This is the problem with/.'s moderation system - you write a long screed based on a bullshit premise and get modded to 5.
There is not law such as you've described. They don't need a law. It's part of the merchant agreement. But it gets better. In the US merchants may specifically add a surcharge to card transactions due to a settlement with the card industry:
"We found massive, massive improvement in performance -- a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home"
At my wife's company, the work-from-home employees have a higher productivity requirement than the office workers. It's a pain because the kind of work she does probably doesn't lend itself as well to the performance gains seen at other places. She's personally so much more productive than average that it doesn't matter to her, but other employees have struggled with it. She's also a total introvert so the arrangement works out perfectly for her.
Comcast et al are scum, but the fact is that Congress is the proper place to implement net neutrality with the FCC's input. Then it can't be removed at the whims of whoever's running the FCC.
The internet companies are going to lobby the hell out of Congress, so we need to make sure that the other side is heard as well. I don't see that as a problem with Google and company lobbying heavily.
You want to win the browser war and become the dominant browser? Then better be the browser where this junk can easily be removed so people can watch their content the way they want to.
Right. Because if you remove all this "junk", people will be able to watch Netflix and Hulu exactly how they want, instead of the awful player that has drm built in. Cause, you know, they'll make their players fall back to non-drm if they can't use the drm system. Right?
was approved by the Department of Homeland Security in January during President Barack Obama's waning hours in office
In other words, it's another one of these policies that is so utterly important to our country that Barack Obama waited until he was 7.95 years through his 8 year term to enact it, and then post-dated it to go into effect during Trump's presidency. Obviously it wasn't a big deal for Obama.
If these were federal employees they wouldn't have been fired. They would have been reassigned. Or asked to take early retirement. Of course this would have happened after being suspended with pay.
Totally agree, but that works both ways. We don't count the environmental impact of wind turbines, for instance, or their abject ugliness. We don't count the environmental impact of building solar panels, which is significant. The reality is that we're bad at that, but if we could count it it's likely that solar panels would still look better. It's just difficult to count what we cannot see.
Why do you have to be 'left' to support renewable energy? Renewable energy gives back control of your energy sources and localises them. This fully compatible with a conservative world view.
If you're asking seriously, I'll answer for you (although I'm not a conservative). "Renewable energy" is a left-wing dogwhistle for "let's throw government money at this". The actual idea of renewable energy is great as long as it's economically efficient. What we tend to get instead is Solyndra.
So, yeah, anybody with a brain is all for renewable energy. But anybody with a brain also wants the government to butt out and let the market handle it. (And, yes, I understand the concept of using government money to get production up to scale so it'll be more economically feasible - I understand it but I also understand the world doesn't work that way).
Are you saying ACA creates high deductible insurance?
Most people I know were moved over to high deductible insurance in the early 00s, as costs were already increasing.
Yes, the ACA made deductibles astronomically high. I know people who went from a couple thousand to eight thousand. This is part of the reason the fine for not having insurance is a joke - it has to be far higher than a deductible to make sense.
These dimensions have been industry standards for 60 years or more (just addressing my own lifetime in that). All contractors know it, all architects know it. Anyone who works with lumber knows it. Those qualified to make plans, like architects, allow for the accepted sizes in their plans.
If you are actually expecting a 2x4 to be 2" x 4", then that tells us, right off, you have no idea what you're doing.
I get the idea that the lawyers behind this know *exactly* what they're doing.
Did actually watch the segment? First of all, the woman does not health insurance so she has to pay the full amount of whatever she is going to be charged. One of the benefits of having health insurance is that the insurance company negotiated rates for you already. Some costs without insurance are ridiculous. Second, $8,000 is what the woman was quoted to her.
Then she should negotiate. This isn't an emergency procedure, so she can take her time and find someone to do it for $1000 or less.
I went through this a few years ago when my wife needed an MRI. There's a place in Nashville that does them, so I called them and asked about the procedure and costs. They quoted me something really high. So I told them I'm willing to pay the medicare reimbursement rate. It was less than half what I was initially quoted. They bitched that they can't accept that because they don't make money at that rate. I reminded them that I would pay at the time of service so they were guaranteed payment (medicare - like insurance - may deny payment and will take weeks to pay even if they do) so they're making more money since there's no possibility for a denial. They understood and accepted.
Anybody can do that, and it has nothing to do with Obamacare. The problem with Obamacare is that deductibles were raised astronomically making it harder for people to pay even with insurance.
oh, and fuck trump and his GOP 'screw everyone but the rich' agenda. impeachment can't come soon enough for that orange idiot.
Yeah, this was such an important policy for Obama that he made an executive rule on his way out of office that wouldn't go into effect until a couple of months into the next Presidency. Obviously, it was *really* important for Obama, right? He had 8 years to do it, and he didn't. That way, he didn't have to piss off his corporate overlords and clueless people like you could then blame Trump. Pathetic.
It doesn't even necessarily hurt the local economy - it changes it. "Research" like this also fails to note that other areas will now be able to grow the arabica plants that can't do so now.
When I was younger, I remember a few farms around Bloomington, Indiana that grew tobacco. That's as far north as I saw it, and the climate was actually different between Bloomington and Brazil, IN, which is just an hour northwest of Bloomington. Now, tobacco is more common around Bloomington and is probably grown north of there.
Every climate alarmist needs to understand this. We're talking about changes, not extinction here.
One of the last big union strongholds was grocery, with Kroger and Safeway/Albertsons employees being unionized. They've been facing stiff competition from non-union Walmart, Trader Joe's, Costco, and Target and some new non-union entrants like Aldi.
Now with Amazon 's big push into the grocery business, unions are setup for even bigger losses.
I tell you, it's awful. If only there were a way that those employees could own part of the company for which they work - like, literally buy a piece of the company. Then they could have even more influence over the company than a union has. They could even buy and sell pieces of their company and others on an open market.
But you DON'T have a right to make ME give YOU health care.
See the difference?
I don't.
If you have the right to make me pay for the Iraq war, which I didn't want, or the War on Drugs, which I didn't want, and many other things I didn't want, then why don't I (meaning a majority of voters) have the right to make you pay into a universal risk pool for health care?
Because the majority of the voters want the Iraq war and the War on Drugs (I'm with you, by the way, on those items), but the majority of voters don't want "free" health care because they're smart enough to understand that health care isn't actually free.
I can't wait to see how the carriers manage to interpret this rule in the most customer-hostile way possible. Maybe they'll create a special "speaking to phone unlocking agent" fee.
Last time I had a landline phone bill it still included some ridiculous amount for touch tone fees. In that spirit, it seems like Canadian telecoms can easily make up for this rule by charging extra for you to use an unlocked phone on their network.
In the looney left version of reality, Trump and his team have been meeting with the Russian puppetmasters repeatedly starting long before the election. So your explanation makes no sense. Of course, the entire point I was making was that it's impossible to reconcile both looney left positions so throwing in your third position wouldn't actually cause more issues.
Like most successful automation, it works well if you can plan the activity to suit the tool. For instance, at home I just don't buy clothes that I can't wash in a washing machine, or dishes that I can't wash in a dishwasher. Once you're willing to make compromises, then automation offers some significant advantages. In this case, if you planned your vegetable garden around this, it could work well.
Of course people don't want to compromise. I think a major reason that Roomba's are more of a toy is people aren't willing to take the step of changing their living area to work well with a robot vacuum.
Buy a Neato. It maps the room with lidar and cleans it properly. No need to redo the house for the vacuum.
"I can respect that these people are wrestling this power from the hands of media conglomerates and making it a commercial service."
Yes, people subverting the course of democracy for personal profit should be respected.
Agreed, but how does that differ from major news organizations doing the same? Fake news isn't new - look at Dan Rather's downfall. Are we suggesting he didn't do it for personal profit?
Slashdot Mirror
This is the problem with /.'s moderation system - you write a long screed based on a bullshit premise and get modded to 5.
There is not law such as you've described. They don't need a law. It's part of the merchant agreement. But it gets better. In the US merchants may specifically add a surcharge to card transactions due to a settlement with the card industry:
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/...
So, basically, you're not only wrong, you are the exact opposite of true.
"We found massive, massive improvement in performance -- a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home"
At my wife's company, the work-from-home employees have a higher productivity requirement than the office workers. It's a pain because the kind of work she does probably doesn't lend itself as well to the performance gains seen at other places. She's personally so much more productive than average that it doesn't matter to her, but other employees have struggled with it. She's also a total introvert so the arrangement works out perfectly for her.
Comcast et al are scum, but the fact is that Congress is the proper place to implement net neutrality with the FCC's input. Then it can't be removed at the whims of whoever's running the FCC.
The internet companies are going to lobby the hell out of Congress, so we need to make sure that the other side is heard as well. I don't see that as a problem with Google and company lobbying heavily.
You want to win the browser war and become the dominant browser? Then better be the browser where this junk can easily be removed so people can watch their content the way they want to.
Right. Because if you remove all this "junk", people will be able to watch Netflix and Hulu exactly how they want, instead of the awful player that has drm built in. Cause, you know, they'll make their players fall back to non-drm if they can't use the drm system. Right?
Are you really that stupid?
the millions of devices still running the operating system
LOL!
Yeah, right.
They should just call the 2 people still using Windows phone to let them know.
You can also see it in the cost of a 26' UHaul between Texas and California/NY
Los Angeles, CA to Dallas, TX: $2,558
Dallas TX to Los Angeles: $1,232
NY, NY to Dallas, TX: $2,772
Dallas TX to NY, NY: $653
At some point uhaul is going to start paying people to take their trailers back to NY and CA.
was approved by the Department of Homeland Security in January during President Barack Obama's waning hours in office
In other words, it's another one of these policies that is so utterly important to our country that Barack Obama waited until he was 7.95 years through his 8 year term to enact it, and then post-dated it to go into effect during Trump's presidency. Obviously it wasn't a big deal for Obama.
You do know that Uber has never made money, right? They've raised plenty of VC, but they don't seem particularly good at actually making money.
If these were federal employees they wouldn't have been fired. They would have been reassigned. Or asked to take early retirement. Of course this would have happened after being suspended with pay.
...for three years...
Totally agree, but that works both ways. We don't count the environmental impact of wind turbines, for instance, or their abject ugliness. We don't count the environmental impact of building solar panels, which is significant. The reality is that we're bad at that, but if we could count it it's likely that solar panels would still look better. It's just difficult to count what we cannot see.
Why do you have to be 'left' to support renewable energy? Renewable energy gives back control of your energy sources and localises them. This fully compatible with a conservative world view.
If you're asking seriously, I'll answer for you (although I'm not a conservative). "Renewable energy" is a left-wing dogwhistle for "let's throw government money at this". The actual idea of renewable energy is great as long as it's economically efficient. What we tend to get instead is Solyndra.
So, yeah, anybody with a brain is all for renewable energy. But anybody with a brain also wants the government to butt out and let the market handle it. (And, yes, I understand the concept of using government money to get production up to scale so it'll be more economically feasible - I understand it but I also understand the world doesn't work that way).
Are you saying ACA creates high deductible insurance?
Most people I know were moved over to high deductible insurance in the early 00s, as costs were already increasing.
Yes, the ACA made deductibles astronomically high. I know people who went from a couple thousand to eight thousand. This is part of the reason the fine for not having insurance is a joke - it has to be far higher than a deductible to make sense.
These dimensions have been industry standards for 60 years or more (just addressing my own lifetime in that). All contractors know it, all architects know it. Anyone who works with lumber knows it. Those qualified to make plans, like architects, allow for the accepted sizes in their plans.
If you are actually expecting a 2x4 to be 2" x 4", then that tells us, right off, you have no idea what you're doing.
I get the idea that the lawyers behind this know *exactly* what they're doing.
Did actually watch the segment? First of all, the woman does not health insurance so she has to pay the full amount of whatever she is going to be charged. One of the benefits of having health insurance is that the insurance company negotiated rates for you already. Some costs without insurance are ridiculous. Second, $8,000 is what the woman was quoted to her.
Then she should negotiate. This isn't an emergency procedure, so she can take her time and find someone to do it for $1000 or less.
I went through this a few years ago when my wife needed an MRI. There's a place in Nashville that does them, so I called them and asked about the procedure and costs. They quoted me something really high. So I told them I'm willing to pay the medicare reimbursement rate. It was less than half what I was initially quoted. They bitched that they can't accept that because they don't make money at that rate. I reminded them that I would pay at the time of service so they were guaranteed payment (medicare - like insurance - may deny payment and will take weeks to pay even if they do) so they're making more money since there's no possibility for a denial. They understood and accepted.
Anybody can do that, and it has nothing to do with Obamacare. The problem with Obamacare is that deductibles were raised astronomically making it harder for people to pay even with insurance.
oh, and fuck trump and his GOP 'screw everyone but the rich' agenda. impeachment can't come soon enough for that orange idiot.
Yeah, this was such an important policy for Obama that he made an executive rule on his way out of office that wouldn't go into effect until a couple of months into the next Presidency. Obviously, it was *really* important for Obama, right? He had 8 years to do it, and he didn't. That way, he didn't have to piss off his corporate overlords and clueless people like you could then blame Trump. Pathetic.
It doesn't even necessarily hurt the local economy - it changes it. "Research" like this also fails to note that other areas will now be able to grow the arabica plants that can't do so now.
When I was younger, I remember a few farms around Bloomington, Indiana that grew tobacco. That's as far north as I saw it, and the climate was actually different between Bloomington and Brazil, IN, which is just an hour northwest of Bloomington. Now, tobacco is more common around Bloomington and is probably grown north of there.
Every climate alarmist needs to understand this. We're talking about changes, not extinction here.
One of the last big union strongholds was grocery, with Kroger and Safeway/Albertsons employees being unionized. They've been facing stiff competition from non-union Walmart, Trader Joe's, Costco, and Target and some new non-union entrants like Aldi.
Now with Amazon 's big push into the grocery business, unions are setup for even bigger losses.
I tell you, it's awful. If only there were a way that those employees could own part of the company for which they work - like, literally buy a piece of the company. Then they could have even more influence over the company than a union has. They could even buy and sell pieces of their company and others on an open market.
Sounds crazy.
If you care about the planet, you also won't ask for a private plane:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
But, you know, Hillary really cares about global warming and all that, right?
But you DON'T have a right to make ME give YOU health care.
See the difference?
I don't.
If you have the right to make me pay for the Iraq war, which I didn't want, or the War on Drugs, which I didn't want, and many other things I didn't want, then why don't I (meaning a majority of voters) have the right to make you pay into a universal risk pool for health care?
Because the majority of the voters want the Iraq war and the War on Drugs (I'm with you, by the way, on those items), but the majority of voters don't want "free" health care because they're smart enough to understand that health care isn't actually free.
I can't wait to see how the carriers manage to interpret this rule in the most customer-hostile way possible. Maybe they'll create a special "speaking to phone unlocking agent" fee.
Last time I had a landline phone bill it still included some ridiculous amount for touch tone fees. In that spirit, it seems like Canadian telecoms can easily make up for this rule by charging extra for you to use an unlocked phone on their network.
The Fuck are you talking about?!
I think he's talking about hot grits, Natalie Portman, and goatse.
They have a right to receive health care, we all do.
But you DON'T have a right to make ME give YOU health care.
See the difference?
In the looney left version of reality, Trump and his team have been meeting with the Russian puppetmasters repeatedly starting long before the election. So your explanation makes no sense. Of course, the entire point I was making was that it's impossible to reconcile both looney left positions so throwing in your third position wouldn't actually cause more issues.
Like most successful automation, it works well if you can plan the activity to suit the tool. For instance, at home I just don't buy clothes that I can't wash in a washing machine, or dishes that I can't wash in a dishwasher. Once you're willing to make compromises, then automation offers some significant advantages. In this case, if you planned your vegetable garden around this, it could work well.
Of course people don't want to compromise. I think a major reason that Roomba's are more of a toy is people aren't willing to take the step of changing their living area to work well with a robot vacuum.
Buy a Neato. It maps the room with lidar and cleans it properly. No need to redo the house for the vacuum.
"I can respect that these people are wrestling this power from the hands of media conglomerates and making it a commercial service."
Yes, people subverting the course of democracy for personal profit should be respected.
Agreed, but how does that differ from major news organizations doing the same? Fake news isn't new - look at Dan Rather's downfall. Are we suggesting he didn't do it for personal profit?