unless people stop providing car maintenance service and reasonable price, there is no necessity for me to learn such things. The extra cost I pay is soaked up by the time and hassle I save. To you, I guess I'm stupid. But to me, I'm just allowing myself more free time to do what I want.
I learned this lesson a long time ago. There are many things I'm capable of doing but that no longer make sense. Moreover, I'd rather support the person/people who "make the sandwiches" or change my oil or detail my car. My goal in life at this point is to make things simple for myself so I can enjoy life.
I'm perfectly capable of changing out a flat tire, however I have roadside assistance on speed dial and my phone has voice recognition. I simply press a button, instruct my phone to "Call Roadside Assistance" and give the respondant my VIN, plate number and location. Hey, it justifies their job as well as that of the dispatcher and the tow truck driver that's sent to change my tire.
You raise an excellent point. However, they (typically) stop sending paper bills in favor of email notices once you start paying them online. With postfix and spamassassin, email occasionally gets misflagged, misfoldered, or otherwise misrouted. Forgetting that a certain bill is due, or not receiving the email notice for some reason, is IMO even worse than having an automatic payment set up. The physical paper bill is just as much a part of my fiscal responsibility process as is the physical paper check.
Question; you know a bill is going to arrive every month, typically on the same day each month. You further know that you must pay said bill every month, typically the same amount at the same time. Why is it excusable to neglect to pay said bill not only once, but perchance to make a habit of not doing so?
In more than a decade of managing my finances I've managed to miss exactly two monthly payments. One was a miscommunication with the person with whom I shared the loan who believed I was supposed to be making the payment that month (which taught me to be more proactive) and the other was a simple confusion. See, my electric bill was the same amount as it had been two months prior and I had erroneously assumed I'd paid it when in fact I had not. So I paid two months' in full the following month. I swallowed the $1.25 late-pay penalty they applied to my account as a further lesson; pay more careful attention. :)
I've paid only enough interest on one of my credit cards to justify the cost of stamping and mailing the card to me only because I tried to game the system (while, I might add, still making my payments; just not enough to cover the purchases made outside my grace period).
I hear often where people complain that a particular company will neglect to take an instalment payment then take double the next time around and my question is always the same; is it a bad thing that this company has allowed you to clutch your money for an additional monthly/bi-weekly period before inevitably taking what is rightfully theirs in the end? Is it the fault of the company in question if you decide that this is now "free money" and opt to spend it such that the following payment bounces?
I'm one of those holdouts who still use paper checks, envelopes, and stamps to pay my bills. Once a month or so I'll bring the stack into the office and take care of it during downtime, and folks look at me like I'm transmitting morse code over a telegraph. I do bank online, but I don't do online bill pay.
Ugh! A stack of bills alone is enough to make me cringe in horror. I used to do that until I realized I'd collected an enormous 4" thick sheaf of stapled statements that required a physical filing system and manual parsing. Now I have everything organized chronologically going back several years in a sub-folder off my home directory which is backed up weekly.
Now every two weeks, on pay day, I sit at my computer, download all available PDF statements and update my budget spreadsheet with my cheque amount and update the amounts of all outstanding bills. I pay all that are possible with my credit card then pay the remainder through online payment. Once I've settled all debts I mark them as paid in my spreadsheet and forecast what my next billing cycle will bring and determine how much surplus I have available in my chequing account which I then transfer to my high interest savings account and I'm done. Thanks to the miracle of tabbed browsing and broadband Internet the entire process can be completed in as little as little as 5-10 minutes and I have no paper cuts, postage expenses or pesky mailbox visits to worry about.
The last time I actually snail-mailed something was to ensure my financial adviser had an original signature and it saved me a 50km round-trip at $0.90/litre to accomplish it.
When I opened my account some years ago they gave me ten cheques. I still have eight of them left.
"...there are far better choices for online payment processing."
Can you elaborate on that? What choices do you like and why?
Basically all the services I subscribe to here in Ontario, Canada support some form of online payment. Many (most) support payment by credit card which affords me the protections of my credit card while at the same time accruing reward points for the dollars spent. I then pay my credit cards from my online banking portal which employs three or four layers of security.
I find myself constantly amazed (amused?) by the apparent differences between Canadian and American business models. The check card versus debit card business was the first, now this. Am I correct in assuming that a significant portion of United States services/companies still require some sort of dead tree / cheque stock payment? I suppose my real question is this; is this actually an issue? Do you not have online bill payment through your conventional bank websites?
Signed: Confused in Canada
Point 1) We don't use black anymore, we use African. This is both PC and more accurate since it clarifies the difference between african "blacks" and native Australian "blacks".
If you ask most man-in-the-street black people if they want to be called "African-American" they'll either look at you funny or tell you off. Politically Correct terms are fictional entities designed to make white people feel good about ourselves for being so sensitive all the while coming off as condescending and ignorant.
Ask a Trini if they're African-American. Or a Jamaican, or an Australian Aborigine, or even a black person originally of African descent whose great, great grandparents were born on North American soil.
Quite frankly speaking, most American and Canadian blacks have more in common these days with their white compatriots than they ever will with African blacks. Different continents, different cultures, different worlds.
It's disgusting that in an effort to curb racism, sexism or whatever else ails the world it's become verboten to identify people by their most striking characteristic. When I was in elementary (grade) school I was taught that when I saw a person in a wheelchair if that was the first thing I identified about them then I was a bad, horrible person. Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows that when you meet someone who's sitting in a chair with large chrome wheels attached to either side that's the first thing you're going to notice about them. Second comes their skin tone, gender, hair colour, clothing and general appearance finally followed by minor physical attributes such as eye colour, facial features etc. Anybody who thinks otherwise is delusional at best.
So let's drop the charade and start treating race the same way we treat gender and hair colour. Nobody objects to being picked out of the crowd as "the tall brown haired guy" so why should anybody feel slighted if they're identified as the "short black woman with long hair"?