But companies should be able to offer corners of the internet - or even large rooms of the internet - where anonymous speech is prohibited. And they should be able to offer corners, or large rooms, where non-anonymous speech is prohibited.
Then, people can exercise their rights of free association to decide whether they want to participate in environments where anonymous speech is restricted, required, or any where in between..
Personally, I prefer environments where anonymous speech is restricted. I can understand that, if I lived in China, I may have a different opinion, but then I can use a different platform.
Either way, just because someone offers something doesn't mean they have to offer it in a way that everyone wants them to.
The problem is, it's not possible for most Americans to effectively save for retirement, because you don't know how long you'll live. Saving for retirement is easy if you get a heart attack before you retire, and then you have a whole bunch of unused retirement savings. But, if you live to be 95, you may be screwed no matter how much you save.
But, even setting that aside, the ship has sailed - Social Security is a pyramid scheme, and there's no way to unwind it. The first recipients got the benefits for free, and current workers pay for current benefits. So the only way to get rid of it is to stop paying current benefits, which would leave the people who DID save for retirement (by making 15% payroll deductions) with no retirement.
So, you're pretty much stuck with Social Security. And, really, it's not a problem. It pretty much pays for itself. The problem is that the ueber rich don't want to pay taxes to support everything else the government does, so they want to "reform" social security so that it takes in more tax revenues than it spends and then use the difference to fund their tax cuts.
(Medicare and Medicaid need to be reformed - they can't just keep growing at faster than inflation.)
The Bush tax cuts cut taxes for everyone, not only the rich.
While that's TECHNICALLY mostly true, it's not true in spirit.
Let's say I have $10,000 that I'm going to give to 100 people. If I give one of them $9,901 and 99 of them $1, would it be fair to say I just gave $10,000 to a group of 100 people?
That's basically the way the Bush income taxes worked. Middle class Americans saw their post-tax income go up 1%. The ueber-rich saw their post-tax income go up 6%. They used a token tax cut for most of us to buy support for a huge tax cut for the uber-rich.
The Obama tax cut saved most Americans much more on their taxes than the Bush tax cuts. Cutting 2% from the payroll tax did almost nothing for the ueber rich, but made a big difference for Americans who actually work for a living.
One doesn't get rich by stealing from the poor. But one who is already rich can get filthy rich by stealing from the middle class - one way to do that is make the middle class pay a 15.4% tax on their jobs, and 25% on any additional income, while only paying a 15% tax on your income because, already being rich, you don't have to "work" anymore and can just "invest".
Federal taxes are currently set up to reward people for already having money.
I'll tell you how to fix the US economy, btw. Eliminate payroll taxes right now, for employees and employers. Make taxes on capital gains and dividends the same as income taxes. If that' still not revenue neutral, up everyone's income taxes by whatever percentage is needed to keep overall revenue the same.
Result: Creating a job in American just became 15.4% less expensive. People who ACTUALLY create jobs get a nice tax cut. Workers get a tax cut. People who only increase profits by shipping jobs overseas get a big tax increase. Result: Huge incentives to create jobs in the US, growing the US economy, and hopefully even making it a long-term wash for the people who don't create jobs.
Short version: You don't pay social security / medicare / medicaid taxes for future benefits. You pay them so if your family or friends get too old and or too sick, you're not faced with having to care for them yourself or watch them try and live in the streets.
I don't like it when people make Social Security a moral imperative. It isn't. It's a practical imperative. Social Security is essentially "living too long" insurance. Everybody pays into it, and when you get old enough, you get paid so that you don't have to keep working to avoid living on the street. This is done in a very, very financially efficient manner. Were you to replace the same program with some private equivalent, much more money would be lost to administration (like advertising), profits, etc. Medicare / Medicaid works the same way - insuring old people isn't profitable, so the government has to do it. And Medicaid steps in to care for people who no longer have any assets.
The reason social security is a practical imperative is that it's better than any alternative. You have to ask yourself, what do you replace social security with? Well, the same thing that exists in 2nd and 3rd world countries: Extended families.
So, you might get lucky - your parents both die of heart attacks when they're 65 and leave you a nice inheritance. Or, you might not get lucky. Maybe your parents live to 85 years old and have a debilitating condition like Alzheimers that requires round-the-clock care. In that case, under the current system, social security pays enough for them to not live on the street, and Medicare covers their hospital bills and some prescriptions. It doesn't cover nursing home care though, so your parents will use all of their assets paying for nursing home care (or, more appropriately, you'll use all their assets paying for nursing home care) until they are broke. At that point, Medicaid will step in and cover their nursing home care.
If you eliminate social security and medicare and medicaid, you instead have different choices: Start bankrupting yourself paying for your parent's care, let your parents move in with you and do nothing except work and have everyone in your family take turns bathing and wiping the ass of your parent, or let them die in the street.
Social Security and Medicare isn't just for old people either. Let's say your sister or brother gets in a car accident and has brain damage and can no longer work or really care for themselves. Social security and Medicare will pay enough that they won't have to live on the street and, once they are completely broke, get their medical bills paid. Remember, since they can't work, they lose any insurance they had.
Without social security and medicaid, once your brother or sister has no assets left, you can bankrupt yourself paying for their care, or let them die. Those are your options - let 'em die, or become bankrupt - because of an accident. Or maybe it's cancer. But as soon as you're sick enough that you can't work, you're sick enough that nobody has to pay for your medical care either.
So, sure, we can get rid of social security and medicare and medicaid. That's likely, at some point, to really make your life difficult. That's a huge cost to you - you lose a big benefit. What do you get? Do your taxes go down? To you get to keep more of your money? No. You don't. The benefit of getting rid of social security and medicare and medicaid is that the richest Americans can continue to pay 15% taxes on their capital gains and dividends while the rest of us pay up to a marginal 43% combined on income and payroll taxes.
The rich don't want to cut social security and medicare and medicaid to help you - they want to cut them to help them.
You're the problem with this country.
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How does it feel to be just smart enough to repeat a talking point, but not smart enough to know that what you're repeating isn't true?
And "raising the debt ceiling" means printing more Dollars.
This is just plain wrong. In fact, raising the debt ceiling is the option that AVOIDs having to print more money.
When the US raises the debt ceiling, it allows the government to sell more debt. When the government sells debt, someone else BUYS that debt. The total number of dollars stays the same - the government isn't printing more money, it's just paying somebody else interest to use the dollars they already have. If that person didn't buy the debt, because they didn't want to or it were not available to buy, then they'd presumably to something else with that money.
If what you were saying were true, then everytime someone used a credit card, they'd be printing money too.
On the converse, if the debt ceiling is NOT raised, one way out of that situation would be for the Fed to mint a $5 trillion coin, and then the government could use that to keep paying what congress already demanded that the government spend. THAT *WOULD*, however, destroy confidence in the currency.
Re:Then Why Are We Seeing the Same Negative Effect
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 2
Please reread what you wrote: The amount of debt you owe has little to do... with the likelihood that you can repay that debt...?
Well, depends how you look at it. The amount of debt alone isn't important; it's the amount of debt compared with likely future income. And in the case of the federal government, we'll almost certainly repay that debt, even if it's ultimately done with an inflation tax.
For example, Greece and Portugal and Ireland and Italy would not be such problems if it were not for the Euro. If they still had their own currencies, they'd have inflation on their currency and the citizens in those countries would pay for their expenses. But since they are all using the Euro, that inflation would also affect Germany and France, forcing those countries to bail out their Euro counterparts to avoid inflation on their currency.
Anyway, for the federal government, the size of the debt does not matter in terms of our ability to repay it. It most certainly matters in terms of future economic stability, but the people who will be screwed will be your average citizens.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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This is just factually incorrect.
Well, no, not really. Income tax taxes income - which includes income from labor, but also includes income from any other activity. SS opened the door to taxing wages only.
First, that's a damned weird definition of evil. Second, 30% of your check isn't collected to guarantee a pension - 4.2% of it is.
That's factually incorrect as well. This year, a total of 13.4% of wages, up to about $100,000, is collected to fund social security AND medicare. And social security also includes disability funding benefits - so if you get injured and can't work anymore, right now, you'll get some money so you won't have to live in the street.
And it's only 13.4% this year - last year, and next year, it'll be 15.4%.
And this tax is ONLY on AMERICAN JOBS. It should really be called the 'Federal Job Tax'. You don't pay it if you get your income from dividends, capital gains, interest, etc. That means it's basically another way for the rich to dodge taxes - you can cut your federal taxes by firing your American workers and shipping their jobs overseas.
Unfortunately, republicans seem to have done a very good job convincing the populace that the only federal taxes are INCOME taxes. So then they run around saying "The rich pay more than their fair share of income taxes!". They never seem to mention that the rest of us pay way more than our fair share of job taxes.
The question here really is: Who does want your real name -- and why?
It depends who you are. There are disadvantages to anonymity - a chief one of which is not knowing the reputation or motives of the anonymous person.
Requiring a real name - identity - also creates more significant consequences for a person's actions, and enables better control over an environment. Prohibiting anonymity, for example, is often an excellent tool for reducing spam.
The odds of the writer being female also goes up if they are bad at math. For example, if there were 140 characters left, I wouldn't have said anything at all.
I've spent a long time online. And I can pretty easily and reliably deduce gender from what someone "says". Women write differently. I wouldn't say they write worse, just differently.
And the Wall Street Journal has access to universal truths that allow them to see the only clear path out of this mess? Right.
If by universal truths you mean "addition", then yes, it appears the WSJ (and the rest of us) have access to those truths while the tea party does not.
The tea party position is that we can not raise taxes and must balance the budget by cutting spending.
That's not mathematically possible, unless we cut federal government to the point that new drugs don't get approved, corporations can lie about their earnings to scam stock sales without fear of enforcement, Mexican drug cartels can invade and take over Texas, nee, a flood of brown people into the country can't be stopped......or you let Grandma move in with you until she spends your inheritance on healthcare until she runs out of money, then you can decide whether you want to let grandma die or will pay for her health care yourself.
That's the thing... if the Tea Party wins, you don't get anything. The rich keep their lower tax rates on all that income they get by not providing any benefits or enough pay for people to save for retirement, and instead of Medicare paying for nursing home care once she's broke, you get to bankrupt yourself too.
I'd like to know how many of these masters degrees are in education. Most teacher union contracts increase pay based on degrees held, and require continuing education. This means most teachers end up with masters degrees by default. And they get their masters degrees wherever it's easiest to get them, since unlike the private sector, the union contract doesn't pay more for a masters degree from a quality institution (as measured by employer experience with the capabilities of students who graduate from such an institution.)
Of course, those masters degrees don't do crap to improve the quality of education received by students, but they do a great job of keeping Universities open to award masters degrees.
Well, that's not entirely true. MySpace and Friendster somehow managed to lose all of my friends to Facebook. And it wasn't because my friends were already on Facebook - it was because Facebook was better.
There are three key factors in why Facebook did well:
1) They made it easy for kids to find other kids at their colleges. That got them their initial critical mass. 2) They didn't let users make their profile pages majorly annoying like MySpace did. 3) Zynga.
Google+ is a real threat because lots of people are already on Google's services, so Google already has that initial critical mass. If Google gets Zynga to put their future games on Google+ in addition to or instead of Facebook, Facebook is in real trouble.
Not right about the mormons, or the catholics? The catholics, maybe, I don't have a whole lot of personal experience there other than I don't know anyone socially ostracized from the catholic church for using birth control (or doing many other things catholics are not supposed to do.) That's definitely not the case with Mormons. There is very, very significant social pressure for mormons to conform, using many of the same mechanisms (although not necessarily to the same degree) as straight-up bonafide cults. (Not, of course, that other major religions and even other social groups don't have the same pressures, just not to the same degree.)
I travel a lot, actually, 75,000+ miles a year in the air.
Although I've never personally tried to turn around once entering security, I have had items in my bags they wouldn't let me on the plane with and not going through security has always been presented as an option.
Plus, TSA agents are not law enforcement personnel. Just turn around and leave, they can't stop you. (With, of course, the caveat that you never know when you might run into an overzealous government employee or law enforcement member.)
Did you know that movie theaters give away half-off tickets to... anyone who goes before 5 PM?
It doesn't seem that you understand price discrimination very well. Often times the best way to maximize profits is to find a way to charge lots of people what they're each individually willing to pay instead of trying to maintain the same price for everyone. Even if none of your groupon customers become repeat customers, you still upped your revenue. And you may have upped your revenue by a lot more than the cost of the groupon - that's why, for example, theme parks often practically give tickets away. Even if you don't pay them a thing to get in the park they'll still make money when you buy concessions.
Groupons won't work for every business, but anyone who insists that groupons are bad for businesses has a very limited understanding of business.
Mormons operate much more like a cult than most major religions. There are significant consequences to not behaving the way the church wants you to behave.
Most of that is based on extensive social pressure. The Mormon church tries very hard to narrow your social existence down to just other mormons. They have special fellowship groups for mormon singles to make sure you're meeting and marrying other mormons. They have their own TV channel with programming they expect you to watch - and if you don't watch it, everyone at church will admonish you when they talk about what was on and you don't know what they're talking about. There is tremendous pressure to conform, and there is lots of programming that starts early. You know how women dream of the "perfect wedding"? Well, in the mormon church, they program you from a very early age to really want to be married at the mormon temple in Utah. Don't behave the way the church wants you to? No perfect wedding for you!
So, if you're a single woman and tell your catholic priest you're using birth control, he'll probably tell you the pope doesn't like it and suggest something else. If you tell your mormon church official that you're using birth control, they will require you to go to counseling about the evils of premarital sex and if you don't go, they will toss you from the church, which may very well result in all your friends and family refusing to continue to associate with you. And don't think that's limited to severe behaviors - I knew an (unmarried) couple pushed into intensive religious counseling because the church officials found out they were both laying horizontally on the same bed at the same time! (By, I believe, basically suggesting to the female half that she better be honest or god was going to smite her.)
Now, I have not interacted much with mormons in the past 10 years, so maybe this has all changed since then, but I doubt it.
So yeah, as far as the Mormon church goes, it is a totally different animal than most of the rest of your garden variety religions.
Pretty much any investment will outperform increases in stamp prices. Forever stamps are a way for the post office to MAKE MONEY on the difference, *AND* cut costs associated with having to make the old stamps obsolete when postage rates go up.
If you can get $1 now and make it worth $1.10 later in exchange for spending $1.08 to provide a service later, you'd be an idiot not to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
But companies should be able to offer corners of the internet - or even large rooms of the internet - where anonymous speech is prohibited. And they should be able to offer corners, or large rooms, where non-anonymous speech is prohibited.
Then, people can exercise their rights of free association to decide whether they want to participate in environments where anonymous speech is restricted, required, or any where in between..
Personally, I prefer environments where anonymous speech is restricted. I can understand that, if I lived in China, I may have a different opinion, but then I can use a different platform.
Either way, just because someone offers something doesn't mean they have to offer it in a way that everyone wants them to.
The problem is, it's not possible for most Americans to effectively save for retirement, because you don't know how long you'll live. Saving for retirement is easy if you get a heart attack before you retire, and then you have a whole bunch of unused retirement savings. But, if you live to be 95, you may be screwed no matter how much you save.
But, even setting that aside, the ship has sailed - Social Security is a pyramid scheme, and there's no way to unwind it. The first recipients got the benefits for free, and current workers pay for current benefits. So the only way to get rid of it is to stop paying current benefits, which would leave the people who DID save for retirement (by making 15% payroll deductions) with no retirement.
So, you're pretty much stuck with Social Security. And, really, it's not a problem. It pretty much pays for itself. The problem is that the ueber rich don't want to pay taxes to support everything else the government does, so they want to "reform" social security so that it takes in more tax revenues than it spends and then use the difference to fund their tax cuts.
(Medicare and Medicaid need to be reformed - they can't just keep growing at faster than inflation.)
I'm guessing you just post google over and over to fill up the 140 characters left after you've said something worthwhile.
It specifically states that something worthwhile is said, which can not be done in 0 characters.
Losing the argument and then pretending you were talking about something else would also increase the odds that the speaker is female.
The Bush tax cuts cut taxes for everyone, not only the rich.
While that's TECHNICALLY mostly true, it's not true in spirit.
Let's say I have $10,000 that I'm going to give to 100 people. If I give one of them $9,901 and 99 of them $1, would it be fair to say I just gave $10,000 to a group of 100 people?
That's basically the way the Bush income taxes worked. Middle class Americans saw their post-tax income go up 1%. The ueber-rich saw their post-tax income go up 6%. They used a token tax cut for most of us to buy support for a huge tax cut for the uber-rich.
The Obama tax cut saved most Americans much more on their taxes than the Bush tax cuts. Cutting 2% from the payroll tax did almost nothing for the ueber rich, but made a big difference for Americans who actually work for a living.
One doesn't get rich by stealing from the poor. But one who is already rich can get filthy rich by stealing from the middle class - one way to do that is make the middle class pay a 15.4% tax on their jobs, and 25% on any additional income, while only paying a 15% tax on your income because, already being rich, you don't have to "work" anymore and can just "invest".
Federal taxes are currently set up to reward people for already having money.
I'll tell you how to fix the US economy, btw. Eliminate payroll taxes right now, for employees and employers. Make taxes on capital gains and dividends the same as income taxes. If that' still not revenue neutral, up everyone's income taxes by whatever percentage is needed to keep overall revenue the same.
Result: Creating a job in American just became 15.4% less expensive. People who ACTUALLY create jobs get a nice tax cut. Workers get a tax cut. People who only increase profits by shipping jobs overseas get a big tax increase. Result: Huge incentives to create jobs in the US, growing the US economy, and hopefully even making it a long-term wash for the people who don't create jobs.
Short version: You don't pay social security / medicare / medicaid taxes for future benefits. You pay them so if your family or friends get too old and or too sick, you're not faced with having to care for them yourself or watch them try and live in the streets.
I don't like it when people make Social Security a moral imperative. It isn't. It's a practical imperative. Social Security is essentially "living too long" insurance. Everybody pays into it, and when you get old enough, you get paid so that you don't have to keep working to avoid living on the street. This is done in a very, very financially efficient manner. Were you to replace the same program with some private equivalent, much more money would be lost to administration (like advertising), profits, etc. Medicare / Medicaid works the same way - insuring old people isn't profitable, so the government has to do it. And Medicaid steps in to care for people who no longer have any assets.
The reason social security is a practical imperative is that it's better than any alternative. You have to ask yourself, what do you replace social security with? Well, the same thing that exists in 2nd and 3rd world countries: Extended families.
So, you might get lucky - your parents both die of heart attacks when they're 65 and leave you a nice inheritance. Or, you might not get lucky. Maybe your parents live to 85 years old and have a debilitating condition like Alzheimers that requires round-the-clock care. In that case, under the current system, social security pays enough for them to not live on the street, and Medicare covers their hospital bills and some prescriptions. It doesn't cover nursing home care though, so your parents will use all of their assets paying for nursing home care (or, more appropriately, you'll use all their assets paying for nursing home care) until they are broke. At that point, Medicaid will step in and cover their nursing home care.
If you eliminate social security and medicare and medicaid, you instead have different choices: Start bankrupting yourself paying for your parent's care, let your parents move in with you and do nothing except work and have everyone in your family take turns bathing and wiping the ass of your parent, or let them die in the street.
Social Security and Medicare isn't just for old people either. Let's say your sister or brother gets in a car accident and has brain damage and can no longer work or really care for themselves. Social security and Medicare will pay enough that they won't have to live on the street and, once they are completely broke, get their medical bills paid. Remember, since they can't work, they lose any insurance they had.
Without social security and medicaid, once your brother or sister has no assets left, you can bankrupt yourself paying for their care, or let them die. Those are your options - let 'em die, or become bankrupt - because of an accident. Or maybe it's cancer. But as soon as you're sick enough that you can't work, you're sick enough that nobody has to pay for your medical care either.
So, sure, we can get rid of social security and medicare and medicaid. That's likely, at some point, to really make your life difficult. That's a huge cost to you - you lose a big benefit. What do you get? Do your taxes go down? To you get to keep more of your money? No. You don't. The benefit of getting rid of social security and medicare and medicaid is that the richest Americans can continue to pay 15% taxes on their capital gains and dividends while the rest of us pay up to a marginal 43% combined on income and payroll taxes.
The rich don't want to cut social security and medicare and medicaid to help you - they want to cut them to help them.
How does it feel to be just smart enough to repeat a talking point, but not smart enough to know that what you're repeating isn't true?
And "raising the debt ceiling" means printing more Dollars.
This is just plain wrong. In fact, raising the debt ceiling is the option that AVOIDs having to print more money.
When the US raises the debt ceiling, it allows the government to sell more debt. When the government sells debt, someone else BUYS that debt. The total number of dollars stays the same - the government isn't printing more money, it's just paying somebody else interest to use the dollars they already have. If that person didn't buy the debt, because they didn't want to or it were not available to buy, then they'd presumably to something else with that money.
If what you were saying were true, then everytime someone used a credit card, they'd be printing money too.
On the converse, if the debt ceiling is NOT raised, one way out of that situation would be for the Fed to mint a $5 trillion coin, and then the government could use that to keep paying what congress already demanded that the government spend. THAT *WOULD*, however, destroy confidence in the currency.
Please reread what you wrote: The amount of debt you owe has little to do ... with the likelihood that you can repay that debt...?
Well, depends how you look at it. The amount of debt alone isn't important; it's the amount of debt compared with likely future income. And in the case of the federal government, we'll almost certainly repay that debt, even if it's ultimately done with an inflation tax.
For example, Greece and Portugal and Ireland and Italy would not be such problems if it were not for the Euro. If they still had their own currencies, they'd have inflation on their currency and the citizens in those countries would pay for their expenses. But since they are all using the Euro, that inflation would also affect Germany and France, forcing those countries to bail out their Euro counterparts to avoid inflation on their currency.
Anyway, for the federal government, the size of the debt does not matter in terms of our ability to repay it. It most certainly matters in terms of future economic stability, but the people who will be screwed will be your average citizens.
This is just factually incorrect.
Well, no, not really. Income tax taxes income - which includes income from labor, but also includes income from any other activity. SS opened the door to taxing wages only.
First, that's a damned weird definition of evil. Second, 30% of your check isn't collected to guarantee a pension - 4.2% of it is.
That's factually incorrect as well. This year, a total of 13.4% of wages, up to about $100,000, is collected to fund social security AND medicare. And social security also includes disability funding benefits - so if you get injured and can't work anymore, right now, you'll get some money so you won't have to live in the street.
And it's only 13.4% this year - last year, and next year, it'll be 15.4%.
And this tax is ONLY on AMERICAN JOBS. It should really be called the 'Federal Job Tax'. You don't pay it if you get your income from dividends, capital gains, interest, etc. That means it's basically another way for the rich to dodge taxes - you can cut your federal taxes by firing your American workers and shipping their jobs overseas.
Unfortunately, republicans seem to have done a very good job convincing the populace that the only federal taxes are INCOME taxes. So then they run around saying "The rich pay more than their fair share of income taxes!". They never seem to mention that the rest of us pay way more than our fair share of job taxes.
The question here really is: Who does want your real name -- and why?
It depends who you are. There are disadvantages to anonymity - a chief one of which is not knowing the reputation or motives of the anonymous person.
Requiring a real name - identity - also creates more significant consequences for a person's actions, and enables better control over an environment. Prohibiting anonymity, for example, is often an excellent tool for reducing spam.
The odds of the writer being female also goes up if they are bad at math. For example, if there were 140 characters left, I wouldn't have said anything at all.
It's probably best I'm a guy. Have you seen the women they elect to congress?
Well, I guess if you got one of the Republicans you'd be OK. Democrats seem to vote for brains.
It's ok. The program filters for exclamation points used after the opening word or after all-caps.
Women do use lol more though, to use up some of the 120 characters left over after anything intelligent they had to say.
I've spent a long time online. And I can pretty easily and reliably deduce gender from what someone "says". Women write differently. I wouldn't say they write worse, just differently.
I go to my congressional office, take my shirt off, arrange my family photos in the background, and take a picture to send to them.
And the Wall Street Journal has access to universal truths that allow them to see the only clear path out of this mess? Right.
If by universal truths you mean "addition", then yes, it appears the WSJ (and the rest of us) have access to those truths while the tea party does not.
The tea party position is that we can not raise taxes and must balance the budget by cutting spending.
That's not mathematically possible, unless we cut federal government to the point that new drugs don't get approved, corporations can lie about their earnings to scam stock sales without fear of enforcement, Mexican drug cartels can invade and take over Texas, nee, a flood of brown people into the country can't be stopped... ...or you let Grandma move in with you until she spends your inheritance on healthcare until she runs out of money, then you can decide whether you want to let grandma die or will pay for her health care yourself.
That's the thing... if the Tea Party wins, you don't get anything. The rich keep their lower tax rates on all that income they get by not providing any benefits or enough pay for people to save for retirement, and instead of Medicare paying for nursing home care once she's broke, you get to bankrupt yourself too.
There's a word for that... it's called an endorsement.
What's the difference between paying Kim Kardashian to appear in a commercial for your product and paying her to +1 your product?
I'd like to know how many of these masters degrees are in education. Most teacher union contracts increase pay based on degrees held, and require continuing education. This means most teachers end up with masters degrees by default. And they get their masters degrees wherever it's easiest to get them, since unlike the private sector, the union contract doesn't pay more for a masters degree from a quality institution (as measured by employer experience with the capabilities of students who graduate from such an institution.)
Of course, those masters degrees don't do crap to improve the quality of education received by students, but they do a great job of keeping Universities open to award masters degrees.
Well, that's not entirely true. MySpace and Friendster somehow managed to lose all of my friends to Facebook. And it wasn't because my friends were already on Facebook - it was because Facebook was better.
There are three key factors in why Facebook did well:
1) They made it easy for kids to find other kids at their colleges. That got them their initial critical mass.
2) They didn't let users make their profile pages majorly annoying like MySpace did.
3) Zynga.
Google+ is a real threat because lots of people are already on Google's services, so Google already has that initial critical mass. If Google gets Zynga to put their future games on Google+ in addition to or instead of Facebook, Facebook is in real trouble.
Not right about the mormons, or the catholics? The catholics, maybe, I don't have a whole lot of personal experience there other than I don't know anyone socially ostracized from the catholic church for using birth control (or doing many other things catholics are not supposed to do.) That's definitely not the case with Mormons. There is very, very significant social pressure for mormons to conform, using many of the same mechanisms (although not necessarily to the same degree) as straight-up bonafide cults. (Not, of course, that other major religions and even other social groups don't have the same pressures, just not to the same degree.)
I travel a lot, actually, 75,000+ miles a year in the air.
Although I've never personally tried to turn around once entering security, I have had items in my bags they wouldn't let me on the plane with and not going through security has always been presented as an option.
Plus, TSA agents are not law enforcement personnel. Just turn around and leave, they can't stop you. (With, of course, the caveat that you never know when you might run into an overzealous government employee or law enforcement member.)
Ask to speak to a supervisor?
Say no and leave the airport?
Did you know that movie theaters give away half-off tickets to... anyone who goes before 5 PM?
It doesn't seem that you understand price discrimination very well. Often times the best way to maximize profits is to find a way to charge lots of people what they're each individually willing to pay instead of trying to maintain the same price for everyone. Even if none of your groupon customers become repeat customers, you still upped your revenue. And you may have upped your revenue by a lot more than the cost of the groupon - that's why, for example, theme parks often practically give tickets away. Even if you don't pay them a thing to get in the park they'll still make money when you buy concessions.
Groupons won't work for every business, but anyone who insists that groupons are bad for businesses has a very limited understanding of business.
Mormons operate much more like a cult than most major religions. There are significant consequences to not behaving the way the church wants you to behave.
Most of that is based on extensive social pressure. The Mormon church tries very hard to narrow your social existence down to just other mormons. They have special fellowship groups for mormon singles to make sure you're meeting and marrying other mormons. They have their own TV channel with programming they expect you to watch - and if you don't watch it, everyone at church will admonish you when they talk about what was on and you don't know what they're talking about. There is tremendous pressure to conform, and there is lots of programming that starts early. You know how women dream of the "perfect wedding"? Well, in the mormon church, they program you from a very early age to really want to be married at the mormon temple in Utah. Don't behave the way the church wants you to? No perfect wedding for you!
So, if you're a single woman and tell your catholic priest you're using birth control, he'll probably tell you the pope doesn't like it and suggest something else. If you tell your mormon church official that you're using birth control, they will require you to go to counseling about the evils of premarital sex and if you don't go, they will toss you from the church, which may very well result in all your friends and family refusing to continue to associate with you. And don't think that's limited to severe behaviors - I knew an (unmarried) couple pushed into intensive religious counseling because the church officials found out they were both laying horizontally on the same bed at the same time! (By, I believe, basically suggesting to the female half that she better be honest or god was going to smite her.)
Now, I have not interacted much with mormons in the past 10 years, so maybe this has all changed since then, but I doubt it.
So yeah, as far as the Mormon church goes, it is a totally different animal than most of the rest of your garden variety religions.
Pretty much any investment will outperform increases in stamp prices. Forever stamps are a way for the post office to MAKE MONEY on the difference, *AND* cut costs associated with having to make the old stamps obsolete when postage rates go up.
If you can get $1 now and make it worth $1.10 later in exchange for spending $1.08 to provide a service later, you'd be an idiot not to do it.