I own the business, like it or lump it .... "or start shopping for a new X to work under."
DING! Finally a real choice.
But see, the third option gives you leverage on the first two options. Given that I have valuable skills that my company's competitors would love to have my company is highly motivated to accommodate my desires, as long as they are compatible with the overall goal of the company (making money). They need me to make money for them more than I need them to stay employed and that means I do have leverage to complain and or get things changed.
Its not like my wants are diametrically opposed to the company anyway. I need the company (or some company somewhere) to be profitable so I can stay employed. I need a good reputation with the customers in my industry so I can stay employed. But I would have never gotten my 23% raise if I had stayed obedient and accepted the company's policy on salary and raises. I let them know that they weren't paying enough to keep me and other companies were ready and eager to do so. My company suddenly found loopholes in the policy to give me what I wanted when I stopped playing by their rules.
Cop with a gun pulled out? Yeah, obedience is a good choice. But that's hardly a common occurance. I wouldn't generalize much about life based on what should you do when threatened with imminent death.
Most Bible Thumpers aren't actually Biblical Literalists.
You must be using a different definition of Bible Thumper than me then. In my mind the "thumper" part come from the image of them jabbing their finger on the bible while insisting that everything is this book is absolutely true. Bible Thumper certainly doesn't refer to all Christians.
But that is the stupid world. If person X sets rules, and the people underneath X don't find them reasonable, only an idiot wouldn't complain, try to change the rules, or start shopping for a new X to work under. True there are times when the advantages of putting up with X and their rules outway the disadvantages, but being obedient is hardly a virtue in real life, unless you just want to be stepped on and exploited for your whole life.
After all, if you're required to work in an office for your job, and you don't show up, you'll get fired.
But in real life, you choose your employer freely. And you can get a manager/job/become-self-employed that doesn't waste your time. I know because I have a job like that. If I'm not actually billing a client (in which case I would be at the client's job site) and don't need to use the copier/fax-machine/office supplies, and don't need to see my manager, then I stay home.
I've found that this varies considerably from airport to airport. I typically fly from LA/Ontario airport whenever traveling domestically and I find that except during Christmas time it is just like you describe, 10 minutes max to get through security. Last year when I flew internationally, I had to fly from LAX (Northwest/KLM's terminal) and it took about an hour and a half waiting in line just to get up to the x-ray conveyor belts/metal detectors.
You get medicine via the Post Office? What happens if the post office loses it for a week of two. You know, like what happens all the time with mail. The Post Office says first class mail normally arrives within 1-2 weeks and they don't even guaranty that. So any of your vital checks, appointment reminders, or vital meds could easily be delayed a week or two anyway.
If it weren't for junk mail, first class mail would cost considerably more than it does. Junk mail subsidizes regular mail and helps keep costs down.
I hear this said a lot, could somebody please explain to me how larger, heavier mail which costs much much less could possibly subsidize smaller, lighter mail which costs much more?
Seems to me that is junk mail was eliminated, the Post Office could get rid of much of its trucks, drivers and infrastructure. Without junk mail, I'd say residential delivery could be scaled back to one delivery per week, meaning one truck could serve six different routes instead of six different drivers and trucks going out every Mon-Sat. All that overhead eliminated would raise first class rates how? And now the remaining trucks would be loaded with letter sized full-rate first class mail instead of giant heavy bundles of newsprint mailed out for a few pennies each. How is that not better revenue for the post office?
I haven't checked the price of 1000MW rated resistors lately, but I'm guessing its not cost effective [/sarcasm]. Seriously though, that's an absurd amount of power to try to drop resistively, and you have to not melt your power plant in the process. And "governors"? Governors usually work by limiting the fuel input to a motor. In this case we'd be talking about closing the steam valves and pushing less steam into the turbine, which is the opposite of what we want. I guess you could put some kind of brake on the turbine shaft to add drag, but again, a brake that can dissipate 100s of megawatts of energy? Without melting itself, the turbine, and the whole rest of your plant?
I always was, and still am a suburban dweller, and I can say from experience that most Americans "love" suburbs based on ignorance of how awesome city life is.
First and foremost, driving sucks! I remember how awesome it felt to get my drivers license and finally have the "freedom" to go to friends houses, go shopping, eat out, be able to get a job, etc. City dwellers have that freedom without ever needing to drive in the first place. Walking in a city is enough to reach hundreds of potential friends and businesses and good public transit (which dense cities make possible) extends walking range to reach millions.
Driving is done in isolation, you can't meet anyone sealed up in your car. Driving requires your full attention, you can't read a book or play a video game. And driving is never spontaneous, you have to plan out before you leave exactly where you are going, how you are going to get there, and where you are going to park. You have to decide all this in advance because you'll need your full concentration while driving, whenever I've been forced to think (or re-think) my plans on the road, my driving becomes dangerous because I'm too distracted.
When walking (augmented by public transit) you can stroll along the many shops and restaurants (as long as you are in a city where there are many shops), look in all the windows and see what looks good, change your mind about where your going (if you even decided before you left home) backtrack if you "missed your turn" just by turning around and walking the other way (if you miss your turn in a car, you can easily get stuck in a situation where "you can't get there from here" and end up circling around lost trying to get where you are going).
And then there's the advantages of being able to find businesses catering to every possible niche. Any type of food you want is available, instantly. Whatever obscure hobby you might get into, there are enough other people around who are also into it that you can find shops catering to it. Oh and those other people who are into the same weird niche hobbies as you are good potential friends, something hard to find in the suburbs if you don't get along with mainstream "Joe Average".
In the end though, the most damning argument against suburban living is an analysis of the costs. It costs way more to live in a city, which demonstrates that the high demand for city living is not being met! If people truly prefer suburbs so much, why don't the market values reflect this? Its clear to me that not enough city is being built to meet demand. I would love to live in a city, but not being a millionaire, I can't afford to move into even the relatively lame downtown Los Angeles. Although most Americans ignorantly cling to suburbs, there clearly is a large population that knows better and keeps the cities packed.
Lack of joysticks these days is one of the reasons I gave up on consoles (until the Wii). Those...things that you control with your thumb are not joysticks. I can't understand how in the hell that was supposed to be better.
My thumbs are.. all thumbs. I mean seriously, that phrase came about because thumbs just aren't very precise in their movement. But all you kids who had NESes before puberty all have that "mutation" that was talked about here on Slashdot a while back which allows you to use your thumb as a precision input device instead of your index fingers. Which also explains how in the hell you manage to text from a cell phone.
Oh and what is it with you folks who say FPS games were best used with "keyboard and mouse"? I was never much into FPS games, but the only really usable configuration was "joystick and mouse". You suction-cupped the joystick onto your desk (your joystick did have suction-cups, right?) for your left hand and mapped the trigger and/or top buttons to things like jump or crouch (the buttons on the joystick base were clearly unusable). Then you put the mouse under your right hand, as usual. This way, you had good coarse analog control of your movement with your left hand, and fine precision analog aiming with your right hand.
Now everyone get off my lawn.
Re:Not any more unrealistic than the MPAA's figure
on
The $54 Million Laptop
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· Score: 1
Why say 'burglarized' when there's a perfectly good English word 'burgled'?
I love this word "burgled" ever since I read that story about the British columnist who wrote a column complaining about "burglarized" (and the American response "You're right, we appogle.")
I mean, it make perfect logical sense the a burglar would be "one who burgles", but come on, "burgle". Burgle! It sounds like something out of a Doctor Suess book ("they tammed their tam-tamlers and burgled their burg-bugles"). It never fails to give me a chuckle.
Care to share where? I've been in some pretty rinky-dink airports (I'm thinking of places like Elko, NV) and I've never seen one that didn't have the standard TSA screening, though the local TSA seems to consist of one guy in some of those places.
Looks to me like you can't play them using Firefox or IE either (the supposedly supported browsers). Firefox just prompts me to install a plug-in which doesn't seem to exist, and IE loads up the game and says "Check Starting Device" for any game.
Fries cost, what, a buck? You would seriously go hungry waiting for someone else to buy fries just to save $1? I don't know about you, but I've given away $1 (or shared $1 of food) to strangers before. And in the hypothetical world where fries are trivially copied for free, it only takes one "generous" person like me willing to give away a buck, or one philanthropist with a vision of "fries for all", or one cook who just feels like cooking up some fries cause he's bored and the whole world get free fries forever.
Worst case, if no one anywhere is willing to cough up $1 to commission the frying of the "seeder-batch" order of french fries, then the government can levy a fry tax and every American pays about one three-millionth of a cent so the National Endowment for Fast Food can afford pay for an order of fries.
I haven't heard of blizzards disrupting natural gas (which makes much of our electricity here in California). Natural gas is generally "shipped" long distance in big underground pipes.
I think possibly because we were Electrical Engineers taking an Electrical Engineering course, we may have focused more on permeability/permittivity (since those concepts are of particular interest to us) than a stock college physics course. Permeability and permittivity do relate (again my math is so far gone that I don't remember exactly how) to the time constants the govern how fast inductors and capacitor charge up (which means, somehow they are related to henrys of inductance and farads of capacitance, but my math memory fails me completely here). Of course you are right that it is "as fast as possible", I'm just saying that permeability and permittivity of free space (or the local permeability/permittivity of space with stuff in it) fairly explicitly define what that speed is.
What I sort of saying here, is that everything, even vacuum, acts at least a little bit like both an inductor and a capacitor, there is a distinct time it take for electric charge and/or magnetic flux to build from zero to its final value. It ramps up at, well literally light speed in a vacuum but it is a continuous function. No point in space will change from 0 to 10 whatever units of flux instantly (nor can it change back instantly).
Your right on the money that, given Einstein's relativity, this defines causality itself.
That is pretty much my recollection of my EE Electromagnetic Fields course. Like you the whole math behind it has slipped away from my memory. I do have one quibble with your statement "There is nothing in the equations or models which describe the electic field causing the magnetic field, and vice-versa, that would limit the rate at which this happens; time is not even in the equation".
I remember my class being tortured with having to do a huge derivation based on the permeability and permittivity of free space (which is roughly how fast magnetic and electric fields charge up). I remember that if you played around with the E/M equations long enough (as we were forced to), you could derive an equation for 'c' based solely on the permeability and permittivity of free space. Not surprisingly, if you plug in the actual experimental values if those variables, you also get the real-life value of 'c'. Which also means that if you change the permeability and permittivity (by say going though a substance instead of vacuum) you get a different speed of light.
Or an even more radical concept: live closer to where you work.
It really pisses me off when people say this, even though I agree in principle with the idea of living near work. It just isn't feasible.
Let's ignore the fact that I don't really work in any one particular place, even though there are a fair number of people like me who serve many different client scattered around (in my case, all over the Earth, but mostly in and around Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas). We will just concentrate on the location of my office (even though I try never to go there). When I bought my condo 4 years ago, my office was about 5 miles away, which meant I didn't even reach the Freeway before reaching the office. But then last year, the office moved about 30 miles south. Should I sell my condo?
It would be pretty nuts to have to sell and re-buy every time the company moves the office. Talking with my older co-workers, the office has moved at least 4 times in the last 20 years, and you can roughly guess how long ago my coworkers joined the company by mapping the location of their house (they live near wherever the office was at that time).
And that's assuming you stay in the same company. If you want to change companies for any reason, well, it's not like the other employers in my line of work put their offices near ours. They also put their ever-shifting locations wherever is cheapest for them at the moment.
That raises the question, why do you make the peculiar assumption that every command in the OT law is of the same type, for the same kind of reason?
Because the basic evangelical argument is that "morality" is based solely on "whatever God said, and humans dare not even try to ask why". If you allow for humans to have some capacity for independent moral awareness, then you would have what us heathen non-believers have been calling for all along, using our own sensibilities to decide what is and isn't acceptable.
I mean, how else do you condemn homosexuality or pre-marital sex? It's two consenting adults enjoying each other's bodies in mutually pleasing ways without harming others. But the evangelical crowd says "God said 'No', end of discussion."
The utility offers, free of charge, "upgrades" to thermostats and other switches,.....
They already do that, the utilities quite regularly send us fliers asking us to accept their special thermostats and get some kind of special discount rate on electricity.
In my experience, the people who study Art, English, Liberal Studies etc are only in it for money. They feel they need a university degree to get higher paying jobs but they have no particular interests or skills so they just take whatever major seems easiest/has the fewest requirements/doesn't involve much math or other difficult subjects.
So, somehow knock 180 square feet off my condo, sell my Wii and my cell phone (my laptop and car technically belong to my company, I don't have cable and my small old TV is only to play the Wii on anyway) and I can live a life of leisure? Where do I sign up?
No part time job could possibly make my mortgage payment, which accounts for nearly 60% of my expenditures, and once working full time the handful of material goods I do bother with are peanuts.
I do like my job well enough, as jobs go, but it doesn't allow for any sort of outside-of-work life, and I'm saving just as fast as I possibly can for retirement, which can't come soon enough.
I think at least part of the reason is mobility. In principle, I like the idea of Mom and Pop small local stores, but it takes time to learn where they are, what you can buy there, what level of price/service/etc to expect. I've lived at my current home for over 4 years now, which is by far the longest I've ever lived at one address. If you take a broader view, the longest I've ever lived in one community (where I could be shopping at the same set of stores) is 5 years (while I was in college). And I spend most of my time far from my home (often in other states) for work related travel. When you're looking for something in an unfamiliar neighborhood and want it NOW (which is usually the case) you tend to just go with what's familiar rather than try browsing around quaint little mom and pop districts trying to figure out who sells what.
I think because of this, the mom and pop stores never really seem to even try to compete with the sorts of things you buy from big name retailers. I remember well the wonderful downtown of San Luis Obispo, California (the college town I was in for 5 years). It was the most vibrant non-big-name-store shopping area I have ever seen or heard of. But you couldn't buy useful things there, just souvenirs and novelties and decorations and such. If you wanted something like a mop bucket or a folding lawn chair you had to drive a couple towns over to buy it at Wal-Mart. And I was there before that Wal-Mart opened, the first couple of years I was there you had to drive about 20 miles to get your useful everyday stuff at Target. The downtown mom and pops just never bothered with anything mundane, they only had specialty gift type stuff to sell to tourists and people out on dates and such.
Almost all seats have power outlets? And yet despite having a job where I fly dozens of times every year, I have yet to see one of these mythical in-seat power outlets.
Slashdot Mirror
....
"or start shopping for a new X to work under."
DING! Finally a real choice.
But see, the third option gives you leverage on the first two options. Given that I have valuable skills that my company's competitors would love to have my company is highly motivated to accommodate my desires, as long as they are compatible with the overall goal of the company (making money). They need me to make money for them more than I need them to stay employed and that means I do have leverage to complain and or get things changed.
Its not like my wants are diametrically opposed to the company anyway. I need the company (or some company somewhere) to be profitable so I can stay employed. I need a good reputation with the customers in my industry so I can stay employed. But I would have never gotten my 23% raise if I had stayed obedient and accepted the company's policy on salary and raises. I let them know that they weren't paying enough to keep me and other companies were ready and eager to do so. My company suddenly found loopholes in the policy to give me what I wanted when I stopped playing by their rules.
Cop with a gun pulled out? Yeah, obedience is a good choice. But that's hardly a common occurance. I wouldn't generalize much about life based on what should you do when threatened with imminent death.
You must be using a different definition of Bible Thumper than me then. In my mind the "thumper" part come from the image of them jabbing their finger on the bible while insisting that everything is this book is absolutely true. Bible Thumper certainly doesn't refer to all Christians.
But that is the stupid world. If person X sets rules, and the people underneath X don't find them reasonable, only an idiot wouldn't complain, try to change the rules, or start shopping for a new X to work under. True there are times when the advantages of putting up with X and their rules outway the disadvantages, but being obedient is hardly a virtue in real life, unless you just want to be stepped on and exploited for your whole life.
But in real life, you choose your employer freely. And you can get a manager/job/become-self-employed that doesn't waste your time. I know because I have a job like that. If I'm not actually billing a client (in which case I would be at the client's job site) and don't need to use the copier/fax-machine/office supplies, and don't need to see my manager, then I stay home.
I've found that this varies considerably from airport to airport. I typically fly from LA/Ontario airport whenever traveling domestically and I find that except during Christmas time it is just like you describe, 10 minutes max to get through security. Last year when I flew internationally, I had to fly from LAX (Northwest/KLM's terminal) and it took about an hour and a half waiting in line just to get up to the x-ray conveyor belts/metal detectors.
You get medicine via the Post Office? What happens if the post office loses it for a week of two. You know, like what happens all the time with mail. The Post Office says first class mail normally arrives within 1-2 weeks and they don't even guaranty that. So any of your vital checks, appointment reminders, or vital meds could easily be delayed a week or two anyway.
I hear this said a lot, could somebody please explain to me how larger, heavier mail which costs much much less could possibly subsidize smaller, lighter mail which costs much more?
Seems to me that is junk mail was eliminated, the Post Office could get rid of much of its trucks, drivers and infrastructure. Without junk mail, I'd say residential delivery could be scaled back to one delivery per week, meaning one truck could serve six different routes instead of six different drivers and trucks going out every Mon-Sat. All that overhead eliminated would raise first class rates how? And now the remaining trucks would be loaded with letter sized full-rate first class mail instead of giant heavy bundles of newsprint mailed out for a few pennies each. How is that not better revenue for the post office?
I haven't checked the price of 1000MW rated resistors lately, but I'm guessing its not cost effective [/sarcasm]. Seriously though, that's an absurd amount of power to try to drop resistively, and you have to not melt your power plant in the process. And "governors"? Governors usually work by limiting the fuel input to a motor. In this case we'd be talking about closing the steam valves and pushing less steam into the turbine, which is the opposite of what we want. I guess you could put some kind of brake on the turbine shaft to add drag, but again, a brake that can dissipate 100s of megawatts of energy? Without melting itself, the turbine, and the whole rest of your plant?
I always was, and still am a suburban dweller, and I can say from experience that most Americans "love" suburbs based on ignorance of how awesome city life is.
First and foremost, driving sucks! I remember how awesome it felt to get my drivers license and finally have the "freedom" to go to friends houses, go shopping, eat out, be able to get a job, etc. City dwellers have that freedom without ever needing to drive in the first place. Walking in a city is enough to reach hundreds of potential friends and businesses and good public transit (which dense cities make possible) extends walking range to reach millions.
Driving is done in isolation, you can't meet anyone sealed up in your car. Driving requires your full attention, you can't read a book or play a video game. And driving is never spontaneous, you have to plan out before you leave exactly where you are going, how you are going to get there, and where you are going to park. You have to decide all this in advance because you'll need your full concentration while driving, whenever I've been forced to think (or re-think) my plans on the road, my driving becomes dangerous because I'm too distracted.
When walking (augmented by public transit) you can stroll along the many shops and restaurants (as long as you are in a city where there are many shops), look in all the windows and see what looks good, change your mind about where your going (if you even decided before you left home) backtrack if you "missed your turn" just by turning around and walking the other way (if you miss your turn in a car, you can easily get stuck in a situation where "you can't get there from here" and end up circling around lost trying to get where you are going).
And then there's the advantages of being able to find businesses catering to every possible niche. Any type of food you want is available, instantly. Whatever obscure hobby you might get into, there are enough other people around who are also into it that you can find shops catering to it. Oh and those other people who are into the same weird niche hobbies as you are good potential friends, something hard to find in the suburbs if you don't get along with mainstream "Joe Average".
In the end though, the most damning argument against suburban living is an analysis of the costs. It costs way more to live in a city, which demonstrates that the high demand for city living is not being met! If people truly prefer suburbs so much, why don't the market values reflect this? Its clear to me that not enough city is being built to meet demand. I would love to live in a city, but not being a millionaire, I can't afford to move into even the relatively lame downtown Los Angeles. Although most Americans ignorantly cling to suburbs, there clearly is a large population that knows better and keeps the cities packed.
Lack of joysticks these days is one of the reasons I gave up on consoles (until the Wii). Those...things that you control with your thumb are not joysticks. I can't understand how in the hell that was supposed to be better.
My thumbs are.. all thumbs. I mean seriously, that phrase came about because thumbs just aren't very precise in their movement. But all you kids who had NESes before puberty all have that "mutation" that was talked about here on Slashdot a while back which allows you to use your thumb as a precision input device instead of your index fingers. Which also explains how in the hell you manage to text from a cell phone.
Oh and what is it with you folks who say FPS games were best used with "keyboard and mouse"? I was never much into FPS games, but the only really usable configuration was "joystick and mouse". You suction-cupped the joystick onto your desk (your joystick did have suction-cups, right?) for your left hand and mapped the trigger and/or top buttons to things like jump or crouch (the buttons on the joystick base were clearly unusable). Then you put the mouse under your right hand, as usual. This way, you had good coarse analog control of your movement with your left hand, and fine precision analog aiming with your right hand.
Now everyone get off my lawn.
Why say 'burglarized' when there's a perfectly good English word 'burgled'?
I love this word "burgled" ever since I read that story about the British columnist who wrote a column complaining about "burglarized" (and the American response "You're right, we appogle.")
I mean, it make perfect logical sense the a burglar would be "one who burgles", but come on, "burgle". Burgle ! It sounds like something out of a Doctor Suess book ("they tammed their tam-tamlers and burgled their burg-bugles"). It never fails to give me a chuckle.
Hehe, burgle!
Care to share where? I've been in some pretty rinky-dink airports (I'm thinking of places like Elko, NV) and I've never seen one that didn't have the standard TSA screening, though the local TSA seems to consist of one guy in some of those places.
Looks to me like you can't play them using Firefox or IE either (the supposedly supported browsers). Firefox just prompts me to install a plug-in which doesn't seem to exist, and IE loads up the game and says "Check Starting Device" for any game.
Damn, I mean Damn!
Fries cost, what, a buck? You would seriously go hungry waiting for someone else to buy fries just to save $1? I don't know about you, but I've given away $1 (or shared $1 of food) to strangers before. And in the hypothetical world where fries are trivially copied for free, it only takes one "generous" person like me willing to give away a buck, or one philanthropist with a vision of "fries for all", or one cook who just feels like cooking up some fries cause he's bored and the whole world get free fries forever.
Worst case, if no one anywhere is willing to cough up $1 to commission the frying of the "seeder-batch" order of french fries, then the government can levy a fry tax and every American pays about one three-millionth of a cent so the National Endowment for Fast Food can afford pay for an order of fries.
I haven't heard of blizzards disrupting natural gas (which makes much of our electricity here in California). Natural gas is generally "shipped" long distance in big underground pipes.
I think possibly because we were Electrical Engineers taking an Electrical Engineering course, we may have focused more on permeability/permittivity (since those concepts are of particular interest to us) than a stock college physics course. Permeability and permittivity do relate (again my math is so far gone that I don't remember exactly how) to the time constants the govern how fast inductors and capacitor charge up (which means, somehow they are related to henrys of inductance and farads of capacitance, but my math memory fails me completely here). Of course you are right that it is "as fast as possible", I'm just saying that permeability and permittivity of free space (or the local permeability/permittivity of space with stuff in it) fairly explicitly define what that speed is.
What I sort of saying here, is that everything, even vacuum, acts at least a little bit like both an inductor and a capacitor, there is a distinct time it take for electric charge and/or magnetic flux to build from zero to its final value. It ramps up at, well literally light speed in a vacuum but it is a continuous function. No point in space will change from 0 to 10 whatever units of flux instantly (nor can it change back instantly).
Your right on the money that, given Einstein's relativity, this defines causality itself.
That is pretty much my recollection of my EE Electromagnetic Fields course. Like you the whole math behind it has slipped away from my memory. I do have one quibble with your statement "There is nothing in the equations or models which describe the electic field causing the magnetic field, and vice-versa, that would limit the rate at which this happens; time is not even in the equation".
I remember my class being tortured with having to do a huge derivation based on the permeability and permittivity of free space (which is roughly how fast magnetic and electric fields charge up). I remember that if you played around with the E/M equations long enough (as we were forced to), you could derive an equation for 'c' based solely on the permeability and permittivity of free space. Not surprisingly, if you plug in the actual experimental values if those variables, you also get the real-life value of 'c'. Which also means that if you change the permeability and permittivity (by say going though a substance instead of vacuum) you get a different speed of light.
It really pisses me off when people say this, even though I agree in principle with the idea of living near work. It just isn't feasible.
Let's ignore the fact that I don't really work in any one particular place, even though there are a fair number of people like me who serve many different client scattered around (in my case, all over the Earth, but mostly in and around Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas). We will just concentrate on the location of my office (even though I try never to go there). When I bought my condo 4 years ago, my office was about 5 miles away, which meant I didn't even reach the Freeway before reaching the office. But then last year, the office moved about 30 miles south. Should I sell my condo?
It would be pretty nuts to have to sell and re-buy every time the company moves the office. Talking with my older co-workers, the office has moved at least 4 times in the last 20 years, and you can roughly guess how long ago my coworkers joined the company by mapping the location of their house (they live near wherever the office was at that time).
And that's assuming you stay in the same company. If you want to change companies for any reason, well, it's not like the other employers in my line of work put their offices near ours. They also put their ever-shifting locations wherever is cheapest for them at the moment.
Because the basic evangelical argument is that "morality" is based solely on "whatever God said, and humans dare not even try to ask why". If you allow for humans to have some capacity for independent moral awareness, then you would have what us heathen non-believers have been calling for all along, using our own sensibilities to decide what is and isn't acceptable.
I mean, how else do you condemn homosexuality or pre-marital sex? It's two consenting adults enjoying each other's bodies in mutually pleasing ways without harming others. But the evangelical crowd says "God said 'No', end of discussion."
The utility offers, free of charge, "upgrades" to thermostats and other switches,.....
They already do that, the utilities quite regularly send us fliers asking us to accept their special thermostats and get some kind of special discount rate on electricity.
In my experience, the people who study Art, English, Liberal Studies etc are only in it for money. They feel they need a university degree to get higher paying jobs but they have no particular interests or skills so they just take whatever major seems easiest/has the fewest requirements/doesn't involve much math or other difficult subjects.
So, somehow knock 180 square feet off my condo, sell my Wii and my cell phone (my laptop and car technically belong to my company, I don't have cable and my small old TV is only to play the Wii on anyway) and I can live a life of leisure? Where do I sign up?
No part time job could possibly make my mortgage payment, which accounts for nearly 60% of my expenditures, and once working full time the handful of material goods I do bother with are peanuts.
I do like my job well enough, as jobs go, but it doesn't allow for any sort of outside-of-work life, and I'm saving just as fast as I possibly can for retirement, which can't come soon enough.
I think at least part of the reason is mobility. In principle, I like the idea of Mom and Pop small local stores, but it takes time to learn where they are, what you can buy there, what level of price/service/etc to expect. I've lived at my current home for over 4 years now, which is by far the longest I've ever lived at one address. If you take a broader view, the longest I've ever lived in one community (where I could be shopping at the same set of stores) is 5 years (while I was in college). And I spend most of my time far from my home (often in other states) for work related travel. When you're looking for something in an unfamiliar neighborhood and want it NOW (which is usually the case) you tend to just go with what's familiar rather than try browsing around quaint little mom and pop districts trying to figure out who sells what.
I think because of this, the mom and pop stores never really seem to even try to compete with the sorts of things you buy from big name retailers. I remember well the wonderful downtown of San Luis Obispo, California (the college town I was in for 5 years). It was the most vibrant non-big-name-store shopping area I have ever seen or heard of. But you couldn't buy useful things there, just souvenirs and novelties and decorations and such. If you wanted something like a mop bucket or a folding lawn chair you had to drive a couple towns over to buy it at Wal-Mart. And I was there before that Wal-Mart opened, the first couple of years I was there you had to drive about 20 miles to get your useful everyday stuff at Target. The downtown mom and pops just never bothered with anything mundane, they only had specialty gift type stuff to sell to tourists and people out on dates and such.
Almost all seats have power outlets? And yet despite having a job where I fly dozens of times every year, I have yet to see one of these mythical in-seat power outlets.
I've done that before, years ago. Tried to fly the same route as the actual plane I was on too (didn't work so well). Nobody noticed at all.