Me too. If you can be patient - and I can - older shows can be dirt cheap on DVD or even Blu Ray. Ripping them to disk and setting them up with Kodi streaming is a bit tedious, but I've been doing this for so long that it's like having my own private Netflix. Thousands of hours of content, no commercials, all legally purchased.
The value of an OTA antenna varies wildly based on where you live. I happen to live close enough to a major city that I can get ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and three dozen junky local channels by antenna. I'm using a $12.50/month Tivo DVR (though setting up MythTV is on the to-do list.)
But I have friends further out that tried the same setup and can only get one or two of the four big networks and maybe ten other channels.
I've had Comcast internet service on my property for fifteen years. The billing and sales department of Comcast comes from the seventh level of hell. Maybe the eighth. But service? Rock solid. I've had two service outages in the past five years, each for less than two hours. Consistent bandwidth, too.
The next time I move, I seriously plan to demand a demonstration of high speed internet connections from two different providers (ideally three or more) on premises before I put in a bid for the property or a deposit for the rent. And not just, "Yes, it's available on these premises." But actually, "Here is the connected, active FiOS connection and the connected, active Comcast connection. You can plug in your laptop to each one and use traceroute and independent speed tests to verify the two connections don't have the same hops, and have different connectivity speeds."
...unfortunately, I expect a lot of other tech-savvy people to make the same demands, which means the prices on well-connected housing will be even crazier than they were before.
Because the Trump supporters were so civil to other Republicans, to Sanders, and to Clinton? Really? You must have been following different news and social media than the rest of the world.
There are no shining examples of diplomatic behavior on any side in this past election. It's absurd to claim that the conduct of the Clinton supporters was an obnoxious anomaly and Trump supporters were classy.
I think it depends upon how you define slovenliness. I dress like a stereotypical unemployed young adult pothead. I don't need to look presentable, I'm not currently in any customer-facing or management roles. But I'm still hygienic. I shower, shave, floss and brush every morning and the tattered t-shirt with the faded logo and track pants I'm wearing came out of the wash yesterday.
If my colleagues don't like the fact that I dress like a bum, that's too bad. If I was hitting them with body odor, halitosis, or increased risk of transmitting colds and the flu they would have a completely valid objection.
I don't give a rat's ass what people think about climate change. I have many members of my extended family with asthma, and more than one with life-threatening asthma. And here's the thing: when they vacation to places with very low levels of air pollution, their symptoms diminish.
Earth gets hot, Florida ends up under water? I don't care. My kids and my siblings stay alive? I do care. So I'm against fossil fuel power sources and all for renewable energy, nuclear, and research into fusion power.
For those of you who wouldn't lose half your family if we had Chinese air quality: lucky you.
You define freedom based on restrictions. My right to swing a fist ends before I punch you in the face, my right to free speech doesn't give me the right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater unless there actually is a fire, and so forth.
So whether BSD license is more free than GPL is a matter of interpretation. BSD guarantees the immediate recipient all rights and guarantees the subsequent recipient no rights. GPL guarantees all recipients some rights. I like them both better than proprietary licenses, but the GPL is better for preserving the rights I care about for all people that ever receive the software.
My internet access bill from Comcast only has one headache that I have to battle every few years: they periodically add a modem rental fee even though I own my own cable modem. Otherwise the bill is very simple, one charge for $87.50 (for 200 Mbit down, 10 Mbit up).
If you look at a Comcast, DirecTV, or Dish Network television brochure they advertise specific prices in bright colors. But the fine print adds a local network fee, a sports fee, an equipment rental fee, and a DVR service fee. They also charge $2-$5 extra per month if you don't use direct debit for your payments. So the $29.99 for the first year is actually $64.99 for the first year and the $59.99 for the second year is actually $94.99 for the second or similar.
And then the immediate month after the two year contract expires, the bill jumps to $117. And then you call to cancel, and they counter by offering better and better deals until they're asking you to pay $52 total per month for another year. So they were charging me $117 when they could profitably charge me $52? No thanks, fucker. I'll never do business with your company again.
My understanding is that the most recent third-party examination of H-1Bs uncovered that most are not paid as well as Americans.
But even if they are, it's still contributing to the same problem. If you have a $60,000 job opening that is currently going unfilled, the ethical way to fill it is to make it a $65,000 job opening. If that doesn't work, make it a $70,000 job opening. And so forth - sooner or later the position will become attractive enough to get qualified applicants. So even if the H1B workers are paid the same as an American, they are still driving down labor costs industry-wide.
I don't want to be a wacky politician that just proposes a solution that's simple, easy to understand, and has some ridiculously terrible side effect (see for examples "No Child Left Behind"). But maybe the workable solution is to just demand that H1B workers get paid 40% more than market rate. That would undoubtedly still anger Americans - why am I making $60,000 when she's making $84,000? But it would prevent the H1Bs from having a bad impact on middle class mean and median earnings.
I just posted this up-thread, but I'll repeat it. The Mycroft project uses the same Google APIs for speech-to-text. Their plan is to collect the user audio and the Google text responses, and then use a giant collection of that to develop and test a free software speech-to-text system https://openstt.org/
I think it's a wonderful idea. On the other hand, if they're making any progress at all it must be behind closed doors because their public site and github repository are very pretty voids.
The Mycroft project is doing something similar to this, with a Raspberry Pi that collects audio and sends it to Google servers for speech-to-text. Then they plan to keep the de-identified data and the Google text response, and use the mass amount of sample data to hone their own open source speech-to-text system https://openstt.org/
* We already had Amazon Prime while we had paid cable, partly for the including video streaming content but largely because of the free shipping and my wife's addiction to Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Music. So it's not "Comcast/DirecTV/Dish" vs. "Amazon Prime +....", Amazon Prime is already in the budget.
* We also already had Netflix while we had paid television, for Daredevil and Orange Is the New Black and a selection of kid shows. So again, it's not "Comcast/DirecTV/Dish" vs. "Netflix +....", Netflix is already in the budget.
* So all I'm paying for is $400 for a Tivo and $12.50 per month Tivo channel package subscription for our Over-The-Air antenna. We get CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox that way so we can record major sporting events, So You Think You Can Dance, and the main channel shows we like. (Granted, this only works if you live someplace that can receive all four channels by antenna. I do.).
But the crucial thing to me is honest pricing. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Tivo, and for that matter CBS All Access, Sling.tv, Hulu, etc... are straightforward with their prices. The paid television services bury you in bullshit, the advertised price has no relation to what the bill is and after the promotional period expires they will find excuses to jack up the bill a bit at a time every few months forever. The only way to fight it is to set aside an hour or two every six months to waste on the phone with someone getting back your original rates. Since that's never going to change, they're never getting another cent out of me.
The killer difference between Netflix and Comcast/DirecTV/Dish Network (the only three I can get at my house) is honest advertising and billing. With Netflix, the price advertised is what you pay, end of story. With the others, the price advertised is a fancy and you have to check your bill carefully every month because they start playing games and introducing fees and package changes. And if you're not willing to call up sales and customer retention departments and chew out some hapless entry level representative every six months, they will keep jacking prices until you're paying $180 per month for something that said "$30 per month" on the original sales brochure.
How about rewriting the headline? "Company with 250 billion in cash assets decides to invest 0.4% in an automated manufacturing facility."
Big. fucking. deal.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Apple is doing this. But as a proportion of Apple's resources, this is so small that it's like Walmart announcing that they're opening another store. It's not notable or praiseworthy, and further I'm 99.44% sure the decision has nothing to do with which pinhead is in the White House.
I have nothing against people from other countries trying to get a better job in the US than they can get in their native land. That makes complete sense to me.
But to me the fundamental problem is that while the means has that nice side effect - using foreign labor that gives non-US citizens better economic options - the end goal by the companies using H1B is to decrease industry-wide labor costs. Instead of a $60,000 annual cost job opening being filled by a $60,000 annual cost American or alternately by hiring a $45,000 annual cost American and training him or her until they can do the $60,000 job and collect the $60,000 pay, the companies can use a $45,000 imported worker.
Or to put it in more snarky terms: supply and demand is wonderful when it works in favor of the executives and majority shareholders. When supply and demand works in favor of the workers, it's a terrible problem and lawmakers need to be bribed until they create a fix.
I have nothing against the foreign workers. I welcome them. I wish them well.
But Apple, Microsoft, Google, GE, etc... isn't bringing these people in to make the lives of the people they brought in better. They're bringing them in to enrich their executives and shareholders. So while their means of reaching the goal isn't fundamentally bad - give some man or woman from India, China, Bulgaria, whatever a better life - their end goal is to continue their class warfare. More money going to the people that own businesses, less money going to the collective salary pool for laborers.
There has to be a way to do this that gives opportunities to people who were not lucky enough to be born US citizens without screwing US citizens in the process. At a bare minimum, H1B visa employees have to be paid market rate for their work. The program claims to be operated that way now but there's been a lot of evidence presented by the news - right and left - that it's just not true and companies routinely hire H1B workers at $60,000 to replace Americans that were paid far more.
If your company only has a few months to get the job done, then of course you don't have time to train your employees. So then, instead of importing cheap labor pay market rate.
Between the H1-B visas and the collusion between Intel, Apple, Google, Oracle, and a host of other companies there have been illegal, unethical downward pressure on engineer labor. You shouldn't get a 200k job for building financial services software unless you live in some place like Mountain View where $200k gets you a one bedroom apartment and a cabinet full of ramen noodles. But there's a damn good chance that someone earning $50k now would be making $55k or $60k if we didn't have this kind of nonsense, and someone making $90k now would be at $100k, and so forth.
In the 1970s, you didn't even have to prove that. An older cousin of mine worked as a secretary at an engineering firm, and every few months they would ask for secretaries who wanted to switch to engineering. She signed up, and went from making coffee and typing messages for a manager to being an assembly programmer. They taught her what she needed to know, and she worked at it until she retired with her pension.
The reason Silicon Valley wants H1-B visas is that the idea of hiring someone and training them for a few years is alien to them. Forty years ago employees had the promise of a pension holding them to the company. "I might be able to get 20% better pay at the other place, but if I stay here another 22 years I can retire on 60% of my retirement age pay. Woo hoo!" Since you can take a 401k with you when you quit a job, now a company that trains someone for two years is likely to lose them to a competitor that pays better.
See, supply and demand is good when it works in favor of the shareholders. When it operates in favor of the workforce, that's bad and laws need to be passed to import foreign labor and fix the problem.
I use Ting ( ting.com ), which is similar to Google Fi in that it uses the Sprint and T-Mobile networks. Differences:
1. Each Ting device uses T-Mobile or Sprint exclusively. We have three Ting phones, two are always on the T-Mobile network and one is always on the Sprint network.
2. Project Fi is $20 per device plus $0.01 per MB in data, that's the whole pay-for-what-you-use. Ting is $6 per device plus pay-for-what-you-use, but they charge separately for minutes, texts, and mobile data. With our three Ting phones, the monthly bill is between $55 and $75. So even with a thousand or so texts and a few GB of mobile data, it's still very slightly cheaper than Project Fi.
3. Ting supports iPhones and a reasonable selection of Android phones, including Nexus, Samsung Galaxy, etc.. Project Fi is limited to recent Nexus phones and Pixel phones.
I'm not a representative of the company, just a customer thrilled to have such transparent billing. I may switch to Project Fi with my next phone anyway, I haven't decided yet. I plan to only get Google Android devices in the future since all of the other vendors are so awful about providing security updates. But as chipschap said, this kind of service only makes sense if your mobile data usage is low.
Teenagers, boys or girls, aren't the most rational creatures. Convincing his daughter she needs new friends is probably as impossible as convincing her existing friends that excluding someone for using Android is absurd.
I'm having the same problem with my own teenage kids. We live in a moderately wealthy area, and more than half their classmates have iPhones. My kids are excluded from a lot of the social activity due to their Android devices. One is tolerating it well, the other isn't. No matter how much he hears weird old dad claim that having a recent i-whatever to communicate with the cool kids is pointless and feeds into the Apple advertising machine, he doesn't believe it.
If you want your libertarian, free market paradise then move to Somalia.
The closest America came to unregulated capitalism with no social safety net was the 19th century, when millions of people were worked to death in mines, factories, and railroads. The oligarchs bought the local law enforcement officials and judges, and then used their own private armies to wipe out anyone that rebelled against the dangerous working conditions. National economic growth was astonishing... which is not a consolation to the dead, including my relatives that died in coal mines.
Mixed socialist democracies like Germany and the Scandinavian countries have their problems. They are not utopias. But the America I want looks more like Denmark and less like a robber baron's paradise.
How many conservatives don't know Lennon's "Imagine"? The biggest reason they don't sing along is the "no heaven" part.
And it's just another piece of conservative propaganda to act as though liberals are all dreams and no solid plans. I'll use American examples because it's easy: ACA/Obamacare. Liberals passed a real piece of legislation. Conservatives took control of Congress in 2010 and had six years to pass amendments to improve it or repeal provisions that didn't work properly. They could have passed their fixes in the House of Representatives, and then blasted Democrats in the Senate for blocking them. Instead, fifty blanket repeals. Zero "we can make this better" and Fifty "burn it down". Then the conservatives get control of Congress and still can't come up with fixes, even though this piece of legislation is arguably their biggest rallying cry of the past seven years.
And how about Reagan's "It's Morning Again In America" or HW Bush's "Kinder, Gentler Nation" or W Bush's "Yes, America Can!" (which Obama appropriated). Your arguments have no substance.
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Me too. If you can be patient - and I can - older shows can be dirt cheap on DVD or even Blu Ray. Ripping them to disk and setting them up with Kodi streaming is a bit tedious, but I've been doing this for so long that it's like having my own private Netflix. Thousands of hours of content, no commercials, all legally purchased.
The value of an OTA antenna varies wildly based on where you live. I happen to live close enough to a major city that I can get ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and three dozen junky local channels by antenna. I'm using a $12.50/month Tivo DVR (though setting up MythTV is on the to-do list.)
But I have friends further out that tried the same setup and can only get one or two of the four big networks and maybe ten other channels.
I've had Comcast internet service on my property for fifteen years. The billing and sales department of Comcast comes from the seventh level of hell. Maybe the eighth. But service? Rock solid. I've had two service outages in the past five years, each for less than two hours. Consistent bandwidth, too.
The next time I move, I seriously plan to demand a demonstration of high speed internet connections from two different providers (ideally three or more) on premises before I put in a bid for the property or a deposit for the rent. And not just, "Yes, it's available on these premises." But actually, "Here is the connected, active FiOS connection and the connected, active Comcast connection. You can plug in your laptop to each one and use traceroute and independent speed tests to verify the two connections don't have the same hops, and have different connectivity speeds."
...unfortunately, I expect a lot of other tech-savvy people to make the same demands, which means the prices on well-connected housing will be even crazier than they were before.
Because the Trump supporters were so civil to other Republicans, to Sanders, and to Clinton? Really? You must have been following different news and social media than the rest of the world.
There are no shining examples of diplomatic behavior on any side in this past election. It's absurd to claim that the conduct of the Clinton supporters was an obnoxious anomaly and Trump supporters were classy.
I think it depends upon how you define slovenliness. I dress like a stereotypical unemployed young adult pothead. I don't need to look presentable, I'm not currently in any customer-facing or management roles. But I'm still hygienic. I shower, shave, floss and brush every morning and the tattered t-shirt with the faded logo and track pants I'm wearing came out of the wash yesterday.
If my colleagues don't like the fact that I dress like a bum, that's too bad. If I was hitting them with body odor, halitosis, or increased risk of transmitting colds and the flu they would have a completely valid objection.
I don't give a rat's ass what people think about climate change. I have many members of my extended family with asthma, and more than one with life-threatening asthma. And here's the thing: when they vacation to places with very low levels of air pollution, their symptoms diminish.
Earth gets hot, Florida ends up under water? I don't care. My kids and my siblings stay alive? I do care. So I'm against fossil fuel power sources and all for renewable energy, nuclear, and research into fusion power.
For those of you who wouldn't lose half your family if we had Chinese air quality: lucky you.
You define freedom based on restrictions. My right to swing a fist ends before I punch you in the face, my right to free speech doesn't give me the right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater unless there actually is a fire, and so forth.
So whether BSD license is more free than GPL is a matter of interpretation. BSD guarantees the immediate recipient all rights and guarantees the subsequent recipient no rights. GPL guarantees all recipients some rights. I like them both better than proprietary licenses, but the GPL is better for preserving the rights I care about for all people that ever receive the software.
My internet access bill from Comcast only has one headache that I have to battle every few years: they periodically add a modem rental fee even though I own my own cable modem. Otherwise the bill is very simple, one charge for $87.50 (for 200 Mbit down, 10 Mbit up).
If you look at a Comcast, DirecTV, or Dish Network television brochure they advertise specific prices in bright colors. But the fine print adds a local network fee, a sports fee, an equipment rental fee, and a DVR service fee. They also charge $2-$5 extra per month if you don't use direct debit for your payments. So the $29.99 for the first year is actually $64.99 for the first year and the $59.99 for the second year is actually $94.99 for the second or similar.
And then the immediate month after the two year contract expires, the bill jumps to $117. And then you call to cancel, and they counter by offering better and better deals until they're asking you to pay $52 total per month for another year. So they were charging me $117 when they could profitably charge me $52? No thanks, fucker. I'll never do business with your company again.
My understanding is that the most recent third-party examination of H-1Bs uncovered that most are not paid as well as Americans.
But even if they are, it's still contributing to the same problem. If you have a $60,000 job opening that is currently going unfilled, the ethical way to fill it is to make it a $65,000 job opening. If that doesn't work, make it a $70,000 job opening. And so forth - sooner or later the position will become attractive enough to get qualified applicants. So even if the H1B workers are paid the same as an American, they are still driving down labor costs industry-wide.
I don't want to be a wacky politician that just proposes a solution that's simple, easy to understand, and has some ridiculously terrible side effect (see for examples "No Child Left Behind"). But maybe the workable solution is to just demand that H1B workers get paid 40% more than market rate. That would undoubtedly still anger Americans - why am I making $60,000 when she's making $84,000? But it would prevent the H1Bs from having a bad impact on middle class mean and median earnings.
I just posted this up-thread, but I'll repeat it. The Mycroft project uses the same Google APIs for speech-to-text. Their plan is to collect the user audio and the Google text responses, and then use a giant collection of that to develop and test a free software speech-to-text system https://openstt.org/
I think it's a wonderful idea. On the other hand, if they're making any progress at all it must be behind closed doors because their public site and github repository are very pretty voids.
The Mycroft project is doing something similar to this, with a Raspberry Pi that collects audio and sends it to Google servers for speech-to-text. Then they plan to keep the de-identified data and the Google text response, and use the mass amount of sample data to hone their own open source speech-to-text system https://openstt.org/
Funny thing. Comcast's service has always been bulletproof for me. Fifteen years in one house, one Internet connection outage lasting more than hour.
It's just the sales and billing department that deserve a spot in the fifteenth level of hell.
Speaking for myself:
....", Amazon Prime is already in the budget.
....", Netflix is already in the budget.
* We already had Amazon Prime while we had paid cable, partly for the including video streaming content but largely because of the free shipping and my wife's addiction to Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Music. So it's not "Comcast/DirecTV/Dish" vs. "Amazon Prime +
* We also already had Netflix while we had paid television, for Daredevil and Orange Is the New Black and a selection of kid shows. So again, it's not "Comcast/DirecTV/Dish" vs. "Netflix +
* So all I'm paying for is $400 for a Tivo and $12.50 per month Tivo channel package subscription for our Over-The-Air antenna. We get CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox that way so we can record major sporting events, So You Think You Can Dance, and the main channel shows we like. (Granted, this only works if you live someplace that can receive all four channels by antenna. I do.).
But the crucial thing to me is honest pricing. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Tivo, and for that matter CBS All Access, Sling.tv, Hulu, etc... are straightforward with their prices. The paid television services bury you in bullshit, the advertised price has no relation to what the bill is and after the promotional period expires they will find excuses to jack up the bill a bit at a time every few months forever. The only way to fight it is to set aside an hour or two every six months to waste on the phone with someone getting back your original rates. Since that's never going to change, they're never getting another cent out of me.
The killer difference between Netflix and Comcast/DirecTV/Dish Network (the only three I can get at my house) is honest advertising and billing. With Netflix, the price advertised is what you pay, end of story. With the others, the price advertised is a fancy and you have to check your bill carefully every month because they start playing games and introducing fees and package changes. And if you're not willing to call up sales and customer retention departments and chew out some hapless entry level representative every six months, they will keep jacking prices until you're paying $180 per month for something that said "$30 per month" on the original sales brochure.
How about rewriting the headline? "Company with 250 billion in cash assets decides to invest 0.4% in an automated manufacturing facility."
Big. fucking. deal.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Apple is doing this. But as a proportion of Apple's resources, this is so small that it's like Walmart announcing that they're opening another store. It's not notable or praiseworthy, and further I'm 99.44% sure the decision has nothing to do with which pinhead is in the White House.
I have nothing against people from other countries trying to get a better job in the US than they can get in their native land. That makes complete sense to me.
But to me the fundamental problem is that while the means has that nice side effect - using foreign labor that gives non-US citizens better economic options - the end goal by the companies using H1B is to decrease industry-wide labor costs. Instead of a $60,000 annual cost job opening being filled by a $60,000 annual cost American or alternately by hiring a $45,000 annual cost American and training him or her until they can do the $60,000 job and collect the $60,000 pay, the companies can use a $45,000 imported worker.
Or to put it in more snarky terms: supply and demand is wonderful when it works in favor of the executives and majority shareholders. When supply and demand works in favor of the workers, it's a terrible problem and lawmakers need to be bribed until they create a fix.
Yup. Or restate the headline this way: "Company with 250 billion in cash assets decides to invest 0.4% in domestic economy!"
I have nothing against the foreign workers. I welcome them. I wish them well.
But Apple, Microsoft, Google, GE, etc... isn't bringing these people in to make the lives of the people they brought in better. They're bringing them in to enrich their executives and shareholders. So while their means of reaching the goal isn't fundamentally bad - give some man or woman from India, China, Bulgaria, whatever a better life - their end goal is to continue their class warfare. More money going to the people that own businesses, less money going to the collective salary pool for laborers.
There has to be a way to do this that gives opportunities to people who were not lucky enough to be born US citizens without screwing US citizens in the process. At a bare minimum, H1B visa employees have to be paid market rate for their work. The program claims to be operated that way now but there's been a lot of evidence presented by the news - right and left - that it's just not true and companies routinely hire H1B workers at $60,000 to replace Americans that were paid far more.
If your company only has a few months to get the job done, then of course you don't have time to train your employees. So then, instead of importing cheap labor pay market rate.
Between the H1-B visas and the collusion between Intel, Apple, Google, Oracle, and a host of other companies there have been illegal, unethical downward pressure on engineer labor. You shouldn't get a 200k job for building financial services software unless you live in some place like Mountain View where $200k gets you a one bedroom apartment and a cabinet full of ramen noodles. But there's a damn good chance that someone earning $50k now would be making $55k or $60k if we didn't have this kind of nonsense, and someone making $90k now would be at $100k, and so forth.
In the 1970s, you didn't even have to prove that. An older cousin of mine worked as a secretary at an engineering firm, and every few months they would ask for secretaries who wanted to switch to engineering. She signed up, and went from making coffee and typing messages for a manager to being an assembly programmer. They taught her what she needed to know, and she worked at it until she retired with her pension.
The reason Silicon Valley wants H1-B visas is that the idea of hiring someone and training them for a few years is alien to them. Forty years ago employees had the promise of a pension holding them to the company. "I might be able to get 20% better pay at the other place, but if I stay here another 22 years I can retire on 60% of my retirement age pay. Woo hoo!" Since you can take a 401k with you when you quit a job, now a company that trains someone for two years is likely to lose them to a competitor that pays better.
See, supply and demand is good when it works in favor of the shareholders. When it operates in favor of the workforce, that's bad and laws need to be passed to import foreign labor and fix the problem.
I use Ting ( ting.com ), which is similar to Google Fi in that it uses the Sprint and T-Mobile networks. Differences:
1. Each Ting device uses T-Mobile or Sprint exclusively. We have three Ting phones, two are always on the T-Mobile network and one is always on the Sprint network.
2. Project Fi is $20 per device plus $0.01 per MB in data, that's the whole pay-for-what-you-use. Ting is $6 per device plus pay-for-what-you-use, but they charge separately for minutes, texts, and mobile data. With our three Ting phones, the monthly bill is between $55 and $75. So even with a thousand or so texts and a few GB of mobile data, it's still very slightly cheaper than Project Fi.
3. Ting supports iPhones and a reasonable selection of Android phones, including Nexus, Samsung Galaxy, etc.. Project Fi is limited to recent Nexus phones and Pixel phones.
I'm not a representative of the company, just a customer thrilled to have such transparent billing. I may switch to Project Fi with my next phone anyway, I haven't decided yet. I plan to only get Google Android devices in the future since all of the other vendors are so awful about providing security updates. But as chipschap said, this kind of service only makes sense if your mobile data usage is low.
Teenagers, boys or girls, aren't the most rational creatures. Convincing his daughter she needs new friends is probably as impossible as convincing her existing friends that excluding someone for using Android is absurd.
I'm having the same problem with my own teenage kids. We live in a moderately wealthy area, and more than half their classmates have iPhones. My kids are excluded from a lot of the social activity due to their Android devices. One is tolerating it well, the other isn't. No matter how much he hears weird old dad claim that having a recent i-whatever to communicate with the cool kids is pointless and feeds into the Apple advertising machine, he doesn't believe it.
If you want your libertarian, free market paradise then move to Somalia.
The closest America came to unregulated capitalism with no social safety net was the 19th century, when millions of people were worked to death in mines, factories, and railroads. The oligarchs bought the local law enforcement officials and judges, and then used their own private armies to wipe out anyone that rebelled against the dangerous working conditions. National economic growth was astonishing... which is not a consolation to the dead, including my relatives that died in coal mines.
Mixed socialist democracies like Germany and the Scandinavian countries have their problems. They are not utopias. But the America I want looks more like Denmark and less like a robber baron's paradise.
How many conservatives don't know Lennon's "Imagine"? The biggest reason they don't sing along is the "no heaven" part.
And it's just another piece of conservative propaganda to act as though liberals are all dreams and no solid plans. I'll use American examples because it's easy: ACA/Obamacare. Liberals passed a real piece of legislation. Conservatives took control of Congress in 2010 and had six years to pass amendments to improve it or repeal provisions that didn't work properly. They could have passed their fixes in the House of Representatives, and then blasted Democrats in the Senate for blocking them. Instead, fifty blanket repeals. Zero "we can make this better" and Fifty "burn it down". Then the conservatives get control of Congress and still can't come up with fixes, even though this piece of legislation is arguably their biggest rallying cry of the past seven years.
And how about Reagan's "It's Morning Again In America" or HW Bush's "Kinder, Gentler Nation" or W Bush's "Yes, America Can!" (which Obama appropriated). Your arguments have no substance.