This happened to me many years back. I had managed to get commonnickname.middleinitial.lastname@gmail.com, intending to use it for "professional" purposes. My name, however, is highly common (even including the middle initial), and after having it for about a year I started getting sign-ups and order confirmations that were obviously not for me.
At first, I ignored it. I figure there was a letter difference, or the other guy wanted meant to use @yahoo.com. After a few confirmation e-mails went unanswered, surely he would realize the problem? But he didn't. And then I started getting personal correspondence, as if he was giving it to acquaintances. I replied to two or three, and those did seem to stop, but the sign-ups and orders didn't. I started reporting them to the respective sites, hoping that if stuff stopped showing up he might get the hint, but it never did.
Finally, I got fed up with it, and after yet another order confirmation I used my e-mail address to reset the password for his account, log into it, and get his physical address. Then I typed up a stern-yet-polite message to him to stop using my @)*(*$%&*)@*( e-mail address! One stamp and off it went.
I think that must have done the trick, because the rate started to decrease, but not long after I just got my own domain name and use that now, instead. The gmail account has probably lapsed since. In hindsight, I probably could have gotten in trouble if he was the vengeful type, but I suspected him to be an older guy with only a passing understanding of the internet in general.
Obviously the charge for postage from EU to AUS will be quite a bit higher than my 30 cents I spent at the time. In the meantime, you might make use of the modifier: gmail allows you to use username+modifier@gmail.com (e.g. tukaro+slashdot@), and with various websites you can use a common modifier and set up a filter to deem it "legitimate". Everything else can be shunted to a quasi-spam folder, which will be easier to sort through.
You may also report the sign-ups as being invalid. Most websites I contacted said they would close the account in question (one music site misinterpreted my notice as a claim of fraud), and if a physical letter doesn't work (or you want to use that as a last resort) this may correct the habit.
many people will find it really difficult to live without work and not because of financial aspects
I don't understand this line of thought (which I place in the same vein as "everyone will become fat and lazy"). I agree that make-work jobs will disappear, but charities and hobbies will not evaporate along with them. A lot of the human-dedicated charities might dwindle, as UBI replaces any need for them, but there are plenty of charities that are not focused on basic human welfare and many of these other groups will expand as more people have time to volunteer for them.
People already donate time beyond their standard 40 hours (or more) at their paying job. My day job is data management and translation, but I also volunteer at a feline rescue/shelter, doing not only shift management and visitor "greeting", but also involved in a lot of their tech-related needs. President Jimmy Carter collapsed building free homes for people this past weekend.
When you're in retirement you don't necessarily have the energy or ability to go out to such places, but I expect even geriatrics might find new opportunities in such a system. UBI means that cash will move around more freely within communities, which will lead to more entrepreneurship; they might get a gig that is both low-hour and low-pay (as low as $1/hour) where they just say "hello" to people who walk into a store and tell them where to find various departments (think Wal-mart greeters, but everywhere.) Go in one day a week, sit on a chair for 6-8 hours, and they get a little extra money on top of their UBI.
I think that UBI would lead to a lot more community efforts as well, to make those UBI dollars stretch for people who want to do something but can't stomach any jobs offered. Community gardens, simplistic tailoring, various trades of services. Many of these would spring from hobbies and personal interests (how many people maintain a small garden in their backyard or quilt/knit on their own time and dime?). Re-using or re-purposing stuff would also take on an extra amount of focus, so someone who can fix up an old laptop could do so in exchange for a few tomatoes or a warm hat.
They can't just let a person be a person who just so happens to be gay, nope its "hey did you know I'm gay? Because i'm totally gay, yup as gay as gay can be uh huh that is me" which I have no doubt we'll look back in 20 years and see this virtue signaling for what it is...as racist as anything Amos and Andy did back in the day because they aren't allowed to just be people,normal folks with thoughts and fears and anxieties like everybody else, nope they have to go "magical negro" only its "super happy gay friend".
It might be the exception that proves the rule, but Law & Order actually did this. One of the ADAs, Serena Southerlyn was a lesbian but the show only gave a few hints of this until her final episode where it was stated plainly in the closing minutes. (That reveal is often lambasted as a cheap stunt, which I do agree with.)
Indeed. I recall having a lot of problems when I used my.edu address for stuff in college and then graduated.
For those that might be squeamish running their own, I believe Gmail offers a way to use its service with your own domain, but I don't know if that costs money (and they might still do data collection even if it does, which is why I didn't mention it in OP.) I imagine other e-mail providers offer similar options.
I'm on the hunt for an email service that supports encryption, has a good Privacy Policy, and doesn't have a history of breaches or allowing snooping.
You don't want any of the free offerings (like Gmail) then. As far as I know, every mail service that is free does snooping for advertising, whether it's directly in their web client or used elsewhere.
I don't have any paid services to recommend (and even these may or may not come with data slurping) but you could always try rolling your own. Domain names are cheap ($10-$20/yr depending on who you get it through) and many domain registrars offer some sort of mail-setup that can vary greatly in price. GoDaddy is not a registrar I'd recommend, but for an example their e-mail service starts at $5/mo normally.
You could also throw together your own mail server, but my understanding is that a lot of ISPs (in the US, which I presume is your country) are not happy with customers hosting anything regularly. Most shared website hosting plans come with some sort of e-mail service, but the abilities and prices can vary tremendously.
Just know that if you roll your own you'll probably have to be a lot more hands on with things like spam, which can have varying degrees of annoyance depending on the method. With your own domain name you can also do neat things like per-registration routing (Gmail allows username+whatever@gmail.com, but a lot of sites don't accept that as a valid e-mail address) and it looks much better in business use. Having a site where you can host random things can also be handy from time-to-time.
As someone who is supporting a legacy environment (six-year-old software from a company since absorbed by a larger one, with a mixture of other outdated software and Office fucking 2003) that is being punted this year, I often wonder about that statement. It may be that the software (or hardware) a company uses follows a process that they set up surrounding the software and when it works, it works well enough, but my personal experience has been that when it doesn't work it's a nightmare.
As an example, I spent 13 hours this past Friday recreating transactions in a secondary system because, for reasons I cannot determine, it decided to stop the normal auto-logging of transactions. The only way to "properly" enter records into this system is to re-do the entire process.
I was an intern at a large shipping company, and they were still using a 1992 DOS program to manage certain portions of shipments. While it worked, it took an entire department to manage and was incredibly manual and time-consuming. The company had mandated all DOS programs go away, but didn't want to actually provide support for transitioning the process, so the project got handed to a poor intern (me). I was the sixth person to attempt replacing it (all other attempts being by other interns), and because the department was so entrenched with the program my attempt went no where, too.
The transition and learning curve might not be easy (or cheap!) but I think a lot of places that hang onto systems with the claim that "they still work" would find that they really didn't work once they have gone through an overhaul.
Too bad you're wrong, and it's also irrelevant to the accuracy of polls either way.
I've been telling everyone who will put up with me for two minutes that our election system is woefully broken, not just the Electoral College but almost all elections in general. Some areas are lucky to have run-off voting (like the district down in Georgia). Maine only last year voted to implement preferential voting, and that still doesn't apply to the Presidential part of the ballot.
If the results had been reversed I wouldn't be as displeased (I only voted for Clinton because I thought all the other choices were worse), but I would still recognize that one person is in office with 49% of a vote that is pigeon-holed by tribalism and want to see greater change in the voting process. With proper reform perhaps we might elect someone who has a solid majority backing of the country.
What's more, the recent "polls are bad" meme comes from the run-up to the 2016 election when polls showed Clinton winning, and then obviously did not. Polls are, in general, an estimate of opinion, and in that regard they were correct: in the final weeks her numbers were only decent, suggesting it would be a solid win but not a landslide, and in the end she did win the popular vote by approx 3 million.
What the pundits got wrong (which seemed a problem more with interpretation of polls than the polls themselves) was the distribution of that support, the actual likelihood of supporters to vote (vs. self-reported), or both, which is how Trump won the electoral vote (and, in the end, that's the only one that matters for choosing the President.)
Okie dokie, here ya go. Table POL17 starting page 164, I included select "conservative" breakdowns to give a better idea of potential bias. Do you think President Donald Trump uses Twitter Demographic | Too much | Not enough | About the right amount | Don’t Know / No Opinion | Total N Registered Voters | 69%(1372) | 4%(79) | 15%(308) | 12%(241) |1999 PID: Rep (no lean) | 53%(361) | 6%(38) | 30%(205) | 11%(77) | 681 Ideo: Conservative (5-7) | 57%(394) | 4%(25) | 28%(194) | 11%(75) | 689 2016 Vote: Republican Donald Trump | 51%(400) | 6%(50) | 30%(240) | 13%(101) | 791 Strongly Approve | 39%(161) | 8%(35) | 42%(176) | 10%(43) | 415 Somewhat Approve | 58%(267) | 4%(18) | 20%(94) | 18%(84) | 462
BONUS! Table POL18, starting page 167. And, do you think President Donald Trump’s use of Twitter is (POL18) Demographic | A good thing | A bad thing | Don’t Know / No Opinion | Total N Registered Voters | 23%(456) | 59%(1172) | 19%(372) | 1999
I leave the breakdowns as an exercise for the reader. (This formatting brought to you by the characters/.)
single-payer would simply use the VAMC infrastructure as a handy pre-existing government bureaucracy from which to run (and eventually own) the whole single-payer healthcare system. Path of least resistance and all that.
Why would they use the well-known-as-problematic system of the VAMC instead of the fairly-well-run program of TriCare (now DHA)? At least, I've not heard nearly the number of problems with TriCare as I have the VA. Or even just do Medicare-for-all? (Which seems a bit worse than TriCare, but better than the VA)
Especially now that there's the DHA, I would think that the VA would function better by offloading medical services to it and only processing qualifications.
(Trust me, as the spouse of a disabled veteran, I can tell you right now that you do *not* want the VAMC running everyone's healthcare.)
Agreed, and thankfully that's not the only government path for doing so.
"Funny how that term caught on, isn't it?" Trump mused during a rally this month in Des Moines, Iowa. "I tell everyone, I hated it. Somebody said 'drain the swamp' and I said, 'Oh, that is so hokey. That is so terrible.'"
"I said, all right, I'll try it," Trump continued. "So like a month ago I said 'drain the swamp' and the place went crazy. And I said 'Whoa, what's this?' Then I said it again. And then I start saying it like I meant it, right? And then I started to love it, and the place loved it. Drain the swamp. It's true. It's true. Drain the swamp."
On Trump's often-stated promise to "drain the swamp" in Washington I'm told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn't want to use it anymore.... I'd written what I thought was a very cute tweet about "the alligators are complaining," and somebody wrote back and said they were tired of hearing this stuff.
I also shudder to think of the government bureaucracy that would be required to administer everyone's "free" housing, food, transportation, etc. [...] give approved parties the ability to put a lien on your UBI, so that essentials get paid for first
As someone who is a strong proponent of UBI, I think this is where a "fair market" solution might actually work out well. Think of something between a club/gym membership and Loot Crate (a monthly subscription where you receive pre-selected items) applied to basic necessities. You enroll in one of these companies, direct your payments to them, and part of it is used to guarantee three squares and a cot with the rest available for withdrawal.
This is glossing over a ton of potential issues, as well as the questions of "can you force, or at least highly encourage, low-willpower people into these without causing some perverted form of regulatory capture?" and "If you can't, would such programs even be useful?" But the idea of leaving it to private industry is that various areas can specialize and use the money better with a local focus than trying to have a national one (at least until all the companies merge into Ma Bell.)
But, as another poster has noted, I think that if everyone knows that everyone else is getting at least a subsistence income you'll find that the food pantries, homeless shelters, and corner begging will quickly dry up. I think we would need to focus instead on making sure we have good addiction treatment programs, something with a focus on assistance and improvement rather than restriction and punishment.
All of that said, I think your daily payment is a good one even without pairing it to liens or clubs.
Which puts a kind of strange set of perverse incentives in place. If it begins to look like Trump and Pence are both going down sooner or later, it becomes in the Republican party's interest to make it happen sooner, and the Democratic party's interests to make it happen later. So, if impeachment proceedings begin, and if Pence is caught up in them too, then you end up with the perverse incentives for Democrats to try to delay them as long as possible until after next year's election, and perverse incentives for Republicans to crush their own executives right now before the Dems have a chance to retake Congress.
I completely agree with that take from the long game, and such is the age we live in. I far prefer Democrats to Republicans, but I'm not a cheerleader for them, so I can't say which manner of ousting I want to see happen (just that I prefer the ousting.)
Unless the Republicans really take that unifying initiative (which, after what they've done so far in this administration, I can't see happening) this will likely play out in the D's favor. Nixon's resignation took two years from Watergate, and while Trump is working hard to play all the same notes at a far faster tempo, the man is so narcissistic that I can't fathom him resigning. Outside of a single damning but simple piece of evidence, I expect this is going to take until early 2018, then maybe the D's draw it out a bit longer (at least through primary season.)
But is it a good thing to have someone every bit as despicable when it comes to the actual dry concrete policy content, who merely looks more respectable and is more trusted? Mightn't it be better if the villain were obviously evil than able to pretend to be good? I just don't know.
I view it simply as Lawful Evil > Chaotic Evil. For an extreme comparison, if either one was to execute me I would expect Pence to simply shoot me in the head, while Trump would make a gameshow out of it. Pence's ways might not be as obvious as Trump's, but then 60 million people didn't see Trump for what he was so it's irrelevant.
But, especially since I'm not looking forward to a Pence Administration, I'm okay with this all taking a while to play out. If Trump does go down, but goes down this year, voters will mostly forget about it come the 2018 election. If it reaches a crescendo next summer (regardless of him being replaced/ousted) then it's fresh in the mind.
It's a weird report to me, as well; I have two separate Gmail accounts that I access through POP3 Thunderbird, and I haven't had a hiccup with them since I first set those profiles up.
How so? There's always the risk of fraud (the same risk in our current system, like when someone continues to collect a check for a now-deceased person), but how would someone abuse a system that is intended to cover their basic needs and then does so?
Sure, there will be people who take their UBI and blow it in a casino, but there won't be an ounce of pity (though, hopefully, a program to fight such addiction). They'll struggle for a bit until their next check and, maybe, spend that one properly.
There are ways this could be combated (e.g. UBI funds can only be used for X, Y, and Z) but they start to add overhead creep back in. Funny enough, there might be a "free market" solution, where banks or some new financial institution substitute for willpower (for a small fee), and they're the ones that limit the X, Y, Z. Perhaps even memberships, or offering the XYZ themselves...
Did you know that there are a lot of people who make a comfortable living just playing video games and recording them for youtube?
I watch a few of them, I'm a big fan of markiplier and brutalmoose. I expect this kind of thing, actually just entertainment options in general, would practically explode from a lot of people now able to take more free time. Very few of them would reach the same heights as, say, PewDiePie, but it might still be enough to do a bit better than they would get on UBI alone. (Expect a lot of Linkin Park cover bands.)
What I’d like to know is how much the welfare system, with all of its admin overhead, costs that doesn’t go to people’s welfare checks.
If you haven't already seen it, this sibling comment does a decent job of breaking it down. No citations, but I've read similar numbers elsewhere.
I don't see either of those as being easy or palatable. [...] what about immigrants? How long are they there until they're eligible?
Some might not be the most palatable, but I think they're pretty easy: Restrictions: native citizen, and immigrants must become naturalized citizen (for at least one full year?) before they can receive benefits Application: Start UBI at a very low number, say $100, and increase this every year until the target amount is hit. At the same time you decrease other government benefit payments by the same amount, and if the payment goes to $0 the benefit is summarily cancelled for that person.
Maybe even do the ramp-up thing for new immigrants as they get on the path to citizenship.
This will allow society to transition much easier, and the government benefit overhead will also decrease (non-linearly?) over time so that those employees aren't suddenly dumped (which, even if they started off receiving full UBI could still be a large shock to the system.) Such a transition might even take half of a generation to complete, depending on how slow society wants (or is able) to move. Such a slow transition would also make it easier to reverse course, if it seems that UBI is working out contrary to the results of every study or trial conducted (to my knowledge.)
I think a negative income tax type of UBI makes sense
A large argument for UBI is that it removes clerical overhead. All citizens, a check, the end. With a negative income tax you bring a lot of that overhead back in, because now the accountants have to make sure that every citizen is getting not a penny more in their UBI check than their income allows.
I think providing people an incentive to work
I never understand this line of thought. Why do you believe that even a significant minority of the population would become life-long stay-at-home-slobs? And why does that reason not already happen for the super-wealthy, the vast majority of whom (AFAIK) still hold various positions for various sums of money? Why is it impossible for a person to have worth if they don't have work?
UBI would allow for survival and little more. It's not going to be a very fun survival, but you'll have a roof, three squares, and clothes. People will still want extravagances, larger dwellings, more options in meals; all of which which require more money, which requires a job. Even those who are content with their UBI won't necessarily stop "working": 25% of Americans volunteer, and for many of these people it's beyond what they already do for a living (I'm a software developer by trade but a shift manager at a feline rescue by volunteering). While the charity landscape would probably change greatly, there would still be a need for volunteers and I expect that number would climb. UBI would also open a lot of interest in thrifty living, so there would be "share work" in communities, person A maintains a garden, person B repairs homes, and they exchange services/goods for help with the other.
A good manager and good co-workers should have recognized the situation and encouraged him to seek help.
Speaking as someone who suffers from severe depression (coming up on a decade of official diagnosis), I do everything I can to avoid my co-workers and deflect their earnest questions about my well-being.
It's not that I'm ashamed of my depression: I'm very open about it amongst friends and family, a small part of trying to turn down the stigma of it. But I would never tell my co-workers: I don't want to pull them into this at all, and I fear their pity. As much as I hate myself now, it would be even worse if I knew people were treating me with kid gloves, because I would be causing extra stress for them. The only reason the company owners know is because I revealed during a particularly rough mental state. But they don't know what to do, and I don't expect them, and I sort of don't want them to, as well.
Yeah, a lot of webcomics just use as a notification system... but I'm fine with that. I only find it a very minor annoyance to open a new tab (and no more than opening a new tab for a Slashdot post so I can read the comments!) Better than nothing, and I've stopped reading some webcomics completely because they didn't offer an RSS feed at all and I didn't find it worth my time to make an extra effort to visit them regularly (even when they have a consistent update schedule.)
Actually, considering what a lot of RSS services seem to be doing, I think I'm in a minority that I'm using it to mostly skim headlines, instead of a summary dashboard like a Facebook or twitter timeline.
Holy shit. I thought that new white space was supposed to be filled with ads, but I didn't realize just how bad it was. And apparently we can't "subscribe" anymore, so thank uBlock...
I can't see how; if the revelations of the past ~17 years did nothing to shake up the establishment, what could there possibly be that would make the majority of people (particularly voting Americans) suddenly "woke"?
Electing Trump may have been an attempt to shake it up, but it was a horribly ham-fisted one: he's done very little reforming on populist promises (but there was never any real indication he would), has appointed directly from "the swamp", and the people who elected him also saw fit to re-elect many swamp-members at the same time.
If anything, it seems that many people have been impervious to astounding revelations, and accept whatever deflection or lie is given in response to a problem.
Before an hour has passed we'll see half a dozen posts by people saying "they'll never take my job".
A large part of these claims, IMO, is that people forget long-tail effects. Okay, the robot who replaces the human on the manufacturing line is not going to also replace the developer... but the decrease in employees will lead to a decrease in (or elimination of!) HR and other supportive roles, and thus also fewer supplies and/or software. So if someone is a developer who focuses mostly on human-management software, then their job becomes at risk if the demand for the software drops low enough.
So, it's not that their jobs will be "taken", it's that they'll be rendered moot, a far better comparison for the "buggy whip manufacturers".
has to relearn that politics is not a matter of black and white
We have an election system that not only promotes tribalism, it promotes a duality: you are either the majority party, the minority party, or a rounding error. Which party is the majority just rotates every 6-8 years. The last time a major party fell out or was replaced was over a century ago, and it's only been the makeup of each that has changed since.
This has been a problem for almost as long as this country has held elections. Parties formed shortly after the country did, States, with few exceptions, all moved to first-past-the-post, winner-take-all based on the popular vote for the Electoral College. Only now is ranked/preferential voting being applied on a wide level: Maine voted it in with this last election. I'd like to say that other states will follow their lead, but Maine (and Nebraska, odd bed-fellows) has had Congressional District Method for the EC for a few decades now but no other states have picked up on it.
In short, American politics is black and white because Americans in general don't care enough to make gray options viable (and the elite for both major parties are all too happy to stay mum on the ability to do so.) I feel the Founding Fathers could have done more to stunt or blunt this, our election system being one of their few major failures (and one of the even fewer that has gone uncorrected.)
Slashdot Mirror
This happened to me many years back. I had managed to get commonnickname.middleinitial.lastname@gmail.com, intending to use it for "professional" purposes. My name, however, is highly common (even including the middle initial), and after having it for about a year I started getting sign-ups and order confirmations that were obviously not for me.
At first, I ignored it. I figure there was a letter difference, or the other guy wanted meant to use @yahoo.com. After a few confirmation e-mails went unanswered, surely he would realize the problem? But he didn't. And then I started getting personal correspondence, as if he was giving it to acquaintances. I replied to two or three, and those did seem to stop, but the sign-ups and orders didn't. I started reporting them to the respective sites, hoping that if stuff stopped showing up he might get the hint, but it never did.
Finally, I got fed up with it, and after yet another order confirmation I used my e-mail address to reset the password for his account, log into it, and get his physical address. Then I typed up a stern-yet-polite message to him to stop using my @)*(*$%&*)@*( e-mail address! One stamp and off it went.
I think that must have done the trick, because the rate started to decrease, but not long after I just got my own domain name and use that now, instead. The gmail account has probably lapsed since. In hindsight, I probably could have gotten in trouble if he was the vengeful type, but I suspected him to be an older guy with only a passing understanding of the internet in general.
Obviously the charge for postage from EU to AUS will be quite a bit higher than my 30 cents I spent at the time. In the meantime, you might make use of the modifier: gmail allows you to use username+modifier@gmail.com (e.g. tukaro+slashdot@), and with various websites you can use a common modifier and set up a filter to deem it "legitimate". Everything else can be shunted to a quasi-spam folder, which will be easier to sort through.
You may also report the sign-ups as being invalid. Most websites I contacted said they would close the account in question (one music site misinterpreted my notice as a claim of fraud), and if a physical letter doesn't work (or you want to use that as a last resort) this may correct the habit.
I don't understand this line of thought (which I place in the same vein as "everyone will become fat and lazy"). I agree that make-work jobs will disappear, but charities and hobbies will not evaporate along with them. A lot of the human-dedicated charities might dwindle, as UBI replaces any need for them, but there are plenty of charities that are not focused on basic human welfare and many of these other groups will expand as more people have time to volunteer for them.
People already donate time beyond their standard 40 hours (or more) at their paying job. My day job is data management and translation, but I also volunteer at a feline rescue/shelter, doing not only shift management and visitor "greeting", but also involved in a lot of their tech-related needs. President Jimmy Carter collapsed building free homes for people this past weekend.
When you're in retirement you don't necessarily have the energy or ability to go out to such places, but I expect even geriatrics might find new opportunities in such a system. UBI means that cash will move around more freely within communities, which will lead to more entrepreneurship; they might get a gig that is both low-hour and low-pay (as low as $1/hour) where they just say "hello" to people who walk into a store and tell them where to find various departments (think Wal-mart greeters, but everywhere.) Go in one day a week, sit on a chair for 6-8 hours, and they get a little extra money on top of their UBI.
I think that UBI would lead to a lot more community efforts as well, to make those UBI dollars stretch for people who want to do something but can't stomach any jobs offered. Community gardens, simplistic tailoring, various trades of services. Many of these would spring from hobbies and personal interests (how many people maintain a small garden in their backyard or quilt/knit on their own time and dime?). Re-using or re-purposing stuff would also take on an extra amount of focus, so someone who can fix up an old laptop could do so in exchange for a few tomatoes or a warm hat.
It might be the exception that proves the rule, but Law & Order actually did this. One of the ADAs, Serena Southerlyn was a lesbian but the show only gave a few hints of this until her final episode where it was stated plainly in the closing minutes. (That reveal is often lambasted as a cheap stunt, which I do agree with.)
Just adopt every possible trend yourself. She will never get into them if she knows her parent(s) are into it.
Indeed. I recall having a lot of problems when I used my .edu address for stuff in college and then graduated.
For those that might be squeamish running their own, I believe Gmail offers a way to use its service with your own domain, but I don't know if that costs money (and they might still do data collection even if it does, which is why I didn't mention it in OP.) I imagine other e-mail providers offer similar options.
You don't want any of the free offerings (like Gmail) then. As far as I know, every mail service that is free does snooping for advertising, whether it's directly in their web client or used elsewhere.
I don't have any paid services to recommend (and even these may or may not come with data slurping) but you could always try rolling your own. Domain names are cheap ($10-$20/yr depending on who you get it through) and many domain registrars offer some sort of mail-setup that can vary greatly in price. GoDaddy is not a registrar I'd recommend, but for an example their e-mail service starts at $5/mo normally.
You could also throw together your own mail server, but my understanding is that a lot of ISPs (in the US, which I presume is your country) are not happy with customers hosting anything regularly. Most shared website hosting plans come with some sort of e-mail service, but the abilities and prices can vary tremendously.
Just know that if you roll your own you'll probably have to be a lot more hands on with things like spam, which can have varying degrees of annoyance depending on the method. With your own domain name you can also do neat things like per-registration routing (Gmail allows username+whatever@gmail.com, but a lot of sites don't accept that as a valid e-mail address) and it looks much better in business use. Having a site where you can host random things can also be handy from time-to-time.
As someone who is supporting a legacy environment (six-year-old software from a company since absorbed by a larger one, with a mixture of other outdated software and Office fucking 2003) that is being punted this year, I often wonder about that statement. It may be that the software (or hardware) a company uses follows a process that they set up surrounding the software and when it works, it works well enough, but my personal experience has been that when it doesn't work it's a nightmare.
As an example, I spent 13 hours this past Friday recreating transactions in a secondary system because, for reasons I cannot determine, it decided to stop the normal auto-logging of transactions. The only way to "properly" enter records into this system is to re-do the entire process.
I was an intern at a large shipping company, and they were still using a 1992 DOS program to manage certain portions of shipments. While it worked, it took an entire department to manage and was incredibly manual and time-consuming. The company had mandated all DOS programs go away, but didn't want to actually provide support for transitioning the process, so the project got handed to a poor intern (me). I was the sixth person to attempt replacing it (all other attempts being by other interns), and because the department was so entrenched with the program my attempt went no where, too.
The transition and learning curve might not be easy (or cheap!) but I think a lot of places that hang onto systems with the claim that "they still work" would find that they really didn't work once they have gone through an overhaul.
Too bad you're wrong, and it's also irrelevant to the accuracy of polls either way.
I've been telling everyone who will put up with me for two minutes that our election system is woefully broken, not just the Electoral College but almost all elections in general. Some areas are lucky to have run-off voting (like the district down in Georgia). Maine only last year voted to implement preferential voting, and that still doesn't apply to the Presidential part of the ballot.
If the results had been reversed I wouldn't be as displeased (I only voted for Clinton because I thought all the other choices were worse), but I would still recognize that one person is in office with 49% of a vote that is pigeon-holed by tribalism and want to see greater change in the voting process. With proper reform perhaps we might elect someone who has a solid majority backing of the country.
What's more, the recent "polls are bad" meme comes from the run-up to the 2016 election when polls showed Clinton winning, and then obviously did not. Polls are, in general, an estimate of opinion, and in that regard they were correct: in the final weeks her numbers were only decent, suggesting it would be a solid win but not a landslide, and in the end she did win the popular vote by approx 3 million.
What the pundits got wrong (which seemed a problem more with interpretation of polls than the polls themselves) was the distribution of that support, the actual likelihood of supporters to vote (vs. self-reported), or both, which is how Trump won the electoral vote (and, in the end, that's the only one that matters for choosing the President.)
Okie dokie, here ya go. Table POL17 starting page 164, I included select "conservative" breakdowns to give a better idea of potential bias.
Do you think President Donald Trump uses Twitter
Demographic | Too much | Not enough | About the right amount | Don’t Know / No Opinion | Total N
Registered Voters | 69%(1372) | 4%(79) | 15%(308) | 12%(241) |1999
PID: Rep (no lean) | 53%(361) | 6%(38) | 30%(205) | 11%(77) | 681
Ideo: Conservative (5-7) | 57%(394) | 4%(25) | 28%(194) | 11%(75) | 689
2016 Vote: Republican Donald Trump | 51%(400) | 6%(50) | 30%(240) | 13%(101) | 791
Strongly Approve | 39%(161) | 8%(35) | 42%(176) | 10%(43) | 415
Somewhat Approve | 58%(267) | 4%(18) | 20%(94) | 18%(84) | 462
BONUS! Table POL18, starting page 167.
And, do you think President Donald Trump’s use of Twitter is (POL18)
Demographic | A good thing | A bad thing | Don’t Know / No Opinion | Total N
Registered Voters | 23%(456) | 59%(1172) | 19%(372) | 1999
I leave the breakdowns as an exercise for the reader. (This formatting brought to you by the characters /.)
Why would they use the well-known-as-problematic system of the VAMC instead of the fairly-well-run program of TriCare (now DHA)? At least, I've not heard nearly the number of problems with TriCare as I have the VA. Or even just do Medicare-for-all? (Which seems a bit worse than TriCare, but better than the VA)
Especially now that there's the DHA, I would think that the VA would function better by offloading medical services to it and only processing qualifications.
Agreed, and thankfully that's not the only government path for doing so.
Absolutely nothing, he went with it because it was popular:
Gingrich Says Trump Must Address Business Conflicts Soon, Urges Monitoring
As someone who is a strong proponent of UBI, I think this is where a "fair market" solution might actually work out well. Think of something between a club/gym membership and Loot Crate (a monthly subscription where you receive pre-selected items) applied to basic necessities. You enroll in one of these companies, direct your payments to them, and part of it is used to guarantee three squares and a cot with the rest available for withdrawal.
This is glossing over a ton of potential issues, as well as the questions of "can you force, or at least highly encourage, low-willpower people into these without causing some perverted form of regulatory capture?" and "If you can't, would such programs even be useful?" But the idea of leaving it to private industry is that various areas can specialize and use the money better with a local focus than trying to have a national one (at least until all the companies merge into Ma Bell.)
But, as another poster has noted, I think that if everyone knows that everyone else is getting at least a subsistence income you'll find that the food pantries, homeless shelters, and corner begging will quickly dry up. I think we would need to focus instead on making sure we have good addiction treatment programs, something with a focus on assistance and improvement rather than restriction and punishment.
All of that said, I think your daily payment is a good one even without pairing it to liens or clubs.
I completely agree with that take from the long game, and such is the age we live in. I far prefer Democrats to Republicans, but I'm not a cheerleader for them, so I can't say which manner of ousting I want to see happen (just that I prefer the ousting.)
Unless the Republicans really take that unifying initiative (which, after what they've done so far in this administration, I can't see happening) this will likely play out in the D's favor. Nixon's resignation took two years from Watergate, and while Trump is working hard to play all the same notes at a far faster tempo, the man is so narcissistic that I can't fathom him resigning. Outside of a single damning but simple piece of evidence, I expect this is going to take until early 2018, then maybe the D's draw it out a bit longer (at least through primary season.)
I view it simply as Lawful Evil > Chaotic Evil. For an extreme comparison, if either one was to execute me I would expect Pence to simply shoot me in the head, while Trump would make a gameshow out of it. Pence's ways might not be as obvious as Trump's, but then 60 million people didn't see Trump for what he was so it's irrelevant.
But, especially since I'm not looking forward to a Pence Administration, I'm okay with this all taking a while to play out. If Trump does go down, but goes down this year, voters will mostly forget about it come the 2018 election. If it reaches a crescendo next summer (regardless of him being replaced/ousted) then it's fresh in the mind.
It's a weird report to me, as well; I have two separate Gmail accounts that I access through POP3 Thunderbird, and I haven't had a hiccup with them since I first set those profiles up.
How so? There's always the risk of fraud (the same risk in our current system, like when someone continues to collect a check for a now-deceased person), but how would someone abuse a system that is intended to cover their basic needs and then does so?
Sure, there will be people who take their UBI and blow it in a casino, but there won't be an ounce of pity (though, hopefully, a program to fight such addiction). They'll struggle for a bit until their next check and, maybe, spend that one properly.
There are ways this could be combated (e.g. UBI funds can only be used for X, Y, and Z) but they start to add overhead creep back in. Funny enough, there might be a "free market" solution, where banks or some new financial institution substitute for willpower (for a small fee), and they're the ones that limit the X, Y, Z. Perhaps even memberships, or offering the XYZ themselves...
I watch a few of them, I'm a big fan of markiplier and brutalmoose. I expect this kind of thing, actually just entertainment options in general, would practically explode from a lot of people now able to take more free time. Very few of them would reach the same heights as, say, PewDiePie, but it might still be enough to do a bit better than they would get on UBI alone. (Expect a lot of Linkin Park cover bands.)
If you haven't already seen it, this sibling comment does a decent job of breaking it down. No citations, but I've read similar numbers elsewhere.
Some might not be the most palatable, but I think they're pretty easy:
Restrictions: native citizen, and immigrants must become naturalized citizen (for at least one full year?) before they can receive benefits
Application: Start UBI at a very low number, say $100, and increase this every year until the target amount is hit. At the same time you decrease other government benefit payments by the same amount, and if the payment goes to $0 the benefit is summarily cancelled for that person.
Maybe even do the ramp-up thing for new immigrants as they get on the path to citizenship.
This will allow society to transition much easier, and the government benefit overhead will also decrease (non-linearly?) over time so that those employees aren't suddenly dumped (which, even if they started off receiving full UBI could still be a large shock to the system.) Such a transition might even take half of a generation to complete, depending on how slow society wants (or is able) to move. Such a slow transition would also make it easier to reverse course, if it seems that UBI is working out contrary to the results of every study or trial conducted (to my knowledge.)
A large argument for UBI is that it removes clerical overhead. All citizens, a check, the end. With a negative income tax you bring a lot of that overhead back in, because now the accountants have to make sure that every citizen is getting not a penny more in their UBI check than their income allows.
I never understand this line of thought. Why do you believe that even a significant minority of the population would become life-long stay-at-home-slobs? And why does that reason not already happen for the super-wealthy, the vast majority of whom (AFAIK) still hold various positions for various sums of money? Why is it impossible for a person to have worth if they don't have work?
UBI would allow for survival and little more. It's not going to be a very fun survival, but you'll have a roof, three squares, and clothes. People will still want extravagances, larger dwellings, more options in meals; all of which which require more money, which requires a job. Even those who are content with their UBI won't necessarily stop "working": 25% of Americans volunteer, and for many of these people it's beyond what they already do for a living (I'm a software developer by trade but a shift manager at a feline rescue by volunteering). While the charity landscape would probably change greatly, there would still be a need for volunteers and I expect that number would climb. UBI would also open a lot of interest in thrifty living, so there would be "share work" in communities, person A maintains a garden, person B repairs homes, and they exchange services/goods for help with the other.
Speaking as someone who suffers from severe depression (coming up on a decade of official diagnosis), I do everything I can to avoid my co-workers and deflect their earnest questions about my well-being.
It's not that I'm ashamed of my depression: I'm very open about it amongst friends and family, a small part of trying to turn down the stigma of it. But I would never tell my co-workers: I don't want to pull them into this at all, and I fear their pity. As much as I hate myself now, it would be even worse if I knew people were treating me with kid gloves, because I would be causing extra stress for them. The only reason the company owners know is because I revealed during a particularly rough mental state. But they don't know what to do, and I don't expect them, and I sort of don't want them to, as well.
Yeah, a lot of webcomics just use as a notification system... but I'm fine with that. I only find it a very minor annoyance to open a new tab (and no more than opening a new tab for a Slashdot post so I can read the comments!) Better than nothing, and I've stopped reading some webcomics completely because they didn't offer an RSS feed at all and I didn't find it worth my time to make an extra effort to visit them regularly (even when they have a consistent update schedule.)
Actually, considering what a lot of RSS services seem to be doing, I think I'm in a minority that I'm using it to mostly skim headlines, instead of a summary dashboard like a Facebook or twitter timeline.
Holy shit. I thought that new white space was supposed to be filled with ads, but I didn't realize just how bad it was. And apparently we can't "subscribe" anymore, so thank uBlock...
I can't see how; if the revelations of the past ~17 years did nothing to shake up the establishment, what could there possibly be that would make the majority of people (particularly voting Americans) suddenly "woke"?
Electing Trump may have been an attempt to shake it up, but it was a horribly ham-fisted one: he's done very little reforming on populist promises (but there was never any real indication he would), has appointed directly from "the swamp", and the people who elected him also saw fit to re-elect many swamp-members at the same time.
If anything, it seems that many people have been impervious to astounding revelations, and accept whatever deflection or lie is given in response to a problem.
Relevant xkcd
A large part of these claims, IMO, is that people forget long-tail effects. Okay, the robot who replaces the human on the manufacturing line is not going to also replace the developer... but the decrease in employees will lead to a decrease in (or elimination of!) HR and other supportive roles, and thus also fewer supplies and/or software. So if someone is a developer who focuses mostly on human-management software, then their job becomes at risk if the demand for the software drops low enough.
So, it's not that their jobs will be "taken", it's that they'll be rendered moot, a far better comparison for the "buggy whip manufacturers".
We have an election system that not only promotes tribalism, it promotes a duality: you are either the majority party, the minority party, or a rounding error. Which party is the majority just rotates every 6-8 years. The last time a major party fell out or was replaced was over a century ago, and it's only been the makeup of each that has changed since.
This has been a problem for almost as long as this country has held elections. Parties formed shortly after the country did, States, with few exceptions, all moved to first-past-the-post, winner-take-all based on the popular vote for the Electoral College. Only now is ranked/preferential voting being applied on a wide level: Maine voted it in with this last election. I'd like to say that other states will follow their lead, but Maine (and Nebraska, odd bed-fellows) has had Congressional District Method for the EC for a few decades now but no other states have picked up on it.
In short, American politics is black and white because Americans in general don't care enough to make gray options viable (and the elite for both major parties are all too happy to stay mum on the ability to do so.) I feel the Founding Fathers could have done more to stunt or blunt this, our election system being one of their few major failures (and one of the even fewer that has gone uncorrected.)