People stop being "people" when they lose all moral awareness and are absolved from all personal responsibility.
Good thing that forming a corporation doesn't remove all moral awareness and absolve anyone from all personal responsibility then, isn't it? Otherwise you'd have decided ad-hoc that people who form corporations don't deserve inalienable rights.
I'm sorry, but you need to calm down. I wasn't telling you that you cannot do something. I was responding to the statement I quoted from TFA:
Images of sexually exploited children are not a judgment call issue, for the most part. It's an obvious thing.
You claim there was "way, shape, or form causing any sort of abuse", and yet those who would react to seeing the pics of your kids in the raw would define those pictures as abuse. That's the "obvious thing", "not a judgement call" attitude.
Here we are on a site where strangers can rate what we say, potentially burying it where others won't get the chance to read it, and we're complaining that governments are vaguely coming around to the same idea?
I was just going to move my cursor over to the little flag in the lower right corner of your comment when the irony hit me. No, actually, it hit me as soon as I read the summary. "Report" is not "censorship", unless the "report" button automatically removes something. Moderation here is closer to censorship because that can automatically lower a comment's rating below the limit the reader has set.
What was actually chilling in TFA was this comment:
Also, the comparison to child porn is a common one, but wrong. Images of sexually exploited children are not a judgment call issue, for the most part. It's an obvious thing.
Tell that to any parent who has had the police visit because they took snaps of the kids doing something while naked and had them processed by the local drugstore. Or the parents who post pics and videos on their blogs of little Jimmy learning to use the potty or taking a bath.
Ashcroft said it best: "I cannot define obscenity but I know it when I see it." And in many people's minds, "picture of kid without clothes" is pornography. There is no judgement involved.
What Americans care about is what is actually in the Constitution.
No, sadly, most of them do not. Most of them care about what they can get the government to do for them so they don't have to do it themselves. If what they want done doesn't happen to mesh with what the Constitution says can be done, well, if you change the meaning of the words and read them backwards then the Constitution says you CAN do what I want...
If you cannot make your own arguments, at least stop making them up in my name. I made no demand. I stated my opinion.
The US simply has too old a tradition of people who have permanently left,
Yeah, there are a lot of old traditions that the sole reason they can't be changed is because they are old traditions. The Democrat voting machine in Chicago being one. Using paper ballots at a physical polling place would be another. Oh, wait, That 'old tradition' is one you think should change. Hmmm. Seems like 'old tradition' is only an argument against change when you don't want something to change.
Since you seem unwilling to defend that "old tradition" of people who don't live someplace getting to set the rules for those who do live there, I'll assume you have no reason other than it is "old tradition", similar to the "old tradition" where the British Parliament and His/Her Majesty set the rules for their colonies.
It's you who is arguing for a change to a very old tradition in America (and many other developed nations) of absentee voting.
I'm WHAT? I'm arguing for a change? Now I know you're replying to someone else.
Really, you remind me of those tiresome Slashbots in the early millennium who read a little too much Heinlein and urged a requirement of military service before one could have voting rights.
I've already commented on the events that came about based on people in one place voting on laws to be followed elsewhere. That you equate a fictional requirement for some public service to earn the right to vote, and a logical and existing requirement that you be a resident of the jurisdiction in which that right exists, is the tiresome part here.
Some states have very lax requirements for maintaining residence and voting rights there.
'Lax' is not 'none', and maintaining a residence is creating a less than location-independent lifestyle. Your use of the term "currently" when referring to the ex-pats implies a short-term nature of the ex-pat status, which also makes them less than location-independent.
You think that having US citizenship makes one somehow bound to the US?
Where did I say that?
Not only are there people who have left the US for good but still vote (often so that they can try to make the US more like the country they currently enjoy living in).
And you can explain why they should have any say in any election in a country they've chosen not to live in? I don't particularly care about those who think they should change where I live to be more like where they live.
And with regard to out of state voting, it's entirely possible to be registered to vote in one state, and then spend the rest of one's life in another state.
Not legally. It's hard to claim residency in one state when you don't live there anymore.
There's only 1 set of power lines going into each building, yet there are multiple providers/sources of electrons in the grid.
The difference being that it is impossible to differentiate between the electrons you take off the wire, while it is critical that you get the same packets your ISP is putting on the wire for you and not just any packet that happens to be coming by.
That means that when an energy provider is "broken" and not putting electrons onto the distribution grid, it is a problem that that provider and the owner of the distribution grid both are very interested in solving (your payment through the distributor goes to the provider and the provider isn't). If your ISP is broken and not putting the right packets onto the distribution medium for you, the distributor doesn't care and probably doesn't know, YOU care and YOU have to deal with the ISP -- who would then blame the distributor who will blame the ISP...
In other words, alternate energy provides can break and you'd never know it but those who have to fix it will. If your ISP breaks, YOU'll know it, but probably nobody else will.
Back in the day, there was only 1 set of phone lines into each building, but you could get phone services from multiple local or long-distance carriers.
No, "back in the day", you got to pick one local phone service and they were tied to one LD. Divestiture change the latter because the LD services were put onto the one local telco's wires to the subs at the CO or above and the LD service didn't need physical access to the copper to your house. In fact, which LD you used became an entirely switching-based question, and you could use access codes to pick a different LD provider every time you called someone. A different local provider would need that physical access, and that didn't happen, because the switching system was hardwired to your copper pair. Your phone talked to the local telco switch and you couldn't say "connect my pair to someone else."
We need to separate IP infrastructure (1 set of fibre cables into each building) from IP services (multiple ISPs, IPTV, IP-whatever companies).
And if you think getting something fixed is difficult now, just wait until there are three or four different companies involved in your one broadband connection. It's hard enough now to really determine where a packet loss problem is happening, just think what it would be like to determine if Comcast (the wire) was dropping packets or is it Frank's Hometown ISP and Dry Cleaner that's messing up.
In five years the "I gave up cable TV... and my life is so great" meme that appears in/. every time a discussion even touches on how bad cable TV providers are will have morphed into "I gave up the internet... and my life is so great".
When all the rest of human activity is moving to virtual spaces, why should the practice of representative government not do the same?
You can have all the virtual-space representative government you want, just as long as it doesn't intrude on the meat-space real government we all have to live with.
But I see no reason why voting must forver remain an exception to the general tendency of location-independent life.
If you care so little about a place that you cannot bother to live there, why should you be allowed to vote there? Voting on location-dependent laws has been and should be done by location-dependent people who are subject to them. I think there was a war or something about one group of people who thought the proper location for voting on laws wasn't the place where the laws were being applied, wasn't there? Something about tea, IIRC
How about a compromise? Make the last mile providers utilities and require them to allow other ISPs to sell on their infrastructure.
This situation is so analogous to the long distance deregulation from decades ago that we'd be silly not to learn from it.
I remember when "Ma Bell" owned the phone system. They owned the wire into your house and the phones attached to it. They did the long distance. If it broke, you called the repair number and someone fixed it.
The only time I ever had a problem getting repair to do something back then was when I had to call the repair number in another state because the mechanical first selector in the local CO had stuck and I was only able to call numbers in a city across the state line that was in our "extended local calling area". Any number that started with '2' was Elkhart, IN, and that's what my line was frozen to. The op who answered the Elkhart repair number had a hard time understanding what I meant when I told him to have someone go to my local CO and smack the step-by-step that was frozen.
Then the great divestiture. The local telco became the "last mile" for the long distance providers. You now own the wire from the demarc into the house. You own the phones attached to it. When it breaks...
You call the local repair number. They ask you if you've tested all your phones, even if the "break" is an inability to make long distance calls but local works fine. They say they'll send someone out, but threaten you with a big fee if they determine the problem is in your equipment.
Once the local provider determines you're calling about an LD issue, they claim it is the LD provider's problem and you need to call them.
You call the LD provider and they tell you it is a local telco issue, call them.
Yes, there were issues when Ma Bell owned it all, but getting good response to service calls was not one of them. I'd really rather not have to live through all of that again with local broadband internet. 'Hey Comcast, it's broke, fix it" is much easier than having to call two different companies eight times each to get one of them to accept responsibility and do something.
(The fictional context I described was close to the real-life contexts that the real pictures were published in.)
What utter bollocks. The originals were on FACEBOOK. You asked about putting them on an academic department home page on a college or university website. Those are two VERY different venues with two very different purposes and audiences.
Any academic department that put pictures of breastfeeding women on their HOME PAGE, where potential and current students are supposed to come to find information about the department, just because someone figures those pictures are FUN, should be laughed out of the college.
Nobody was evaluating the pictures as pictures, they were evaluating the entire content/venue combination. And I have no doubt that you know that, but you just wanted yet another long rant on/.
He's saying, there is no significant difference between the two groups.
But the issue is "groups of what"? The original groups were "people who are racist and don't like seeing pictures of black women breastfeeding because they are black" and "people who aren't etc." He converted the groups being tested into "people who think pictures of women of any color breastfeeding posted to a faculty webpage is inappropriate" and "people who don't...".
You can't ask a radically different question and expect to get statistically significant information about the original question out of it. It's like claiming that you've determined that there is no difference in preference of ownership between a Lambo and a Yugo by randomly showing pictures of one of the two to a large number of people and asking "should a driver of this car be allowed to drive up on the sidewalk and run over pedestrians?" Yeah, you get 94% for both cars saying "no". That's a clear lack of preference in ownership, isn't it?
An actual weakness here is that he didn't establish a margin of error.
The actual weakness is that he asked a completely different question in a completely different context and is trying to shoehorn the answer to fit his personal view, and wasting a lot of electrons in doing it.
Why should the government prevent competent adults from entering into an agreement that includes a rebate? Sure, the companies are hoping that many will not claim it, but that's the customer's choice.
Because as you say the companies are actively planning to make the advertised price/rebate not possible, or very complicated for the customer to get.
No, that's not what he said. He said nothing about "advertised price", and it is already against the law for bait and switch or other kinds of that fraud.
With regards to rebates and coupons, companies are assuming that some non-trivial percentage of people simply will not follow through on the rebate process. The way to redeem either is usually specified up front, and the customer has the right to either accept the terms or not.
It's not every company that tries to rip the customer off by failing to honor a rebate, but many customers choose not to spend the time doing it. I, too, ignore rebate numbers when I compare prices because I know I'm lazy enough not to spend a lot of time getting a $5 rebate on something.
Most rebates only serves to confuse the customer, so they can't see the real cost.
That's nonsense. The 'real cost' is what they pay. They get to see that before they hand over the money. If they choose not to redeem a coupon or rebate, that's their choice, freely made.
For the customers to compare products, with such complicated pricing schemes is just not feasible; it would take days to evaluate.
Also nonsense. "What's your price before rebate?" "What's YOUR price before rebate?" A>B? B : A.
Either way, it is a government issue to promote and ensure a transparent market that facilitates competition.
Part of competition is rebates and coupons. It's not inherently fraud, it only becomes so when one side violates the terms of the rebate or coupon. And fraud is already illegal.
Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.
No, by taking those photos so far out of context and asking a question about them that is so far out of context, his survey is made meaningless.
If the question is about general reactions to a photo, then trying to put those photos into a "fun photo on an academic website" you've already changed the question so much that it cannot answer the first. What you found out is that NATURALLY, 3/4 of people think a picture of a woman breastfeeding on an academic website is inappropriate. It's not about black or white at that point, it's about the website and audience. I gots no problem with pics of women breastfeeding, or real life for that matter, but a university faculty website is not the place for them, and I'd have been part of the 3/4 that said it wasn't appropriate, too.
Someone else earlier talked about women whipping out engorged breasts in public, as if that's how most women who breastfeed in public do it, claiming it was an inherently sexual thing. They don't, and it isn't. When I've seen it happening I actually had to look twice to realize that's what was happening. If you haven't seen it and you think it is a great way to ogle boobs, you're wrong.
So your complaint is about NASA allowing Google to base their air fleet at Moffett in the first place?
It is? Gosh, I don't recall saying anything like that.
Yes, the fuel trucks could drive across the bay instead (on the toll bridges, etc. for multiple additional charges) but this isn't otherwise hindering private enterprise.
Fuel trucks don't have to "drive across the bay" when they go to refuel a jet that has just landed at the airport. They drive across the ramp. It's just not that hard. Any FBO that keeps their fuel trucks "across the bay" from the aircraft at an airport they serve deserves to go out of business, AND THAT IS WHY THEY DON'T.
What you are suggesting is that these pilots are going to be casually flying around for the hell of it
No, I pretty much said exactly the opposite. They're going to be going someplace with their passengers because that's the whole purpose of having a corporate jet. It isn't to just fly "around the patch" and use up fuel, it's to GO SOMEWHERE. That somewhere will almost certainly have an FBO that sells fuel.
I'm not freaking clueless about these things,
Yeah, if you've read what I've written and come away with the idea that my complaint (which I didn't actually make, I just pointed out that such a complaint it valid) is that Google gets to use Moffett, or that I think pilots should be "casually flying around" anywhere, then you are clueless. And if you think those jets cannot get their fuel at almost any airport they go to as they cart the execs around, then yes, "freaking" is the right adjective.
just pointing out that Moffett Field has minimal services oriented towards servicing government flights instead of commercial ones, hence the reason why Google was using the same system when at that air field.
And if you think I've said they cannot use the same "system" when refueling at Moffett, "freaking" is an understatement. PAYING GOVERNMENT RATES for fuel they buy for a commercial operation is the problem. Now maybe they are a big enough operation that they can negotiate steep discounts, but that should be the decision of the company they buy from, not leveraged through the massive buying of the US government. I can't get that kind of deal for my avgas, maybe I should expect the US government to sell me avgas at cost, too?
This isn't like there is some monopoly on people who sell jet fuel and that there is nobody else they could get fuel from so the government has to step in and sell it to them at cost. It's not a "there's only one cable company in town so the government should run fiber for everyone" kind of situation. There are probably, just guessing, twenty FBOs within a five minute flight from Moffett, or at most ten, and there will almost ALWAYS be an FBO where the jets go. And my God, how awful that those pilots for Google have to manage fuel loads instead of just filling up with cheap gas every time they get to Moffett.
Now, if I thought the FBOs would actually stop providing Google pilots and their pax ANY services because Google doesn't buy anything from them, and is in fact getting their fuel at a GSA price through the government in direct competition with those FBOs, I'd say "good", and I hope the execs who have to walk around the building to get out of the secure areas think about why. And then when they have to wait for someone who has the gate code to come by to let them back in. But no, the pilots and execs will waltz into the FBO expecting the same great service and perks. "Coffee, sir? A nice comfy chair to wait in until your chauffeur shows up? Oh, he's stuck in traffic? How about a loaner car to get you where you're going? How much fuel will you need? Oh, none. I see."
You're right again. The government has absolutely no aircraft with built in containers for transporting fuel anywhere, it has to be sold at cost just to get rid of it. There is no way there should be any auction or bidding open to the public to allow the people who paid for the fuel in the first place a crack at getting a good price for surplus.
You've convinced me. It's just peachy that all those people who pay taxes (business and personal) because they're in the business of selling aviation fuel have the tax money they donated used to get a huge multinational company a good deal on jet fuel. Nothing wrong with that at all. It's the government's money, after all, and they're lucky that they get to keep what they do. They should just wave at those Google corporate jets as they taxi by with tanks full of NASA-bought fuel and be thankful that the government allows them to breathe the exhaust.
That sounds like a major inconvenience and a waste of time as well.
Do you understand why companies have corporate jets? It isn't so the pilots can go out to "fly around the patch" for fun. It is so the people who ride in them can go other places. Those "other places" are called "airports". Unless the CEO or CFO or whatever likes to take the corporate jet to his vacation cabin out in Bumfart, ND, those planes aren't going to be spending much time at an airport that doesn't have an FBO that sells Jet-A.
And it's not difficult to fuel up. They'll come right to the plane and fill it up for you! It's not like driving a car where you have to look for the gas station and then drive up to the pumps. They bring the pump to you at the same place you've just parked. And someone buying a plane-full of jet-A isn't going to get "self service" treatment once the truck arrives.
It may be a small thing in the land of large government excess and other problems, but it is a thing nonetheless, and it is acceptable for people to be upset when the government acts to hinder private enterprise. My goodness, man. This is a place where the government is routinely flamed for preventing a second cable company from entering a local market (when the only prevention is economic and not legal), and here we've got the government actively competing with a large number of private businesses but it is peachy keen and no problem at all.
You're ignoring the fact that extra jet fuel was simply available at a discount, because NASA had already bought it.
Huh? Of course NASA had the fuel because NASA bought it. They wouldn't have had it otherwise, would they?
What should NASA have done with that extra jet fuel? Sold it to a private jet-fuel company?
Gee, I don't know. It's not like the government owns any jets that it could have been used in. I think the FAA uses floobydust in their jets. I doubt that even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration owns anything as complicated as a jet or anything. You're right, selling at cost in direct competition with commercial dealers was the only thing they could have done.
Oh, you say, they could have sold it to the same private jet-fuel company that Google has contracted to fuel its planes!
No, I don't think you've ever seen me say anything even remotely like that. But since you want to make up what I've said, you can make up the answers, too.
That's not what was said. Neither NASA nor DLA-Energy lost money, but all the companies that would have sold the jet fuel to Google at a profit did. The government acted in competition with private enterprise to fuel private enterprise aircraft.
Some people think that government competition (with huge bulk price discounts and endlessly deep pockets to cover losses) with commercial ventures is bad.
The US is nowhere near as heterogenous as you think.
I've lived in three regions so far -- east coast, west coast, and midwest. All three are very different places. Actually, I spent a few months in the south, too, and THAT is a significantly different place from the other three.
Americans broadly expect things to work the same everywhere,
Half of all Americans are below average intelligence. Many Americans expected radio signals from a device they're holding in their hand that are transmitted in the clear to a receiver miles away would be secret and private. Many Americans expected those same transmissions to become private once the law that said they were was enacted, and that some serious magic would prevent a standard UHF television from picking them up. I suspect many Americans expect that the postman doesn't read their postcards.
Please, stupid people expecting stupid things isn't an argument to actually do those stupid things.
and if one particular state offers something they find attractive, changes are they would vote for whoever is supporting it at the federal level anyway.
The trouble comes when the federal level is prohibited from doing it, and those people still expect the federal government to do it anyway.
I'd gladly get rid of the mortgage interest deduction, too, now that I've paid off my mortgage.
I am rather hesitant to do it, though, because there are people who have made critical life decisions based on the (implied) promise that mortgage interest would be deductible, just as there are many many people who have made long-term decisions based on the promise of social security keeps me from calling for the abolishment of that system.
You should keep in mind before you ask for all deductions to be eliminated -- everyone who pays taxes paying even more in taxes isn't a reasonable goal for tax reform.
Slashdot Mirror
So for a law against gay sex, you have to ask the next question: What in the Constitution grants government the power to regulate it?
ICC.
People stop being "people" when they lose all moral awareness and are absolved from all personal responsibility.
Good thing that forming a corporation doesn't remove all moral awareness and absolve anyone from all personal responsibility then, isn't it? Otherwise you'd have decided ad-hoc that people who form corporations don't deserve inalienable rights.
You claim there was "way, shape, or form causing any sort of abuse", and yet those who would react to seeing the pics of your kids in the raw would define those pictures as abuse. That's the "obvious thing", "not a judgement call" attitude.
Here we are on a site where strangers can rate what we say, potentially burying it where others won't get the chance to read it, and we're complaining that governments are vaguely coming around to the same idea?
I was just going to move my cursor over to the little flag in the lower right corner of your comment when the irony hit me. No, actually, it hit me as soon as I read the summary. "Report" is not "censorship", unless the "report" button automatically removes something. Moderation here is closer to censorship because that can automatically lower a comment's rating below the limit the reader has set.
What was actually chilling in TFA was this comment:
Tell that to any parent who has had the police visit because they took snaps of the kids doing something while naked and had them processed by the local drugstore. Or the parents who post pics and videos on their blogs of little Jimmy learning to use the potty or taking a bath.
Ashcroft said it best: "I cannot define obscenity but I know it when I see it." And in many people's minds, "picture of kid without clothes" is pornography. There is no judgement involved.
What Americans care about is what is actually in the Constitution.
No, sadly, most of them do not. Most of them care about what they can get the government to do for them so they don't have to do it themselves. If what they want done doesn't happen to mesh with what the Constitution says can be done, well, if you change the meaning of the words and read them backwards then the Constitution says you CAN do what I want...
would satisfy Obfuscant's demand
If you cannot make your own arguments, at least stop making them up in my name. I made no demand. I stated my opinion.
The US simply has too old a tradition of people who have permanently left,
Yeah, there are a lot of old traditions that the sole reason they can't be changed is because they are old traditions. The Democrat voting machine in Chicago being one. Using paper ballots at a physical polling place would be another. Oh, wait, That 'old tradition' is one you think should change. Hmmm. Seems like 'old tradition' is only an argument against change when you don't want something to change.
Since you seem unwilling to defend that "old tradition" of people who don't live someplace getting to set the rules for those who do live there, I'll assume you have no reason other than it is "old tradition", similar to the "old tradition" where the British Parliament and His/Her Majesty set the rules for their colonies.
It's you who is arguing for a change to a very old tradition in America (and many other developed nations) of absentee voting.
I'm WHAT? I'm arguing for a change? Now I know you're replying to someone else.
Really, you remind me of those tiresome Slashbots in the early millennium who read a little too much Heinlein and urged a requirement of military service before one could have voting rights.
I've already commented on the events that came about based on people in one place voting on laws to be followed elsewhere. That you equate a fictional requirement for some public service to earn the right to vote, and a logical and existing requirement that you be a resident of the jurisdiction in which that right exists, is the tiresome part here.
Some states have very lax requirements for maintaining residence and voting rights there.
'Lax' is not 'none', and maintaining a residence is creating a less than location-independent lifestyle. Your use of the term "currently" when referring to the ex-pats implies a short-term nature of the ex-pat status, which also makes them less than location-independent.
You think that having US citizenship makes one somehow bound to the US?
Where did I say that?
Not only are there people who have left the US for good but still vote (often so that they can try to make the US more like the country they currently enjoy living in).
And you can explain why they should have any say in any election in a country they've chosen not to live in? I don't particularly care about those who think they should change where I live to be more like where they live.
And with regard to out of state voting, it's entirely possible to be registered to vote in one state, and then spend the rest of one's life in another state.
Not legally. It's hard to claim residency in one state when you don't live there anymore.
US citizens abroad, or voters registered to vote in one state but currently in another state,
Neither are an example of location-independent people, especially not the latter. "Currently" is a dead giveaway.
There's only 1 set of power lines going into each building, yet there are multiple providers/sources of electrons in the grid.
The difference being that it is impossible to differentiate between the electrons you take off the wire, while it is critical that you get the same packets your ISP is putting on the wire for you and not just any packet that happens to be coming by.
That means that when an energy provider is "broken" and not putting electrons onto the distribution grid, it is a problem that that provider and the owner of the distribution grid both are very interested in solving (your payment through the distributor goes to the provider and the provider isn't). If your ISP is broken and not putting the right packets onto the distribution medium for you, the distributor doesn't care and probably doesn't know, YOU care and YOU have to deal with the ISP -- who would then blame the distributor who will blame the ISP ...
In other words, alternate energy provides can break and you'd never know it but those who have to fix it will. If your ISP breaks, YOU'll know it, but probably nobody else will.
Back in the day, there was only 1 set of phone lines into each building, but you could get phone services from multiple local or long-distance carriers.
No, "back in the day", you got to pick one local phone service and they were tied to one LD. Divestiture change the latter because the LD services were put onto the one local telco's wires to the subs at the CO or above and the LD service didn't need physical access to the copper to your house. In fact, which LD you used became an entirely switching-based question, and you could use access codes to pick a different LD provider every time you called someone. A different local provider would need that physical access, and that didn't happen, because the switching system was hardwired to your copper pair. Your phone talked to the local telco switch and you couldn't say "connect my pair to someone else."
We need to separate IP infrastructure (1 set of fibre cables into each building) from IP services (multiple ISPs, IPTV, IP-whatever companies).
And if you think getting something fixed is difficult now, just wait until there are three or four different companies involved in your one broadband connection. It's hard enough now to really determine where a packet loss problem is happening, just think what it would be like to determine if Comcast (the wire) was dropping packets or is it Frank's Hometown ISP and Dry Cleaner that's messing up.
Yes. Just abandon the internet entirely.
In five years the "I gave up cable TV ... and my life is so great" meme that appears in /. every time a discussion even touches on how bad cable TV providers are will have morphed into "I gave up the internet ... and my life is so great".
Yes, you can subscribe to my newsletter.
When all the rest of human activity is moving to virtual spaces, why should the practice of representative government not do the same?
You can have all the virtual-space representative government you want, just as long as it doesn't intrude on the meat-space real government we all have to live with.
But I see no reason why voting must forver remain an exception to the general tendency of location-independent life.
If you care so little about a place that you cannot bother to live there, why should you be allowed to vote there? Voting on location-dependent laws has been and should be done by location-dependent people who are subject to them. I think there was a war or something about one group of people who thought the proper location for voting on laws wasn't the place where the laws were being applied, wasn't there? Something about tea, IIRC
Network neutrality demands that things work, without having to pay for extra services that should not be needed, or jumping through hoops.
A better example of the silly interpretations of what 'net neutrality' means would be hard to find.
How about a compromise? Make the last mile providers utilities and require them to allow other ISPs to sell on their infrastructure.
This situation is so analogous to the long distance deregulation from decades ago that we'd be silly not to learn from it.
I remember when "Ma Bell" owned the phone system. They owned the wire into your house and the phones attached to it. They did the long distance. If it broke, you called the repair number and someone fixed it.
The only time I ever had a problem getting repair to do something back then was when I had to call the repair number in another state because the mechanical first selector in the local CO had stuck and I was only able to call numbers in a city across the state line that was in our "extended local calling area". Any number that started with '2' was Elkhart, IN, and that's what my line was frozen to. The op who answered the Elkhart repair number had a hard time understanding what I meant when I told him to have someone go to my local CO and smack the step-by-step that was frozen.
Then the great divestiture. The local telco became the "last mile" for the long distance providers. You now own the wire from the demarc into the house. You own the phones attached to it. When it breaks ...
You call the local repair number. They ask you if you've tested all your phones, even if the "break" is an inability to make long distance calls but local works fine. They say they'll send someone out, but threaten you with a big fee if they determine the problem is in your equipment.
Once the local provider determines you're calling about an LD issue, they claim it is the LD provider's problem and you need to call them.
You call the LD provider and they tell you it is a local telco issue, call them.
Yes, there were issues when Ma Bell owned it all, but getting good response to service calls was not one of them. I'd really rather not have to live through all of that again with local broadband internet. 'Hey Comcast, it's broke, fix it" is much easier than having to call two different companies eight times each to get one of them to accept responsibility and do something.
(The fictional context I described was close to the real-life contexts that the real pictures were published in.)
What utter bollocks. The originals were on FACEBOOK. You asked about putting them on an academic department home page on a college or university website. Those are two VERY different venues with two very different purposes and audiences.
Any academic department that put pictures of breastfeeding women on their HOME PAGE, where potential and current students are supposed to come to find information about the department, just because someone figures those pictures are FUN, should be laughed out of the college.
Nobody was evaluating the pictures as pictures, they were evaluating the entire content/venue combination. And I have no doubt that you know that, but you just wanted yet another long rant on /.
He's saying, there is no significant difference between the two groups.
But the issue is "groups of what"? The original groups were "people who are racist and don't like seeing pictures of black women breastfeeding because they are black" and "people who aren't etc." He converted the groups being tested into "people who think pictures of women of any color breastfeeding posted to a faculty webpage is inappropriate" and "people who don't...".
You can't ask a radically different question and expect to get statistically significant information about the original question out of it. It's like claiming that you've determined that there is no difference in preference of ownership between a Lambo and a Yugo by randomly showing pictures of one of the two to a large number of people and asking "should a driver of this car be allowed to drive up on the sidewalk and run over pedestrians?" Yeah, you get 94% for both cars saying "no". That's a clear lack of preference in ownership, isn't it?
An actual weakness here is that he didn't establish a margin of error.
The actual weakness is that he asked a completely different question in a completely different context and is trying to shoehorn the answer to fit his personal view, and wasting a lot of electrons in doing it.
Why should the government prevent competent adults from entering into an agreement that includes a rebate? Sure, the companies are hoping that many will not claim it, but that's the customer's choice.
Because as you say the companies are actively planning to make the advertised price/rebate not possible, or very complicated for the customer to get.
No, that's not what he said. He said nothing about "advertised price", and it is already against the law for bait and switch or other kinds of that fraud.
With regards to rebates and coupons, companies are assuming that some non-trivial percentage of people simply will not follow through on the rebate process. The way to redeem either is usually specified up front, and the customer has the right to either accept the terms or not.
It's not every company that tries to rip the customer off by failing to honor a rebate, but many customers choose not to spend the time doing it. I, too, ignore rebate numbers when I compare prices because I know I'm lazy enough not to spend a lot of time getting a $5 rebate on something.
Most rebates only serves to confuse the customer, so they can't see the real cost.
That's nonsense. The 'real cost' is what they pay. They get to see that before they hand over the money. If they choose not to redeem a coupon or rebate, that's their choice, freely made.
For the customers to compare products, with such complicated pricing schemes is just not feasible; it would take days to evaluate.
Also nonsense. "What's your price before rebate?" "What's YOUR price before rebate?" A>B? B : A.
Either way, it is a government issue to promote and ensure a transparent market that facilitates competition.
Part of competition is rebates and coupons. It's not inherently fraud, it only becomes so when one side violates the terms of the rebate or coupon. And fraud is already illegal.
Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.
No, by taking those photos so far out of context and asking a question about them that is so far out of context, his survey is made meaningless.
If the question is about general reactions to a photo, then trying to put those photos into a "fun photo on an academic website" you've already changed the question so much that it cannot answer the first. What you found out is that NATURALLY, 3/4 of people think a picture of a woman breastfeeding on an academic website is inappropriate. It's not about black or white at that point, it's about the website and audience. I gots no problem with pics of women breastfeeding, or real life for that matter, but a university faculty website is not the place for them, and I'd have been part of the 3/4 that said it wasn't appropriate, too.
Someone else earlier talked about women whipping out engorged breasts in public, as if that's how most women who breastfeed in public do it, claiming it was an inherently sexual thing. They don't, and it isn't. When I've seen it happening I actually had to look twice to realize that's what was happening. If you haven't seen it and you think it is a great way to ogle boobs, you're wrong.
So your complaint is about NASA allowing Google to base their air fleet at Moffett in the first place?
It is? Gosh, I don't recall saying anything like that.
Yes, the fuel trucks could drive across the bay instead (on the toll bridges, etc. for multiple additional charges) but this isn't otherwise hindering private enterprise.
Fuel trucks don't have to "drive across the bay" when they go to refuel a jet that has just landed at the airport. They drive across the ramp. It's just not that hard. Any FBO that keeps their fuel trucks "across the bay" from the aircraft at an airport they serve deserves to go out of business, AND THAT IS WHY THEY DON'T.
What you are suggesting is that these pilots are going to be casually flying around for the hell of it
No, I pretty much said exactly the opposite. They're going to be going someplace with their passengers because that's the whole purpose of having a corporate jet. It isn't to just fly "around the patch" and use up fuel, it's to GO SOMEWHERE. That somewhere will almost certainly have an FBO that sells fuel.
I'm not freaking clueless about these things,
Yeah, if you've read what I've written and come away with the idea that my complaint (which I didn't actually make, I just pointed out that such a complaint it valid) is that Google gets to use Moffett, or that I think pilots should be "casually flying around" anywhere, then you are clueless. And if you think those jets cannot get their fuel at almost any airport they go to as they cart the execs around, then yes, "freaking" is the right adjective.
just pointing out that Moffett Field has minimal services oriented towards servicing government flights instead of commercial ones, hence the reason why Google was using the same system when at that air field.
And if you think I've said they cannot use the same "system" when refueling at Moffett, "freaking" is an understatement. PAYING GOVERNMENT RATES for fuel they buy for a commercial operation is the problem. Now maybe they are a big enough operation that they can negotiate steep discounts, but that should be the decision of the company they buy from, not leveraged through the massive buying of the US government. I can't get that kind of deal for my avgas, maybe I should expect the US government to sell me avgas at cost, too?
This isn't like there is some monopoly on people who sell jet fuel and that there is nobody else they could get fuel from so the government has to step in and sell it to them at cost. It's not a "there's only one cable company in town so the government should run fiber for everyone" kind of situation. There are probably, just guessing, twenty FBOs within a five minute flight from Moffett, or at most ten, and there will almost ALWAYS be an FBO where the jets go. And my God, how awful that those pilots for Google have to manage fuel loads instead of just filling up with cheap gas every time they get to Moffett.
Now, if I thought the FBOs would actually stop providing Google pilots and their pax ANY services because Google doesn't buy anything from them, and is in fact getting their fuel at a GSA price through the government in direct competition with those FBOs, I'd say "good", and I hope the execs who have to walk around the building to get out of the secure areas think about why. And then when they have to wait for someone who has the gate code to come by to let them back in. But no, the pilots and execs will waltz into the FBO expecting the same great service and perks. "Coffee, sir? A nice comfy chair to wait in until your chauffeur shows up? Oh, he's stuck in traffic? How about a loaner car to get you where you're going? How much fuel will you need? Oh, none. I see."
You've convinced me. It's just peachy that all those people who pay taxes (business and personal) because they're in the business of selling aviation fuel have the tax money they donated used to get a huge multinational company a good deal on jet fuel. Nothing wrong with that at all. It's the government's money, after all, and they're lucky that they get to keep what they do. They should just wave at those Google corporate jets as they taxi by with tanks full of NASA-bought fuel and be thankful that the government allows them to breathe the exhaust.
That sounds like a major inconvenience and a waste of time as well.
Do you understand why companies have corporate jets? It isn't so the pilots can go out to "fly around the patch" for fun. It is so the people who ride in them can go other places. Those "other places" are called "airports". Unless the CEO or CFO or whatever likes to take the corporate jet to his vacation cabin out in Bumfart, ND, those planes aren't going to be spending much time at an airport that doesn't have an FBO that sells Jet-A.
And it's not difficult to fuel up. They'll come right to the plane and fill it up for you! It's not like driving a car where you have to look for the gas station and then drive up to the pumps. They bring the pump to you at the same place you've just parked. And someone buying a plane-full of jet-A isn't going to get "self service" treatment once the truck arrives.
It may be a small thing in the land of large government excess and other problems, but it is a thing nonetheless, and it is acceptable for people to be upset when the government acts to hinder private enterprise. My goodness, man. This is a place where the government is routinely flamed for preventing a second cable company from entering a local market (when the only prevention is economic and not legal), and here we've got the government actively competing with a large number of private businesses but it is peachy keen and no problem at all.
You're ignoring the fact that extra jet fuel was simply available at a discount, because NASA had already bought it.
Huh? Of course NASA had the fuel because NASA bought it. They wouldn't have had it otherwise, would they?
What should NASA have done with that extra jet fuel? Sold it to a private jet-fuel company?
Gee, I don't know. It's not like the government owns any jets that it could have been used in. I think the FAA uses floobydust in their jets. I doubt that even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration owns anything as complicated as a jet or anything. You're right, selling at cost in direct competition with commercial dealers was the only thing they could have done.
Oh, you say, they could have sold it to the same private jet-fuel company that Google has contracted to fuel its planes!
No, I don't think you've ever seen me say anything even remotely like that. But since you want to make up what I've said, you can make up the answers, too.
So nobody lost money.
That's not what was said. Neither NASA nor DLA-Energy lost money, but all the companies that would have sold the jet fuel to Google at a profit did. The government acted in competition with private enterprise to fuel private enterprise aircraft.
Some people think that government competition (with huge bulk price discounts and endlessly deep pockets to cover losses) with commercial ventures is bad.
The US is nowhere near as heterogenous as you think.
I've lived in three regions so far -- east coast, west coast, and midwest. All three are very different places. Actually, I spent a few months in the south, too, and THAT is a significantly different place from the other three.
Americans broadly expect things to work the same everywhere,
Half of all Americans are below average intelligence. Many Americans expected radio signals from a device they're holding in their hand that are transmitted in the clear to a receiver miles away would be secret and private. Many Americans expected those same transmissions to become private once the law that said they were was enacted, and that some serious magic would prevent a standard UHF television from picking them up. I suspect many Americans expect that the postman doesn't read their postcards.
Please, stupid people expecting stupid things isn't an argument to actually do those stupid things.
and if one particular state offers something they find attractive, changes are they would vote for whoever is supporting it at the federal level anyway.
The trouble comes when the federal level is prohibited from doing it, and those people still expect the federal government to do it anyway.
I am rather hesitant to do it, though, because there are people who have made critical life decisions based on the (implied) promise that mortgage interest would be deductible, just as there are many many people who have made long-term decisions based on the promise of social security keeps me from calling for the abolishment of that system.
You should keep in mind before you ask for all deductions to be eliminated -- everyone who pays taxes paying even more in taxes isn't a reasonable goal for tax reform.