You have to love how people will find anything to blame to explain their problems...except themselves. Obesity (for the most part), as with most things, is entirely a problem of the person and their eating habits. It is entirely a caloric consumption/expenditure issue. Since people in this country drive everywhere, and have some device to do pretty much all of their activities that could even remotely be construed as exercise, the amount of calories burned is horrendously low when compared to the monster meals we eat. People just need to be conscious of WHAT and HOW MUCH they are eating, and adjust accordingly. Eating everything that a restaurant puts on a plate is a really bad idea, but most people do it because they have either been taught that they must finish everything on their plate, or they feel they are wasting food. The worst is really a buffet though, because unless you return to the buffet line X number of times, you haven't gotten your money's worth!!
FWIW, I am a medical student, and didn't fully understand some of this stuff prior to taking classes in nutrition, mostly because most had never been presented to me in a useful format. "Eat Healthy and Exercise" is all you hear, but if you take a survey of 100 Americans, how many know what that really means? My parents believed that cleaning the house and doing laundry qualifies as exercise, and while it does qualify as activity, its not enough. Some people think eating healthy is eating a fried chicken sandwich (because its chicken) and vegetables drenched in butter (or worse yet, fried as in the case of fries). I believe if there was more education in the USA about eating habits and the problems that are caused by obesity (diabetes,cardiovascular disease,high blood pressure, etc etc), we would be better off. But in the "land of the free", evidently we are all free to eat ourselves to death.
I think there are many reasons Americans are less healthly than many others around the world. A big part of it is indeed the almost complete lack of time off in our workplaces. That raises the stress levels a good deal. Add in there that with an hour for lunch, it is more difficult to find a healthly meal, so a person eats McDonalds and Wendy's every day. They start to gain weight because all they do is sit behind a desk 8-10 hours a day at least 5 days of the week.
With little exercise they eventually become "morbidly obese" (obviously not everyone, but it happens quite often). However, during this progression, nothing is done, it is accepted, and the habits continue. So now the mental stress level from working is very high, and the stress level on the body itself from the excess weight is rediculously high.
Now, add all of that up, and combine it with a pharmaceutical industry which does an excellent job of convincing everyone they are sick or plagued with some sort of disease, and you have a horribly sick population. Has nothing to do with a free market healthcare system, and has everything to do with our lifestyles.
How many times must a person who is sad see a commercial about anti-depressants and think, "Hey, maybe im not just sad because my dog died, maybe I'm depressed and need medication to make me feel better!"
You actually just need to visit an ATT store. If you call your previous provider, they wont be able to do anything. ATT would handle the entire transaction.
The fees you see on your bill amount to a fraction of what it cost for the telcos to set up this ability. Those few dollars on your bill is our nice way of recouping some of those costs.
Not sleazy at all, good business practice. Whether or not the laws go through, all cell phone providers(One of which I work for) are required to be able to comply with this new law by the 24th. This means that they have been working steadily to introduce this ability into their systems and switches. This is no easy feat, as I will guarantee that no billing system or switch any company used had this ability. The sheer cost of reprogramming along, plus the cost of retraining everyone from technical support people, to engineers, to sales people across the country, is staggering. The cellular providers, rather than being stuck with the entire cost, decided to add a surcharge of usually less than $1 to their customers bills for this. So even if this gets trash canned before the 24th, they still had to pay to implement it so that it would be up and running before then just in case.
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You have to love how people will find anything to blame to explain their problems...except themselves. Obesity (for the most part), as with most things, is entirely a problem of the person and their eating habits. It is entirely a caloric consumption/expenditure issue. Since people in this country drive everywhere, and have some device to do pretty much all of their activities that could even remotely be construed as exercise, the amount of calories burned is horrendously low when compared to the monster meals we eat. People just need to be conscious of WHAT and HOW MUCH they are eating, and adjust accordingly. Eating everything that a restaurant puts on a plate is a really bad idea, but most people do it because they have either been taught that they must finish everything on their plate, or they feel they are wasting food. The worst is really a buffet though, because unless you return to the buffet line X number of times, you haven't gotten your money's worth!! FWIW, I am a medical student, and didn't fully understand some of this stuff prior to taking classes in nutrition, mostly because most had never been presented to me in a useful format. "Eat Healthy and Exercise" is all you hear, but if you take a survey of 100 Americans, how many know what that really means? My parents believed that cleaning the house and doing laundry qualifies as exercise, and while it does qualify as activity, its not enough. Some people think eating healthy is eating a fried chicken sandwich (because its chicken) and vegetables drenched in butter (or worse yet, fried as in the case of fries). I believe if there was more education in the USA about eating habits and the problems that are caused by obesity (diabetes,cardiovascular disease,high blood pressure, etc etc), we would be better off. But in the "land of the free", evidently we are all free to eat ourselves to death.
I think there are many reasons Americans are less healthly than many others around the world. A big part of it is indeed the almost complete lack of time off in our workplaces. That raises the stress levels a good deal. Add in there that with an hour for lunch, it is more difficult to find a healthly meal, so a person eats McDonalds and Wendy's every day. They start to gain weight because all they do is sit behind a desk 8-10 hours a day at least 5 days of the week.
With little exercise they eventually become "morbidly obese" (obviously not everyone, but it happens quite often). However, during this progression, nothing is done, it is accepted, and the habits continue. So now the mental stress level from working is very high, and the stress level on the body itself from the excess weight is rediculously high.
Now, add all of that up, and combine it with a pharmaceutical industry which does an excellent job of convincing everyone they are sick or plagued with some sort of disease, and you have a horribly sick population. Has nothing to do with a free market healthcare system, and has everything to do with our lifestyles.
How many times must a person who is sad see a commercial about anti-depressants and think, "Hey, maybe im not just sad because my dog died, maybe I'm depressed and need medication to make me feel better!"
I'd argue not many...
Why not? The federal government practices this every year!
You actually just need to visit an ATT store. If you call your previous provider, they wont be able to do anything. ATT would handle the entire transaction.
The charge is to help recoup some of the money that has had to be poured into this thing...recoding billing systems, etc
The fees you see on your bill amount to a fraction of what it cost for the telcos to set up this ability. Those few dollars on your bill is our nice way of recouping some of those costs.
Not sleazy at all, good business practice. Whether or not the laws go through, all cell phone providers(One of which I work for) are required to be able to comply with this new law by the 24th. This means that they have been working steadily to introduce this ability into their systems and switches. This is no easy feat, as I will guarantee that no billing system or switch any company used had this ability. The sheer cost of reprogramming along, plus the cost of retraining everyone from technical support people, to engineers, to sales people across the country, is staggering. The cellular providers, rather than being stuck with the entire cost, decided to add a surcharge of usually less than $1 to their customers bills for this. So even if this gets trash canned before the 24th, they still had to pay to implement it so that it would be up and running before then just in case.