Is it really too much to ask to actually write out the full names of universities? I realize it's a short way into the article, but seriously. I live in Ohio. CSU is Cleveland State, to me. KSU is Kent State. Elsewhere, KSU might be Kansas State (and is, as far as domains go), and CSU is apparently California... but especially as summaries go, I can't psychically know that you mean California. USC is more commonly the University of Southern California... but it's also the University of South Carolina.
Nobody's fingers are at risk of falling off from those few additional letters, are they?
I know, it's not *that* important, but it makes me peevish.
Nitpick: Microsoft's *fiscal* year-end (fiscal, not financial) is June 30. But that doesn't preclude them from having goals for any period, up to and including December 31... in fact, it's a fairly good bet that they do have projections in place for Christmas sales.
As the articles don't seem to actually mention specific Xbox360 goals, I don't think we really have any way of knowing if they'll meet them or not, but they probably do exist.
Those kids don't *deserve* to be at state colleges. This is my point. They don't deserve to be in college at all. A couple generations ago, they wouldn't have been, and they wouldn't have made any less money or done jobs any less complicated than the ones they're doing now.
This isn't just "a few people." It's the vast majority of the ones I had classes with as an undergrad, and more than a few of the people I'm encountering in graduate school. And that's in one of the programs with a reputation here for being "hard"--I suspect that some of the other majors graduate students without ever giving them an exam that isn't multiple choice.
What's the point of the government--and therefore the taxpayers--expending money to educate a class of students who don't need more education, don't want more education, and are going to have no more satisfying lives for this supposed service being given to them?
It's a waste. At private schools, such a thing would be only a waste for the parents and the students who have to pay for it, but at public schools, much of the burden is borne by the community, and for no purpose whatsoever.
Is that what you've heard? I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but my school valedictorian got a very high score on the ACT (which they tend to use instead of the SAT around here) including a perfect score on the math, did post-secondary (college courses during high school), and... ended up at a state school. My undergrad GPA was extremely good, my GMAT scores were just short of astounding, and... I'm at a state school. Why? Because the private schools and the good public ones don't offer enough money to students who don't come from financially solid backgrounds. My friend got gapped by CMU and had no way of obtaining more money. I would have had to take out over $30k a year in loans to go to the better graduate school that accepted me, and I don't have the credit to get them or family members who can help.
But that's neither here nor there. Even if the best go to better schools, the people who go to college *at all* should be able to write a paper that doesn't have spelling mistakes in it. They should be capable of that before they leave high school. They should have the skills to study for exams, write papers, learn the material being presented in class. And they just don't. People graduate from these universities with C averages when a person who is reasonably prepared for college could get A's in their sleep, and some professors will come out and say that they won't give grades lower than C.
And, unfortunately, those of us who lack the funds to attend a more prestigious school then get marked by the fact that oh, no *good* student would ever have gone to one of these state schools in the first place. It's just not true. It's just that unfortunately, right now, you need a degree to get all manner of jobs that didn't require a college education thirty years ago, so they show up to get their Bachelor's with a major in Binge Drinking, just to have that piece of paper.
But doing well on those sections is generally *not* required to get into your Ordinary Generic State University. In fact, a lot of the places around here seem to hardly care if you've taken the test at all, much less if you scored well enough on it to indicate that you're capable of doing college-level work.
Result: I had bronchitis this semester. A group project I'm involved with was written by other people in the group, and where I'd ordinary go over it with a fine-tooth comb, I don't have energy. I do know that there are rampant misspellings, completely inappropriate informal language, and grammatical errors out the wazoo. And my group members are either graduate students or seniors going into a very detail-oriented field.
Many of the girls in my classes would be better off as hairdressers. Many of the guys might make great auto mechanics. What they aren't is college-ready... and most of them are just about to graduation.
A small business server should act as... a small business server. That doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be a domain controller. The average small business I've been involved with needs a file server, probably not DC. I would not, personally, think that it would need to behave that way when I picked up a product that said "small business server", especially not if it allowed me to set it up without that capability and then started shutting down randomly.
To use a slightly less crass example, say you got something called "moisturizing cream", thinking you were going to use it as a face moisturizer. It turns out to be intended as a hand cream only. (Here we can tell that the author is actually a woman and not just pretending to be. I hope the whole moisturizer thing isn't too hard for men to follow.) Instead of just not working as a face cream, when used as a face cream it makes you break out in a rash, not because of the necessary ingredients to but as a deterrent from using it as a face cream.
Would any consumer put up with that?
I was stuck adminning a Small Business Server 2000 machine for a year by virtue of being the only person in the office with any business savvy. Never again. Yes, the needs of my office--and maybe that one, too--would have been served just fine with some other system configuration, but we got stuck with someone who bought 'Small Business Server' because we were a small business and it was a file server. Microsoft needs to expect that this is going to happen. Small businesses often don't have dedicated IT staff, I'm an accountant for heaven's sake. Shutting the computer down after an hour because you're not using a particular feature the way they want you to is stupid. When I'm buying software, either don't give me the option or let me choose how I want to use it. Don't give me the choice and then have the whole thing refuse to run because it's the wrong choice.
Eventually the animations and neon background images will blind the user base, however. And then where will they be?
I know everybody my age uses Myspace. I patently refuse not because I mind social networking sites, although I think that's kind of a highbrow name for them, but because the average Myspace page looks like it was created in 1994 by a visually impaired thirteen-year-old with a stock of clip art and animated GIFs.
It's the fault of all those sellers trying to 'optimize' their listings. The more people 'optimize', the harder it is for buyers to find what they really want.
The sellers have tried to trick people into buying their products all sorts of ways. Sky-high shipping on cheap items, misleading listings, high reserves... and now they complain because nobody buys? It's not Ebay that's the problem, it's the sellers.
Most are, I'm sure. But that doesn't actually change anything. Because you don't get a good deal off of Prime unless you ship more than $80 worth of shipping. *They* don't get a good deal unless you ship less, unless the sheer volume which you spend with them is so much more now that their margin makes up your shipping costs and then some. That won't happen if all you're doing is shipping single books.
Amazon's only able to hype this up now because it's a novelty. It's not likely to work in the long run because those 'impulse purchases' aren't going to pay for themselves. Even if they're getting an amazing deal on shipping, it's still going to cost them a couple bucks to ship a single book two-day. They've already cut their packaging, which helps a little and is much more environmentally sound, but there's only so far they can reduce that cost. Let's say it costs them $5 to ship that book, which they'd charge someone $9.48 to ship without Prime. (It could be less than $5, but I wouldn't bet on it. Amazon can negotiate shipping rates, but the shipping company still needs to make a profit off of them, and with fuel rates where they are...) They get 16 ships out of the $80 fee before it starts having to come out of their margin. Most folks who shell out for Prime will probably ship more than 16 things in the course of a year, so now it's being paid for out of their usual profit margin. Except that if you don't order something that has a $5 margin--and most books certainly won't--then they haven't made any money. Only big purchases will have big margins, but those purchases will also cost a lot more to ship.
Leaving Amazon drowning in their 'bright idea' and trying to figure out ways to ship as much of this stuff out by discount 3+ day ground rates as possible. And, oh, hopefully to convince you to add a few more things to that order, so it'll all go out at once instead of you coming back next week for something new. I wouldn't be surprised if they institute a minimum for Prime before long.
And you, overall, what do you as the customer get out of it? Lots, at first, presuming you're a regular customer. Much more than what you paid for it, especially if you split your membership among family members and everybody orders a lot. We'll assume you're willing to deal with having paid actual money to find out that your 'second day' shipping will take a week in some cases, it's still a pretty good deal for you. That is, for now. Amazon can't make money on this as long as you're getting this good a deal, I'm sorry to say. It just won't work. Like Super Saver shipping, which used to arrive sometimes only a day or two after you ordered, soon you'll find it taking longer and longer, with more and more limitations, because they won't be able to keep it alive any other way.
I'm not saying it can't last because it's free for some people. It just can't last, period, the way it's going right now. They're not taking in enough money in exchange for what they're giving out. The shipping costs have to come from somewhere.
Except that this is a model which is unlikely to *ever* work unless they dupe a lot of customers who don't need it into buying it or place limits on its use, and both of those are not what I consider to be acceptable. The ones who don't ship much have to pay for the ones who ship tons. It's just like a buffet, only on a much larger and more expensive scale, and just like a buffet, they have to either screw over the small consumers or put major limits on the big ones in order to make it pay. The difference is, at a restaurant, there's not going to be too much of a difference dollar-wise between the big customers and the small ones. A couple plates of food. Here, we're talking the difference between someone who does $800 worth of shipping in a year and the one who does $15. The person who uses $15 worth of shipping gets screwed. The one who uses $800 worth screws Amazon, because the increased margin is unlikely to cover it... unless Amazon cuts corners wherever they can to increase their margin.
I'm now on my second 'sample' of Prime. The first was given to my account, the second to my sibling's. In the course of those two, I have had such items as a 60-pound piece of exercise equipment shipped next-day to my home for $4 so it'd show up on my day off. I've ordered tons of books and had them shipped singly. And I have paid Amazon not a dime for the privilege, and wouldn't, ever.
Why? Because once upon a time, you could get free shipping and have something a few days later. Then, Super Saver started taking longer... and longer... and longer. They'd wait a week to ship an item that was 'ships within 24 hours'. I suppose this probably happened around the time that Prime was taking shape. But then, and this is the kicker, lots of items on the Amazon site started showing up as longer ship times than they'd had before. 'Ships within 3-5 days' or something like that for an item that used to be 24 hours. As someone who has a Prime membership, free or not, I found that irritating. But then the worst part:
They still often ship the items the next day. They just ship them by a method that will take longer to get there, even though you've used Prime for 'free second day shipping'. The excuse for this is that it 'still arrives within the delivery window', even though they're the ones who set the delivery window as being a week later for an in-stock product.
I'd rather they patented this, to be honest, because I don't want any other company copying it. I don't want to pay for the people who buy 'all you can ship' packages and then ship a huge piece of furniture on it, when all I'm usually shipping is small items. But I think that, patent or not, this will eventually either start costing a lot more or vanish entirely. The delays are a symptom of a system that doesn't work. They're having to cut corners now to afford Prime. They can't do that forever, because people won't pay for prime if *everything* starts taking a week to arrive with 'second day' shipping.
I don't want other companies doing this. I'm fine with paying for shipping if it's a reasonable price. Free is cool, too, because I know I'm still paying for it but it's packaged into the prices I'm paying, I don't have to add things to my cart to figure it out. I don't want to show up at other online sites where I shop to find that I suddenly have to shell out $80 to get things promptly because the 'free' shipping suddenly takes three times longer than it used to. It's not fair to the customers.
The votes from the Electoral College do decide. The President. Do you have a representative? A senator? A governor? A mayor, a city councilman?
The president has surprisingly little to do with how police officers in one (or two, or ten) particular area(s) behave. The election of John Kerry (or Al Gore) would not have had a material impact on cases like this. Perhaps the *repeated* election of more liberal presidents would have some impact, but you can't really blame the lack of that on the EC. Even there, you're talking a limited amount of power over this particular situation. Or, in fact, most situations that influence your actual everyday life.
The electoral college usually does *not* vote contrary to the vote of states, although it does mean that 'winner takes all' within a state. That means that your vote does count even there, because they generally do listen to the way the state votes. But even if you don't take that into account, that isn't the only election that ever happens in the US, and you don't have that excuse for any other. So tell me why your vote doesn't count again?
Offshore accounts do not make failure to report income legal in the US. Ever. If you are in this country and you earn income--whether that income is salary from your job or revenue from prostitution or sale of cocaine, it doesn't matter--you must report it to the IRS to be taxed. Period. I suspect we are not the only country to operate this way.
Offshore bank accounts make tax evasion more difficult to track... but not by any means impossible. They don't make your tax payments optional. The only thing that gets you out of reporting your income is if you don't have any (or so little as to not make a difference; I admit I don't know the cutoff number). Even if you spent every last dime on tax-deductible expenses--which would be difficult unless you're living on savings and donating your income to charity or something--you'd still have to report the income, you'd just get out of paying taxes on it.
So no, taxes *cannot* be legally sidestepped. Sorry, try again.
You're assuming I don't... which isn't, in fact, true. But in exchange for what I'm getting, I have to do stuff, and so do most folks, whether it's work for a GA, keeping a GPA up, etc. Yes, I realize that the University is making money off *some of* these people, but there's a certain amount being put up on the student's end. Part of that is being expected to act like a credit to the university, and not, for example, being arrested for marijuana trafficking and convicted of possession. (Not that *that* stopped them from putting Cribbs back on the football team in '04, scholarship intact so far as I know. He got a one-game suspension.)
It does mean that when the University's footing the bill for your education, you're going to be required to act like slightly less of a moron than the general student population. Further, ethically, you probably have a responsibility to do something more with your education than drink and steal street signs. Most of these athletes will not have 'glory days' except in their most optimistic rememberances. Nobody will remember them after they're gone. They're not providing so much service to the University that their bad behavior ought to be excused, and unfortunately, much of what the university community uses Facebook for is the glorification of bad behavior.
I'm a Kent student. And while I know this is by far not universal among the athletes at this campus, at least going by the ones who I've seen in classes:
Good, if not good enough. Because they're getting a ridiculous amount of money in the form of scholarships and such, in exchange for which they do terribly in classes (dragging their groups down with them, much of the time), drink as much or more as anybody else here (which is no small amount) and then go throw a ball around every now and then in exchange.
No, I don't have sympathy. Stop showing off your drinking skills and go to class. I'd be happier if they'd prevent them from drinking and tell them to stop using the team as an excuse to ditch classwork when they apparently have plenty of time for parties. Considering very few of them are going to be able to rely on sports as a career, I'd be happier if the University was less concerned with image and more concerned with the fact that the images are often of underaged students drinking alcohol. But... oh, right. I go to a state school in Ohio. Chances of that happening... slightly less than zero. They'll probably end up cutting the whole ban later due to lack of funds for enforcement.
I never said I agreed with the practice. Just that there's a business reason for it, which is more than can be said for IM, because it's not a direct competitor and the only thing it indirectly competes with is a supplementary service.
Except that for telephone, you're probably paying them for a certain number of minutes, not unlimited usage. And for high rates for international calls, for example. They want you 'on the meter' when you're making phone calls. I would think, though I don't personally use it, that VOIP may also be fairly bandwidth-intensive, and they like to keep their usage down even while they tout just how 'fast' it is.
IM, though, I don't use the same way I use text messaging, and wouldn't be even if I had a fancy phone with a QWERTY keyboard. IM is also a much more established part of the 'internet experience'. I'm not saying the reasoning for banning VOIP is especially good, just that at least there's a business rationale, whereas banning instant messaging as a whole is ridiculous verging upon impossible.
I can understand banning VOIP. Not that everybody's going to like it, but it's at least rational. They're in the business of providing telephone service, after all. But I can't even imagine being online without having IM service running in the background, it's so central to how I work now. Why would you provide internet service and then ban that? Just because you get $.10 a text message, which nobody is going to be sending and receiving with a laptop anyway?
It seems likely that a large percentage of the people who get this service will end up violating the agreement without even thinking about it, just because it's habit.
Our work email suffers from a persistant deluge of spam. Probably about 100 spam messages per legitimate message. There's only one address for the office, and my boss has unfortunately used it periodically for online shopping, posted it publicly on the website, etc. He's not very internet-smart. The upshot of this is that the spam is terrible, and the employee who handles the incoming email isn't skilled enough to handle a client-side antispam system.
We have Spam Assassin on the email server. Or I should say, our ISP does. Unfortunately, all we can do as far as configuration is changing the threshhold level. We have no access to the actual rules. Even though Spam Assassin would be capable of working better in our situation--for example, no email containing sexual terms is *ever* going to be a legitimate email to this account, but the rule still doesn't give enough points by itself to mark as spam without a ridiculously low threshhold. And the 'training' option we're given seems to have no effect. In the end, it's better than nothing, but still results in an employee having to spend valuable time checking and deleting spam.
If ISPs gave more control over this to the users, the users could define what's spam for *them*, instead of it being one definition of spam for everyone. A loan officer at a bank might legitiately get emails about loans, but the same key words in my email mean spam. Signals of spam for a business account might mark normal, everyday personal email. My ISP can't know my email as well as I do, so I should be the one to do the configuration.
Cash prices are higher for one major reason: collectibility. As doctors move over to automated systems, finally, it'll improve. Right now, the level of collections for cash customers for medical services is terrible. I don't remember the exact rate, but it's brought up often in the arguement over pushing towards electronic medical records. Insurance is reliable, you'll get it every time. Cash, you have to ask for up front or pretty much write it off, and asking for money up front is something many doctors aren't comfortable with doing once you get up into larger figures.
Medicine is horribly out of date in this way, and I'm not saying this to excuse them, because it really needs to change.
That doesn't count for pharmacy, obviously. I assume that probably has to do with some kind of price negotiation between the companies, but I don't really know.
It's called disparate impact. If the higher level of education is not required, that by itself is not the problem. The problem is if in the applicant pool, more of a certain protected class of people don't meet that level of education. In most cases, what happens is that the white applicants do, for example, have a high school diploma... while blacks and Hispanics are more likely not to.
However, it's progressively easier to claim that the education is required, as more and more jobs require employees to have literacy and problem-solving skills even at low levels.
Alienware CS, last I heard, is in Costa Rica. The guy tells you his name is Juan. Chances are, his name is Juan.
I don't remember if I was calling Gateway or Compaq or Toshiba (I own too many computers) at the time, but one of them, I got a CS rep with such a heavy Indian accent that I could barely understand her, and it took me several minutes just to understand that she was trying to claim her name was 'Mary' or something like that.
Give me CS who isn't going to lie to me about their name, and I'll be more likely to trust them with other things. I may not be capable of actually pronouncing 'Mary's real name, but I'm not likely to be calling her by name much anyway. Since she's not fooling anybody about what continent she's on, why bother giving her an American name? And if I can't be trusted to know her real name, what else aren't they telling me?
My solution: I don't play FPS games. I was a very reluctant convert to 3d games at all (I didn't have a Playstation until long after the SNES was supposed to have been dead), but I've found that most RPGs have fairly reasonable camera angles. I also play things like Civilization and Age of Empires on the PC, which are lovely, challenging games but aren't hard on the stomach.
Other than that, on any game that gives you trouble, pause frequently and look away from the screen, that helps quite a bit.
They do generally *think* they're hiring the most effective, efficient people. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people out there who believe that a woman is not going to be a good engineer. Or that even if she is, she's probably going to want a bunch of vacation time for a honeymoon, then maternity leave, then she'll be asking for personal days all over the place to stay home with sick kids--very inefficient! That a black person is not going to be able to handle a job where they need to communicate well with others, because she obviously just speaks 'Ebonics' if her name is Sheniqua. Or that a black man can't deal with customers in a sales position because they'll feel threatened by him. All of which lead directly to a hiring manager choosing a nice, safe white male, because he'll obviously be better at the job.
Not that this happens a lot--most younger people don't have the same level of bias that was rampant twenty years ago. It's fading. But it does still exist, and even a relatively young, enlightened HR person may still need encouraging to hire someone of a different cultural background than their own.
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Is it really too much to ask to actually write out the full names of universities? I realize it's a short way into the article, but seriously. I live in Ohio. CSU is Cleveland State, to me. KSU is Kent State. Elsewhere, KSU might be Kansas State (and is, as far as domains go), and CSU is apparently California... but especially as summaries go, I can't psychically know that you mean California. USC is more commonly the University of Southern California... but it's also the University of South Carolina.
Nobody's fingers are at risk of falling off from those few additional letters, are they?
I know, it's not *that* important, but it makes me peevish.
Nitpick: Microsoft's *fiscal* year-end (fiscal, not financial) is June 30. But that doesn't preclude them from having goals for any period, up to and including December 31... in fact, it's a fairly good bet that they do have projections in place for Christmas sales.
As the articles don't seem to actually mention specific Xbox360 goals, I don't think we really have any way of knowing if they'll meet them or not, but they probably do exist.
Those kids don't *deserve* to be at state colleges. This is my point. They don't deserve to be in college at all. A couple generations ago, they wouldn't have been, and they wouldn't have made any less money or done jobs any less complicated than the ones they're doing now.
This isn't just "a few people." It's the vast majority of the ones I had classes with as an undergrad, and more than a few of the people I'm encountering in graduate school. And that's in one of the programs with a reputation here for being "hard"--I suspect that some of the other majors graduate students without ever giving them an exam that isn't multiple choice.
What's the point of the government--and therefore the taxpayers--expending money to educate a class of students who don't need more education, don't want more education, and are going to have no more satisfying lives for this supposed service being given to them?
It's a waste. At private schools, such a thing would be only a waste for the parents and the students who have to pay for it, but at public schools, much of the burden is borne by the community, and for no purpose whatsoever.
Is that what you've heard? I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but my school valedictorian got a very high score on the ACT (which they tend to use instead of the SAT around here) including a perfect score on the math, did post-secondary (college courses during high school), and... ended up at a state school. My undergrad GPA was extremely good, my GMAT scores were just short of astounding, and... I'm at a state school. Why? Because the private schools and the good public ones don't offer enough money to students who don't come from financially solid backgrounds. My friend got gapped by CMU and had no way of obtaining more money. I would have had to take out over $30k a year in loans to go to the better graduate school that accepted me, and I don't have the credit to get them or family members who can help.
But that's neither here nor there. Even if the best go to better schools, the people who go to college *at all* should be able to write a paper that doesn't have spelling mistakes in it. They should be capable of that before they leave high school. They should have the skills to study for exams, write papers, learn the material being presented in class. And they just don't. People graduate from these universities with C averages when a person who is reasonably prepared for college could get A's in their sleep, and some professors will come out and say that they won't give grades lower than C.
And, unfortunately, those of us who lack the funds to attend a more prestigious school then get marked by the fact that oh, no *good* student would ever have gone to one of these state schools in the first place. It's just not true. It's just that unfortunately, right now, you need a degree to get all manner of jobs that didn't require a college education thirty years ago, so they show up to get their Bachelor's with a major in Binge Drinking, just to have that piece of paper.
But doing well on those sections is generally *not* required to get into your Ordinary Generic State University. In fact, a lot of the places around here seem to hardly care if you've taken the test at all, much less if you scored well enough on it to indicate that you're capable of doing college-level work.
Result: I had bronchitis this semester. A group project I'm involved with was written by other people in the group, and where I'd ordinary go over it with a fine-tooth comb, I don't have energy. I do know that there are rampant misspellings, completely inappropriate informal language, and grammatical errors out the wazoo. And my group members are either graduate students or seniors going into a very detail-oriented field.
Many of the girls in my classes would be better off as hairdressers. Many of the guys might make great auto mechanics. What they aren't is college-ready... and most of them are just about to graduation.
A small business server should act as... a small business server. That doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be a domain controller. The average small business I've been involved with needs a file server, probably not DC. I would not, personally, think that it would need to behave that way when I picked up a product that said "small business server", especially not if it allowed me to set it up without that capability and then started shutting down randomly.
To use a slightly less crass example, say you got something called "moisturizing cream", thinking you were going to use it as a face moisturizer. It turns out to be intended as a hand cream only. (Here we can tell that the author is actually a woman and not just pretending to be. I hope the whole moisturizer thing isn't too hard for men to follow.) Instead of just not working as a face cream, when used as a face cream it makes you break out in a rash, not because of the necessary ingredients to but as a deterrent from using it as a face cream.
Would any consumer put up with that?
I was stuck adminning a Small Business Server 2000 machine for a year by virtue of being the only person in the office with any business savvy. Never again. Yes, the needs of my office--and maybe that one, too--would have been served just fine with some other system configuration, but we got stuck with someone who bought 'Small Business Server' because we were a small business and it was a file server. Microsoft needs to expect that this is going to happen. Small businesses often don't have dedicated IT staff, I'm an accountant for heaven's sake. Shutting the computer down after an hour because you're not using a particular feature the way they want you to is stupid. When I'm buying software, either don't give me the option or let me choose how I want to use it. Don't give me the choice and then have the whole thing refuse to run because it's the wrong choice.
Eventually the animations and neon background images will blind the user base, however. And then where will they be?
I know everybody my age uses Myspace. I patently refuse not because I mind social networking sites, although I think that's kind of a highbrow name for them, but because the average Myspace page looks like it was created in 1994 by a visually impaired thirteen-year-old with a stock of clip art and animated GIFs.
It's the fault of all those sellers trying to 'optimize' their listings. The more people 'optimize', the harder it is for buyers to find what they really want.
The sellers have tried to trick people into buying their products all sorts of ways. Sky-high shipping on cheap items, misleading listings, high reserves... and now they complain because nobody buys? It's not Ebay that's the problem, it's the sellers.
Most are, I'm sure. But that doesn't actually change anything. Because you don't get a good deal off of Prime unless you ship more than $80 worth of shipping. *They* don't get a good deal unless you ship less, unless the sheer volume which you spend with them is so much more now that their margin makes up your shipping costs and then some. That won't happen if all you're doing is shipping single books.
Amazon's only able to hype this up now because it's a novelty. It's not likely to work in the long run because those 'impulse purchases' aren't going to pay for themselves. Even if they're getting an amazing deal on shipping, it's still going to cost them a couple bucks to ship a single book two-day. They've already cut their packaging, which helps a little and is much more environmentally sound, but there's only so far they can reduce that cost. Let's say it costs them $5 to ship that book, which they'd charge someone $9.48 to ship without Prime. (It could be less than $5, but I wouldn't bet on it. Amazon can negotiate shipping rates, but the shipping company still needs to make a profit off of them, and with fuel rates where they are...) They get 16 ships out of the $80 fee before it starts having to come out of their margin. Most folks who shell out for Prime will probably ship more than 16 things in the course of a year, so now it's being paid for out of their usual profit margin. Except that if you don't order something that has a $5 margin--and most books certainly won't--then they haven't made any money. Only big purchases will have big margins, but those purchases will also cost a lot more to ship.
Leaving Amazon drowning in their 'bright idea' and trying to figure out ways to ship as much of this stuff out by discount 3+ day ground rates as possible. And, oh, hopefully to convince you to add a few more things to that order, so it'll all go out at once instead of you coming back next week for something new. I wouldn't be surprised if they institute a minimum for Prime before long.
And you, overall, what do you as the customer get out of it? Lots, at first, presuming you're a regular customer. Much more than what you paid for it, especially if you split your membership among family members and everybody orders a lot. We'll assume you're willing to deal with having paid actual money to find out that your 'second day' shipping will take a week in some cases, it's still a pretty good deal for you. That is, for now. Amazon can't make money on this as long as you're getting this good a deal, I'm sorry to say. It just won't work. Like Super Saver shipping, which used to arrive sometimes only a day or two after you ordered, soon you'll find it taking longer and longer, with more and more limitations, because they won't be able to keep it alive any other way.
I'm not saying it can't last because it's free for some people. It just can't last, period, the way it's going right now. They're not taking in enough money in exchange for what they're giving out. The shipping costs have to come from somewhere.
Except that this is a model which is unlikely to *ever* work unless they dupe a lot of customers who don't need it into buying it or place limits on its use, and both of those are not what I consider to be acceptable. The ones who don't ship much have to pay for the ones who ship tons. It's just like a buffet, only on a much larger and more expensive scale, and just like a buffet, they have to either screw over the small consumers or put major limits on the big ones in order to make it pay. The difference is, at a restaurant, there's not going to be too much of a difference dollar-wise between the big customers and the small ones. A couple plates of food. Here, we're talking the difference between someone who does $800 worth of shipping in a year and the one who does $15. The person who uses $15 worth of shipping gets screwed. The one who uses $800 worth screws Amazon, because the increased margin is unlikely to cover it... unless Amazon cuts corners wherever they can to increase their margin.
Competition can't change things like that.
I'm now on my second 'sample' of Prime. The first was given to my account, the second to my sibling's. In the course of those two, I have had such items as a 60-pound piece of exercise equipment shipped next-day to my home for $4 so it'd show up on my day off. I've ordered tons of books and had them shipped singly. And I have paid Amazon not a dime for the privilege, and wouldn't, ever.
Why? Because once upon a time, you could get free shipping and have something a few days later. Then, Super Saver started taking longer... and longer... and longer. They'd wait a week to ship an item that was 'ships within 24 hours'. I suppose this probably happened around the time that Prime was taking shape. But then, and this is the kicker, lots of items on the Amazon site started showing up as longer ship times than they'd had before. 'Ships within 3-5 days' or something like that for an item that used to be 24 hours. As someone who has a Prime membership, free or not, I found that irritating. But then the worst part:
They still often ship the items the next day. They just ship them by a method that will take longer to get there, even though you've used Prime for 'free second day shipping'. The excuse for this is that it 'still arrives within the delivery window', even though they're the ones who set the delivery window as being a week later for an in-stock product.
I'd rather they patented this, to be honest, because I don't want any other company copying it. I don't want to pay for the people who buy 'all you can ship' packages and then ship a huge piece of furniture on it, when all I'm usually shipping is small items. But I think that, patent or not, this will eventually either start costing a lot more or vanish entirely. The delays are a symptom of a system that doesn't work. They're having to cut corners now to afford Prime. They can't do that forever, because people won't pay for prime if *everything* starts taking a week to arrive with 'second day' shipping.
I don't want other companies doing this. I'm fine with paying for shipping if it's a reasonable price. Free is cool, too, because I know I'm still paying for it but it's packaged into the prices I'm paying, I don't have to add things to my cart to figure it out. I don't want to show up at other online sites where I shop to find that I suddenly have to shell out $80 to get things promptly because the 'free' shipping suddenly takes three times longer than it used to. It's not fair to the customers.
The votes from the Electoral College do decide. The President. Do you have a representative? A senator? A governor? A mayor, a city councilman?
The president has surprisingly little to do with how police officers in one (or two, or ten) particular area(s) behave. The election of John Kerry (or Al Gore) would not have had a material impact on cases like this. Perhaps the *repeated* election of more liberal presidents would have some impact, but you can't really blame the lack of that on the EC. Even there, you're talking a limited amount of power over this particular situation. Or, in fact, most situations that influence your actual everyday life.
The electoral college usually does *not* vote contrary to the vote of states, although it does mean that 'winner takes all' within a state. That means that your vote does count even there, because they generally do listen to the way the state votes. But even if you don't take that into account, that isn't the only election that ever happens in the US, and you don't have that excuse for any other. So tell me why your vote doesn't count again?
Offshore accounts do not make failure to report income legal in the US. Ever. If you are in this country and you earn income--whether that income is salary from your job or revenue from prostitution or sale of cocaine, it doesn't matter--you must report it to the IRS to be taxed. Period. I suspect we are not the only country to operate this way.
Offshore bank accounts make tax evasion more difficult to track... but not by any means impossible. They don't make your tax payments optional. The only thing that gets you out of reporting your income is if you don't have any (or so little as to not make a difference; I admit I don't know the cutoff number). Even if you spent every last dime on tax-deductible expenses--which would be difficult unless you're living on savings and donating your income to charity or something--you'd still have to report the income, you'd just get out of paying taxes on it.
So no, taxes *cannot* be legally sidestepped. Sorry, try again.
You're assuming I don't... which isn't, in fact, true. But in exchange for what I'm getting, I have to do stuff, and so do most folks, whether it's work for a GA, keeping a GPA up, etc. Yes, I realize that the University is making money off *some of* these people, but there's a certain amount being put up on the student's end. Part of that is being expected to act like a credit to the university, and not, for example, being arrested for marijuana trafficking and convicted of possession. (Not that *that* stopped them from putting Cribbs back on the football team in '04, scholarship intact so far as I know. He got a one-game suspension.)
It does mean that when the University's footing the bill for your education, you're going to be required to act like slightly less of a moron than the general student population. Further, ethically, you probably have a responsibility to do something more with your education than drink and steal street signs. Most of these athletes will not have 'glory days' except in their most optimistic rememberances. Nobody will remember them after they're gone. They're not providing so much service to the University that their bad behavior ought to be excused, and unfortunately, much of what the university community uses Facebook for is the glorification of bad behavior.
I'm a Kent student. And while I know this is by far not universal among the athletes at this campus, at least going by the ones who I've seen in classes:
Good, if not good enough. Because they're getting a ridiculous amount of money in the form of scholarships and such, in exchange for which they do terribly in classes (dragging their groups down with them, much of the time), drink as much or more as anybody else here (which is no small amount) and then go throw a ball around every now and then in exchange.
No, I don't have sympathy. Stop showing off your drinking skills and go to class. I'd be happier if they'd prevent them from drinking and tell them to stop using the team as an excuse to ditch classwork when they apparently have plenty of time for parties. Considering very few of them are going to be able to rely on sports as a career, I'd be happier if the University was less concerned with image and more concerned with the fact that the images are often of underaged students drinking alcohol. But... oh, right. I go to a state school in Ohio. Chances of that happening... slightly less than zero. They'll probably end up cutting the whole ban later due to lack of funds for enforcement.
I never said I agreed with the practice. Just that there's a business reason for it, which is more than can be said for IM, because it's not a direct competitor and the only thing it indirectly competes with is a supplementary service.
Except that for telephone, you're probably paying them for a certain number of minutes, not unlimited usage. And for high rates for international calls, for example. They want you 'on the meter' when you're making phone calls. I would think, though I don't personally use it, that VOIP may also be fairly bandwidth-intensive, and they like to keep their usage down even while they tout just how 'fast' it is.
IM, though, I don't use the same way I use text messaging, and wouldn't be even if I had a fancy phone with a QWERTY keyboard. IM is also a much more established part of the 'internet experience'. I'm not saying the reasoning for banning VOIP is especially good, just that at least there's a business rationale, whereas banning instant messaging as a whole is ridiculous verging upon impossible.
I can understand banning VOIP. Not that everybody's going to like it, but it's at least rational. They're in the business of providing telephone service, after all. But I can't even imagine being online without having IM service running in the background, it's so central to how I work now. Why would you provide internet service and then ban that? Just because you get $.10 a text message, which nobody is going to be sending and receiving with a laptop anyway?
It seems likely that a large percentage of the people who get this service will end up violating the agreement without even thinking about it, just because it's habit.
Our work email suffers from a persistant deluge of spam. Probably about 100 spam messages per legitimate message. There's only one address for the office, and my boss has unfortunately used it periodically for online shopping, posted it publicly on the website, etc. He's not very internet-smart. The upshot of this is that the spam is terrible, and the employee who handles the incoming email isn't skilled enough to handle a client-side antispam system.
We have Spam Assassin on the email server. Or I should say, our ISP does. Unfortunately, all we can do as far as configuration is changing the threshhold level. We have no access to the actual rules. Even though Spam Assassin would be capable of working better in our situation--for example, no email containing sexual terms is *ever* going to be a legitimate email to this account, but the rule still doesn't give enough points by itself to mark as spam without a ridiculously low threshhold. And the 'training' option we're given seems to have no effect. In the end, it's better than nothing, but still results in an employee having to spend valuable time checking and deleting spam.
If ISPs gave more control over this to the users, the users could define what's spam for *them*, instead of it being one definition of spam for everyone. A loan officer at a bank might legitiately get emails about loans, but the same key words in my email mean spam. Signals of spam for a business account might mark normal, everyday personal email. My ISP can't know my email as well as I do, so I should be the one to do the configuration.
Cash prices are higher for one major reason: collectibility. As doctors move over to automated systems, finally, it'll improve. Right now, the level of collections for cash customers for medical services is terrible. I don't remember the exact rate, but it's brought up often in the arguement over pushing towards electronic medical records. Insurance is reliable, you'll get it every time. Cash, you have to ask for up front or pretty much write it off, and asking for money up front is something many doctors aren't comfortable with doing once you get up into larger figures.
Medicine is horribly out of date in this way, and I'm not saying this to excuse them, because it really needs to change.
That doesn't count for pharmacy, obviously. I assume that probably has to do with some kind of price negotiation between the companies, but I don't really know.
It's called disparate impact. If the higher level of education is not required, that by itself is not the problem. The problem is if in the applicant pool, more of a certain protected class of people don't meet that level of education. In most cases, what happens is that the white applicants do, for example, have a high school diploma... while blacks and Hispanics are more likely not to.
However, it's progressively easier to claim that the education is required, as more and more jobs require employees to have literacy and problem-solving skills even at low levels.
Alienware CS, last I heard, is in Costa Rica. The guy tells you his name is Juan. Chances are, his name is Juan.
I don't remember if I was calling Gateway or Compaq or Toshiba (I own too many computers) at the time, but one of them, I got a CS rep with such a heavy Indian accent that I could barely understand her, and it took me several minutes just to understand that she was trying to claim her name was 'Mary' or something like that.
Give me CS who isn't going to lie to me about their name, and I'll be more likely to trust them with other things. I may not be capable of actually pronouncing 'Mary's real name, but I'm not likely to be calling her by name much anyway. Since she's not fooling anybody about what continent she's on, why bother giving her an American name? And if I can't be trusted to know her real name, what else aren't they telling me?
Give me Juan any day of the week.
My solution: I don't play FPS games. I was a very reluctant convert to 3d games at all (I didn't have a Playstation until long after the SNES was supposed to have been dead), but I've found that most RPGs have fairly reasonable camera angles. I also play things like Civilization and Age of Empires on the PC, which are lovely, challenging games but aren't hard on the stomach.
Other than that, on any game that gives you trouble, pause frequently and look away from the screen, that helps quite a bit.
...wouldn't exist if there wasn't a demand for them.
The day men stop patronizing prostitutes, there will be no more prostitution. Not one day earlier.
They do generally *think* they're hiring the most effective, efficient people. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people out there who believe that a woman is not going to be a good engineer. Or that even if she is, she's probably going to want a bunch of vacation time for a honeymoon, then maternity leave, then she'll be asking for personal days all over the place to stay home with sick kids--very inefficient! That a black person is not going to be able to handle a job where they need to communicate well with others, because she obviously just speaks 'Ebonics' if her name is Sheniqua. Or that a black man can't deal with customers in a sales position because they'll feel threatened by him. All of which lead directly to a hiring manager choosing a nice, safe white male, because he'll obviously be better at the job.
Not that this happens a lot--most younger people don't have the same level of bias that was rampant twenty years ago. It's fading. But it does still exist, and even a relatively young, enlightened HR person may still need encouraging to hire someone of a different cultural background than their own.