It costs tMobile money to make no interest loans. For example, they pay hundreds wholesale for a device right now. Then they get that back in dribs and drabs over two years, each payment worth slightly less due to inflation -- if they sold the phones at cost, they would lose money over time for certain. I'm sure there is markup though, so at some point, this turns around and they make a little money on the phone itself.
That said, imagine how screwed tMobile would be if millions of people go in, sign up for one month, walk out with a $600 retail ($500? wholesale) phone, and then cancel the next month. Even if half the service fee was profit, they'd be out $475 or so each time that happened -- it would a recipe for bankruptcy.
No even remotely the same as a standard cell service contract.
I agree. A couple years ago I decided to upgrade my phone (I was already a T-Mobile customer). After looking at the difference between subsidized plans to paying for a phone outright and getting a month-to-month plan, I decided I'd buy the phone. Anyway, when I told the guy what I wanted to do, he said fine, but also, if I wanted to, I could finance the phone at 0% interest for 20 months and have the MTM plan. That was a no brainer so I took that deal instead of laying out the cash.
It was quite obvious the phone and the plan were separate things. And that's what T-Mobile is still doing. It doesn't seem deceptive at all -- rather, in the spirit of "no good deed goes unpunished" -- they're getting criticized for offering a zero or low percentage interest installment plan. If people don't want to be beholden for the remaining balance, they can just put it on a Visa and pay somewhere between 10 and 5billion percent interest. No matter how you pay for the phone, the plan is still the same MTM plan.
Last point, if you buy a phone with decent specs and build quality, it's going to outlast the repayment term. When I bought my last phone, I got an HTC Amaze -- the speed and quality is such that even after a couple years, I have no desire to replace it. It's worth it to spend money on a good phone.
That, or at least some video of cool tools and a description of the process, rather than simple claims of what they can do. Show a water damaged drive, show how they get it spinning, show how they read data --- that would have been interesting even if it required an investment beyond what the average user would make.
But the insanity of someone protecting their job by never updating technology is just amazing.
I don't think it is that kind of insanity -- more the kind where the owner doesn't upgrade because the old system works. As a business owner myself, I can understand that sentiment, though Sparkler Filters has taken that to quite an extreme.
Carl Kracklauer, whose father founded Sparkler Filters in 1927, usually types the data onto the punch cards. The company sticks with the 402 because it's a known entity: Staffers know how to use it, and they have over 60 years of company accounting records formatted for the device.
Oh -- we're at war with Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, etc. etc.? I guess I didn't get the memo. Or do you mean "the whole world is a battlefield"? In that case, there is no logical reason to exclude drone strikes in Iowa -- it is after all, part of the battlefield. Expect it. Not this year or the next, but a decade or so from now. And then blame yourself.
And yes, it is so terrible that Obama does the same and worse than GWB. It's the pattern:
Considered historically, it will become clear that the job of Republican governments is to invent novel, ad hoc expansions of state power, while the job of Democratic governments is to consolidate and systematize them. Far from repudiating supposed Bush-era "excesses," the Obama regime has sought--usually successfully--to entrench and to codify them. This is just the latest example.
I think you totally missed his point -- tin whiskers on your circuit board? Blown caps?
The fact that 9 women can have 9 babies in 9 months for an average rate of 1/mo, does not disprove the assertion 9 women cannot have __a__ (i.e. a single) baby in one month. You're talking about something totally different and being awfully smug about it to boot.
but there's more to this than "I'm a Democrat and expected Obama to do the right thing because he's a Democrat, too".
I'd like to believe that but as I said, Obama's presidency is proof against your assertion. Take for example Marty Lederman. He used to excoriate the GWB administration for using secret memo to support due process free detention (Gitmo). When he became part of the Obama administration, he began _writing_ Obama's secret memos "authorizing" (*) due process free execution.
Exactly what besides "my tribe uber alles" can account for that 180 degree switch in position on the core question of whether a person is entitled to trial before punishment is exacted?
Or try to have a conversation with an Obama apologist, and try to get a straight answer to the question: why was it wrong for GWB to put people in jail without trial, but not wrong for Obama to kill people without trial? Eventually, after all the deflections, slogans, and GWB-blaming, you'll get down to the core: I trust Obama and I did not trust Bush. I did this once with a frequent poster on my local paper's website and that is exactly what he said. His avatar is a picture of Bush with "worst ever" written over it. That is tribal politics, nothing else, and I think it accounts for much more of what we see than it is given credit for.
The ways in which Obama has extended the GWB era policies are legion. I started to list those before burning out on the project -- I've not updated this in a year, but you can sort of get an idea: http://nothingchanged.org/ Despite the plain facts, people still support him, and nothing can explain that besides the fact that he's a member of their tribe. The silence we hear from "progressives" is proof positive that policy doesn't matter because if it did, the same people that burned GWB in effigy, would be doing that to Obama. He's that bad from a policy perspective. And of course, all those GOPers should be praising him as much as Dick Cheney has praised him. But they don't. They call him a Marxist for coming up with a health care plan to the right of that proposed by Nixon. It really is tribal, at least for the most part.
(*) legal memos written by your own lawyers are not laws, they are opinions, so to suggest there is some authority there is ridiculous.
You could get a phantoscopic system planted directly on your retinas...You could even get telaesthetics patched into your spinal column at key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concern about long term nerve damage, plus it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time -- even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.
From Neil Stephenon's book: The Diamond Age (p 39)
None of that is necessary. Just let the "new" IT guy find some child porn on his computer at the office during a software update, doctor some log files showing he visited various bad sites... and that's that. Character assassination is way less risky than assassination.
The second big reason is to protect loss of face and avoid embarrassment
This is the heart of it. The State Secrets Doctrine in its modern form has its roots in a coverup by the Air Force of its own negligence that led to a plane crash that killed three RCA engineers. When their widows sued and requested the crash report in discovery, the Air Force refused citing State Secrets. Eventually, the Supreme Court upheld the Air Force's right to not turn over the document without any judge having ever looking at what it contained, but rather, just trusting the Government to be honest.
Fast forward many decades, the report is declassified, and guess what, all it contained was a record of poor maintenance and a failure to install manufacturer recommended heat shields in the engine to prevent the exact type of engine fire that occurred and caused the crash.
It's not mindless cynicism. It is a recognition that US politics operates on a purely tribal basis.
You have Democrats who really honestly believe Obama is a peacenik who has reduced the number of troops in Afghanistan every single year of his presidency. I'm not joking -- I saw this exact comment in my local paper's comment section by a die-hard Obamabot.
You have Republicans who believe that forcing people to pay premiums to private for profit insurance companies is Marxism (as opposed to crony capitalism or corporatism, the softer brother of fascism). I see this in my local paper's comment section all the time from the mainstream-GOP-subverted Tea Baggers.
Combined, the purely tribal Democrats and Republicans probably account for about 60% of the population. The remainder will be largely filled by people who vote for a "lesser evil" and a few single digit percentage pointers who support "fringe" third parties. I'm in that last group, have been actively engaged with the fringe, stood out in the sleet and rain holding signs for that fringe, will not vote for any candidate affiliated with either the DNC or the GOP under any circumstances -- I am the fringe -- and I know there is no hope short of a scandal so egregious that one of the parties basically has to reinvent itself. Seriously, Obama's presidency should be all the demonstration one needs that to most people, policies are irrelevant, only party affiliation matters.
I had at least two teachers try to fail me on purpose because they resented the gifted students.
Wow. That's just weird and vindictive.
I was in a similar once/week program -- I remember getting into trouble in my regular classes, being scolded for this or that, but mostly I have very few memories, as if I daydreamed through school. But every memory I have of that other class is really good, sort of nostalgically golden. I had a great time in it and I wish all my school had been that way.
His opinion may be silly, but he isn't alone. I overheard two teachers saying the same thing, that the gifted kids take care of themselves and don't need any help.
Of course that's often false. It is a common enough occurrence for some gifted kids to get really lazy because early on, they find it is easy to skate with minimal effort. Later in their education careers however, when subjects become inherently tougher, those skating work habits turn to failure. I have personal experience here.
Secondly, relying on smart kids to take care of themselves is not a recipe for a well rounded education, it's a recipe for hyper focus on a single area that may or may not prove valuable to the student. In the college context, the point of a liberal arts education is to expose students to a wide range subjects because sometimes, very interesting things can happen when knowledge in different subject areas intersects. Ignoring smart kids might make sense for a diploma mill, but it doesn't make sense if the actual goal is help kids succeed by showing them where interesting (and potentially lucrative) intersections can be found.
A few years ago I had the stinky job of cleaning up a large area of a building that had skunk stink so bad I had to use a quality respiratory just to get near. A chemically effective solution involves hydrogen peroxide and baking soda: http://home.earthlink.net/~skunkremedy/home/sk00003.htm
I went to Walgreens to get a bunch of hydrogen peroxide -- put eight quarts in my basket and proceeded to the checkout. When I got there, I was told I wasn't allowed to buy that much at once -- I can't recall the limit but it was less than I had. Obviously, I just went shopping at multiple stores till I figured I had enough, but, it is this kind of ridiculous crap that is sure to expand.
Hmmm... some random dork on/., or people who spent years in the __GWB__ administration dealing with Iran?
TLDR: you're wrong and brainwashed.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett are two of the nation's preeminent experts on all matters relating to Iran. They have also become the nation's most unlikely yet compelling critics of US policy toward Tehran and particularly the misconceptions shaping political and media discourse in the west. What's most amazing is that they come directly from the belly of the National Security State beast: they both were Middle East officials in the National Security Council and State Department during the Bush years, while he also worked as a CIA analyst and she for the US mission to the UN and as one of the few diplomats to directly negotiate with Tehran in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. With their top secret security clearances, they both had front-row seats to the run-up to the Iraq war from inside the US government.
They have now published an extraordinary new book entitled Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Drones killing civilians is an accident; people thought there was a military target there.
For definitions of "believe" that require no evidence or actual knowledge, then yeah sure, your comment is accurate. For rational definitions of believe, it's pure crap. Look up what "signature strike" means -- they have no idea who they are killing.
With respect to Syria (or pick any random mideast country for that matter), why would it matter who was involved. See for instance 9/11, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
This isn't tinfoil hat shit. It is the published policy of the administration that imminent means neither "about to happen" or that it has any actual evidence that anything bad will happen. I didn't make that shit up. It's like Obama's definition of "militant" -- it doesn't mean someone who is taking up arms against the US. It means someone killed by a drone who happens to be male and over 12 years old. If the administration will twist words beyond recognition in order to murder -- exactly what won't it do?
Exactly. A perfect example is the recently released white paper on drones in which "imminent" is redefined. The White House defines imminent to mean:
First, the condition that an operational leader present an "imminent" threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.
Merriam Webster in contrast, defines imminent as:
ready to take place; especially : hanging threateningly over one's head <was in imminent danger of being run over>
Obviously laws are just about placating people into believing they have certain rights. That this is true should be apparent in that we have a discussion going on right now regarding whether killing people by drone strike far from any battlefield is acceptable under the constitutional provision that "no person shall deprived of life... without due process of law." The constitution is supposed to be the highest law, but obviously, it means jack. Its sole purpose is to placate people into thinking the Feds will exercise restraint. However, anyone who expects the Feds to protect human rights or abide by its own laws, is engaging in willful self-delusion or is irreparably stupid.
Totally agree. I would love to see a constitutional amendment that would allow states to unilaterally secede. That issue was decided during the civl war such that secession requires the consent of both the Feds and the seceding state. But that could be rendered moot with a constitutional amendment that would allow unilateral secession.
And if you think about everything good the government does, almost all of that comes from local government -- roads, firetrucks, water and sewer -- that's all local or state. And sure, maybe there are Federal grants for those projects, but the Feds are just being a resource sapping middleman in that situation.
Donor states would especially benefit from secession -- for example, WA state gets about 86% of the Federal Tax money we send in. If we paid those taxes to the state instead, we'd immediately have 14% more money in the budget. Plus, I'm pretty sure Washington State wouldn't be blowing up the middle east, wasting money, and generating a never ending supply of enemies. All that wasted money would be available for ethically defensible projects.
What I mean by "too far away" is along the lines of 25 miles in a neighboring county (too much gas). People w/ addresses 100s of miles away are obviously looking at relocating so don't get the immediate discard, but really, I think enough people live here already. I'd rather not see my county's population increase.
I'm half-owner of a small business. We recently had to go through the grind of hiring a new front desk person, a yearly task it seems. After a few days with a Craigslist posting, we had 70 or 80 resumes which we each had to read in our spare time. The first to go are those who can't follow a simple instruction (e.g., we get a resume only, but asked for resume and cover letter), then the ones with egregious grammar or spelling errors, or "WEIRd" capitalization patterns, and so forth. Sometimes it is rather arbitrary, such as: lives too far away, or uses an unprofessional sounding email address (for example: hotkitty@aol.com). But arbitrary choices work the other way too. This last time, after picking eight people, I put the whole stack of remaining applications together, shuffled them, and picked two at random. Only one of the randoms didn't show, but the other one almost made it into the final pool.
Anyway, this article makes me glad I'm not an applicant: my selection of a browser is well considered and goes beyond merely selecting Firefox, despite the fact I'd end up not using Firefox to fill out an application. On my Linux Desktop and Mac laptop, I use Firefox with the No Script and Self Destructing Cookies plugins. If the application process relies on javascript and cookies -- there's a reasonable chance it would fail despite temporarily allowing this or that, and rather than take that risk, I'd fire up Safari like I always do when I need to visit a site that requires javascript and cookies. But that would make it appear to HR that I just used the default browser without giving it any consideration, which is exactly the opposite of the truth.
There are lots of ways self-employment sucks, but the amount of arbitrary decision making (*) in hiring is one reason why I'm glad I'll never be on the other side of an interview.
(*) and yeah, I realize I make arbitrary decisions and I can understand why that happens. The number of people looking for work is huge and there is only so much time in the day. It's a thorny issue.
Slashdot Mirror
It costs tMobile money to make no interest loans. For example, they pay hundreds wholesale for a device right now. Then they get that back in dribs and drabs over two years, each payment worth slightly less due to inflation -- if they sold the phones at cost, they would lose money over time for certain. I'm sure there is markup though, so at some point, this turns around and they make a little money on the phone itself.
That said, imagine how screwed tMobile would be if millions of people go in, sign up for one month, walk out with a $600 retail ($500? wholesale) phone, and then cancel the next month. Even if half the service fee was profit, they'd be out $475 or so each time that happened -- it would a recipe for bankruptcy.
I agree. A couple years ago I decided to upgrade my phone (I was already a T-Mobile customer). After looking at the difference between subsidized plans to paying for a phone outright and getting a month-to-month plan, I decided I'd buy the phone. Anyway, when I told the guy what I wanted to do, he said fine, but also, if I wanted to, I could finance the phone at 0% interest for 20 months and have the MTM plan. That was a no brainer so I took that deal instead of laying out the cash.
It was quite obvious the phone and the plan were separate things. And that's what T-Mobile is still doing. It doesn't seem deceptive at all -- rather, in the spirit of "no good deed goes unpunished" -- they're getting criticized for offering a zero or low percentage interest installment plan. If people don't want to be beholden for the remaining balance, they can just put it on a Visa and pay somewhere between 10 and 5billion percent interest. No matter how you pay for the phone, the plan is still the same MTM plan.
Last point, if you buy a phone with decent specs and build quality, it's going to outlast the repayment term. When I bought my last phone, I got an HTC Amaze -- the speed and quality is such that even after a couple years, I have no desire to replace it. It's worth it to spend money on a good phone.
That, or at least some video of cool tools and a description of the process, rather than simple claims of what they can do. Show a water damaged drive, show how they get it spinning, show how they read data --- that would have been interesting even if it required an investment beyond what the average user would make.
I don't think it is that kind of insanity -- more the kind where the owner doesn't upgrade because the old system works. As a business owner myself, I can understand that sentiment, though Sparkler Filters has taken that to quite an extreme.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_fix_it_ancient_computers_in_use_today.html
That's actually old news from early in his presidency:
From 2010:
War on whistle-blowers intensifies: http://www.salon.com/2010/05/25/whistleblowers_2/
Here are the six whistleblowers prosecuted under the espionage act:
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2012/01/six-americans-obama-and-holder-charged-under-the-espionage-act-and-one-bonus-whistleblower.htm
Oh -- we're at war with Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, etc. etc.? I guess I didn't get the memo. Or do you mean "the whole world is a battlefield"? In that case, there is no logical reason to exclude drone strikes in Iowa -- it is after all, part of the battlefield. Expect it. Not this year or the next, but a decade or so from now. And then blame yourself.
And yes, it is so terrible that Obama does the same and worse than GWB. It's the pattern:
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/05/ratchet-effect-part-infinity.html
I think you totally missed his point -- tin whiskers on your circuit board? Blown caps?
The fact that 9 women can have 9 babies in 9 months for an average rate of 1/mo, does not disprove the assertion 9 women cannot have __a__ (i.e. a single) baby in one month. You're talking about something totally different and being awfully smug about it to boot.
I'd like to believe that but as I said, Obama's presidency is proof against your assertion. Take for example Marty Lederman. He used to excoriate the GWB administration for using secret memo to support due process free detention (Gitmo). When he became part of the Obama administration, he began _writing_ Obama's secret memos "authorizing" (*) due process free execution.
Exactly what besides "my tribe uber alles" can account for that 180 degree switch in position on the core question of whether a person is entitled to trial before punishment is exacted?
Or try to have a conversation with an Obama apologist, and try to get a straight answer to the question: why was it wrong for GWB to put people in jail without trial, but not wrong for Obama to kill people without trial? Eventually, after all the deflections, slogans, and GWB-blaming, you'll get down to the core: I trust Obama and I did not trust Bush. I did this once with a frequent poster on my local paper's website and that is exactly what he said. His avatar is a picture of Bush with "worst ever" written over it. That is tribal politics, nothing else, and I think it accounts for much more of what we see than it is given credit for.
The ways in which Obama has extended the GWB era policies are legion. I started to list those before burning out on the project -- I've not updated this in a year, but you can sort of get an idea: http://nothingchanged.org/ Despite the plain facts, people still support him, and nothing can explain that besides the fact that he's a member of their tribe. The silence we hear from "progressives" is proof positive that policy doesn't matter because if it did, the same people that burned GWB in effigy, would be doing that to Obama. He's that bad from a policy perspective. And of course, all those GOPers should be praising him as much as Dick Cheney has praised him. But they don't. They call him a Marxist for coming up with a health care plan to the right of that proposed by Nixon. It really is tribal, at least for the most part.
(*) legal memos written by your own lawyers are not laws, they are opinions, so to suggest there is some authority there is ridiculous.
From Neil Stephenon's book: The Diamond Age (p 39)
Can you send me a check for $5,000,000? Really I mean it, you must be very wealthy given that you have representatives in Congress.
None of that is necessary. Just let the "new" IT guy find some child porn on his computer at the office during a software update, doctor some log files showing he visited various bad sites ... and that's that. Character assassination is way less risky than assassination.
This is the heart of it. The State Secrets Doctrine in its modern form has its roots in a coverup by the Air Force of its own negligence that led to a plane crash that killed three RCA engineers. When their widows sued and requested the crash report in discovery, the Air Force refused citing State Secrets. Eventually, the Supreme Court upheld the Air Force's right to not turn over the document without any judge having ever looking at what it contained, but rather, just trusting the Government to be honest.
Fast forward many decades, the report is declassified, and guess what, all it contained was a record of poor maintenance and a failure to install manufacturer recommended heat shields in the engine to prevent the exact type of engine fire that occurred and caused the crash.
Great interview with the granddaughter who finally got her hands on the document:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/383/origin-story?act=2#play
It's not mindless cynicism. It is a recognition that US politics operates on a purely tribal basis.
You have Democrats who really honestly believe Obama is a peacenik who has reduced the number of troops in Afghanistan every single year of his presidency. I'm not joking -- I saw this exact comment in my local paper's comment section by a die-hard Obamabot.
You have Republicans who believe that forcing people to pay premiums to private for profit insurance companies is Marxism (as opposed to crony capitalism or corporatism, the softer brother of fascism). I see this in my local paper's comment section all the time from the mainstream-GOP-subverted Tea Baggers.
Combined, the purely tribal Democrats and Republicans probably account for about 60% of the population. The remainder will be largely filled by people who vote for a "lesser evil" and a few single digit percentage pointers who support "fringe" third parties. I'm in that last group, have been actively engaged with the fringe, stood out in the sleet and rain holding signs for that fringe, will not vote for any candidate affiliated with either the DNC or the GOP under any circumstances -- I am the fringe -- and I know there is no hope short of a scandal so egregious that one of the parties basically has to reinvent itself. Seriously, Obama's presidency should be all the demonstration one needs that to most people, policies are irrelevant, only party affiliation matters.
Wow. That's just weird and vindictive.
I was in a similar once/week program -- I remember getting into trouble in my regular classes, being scolded for this or that, but mostly I have very few memories, as if I daydreamed through school. But every memory I have of that other class is really good, sort of nostalgically golden. I had a great time in it and I wish all my school had been that way.
His opinion may be silly, but he isn't alone. I overheard two teachers saying the same thing, that the gifted kids take care of themselves and don't need any help.
Of course that's often false. It is a common enough occurrence for some gifted kids to get really lazy because early on, they find it is easy to skate with minimal effort. Later in their education careers however, when subjects become inherently tougher, those skating work habits turn to failure. I have personal experience here.
Secondly, relying on smart kids to take care of themselves is not a recipe for a well rounded education, it's a recipe for hyper focus on a single area that may or may not prove valuable to the student. In the college context, the point of a liberal arts education is to expose students to a wide range subjects because sometimes, very interesting things can happen when knowledge in different subject areas intersects. Ignoring smart kids might make sense for a diploma mill, but it doesn't make sense if the actual goal is help kids succeed by showing them where interesting (and potentially lucrative) intersections can be found.
A few years ago I had the stinky job of cleaning up a large area of a building that had skunk stink so bad I had to use a quality respiratory just to get near. A chemically effective solution involves hydrogen peroxide and baking soda: http://home.earthlink.net/~skunkremedy/home/sk00003.htm
I went to Walgreens to get a bunch of hydrogen peroxide -- put eight quarts in my basket and proceeded to the checkout. When I got there, I was told I wasn't allowed to buy that much at once -- I can't recall the limit but it was less than I had. Obviously, I just went shopping at multiple stores till I figured I had enough, but, it is this kind of ridiculous crap that is sure to expand.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/09/iran
Hmmm ... some random dork on /., or people who spent years in the __GWB__ administration dealing with Iran?
TLDR: you're wrong and brainwashed.
For definitions of "believe" that require no evidence or actual knowledge, then yeah sure, your comment is accurate. For rational definitions of believe, it's pure crap. Look up what "signature strike" means -- they have no idea who they are killing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/11/three-lessons-obama-drone-lies
With respect to Syria (or pick any random mideast country for that matter), why would it matter who was involved. See for instance 9/11, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
You are uninformed.
Non-citizens are protected by the constitution: http://www.asil.org/insights080620.cfm
Obama's definition of imminent: page 7, par 2, first sentence:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf
Analysis: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/05/obama-kill-list-doj-memo
Obama's definition of militant:
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/
which should be put in context with the recent CIA document leak which confirms that the Obama administration kills random people and calls them militants:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/09/188062/obamas-drone-war-kills-others.html
So how do you define imminent?
This isn't tinfoil hat shit. It is the published policy of the administration that imminent means neither "about to happen" or that it has any actual evidence that anything bad will happen. I didn't make that shit up. It's like Obama's definition of "militant" -- it doesn't mean someone who is taking up arms against the US. It means someone killed by a drone who happens to be male and over 12 years old. If the administration will twist words beyond recognition in order to murder -- exactly what won't it do?
Exactly. A perfect example is the recently released white paper on drones in which "imminent" is redefined. The White House defines imminent to mean:
Merriam Webster in contrast, defines imminent as:
Obviously laws are just about placating people into believing they have certain rights. That this is true should be apparent in that we have a discussion going on right now regarding whether killing people by drone strike far from any battlefield is acceptable under the constitutional provision that "no person shall deprived of life ... without due process of law." The constitution is supposed to be the highest law, but obviously, it means jack. Its sole purpose is to placate people into thinking the Feds will exercise restraint. However, anyone who expects the Feds to protect human rights or abide by its own laws, is engaging in willful self-delusion or is irreparably stupid.
Totally agree. I would love to see a constitutional amendment that would allow states to unilaterally secede. That issue was decided during the civl war such that secession requires the consent of both the Feds and the seceding state. But that could be rendered moot with a constitutional amendment that would allow unilateral secession.
And if you think about everything good the government does, almost all of that comes from local government -- roads, firetrucks, water and sewer -- that's all local or state. And sure, maybe there are Federal grants for those projects, but the Feds are just being a resource sapping middleman in that situation.
Donor states would especially benefit from secession -- for example, WA state gets about 86% of the Federal Tax money we send in. If we paid those taxes to the state instead, we'd immediately have 14% more money in the budget. Plus, I'm pretty sure Washington State wouldn't be blowing up the middle east, wasting money, and generating a never ending supply of enemies. All that wasted money would be available for ethically defensible projects.
What I mean by "too far away" is along the lines of 25 miles in a neighboring county (too much gas). People w/ addresses 100s of miles away are obviously looking at relocating so don't get the immediate discard, but really, I think enough people live here already. I'd rather not see my county's population increase.
I'm half-owner of a small business. We recently had to go through the grind of hiring a new front desk person, a yearly task it seems. After a few days with a Craigslist posting, we had 70 or 80 resumes which we each had to read in our spare time. The first to go are those who can't follow a simple instruction (e.g., we get a resume only, but asked for resume and cover letter), then the ones with egregious grammar or spelling errors, or "WEIRd" capitalization patterns, and so forth. Sometimes it is rather arbitrary, such as: lives too far away, or uses an unprofessional sounding email address (for example: hotkitty@aol.com). But arbitrary choices work the other way too. This last time, after picking eight people, I put the whole stack of remaining applications together, shuffled them, and picked two at random. Only one of the randoms didn't show, but the other one almost made it into the final pool.
Anyway, this article makes me glad I'm not an applicant: my selection of a browser is well considered and goes beyond merely selecting Firefox, despite the fact I'd end up not using Firefox to fill out an application. On my Linux Desktop and Mac laptop, I use Firefox with the No Script and Self Destructing Cookies plugins. If the application process relies on javascript and cookies -- there's a reasonable chance it would fail despite temporarily allowing this or that, and rather than take that risk, I'd fire up Safari like I always do when I need to visit a site that requires javascript and cookies. But that would make it appear to HR that I just used the default browser without giving it any consideration, which is exactly the opposite of the truth.
There are lots of ways self-employment sucks, but the amount of arbitrary decision making (*) in hiring is one reason why I'm glad I'll never be on the other side of an interview.
(*) and yeah, I realize I make arbitrary decisions and I can understand why that happens. The number of people looking for work is huge and there is only so much time in the day. It's a thorny issue.