I disagree. Once it's been established that leaving phone books at a property constitutes speech, then I would argue that protest speech (dumping them all at once) is more protection worthy than commercial speech (leaving one for use).
If you can't find books at your office, go grab a few reams of paper from the copier. If your office doesn't have a copier... well, it must be either a broke startup or some hip ultra-modern startup. If it's the former, go poke around out in the owner's garage for something to prop the monitor on. If it's the latter, just have an intern hold your monitor while you work.
What?! No! Monster Cables are made from gold and faerie sweat. That's how they can improve the fidelity of digital signals transmitted over short distances.
What you propose would make it nearly impossible for a private citizen to ever, ever again sue a corporate citizen. Big corporations have dozens of lawyers on staff, so they can easily rack up "millions" of dollars of work on a lawsuit. (Of course, if the suit were never filed, those lawyers would have instead racked up millions of dollars of work doing something else as they are salaried employees.) With the chilling effect of you having to pay those fines if you lose the lawsuit, why would you, a mere citizen with a lawyer working on a small retainer and a percent of your winnings (if any) ever risk destroying your financial life to file your suit?
Unfortunately, the existing system means that citizens can file trivial suits alongside citizens that file the important suits protecting private citizens from corporations. But your proposal eliminates both types.
No, that only means it would be safe to say we'd be out with Bush (term #3) or Obama. McCain's statements indicated that he would follow a different path. Bush, as I said, wasn't an option.
I think that's pretty far down the list of reasons why business stopped worrying about long-term research. There's at least 50 places ahead of it that all read "bonus tied to short term stock price"
Agreed, and we need to keep doing that, too. We need to find ways to structure help provided to get people out of a cycle of dependency. Hiring people already receiving government aid to repair roads and bridges? Great idea! Helping some of them further (like with day care) so they can get a degree? Great idea! Plenty of bad things happen to good people, and it's in society's interest to have the government help them. It's also in society's interest to invest in a future that will lead to less dependency on government help. If the too can be related, everyone wins.
More likely, EA would let community developers create an Empire State Building, then sell it via EA's microtransaction site for $6.99, with EA taking a $2 cut.
Then, with huge records showing what items sell best, EA can create their own version of the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building and Lolcat Statue, etc., ban the third-party "copies" from the marketplace, and take all the money then on for themselves for those items, all while letting the community developers make pennies on the rarer stuff to keep the "marketplace thriving".
It's hard to say if, under the previous administration, we would still be in Iraq, since that was never a possible outcome. However, compared to the alternative (McCain's "100 more years!" explanation, Obama getting our troops out in his first term earns him a solid B+ from me on that promise.
You can't spend your way out of debt, it's ludicrous
Isn't this what every start-up company that accepts venture capital is trying to do?
This article isn't talking about spending on food stamps or fallacious broken windows. It's talking about spending on fundamental research - the kind chase-the-quarter capitalism doesn't do very well - so as to yield a return in new industries to create employment years and decades from now. This isn't that much different than what start-ups are trying to do, except the government can think on a much longer scale - something that I'm glad a government can take time to do.
You really need to differentiate between government spending and government investment. The government should be able to keep investing in areas that will enable the new and continued markets of the future, creating the basis for continued employment. The government needs to provide some level of spending helping people who are stumbling get back on their feet, too, but right now we do way too little of the first compared to the second. The solution isn't to slash the first further.
There's a new Death Star being built by the remnants of the trade federation army, being led by a young and brash Jedi (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who's being turned by the haunting apparitions of Emperor Palpatine and Count Dooku. To test their new, fully operational battle station, they use it to blow up Corellia, killing most of the inhabitants. As the Millennium Falcon sweeps in, piloted by Chewbacca and his protegee (Shia LaBeouf), to see if anyone survived, it's hit by a largish rectanguar piece of debris, causing the Falcon to yet again lose its precarious sensor dish. The Falcon sweeps around to see what hit them and pick it up, and they discover that Han Solo survived. He escaped in a Corellian intergalactic-class refrigerator that was flung from the explosion at less than 4 parsecs.
If they don't print the per-unit costs on the label, then when you think I'm looking at my shopping list on my phone, I'm actually using a calculator to figure out which of those is the better deal. Usually, though, the per-unit costs are printed on the label on the shelf.
There will never be a perfect, sustainable, nonpolluting source of energy, because perfect is 100% subjective.* What we do have are some sources of energy that are pretty good, pretty sustainable, and minimally polluting, and we would be in a lot better place if we adopted those rather than staying the course and using the awful stuff until unicorn poop becomes available on the market.**
* Except unicorn poop ** Unicorn poop has the same energy density as gasoline, and, when burnt, it smells of fresh roses and releases a healthy mix of oxygen and nitrogen into the air.
Well, said junk mail needs to at least cost enough to pay for the expense of delivering said junk mail. If that's not the case, I don't see how it "lubricates" the system at all. Were they able to pay for universal service through junk mail alone, then any remaining first-class service would be profit, as would priority, express, copies, ISP, and any other services they expanded into.
The US Postal Service isn't the government, so what it does isn't a function of the government. It hasn't been set up like that since the 1970s. Unfortunately the government decided to keep tabs on it when it was cut loose, and they mess with it from time to time. It's like the worst parts of government stapled to the worst parts of business, which is really sad for something I really want to like.
I think the opposite of your suggestions should be true. The USPS should be free to do what it needs to do to survive in the private sector as its own company. After all, it doesn't receive any funding from the government. All the government gives it is a mandate that it serve every address in the country, along with a monopoly on the (apparently unprofitable) first-class mail business. I can't imagine being saddled with that burden helps their other services at all.
As another respondent to my original post suggests, letting the post office remake themselves as more of a FedEx/Kinkos or a local ISP or something else would have been the right way to save them in the past few years. Had they been able to make such a transformation in the 2008-2012 time frame, they wouldn't be in the situation they are in today.
I do my research from my recipe database, which is synced to my phone. Usually this is while having lunch out somewhere.
It would be more efficient to do this research at home, where the supplies are.
That is incorrect. I have tried to do the research in this fashion. What usually happens is that I spend an hour coming up with recipes for the week, then 10 minutes making a shopping list and crossing off the ingredients I already have. Then, I have to go eat lunch somewhere before going to the store, and at this point I've eaten lunch so late that I can't or won't cook dinner that night, ruining the point of going shopping.
I know myself, and for me it is far more efficient to get eating lunch out of the way as soon as possible, then deal with the grocery store while I can still time my meals to make cooking feasible.
And no, I won't re-buy smoked paprika and white pepper when I use them up, "just in case" I make a recipe that requires them again in the next year.
I see. You are unwilling to spend $3 on a bottle of pepper that is always usable and lasts forever, but you are ready to spend hundreds of dollars on technology that will not last more than a few years and will not be sufficiently reliable from day zero.
Perhaps you don't know how small my house is. Actually I'm pretty certain you don't know how small my house is. I'm happy to live in a small house; I save significantly on expenses like heating and cooling so that I can spent my discretionary income on neat technologies.
If I had room to space things out, pan and zoom cameras would be awesome.
Perhaps you need a fisheye camera and a LED light source inside the cabinet (or the refrigerator.) If you want it, why to deny yourself this toy - go ahead and build it! I do such things all the time (the WAF in this house is unbounded.)
Isn't the best-case scenario these people putting the phone on speaker and setting it on the center console? That gets it out of the shoulder/head/hands entirely.
Senders already pay for mail delivery. If senders aren't paying enough to make delivery viable, then the postal service needs to raise rates.
The post office is Constitutionally-mandated to provide universal service, at least for first-class mail. They could raise rates for junk ("bulk rate") mail, or drop rural service to a few days a week, and still maintain their universal service but save money on gas and salaries. (I say rural only because most suburban and urban service is probably dense enough to still be profitable, assuming the prefunded retirement debacle is fixed.)
They offer free tracking if you buy your postage online. Heck, they actually pay you for the tracking since postage rates online are cheaper than if you walk into a post office.
I'm pretty sure that graduated scales for first-class mail would make postage rates so complicated as to destroy the remaining business.
People like predictable. Hell, the USPS flat-rate priority boxes are expensive but predictable, and many people I know prefer them over variable-rate boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. Once it's been established that leaving phone books at a property constitutes speech, then I would argue that protest speech (dumping them all at once) is more protection worthy than commercial speech (leaving one for use).
If you can't find books at your office, go grab a few reams of paper from the copier. If your office doesn't have a copier... well, it must be either a broke startup or some hip ultra-modern startup. If it's the former, go poke around out in the owner's garage for something to prop the monitor on. If it's the latter, just have an intern hold your monitor while you work.
What?! No! Monster Cables are made from gold and faerie sweat. That's how they can improve the fidelity of digital signals transmitted over short distances.
What you propose would make it nearly impossible for a private citizen to ever, ever again sue a corporate citizen. Big corporations have dozens of lawyers on staff, so they can easily rack up "millions" of dollars of work on a lawsuit. (Of course, if the suit were never filed, those lawyers would have instead racked up millions of dollars of work doing something else as they are salaried employees.) With the chilling effect of you having to pay those fines if you lose the lawsuit, why would you, a mere citizen with a lawyer working on a small retainer and a percent of your winnings (if any) ever risk destroying your financial life to file your suit?
Unfortunately, the existing system means that citizens can file trivial suits alongside citizens that file the important suits protecting private citizens from corporations. But your proposal eliminates both types.
No, that only means it would be safe to say we'd be out with Bush (term #3) or Obama. McCain's statements indicated that he would follow a different path. Bush, as I said, wasn't an option.
I think that's pretty far down the list of reasons why business stopped worrying about long-term research. There's at least 50 places ahead of it that all read "bonus tied to short term stock price"
Agreed, and we need to keep doing that, too. We need to find ways to structure help provided to get people out of a cycle of dependency. Hiring people already receiving government aid to repair roads and bridges? Great idea! Helping some of them further (like with day care) so they can get a degree? Great idea! Plenty of bad things happen to good people, and it's in society's interest to have the government help them. It's also in society's interest to invest in a future that will lead to less dependency on government help. If the too can be related, everyone wins.
Well, if you keep reading, you'll note that at least one survives...
More likely, EA would let community developers create an Empire State Building, then sell it via EA's microtransaction site for $6.99, with EA taking a $2 cut.
Then, with huge records showing what items sell best, EA can create their own version of the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building and Lolcat Statue, etc., ban the third-party "copies" from the marketplace, and take all the money then on for themselves for those items, all while letting the community developers make pennies on the rarer stuff to keep the "marketplace thriving".
No wonder there are crashes. What are ducks doing at a turtle race?
It's hard to say if, under the previous administration, we would still be in Iraq, since that was never a possible outcome. However, compared to the alternative (McCain's "100 more years!" explanation, Obama getting our troops out in his first term earns him a solid B+ from me on that promise.
You can't spend your way out of debt, it's ludicrous
Isn't this what every start-up company that accepts venture capital is trying to do?
This article isn't talking about spending on food stamps or fallacious broken windows. It's talking about spending on fundamental research - the kind chase-the-quarter capitalism doesn't do very well - so as to yield a return in new industries to create employment years and decades from now. This isn't that much different than what start-ups are trying to do, except the government can think on a much longer scale - something that I'm glad a government can take time to do.
You really need to differentiate between government spending and government investment. The government should be able to keep investing in areas that will enable the new and continued markets of the future, creating the basis for continued employment. The government needs to provide some level of spending helping people who are stumbling get back on their feet, too, but right now we do way too little of the first compared to the second. The solution isn't to slash the first further.
There's a new Death Star being built by the remnants of the trade federation army, being led by a young and brash Jedi (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who's being turned by the haunting apparitions of Emperor Palpatine and Count Dooku. To test their new, fully operational battle station, they use it to blow up Corellia, killing most of the inhabitants. As the Millennium Falcon sweeps in, piloted by Chewbacca and his protegee (Shia LaBeouf), to see if anyone survived, it's hit by a largish rectanguar piece of debris, causing the Falcon to yet again lose its precarious sensor dish. The Falcon sweeps around to see what hit them and pick it up, and they discover that Han Solo survived. He escaped in a Corellian intergalactic-class refrigerator that was flung from the explosion at less than 4 parsecs.
If they don't print the per-unit costs on the label, then when you think I'm looking at my shopping list on my phone, I'm actually using a calculator to figure out which of those is the better deal. Usually, though, the per-unit costs are printed on the label on the shelf.
There will never be a perfect, sustainable, nonpolluting source of energy, because perfect is 100% subjective.* What we do have are some sources of energy that are pretty good, pretty sustainable, and minimally polluting, and we would be in a lot better place if we adopted those rather than staying the course and using the awful stuff until unicorn poop becomes available on the market.**
* Except unicorn poop
** Unicorn poop has the same energy density as gasoline, and, when burnt, it smells of fresh roses and releases a healthy mix of oxygen and nitrogen into the air.
Well, said junk mail needs to at least cost enough to pay for the expense of delivering said junk mail. If that's not the case, I don't see how it "lubricates" the system at all. Were they able to pay for universal service through junk mail alone, then any remaining first-class service would be profit, as would priority, express, copies, ISP, and any other services they expanded into.
The US Postal Service isn't the government, so what it does isn't a function of the government. It hasn't been set up like that since the 1970s. Unfortunately the government decided to keep tabs on it when it was cut loose, and they mess with it from time to time. It's like the worst parts of government stapled to the worst parts of business, which is really sad for something I really want to like.
I think the opposite of your suggestions should be true. The USPS should be free to do what it needs to do to survive in the private sector as its own company. After all, it doesn't receive any funding from the government. All the government gives it is a mandate that it serve every address in the country, along with a monopoly on the (apparently unprofitable) first-class mail business. I can't imagine being saddled with that burden helps their other services at all.
As another respondent to my original post suggests, letting the post office remake themselves as more of a FedEx/Kinkos or a local ISP or something else would have been the right way to save them in the past few years. Had they been able to make such a transformation in the 2008-2012 time frame, they wouldn't be in the situation they are in today.
Well there's still media mail, if you want something to get there eventually, maybe.
Does it have secret code that uploads your webcam to some IP address if it detects a ghost? Who knows.
That seems relatively easy to check. All you need is a sheet, a pair of scissors, and traffic monitoring software on your router.
I do my research from my recipe database, which is synced to my phone. Usually this is while having lunch out somewhere.
It would be more efficient to do this research at home, where the supplies are.
That is incorrect. I have tried to do the research in this fashion. What usually happens is that I spend an hour coming up with recipes for the week, then 10 minutes making a shopping list and crossing off the ingredients I already have. Then, I have to go eat lunch somewhere before going to the store, and at this point I've eaten lunch so late that I can't or won't cook dinner that night, ruining the point of going shopping.
I know myself, and for me it is far more efficient to get eating lunch out of the way as soon as possible, then deal with the grocery store while I can still time my meals to make cooking feasible.
And no, I won't re-buy smoked paprika and white pepper when I use them up, "just in case" I make a recipe that requires them again in the next year.
I see. You are unwilling to spend $3 on a bottle of pepper that is always usable and lasts forever, but you are ready to spend hundreds of dollars on technology that will not last more than a few years and will not be sufficiently reliable from day zero.
Perhaps you don't know how small my house is. Actually I'm pretty certain you don't know how small my house is. I'm happy to live in a small house; I save significantly on expenses like heating and cooling so that I can spent my discretionary income on neat technologies.
If I had room to space things out, pan and zoom cameras would be awesome.
Perhaps you need a fisheye camera and a LED light source inside the cabinet (or the refrigerator.) If you want it, why to deny yourself this toy - go ahead and build it! I do such things all the time (the WAF in this house is unbounded.)
That could work!
Isn't the best-case scenario these people putting the phone on speaker and setting it on the center console? That gets it out of the shoulder/head/hands entirely.
Senders already pay for mail delivery. If senders aren't paying enough to make delivery viable, then the postal service needs to raise rates.
The post office is Constitutionally-mandated to provide universal service, at least for first-class mail. They could raise rates for junk ("bulk rate") mail, or drop rural service to a few days a week, and still maintain their universal service but save money on gas and salaries. (I say rural only because most suburban and urban service is probably dense enough to still be profitable, assuming the prefunded retirement debacle is fixed.)
They offer free tracking if you buy your postage online. Heck, they actually pay you for the tracking since postage rates online are cheaper than if you walk into a post office.
I'm pretty sure that graduated scales for first-class mail would make postage rates so complicated as to destroy the remaining business.
People like predictable. Hell, the USPS flat-rate priority boxes are expensive but predictable, and many people I know prefer them over variable-rate boxes.