It depends 100% on your transaction volume and your history. Where I work we get transactions for pennies, but that's an exceptional deal that we get for being a long-standing, reputable, high-volume customer.
If you get a lot of disputed charges, if you only process a handful of cards...It's a wholly different situation, and the GP is right, it can cost 75 cents or more to process a card.
There are a lot more efficient ways of doing that than some kind of "grow and bury" timber operation. For the time and cost involved, you'd be better off just slurping the C02 from the air directly.
The problem is fire. If a tree falls and is allowed to remain in situ it just increases the fuel load of the area. Then, when the inevitable fire breaks out, it quickly becomes unmanageable...There is just way too much to burn.
The only way to prevent this is with regular prescribed burns to keep the fuel loads of the forests low.
Carting it all off, pressure treating it, and building things with it isn't much of an answer either. Not only do you screw the forests over, but pressure treated wood has all kinds of nasty crap in it...You don't worry about the C02 being released when you burn it, you worry about the PCBs.
Newer fibre is a lot more durable than it used to be, but I still wouldn't want to maul it around like that.
Might be a good time to rethink their wire plan. If they have too much exposed wire, then they can reduce the number of wires, and add heavy conduit. Fibre should be well planned anyway; it's too expensive to run a lot of it, and it's probably not necessary to run more than a backbone of fibre unless you're wiring a datacenter.
Good call. I spaced on that part. That's almost worse though, because of what may be nearby. A river, some fast food places, one of those goddamn toxic peanut factories.
All the same points apply though. Stop the food. Or get some exterminators...Some good ones if the rats are coming from a neighboring property. Maybe see if you can report your neighbors for excessive vermin?
For a big install that may not be possible...If all the wire is already pulled, for example, you can't unpull it all and add conduit without a huge expense.
On the other hand, it may be pulled in quantities that exceed common conduit widths. I've seen even small buildings with bundles of cable the diameter of a soccer ball, and if the conduit is that big, it's more likely a convenient rat super-highway than a deterrent.
Rats and mice don't eat cables...They chew the insulation off to make their nests...or if it happens to be in their way. So your best be it to figure out what the hell they're eating, and shut down their food supply. They'll move on shortly thereafter.
The word "campus" may put paid to that notion, however. Campus implies lots of people, lots of garbage, and lots of space. God help you if it's a college campus, the promised land of vermin the world over, where bulldog sized rats subsist on half a cheeseburger out of the dumpster. If that's the case, then there is no way you'll be able to shut off their food.
Introducing predators isn't necessarily a bad idea, but its a measure that can, in no way, co-exist with traditional methods of poison and trapping. Your predator will likely set off the traps and poison itself on the bioaccumulated toxins in the bodies of its prey. If you do get a cat, better feed it a bunch of activated charcoal with its kibble.
Which brings us to poison and trapping. It's not that they don't work. They work GREAT. If they're not working, it means you're not using enough. You need to come to the budgetary equilibrium where the amount you spend on extermination makes sense based on the cost of cable replacement.
So if you can't shut off their food, and you can't stomach the thought of your kitties/ferrets/snakes keeling over dead from poison every month or two, you're going to have to up the extermination.
Eh. It was one of those labour saving devices that made slavery popular again in the first place: the Cotton Gin. Without that, the cotton economy was impossible.
There wasn't a good mechanical cotton picker until the 1950's so you bet your ass the plantation owners would have demanded slavery up until that point, or even later. They also would have defended it as a integral part of their way of life.
It definitely needed to stop, and there definitely wasn't a good peaceful mechanism to stop it, given the powers the states held at that time. I deplore the waste of the war, and the larger wastes and excesses that followed it, but I'm not going to argue the necessity.
Typically this presents as one of two phenomenons:
"Contact Immunity" where an individual is immune, and their immunity is contagious. Usually this is a response to a vaccination. The weakened strain of the vaccination is still contagious, and so spreads through the population stopping the spread of the original disease.
Or so called "Herd Immunity" where an immune population is large enough to block transmission vectors between non-immune members. Person A gets sick, but dies/gets better before they run into anyone who isn't immune.
51% of the people of the country vote one way, and 100% of the people of Iowa vote the other way, Iowa's votes go to someone who no one in Iowa voted for. How the hell does that make sense to you, and how the HELL do you equate that with the relative "value" of a vote?
Subjugation? If Kansas tried to secede, I think we could take 'em. Or was it a trick question?
The reason power isn't local is because of the Civil War. The breadth of the rights that the federal government has taken for itself since the civil war is tremendous. States get to vote for paltry crap, within guidelines.
I'm not actually in favor of this, simply because it takes away the say of the people in Iowa. If their state votes for the loser, so be it, they should be counted.
I hate the idea of the winner-take-all electoral college as it is currently incarnated, but I don't think that this is the right way to go about changing it.
This isn't about winners and losers. This is about votes not counting.
If 49% of a state votes 1 way, and 100% of the states votes are distributed the other way, then people are getting disenfranchised because their votes aren't being represented in the final tally that determines the actual winner.
In most states, this is not the case, and the EC members are required to vote in alignment with the citizens. Some states even split the EC votes based on the way the popular vote within the state turns out.
There are still a few states, however, where the EC members can vote for whoever they like.
Abiword is better than writer; Gnumeric is better than calc. Both of them are light and responsive, and if they lack features, it's only in comparison to Office, not Open Office.
Maybe originally, but the Civil War put an end to any pretensions of state's rights. That being the case, everyone should have an equal say on the election of a chief executive.
The problems you state already exist. California goes with its big cities, New York goes with New York city...New york state is as red as a damn stop sign, and the entire state has gone democrat since forever because the city has more votes than the whole rest of the state. Those states have more electoral votes than nearly all the midwest combined.
I'm not even against splitting the electoral college votes based on the votes of the population of the state. But winner take all disenfranchises people who aren't the majority, and it doesn't reflect the actual views of the state.
And, frankly, the small states have such an inordinate amount of legislative clout in the Senate, I really don't care if they don't get a lot of say in the Executive. Executive branch representation should be based on the wants of the majority of citizens.
That wasn't the reasoning though. The reasoning was that the average person wasn't educated enough to understand the issues well enough to pick the best person.
It's not about Joe Farmer not having sufficient opportunity to weight the merits of candidate A's 4 hour speech vs Candidate B's 4 hour speech. It's about Joe Farmer voting based on the phase of the moon, or the direction the tobaccy plant leaned in.
In short, the founding fathers thought the people were largely a bunch of morons, and they wanted the actual votes to be filtered through the worldview of a bunch of wealthy, educated landowners (e.g. the electoral college).
On a purely practical level, it's an excellent way to make sure the colony doesn't just decide to vote itself back to being a part of england.
In short I think the GP was more nearly correct. The FF's didn't really trust the people to do the right thing.
Why not? I've lived in plenty of states where my vote for any national election was absolutely pointless, because 80% of the population always voted the other way. If you don't care about local politics, and you can't change national politics, why vote?
(I personally do care about the local crap, but if I didn't, I don't know that I'd bother going out without a close senate/house race)
The electoral college was put in place so that there would be a check on the power of the uneducated masses...Originally the EC didn't have to vote with the state!
Winner take-all-vote distribution is disgusting. If I live in a state that goes 49% for party X, and 51% for party Y, you can't even argue that giving 100% of our states votes to party Y makes the least bit of sense.
Who knows? The thing is, once you have 1000 people, the critical mass of pointy-hairs will make Exchange a requirement.
Still, 70 bucks a seat sounds expensive when your budget is in the hundreds of thousands. When your budget is in the millions, that's like 1 manager's salary, so you fire the guy you like least, and buy exchange for the company.
I am often at a loss to explain business decisions though. We use this huge proprietary design system, and for years we were shackled to the old version of the system by costs of the hardware upgrade (old solaris mainframes). I sat down one day and took the new version of the system (which we had for free, since we were paying support), and made it work on open solaris on x86 hardware.
Took it to my boss expecting a raise, and maybe, you know, some appreciation. Got told off because my solution didn't account for the need to buy ~40 CS3 licenses (around 30k, for some new copies, and some upgrades).
Fast forward 6 months, and we went out and bought a NEW system to do the same thing for more than 10 times what my upgrade would have cost. The new system only replaces half of the old system, so we still have half a crappy old system to maintain, and, AND, we still had to buy the fucking CS3 licenses!
Front to back it cost us probably half a million dollars and the new system is universally hated for its crap speed and crap stability (it's running, I shit you not, on virtualized win2k boxes...I could fucking weep).
The thing is, my solution was impossible because it couldn't be put on the capital budget because it was over the max budget for an in-house upgrade. But the much more expensive system could because it was under the budget for a purchased system. Penny wise, pound foolish.
The reason it's been a problem is that the vast majority of Windows admins don't know what the hell they're doing.
If it's properly configured, and properly deployed behind a shitload of OSS-based hardening, it'll hardly ever have problems...Our corporate exchange setup hasn't had a virus in years...We have far far far more trouble with people who still use IE and people who bring in thumbdrives full of crap from home.
Yea, it's a pain to protect it, but once you do it works fine.
Sexual misconduct, accusations of criminal activity, accusations of carrying a disease, and accusations that might impinge on the subjects ability to run their business: these are all special exceptions to the rule. It's best not to "believe" things like this in public if you don't have proof.
However, the "farm animals" slur probably still wouldn't fly because it's too outlandish to be believed without any substantiation. The judge could likely rule that no one would reasonably believe the falsehood, therefore no damages.
Clearly you've never used the beauty and wonder that is Entourage. [/sarcasm]
You're right, and you're wrong. The assumption is that you just don't need fancy calendar apps, and mail server based collaboration and crap like that if you're a unix/linux shop. I know how it is. Even mutt is decadent to a hardcore unix freak, just grep the mail spool you pussy!
And really, the Exchange infrastructure is massive overkill if you're a small shop anyway.
But for a decent sized corporation it really helps to be able to manage all that crap. Where I am we have about 40 major business units, and we're forever passing off projects from one property to the next, so it makes for constant meetings and crap, and it's really nice to just have a massive shared calendar and scheduling system that works with your email.
Even the subset (of which I am a member) of the corp that does only linux/unix stuff gets a lot of mileage out of Exchange. We hate to admit it, but it's impossible to coordinate it on a traditional mail system, and our various message boards are too crowded for that crap, and it doesn't manage groups well, so you have to know everybody you want to talk to at 40 properties, etc.
I guess I'm saying, it can still be nice, even if you're all about the unix.
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It depends 100% on your transaction volume and your history. Where I work we get transactions for pennies, but that's an exceptional deal that we get for being a long-standing, reputable, high-volume customer.
If you get a lot of disputed charges, if you only process a handful of cards...It's a wholly different situation, and the GP is right, it can cost 75 cents or more to process a card.
There are a lot more efficient ways of doing that than some kind of "grow and bury" timber operation. For the time and cost involved, you'd be better off just slurping the C02 from the air directly.
The problem is fire. If a tree falls and is allowed to remain in situ it just increases the fuel load of the area. Then, when the inevitable fire breaks out, it quickly becomes unmanageable...There is just way too much to burn.
The only way to prevent this is with regular prescribed burns to keep the fuel loads of the forests low.
Carting it all off, pressure treating it, and building things with it isn't much of an answer either. Not only do you screw the forests over, but pressure treated wood has all kinds of nasty crap in it...You don't worry about the C02 being released when you burn it, you worry about the PCBs.
Newer fibre is a lot more durable than it used to be, but I still wouldn't want to maul it around like that.
Might be a good time to rethink their wire plan. If they have too much exposed wire, then they can reduce the number of wires, and add heavy conduit. Fibre should be well planned anyway; it's too expensive to run a lot of it, and it's probably not necessary to run more than a backbone of fibre unless you're wiring a datacenter.
Can't have been peanut butter...The rats are still alive.
Heh. I wouldn't have pegged you for a big poison proponent. I agree though; if you can't shut off their food, there really isn't any other option.
As far as humane-ness, if you're killing them, does it really matter how?
Good call. I spaced on that part. That's almost worse though, because of what may be nearby. A river, some fast food places, one of those goddamn toxic peanut factories.
All the same points apply though. Stop the food. Or get some exterminators...Some good ones if the rats are coming from a neighboring property. Maybe see if you can report your neighbors for excessive vermin?
For a big install that may not be possible...If all the wire is already pulled, for example, you can't unpull it all and add conduit without a huge expense.
On the other hand, it may be pulled in quantities that exceed common conduit widths. I've seen even small buildings with bundles of cable the diameter of a soccer ball, and if the conduit is that big, it's more likely a convenient rat super-highway than a deterrent.
Rats and mice don't eat cables...They chew the insulation off to make their nests...or if it happens to be in their way. So your best be it to figure out what the hell they're eating, and shut down their food supply. They'll move on shortly thereafter.
The word "campus" may put paid to that notion, however. Campus implies lots of people, lots of garbage, and lots of space. God help you if it's a college campus, the promised land of vermin the world over, where bulldog sized rats subsist on half a cheeseburger out of the dumpster. If that's the case, then there is no way you'll be able to shut off their food.
Introducing predators isn't necessarily a bad idea, but its a measure that can, in no way, co-exist with traditional methods of poison and trapping. Your predator will likely set off the traps and poison itself on the bioaccumulated toxins in the bodies of its prey. If you do get a cat, better feed it a bunch of activated charcoal with its kibble.
Which brings us to poison and trapping. It's not that they don't work. They work GREAT. If they're not working, it means you're not using enough. You need to come to the budgetary equilibrium where the amount you spend on extermination makes sense based on the cost of cable replacement.
So if you can't shut off their food, and you can't stomach the thought of your kitties/ferrets/snakes keeling over dead from poison every month or two, you're going to have to up the extermination.
Eh. It was one of those labour saving devices that made slavery popular again in the first place: the Cotton Gin. Without that, the cotton economy was impossible.
There wasn't a good mechanical cotton picker until the 1950's so you bet your ass the plantation owners would have demanded slavery up until that point, or even later. They also would have defended it as a integral part of their way of life.
It definitely needed to stop, and there definitely wasn't a good peaceful mechanism to stop it, given the powers the states held at that time. I deplore the waste of the war, and the larger wastes and excesses that followed it, but I'm not going to argue the necessity.
An immune non-carrier.
Typically this presents as one of two phenomenons:
"Contact Immunity" where an individual is immune, and their immunity is contagious. Usually this is a response to a vaccination. The weakened strain of the vaccination is still contagious, and so spreads through the population stopping the spread of the original disease.
Or so called "Herd Immunity" where an immune population is large enough to block transmission vectors between non-immune members. Person A gets sick, but dies/gets better before they run into anyone who isn't immune.
What the hell are you talking about?
51% of the people of the country vote one way, and 100% of the people of Iowa vote the other way, Iowa's votes go to someone who no one in Iowa voted for. How the hell does that make sense to you, and how the HELL do you equate that with the relative "value" of a vote?
Subjugation? If Kansas tried to secede, I think we could take 'em. Or was it a trick question?
The reason power isn't local is because of the Civil War. The breadth of the rights that the federal government has taken for itself since the civil war is tremendous. States get to vote for paltry crap, within guidelines.
I'm not actually in favor of this, simply because it takes away the say of the people in Iowa. If their state votes for the loser, so be it, they should be counted.
I hate the idea of the winner-take-all electoral college as it is currently incarnated, but I don't think that this is the right way to go about changing it.
This isn't about winners and losers. This is about votes not counting.
If 49% of a state votes 1 way, and 100% of the states votes are distributed the other way, then people are getting disenfranchised because their votes aren't being represented in the final tally that determines the actual winner.
In most states, this is not the case, and the EC members are required to vote in alignment with the citizens. Some states even split the EC votes based on the way the popular vote within the state turns out.
There are still a few states, however, where the EC members can vote for whoever they like.
Abiword is better than writer; Gnumeric is better than calc. Both of them are light and responsive, and if they lack features, it's only in comparison to Office, not Open Office.
End of story. Thanks for shopping.
Maybe originally, but the Civil War put an end to any pretensions of state's rights. That being the case, everyone should have an equal say on the election of a chief executive.
The problems you state already exist. California goes with its big cities, New York goes with New York city...New york state is as red as a damn stop sign, and the entire state has gone democrat since forever because the city has more votes than the whole rest of the state. Those states have more electoral votes than nearly all the midwest combined.
I'm not even against splitting the electoral college votes based on the votes of the population of the state. But winner take all disenfranchises people who aren't the majority, and it doesn't reflect the actual views of the state.
And, frankly, the small states have such an inordinate amount of legislative clout in the Senate, I really don't care if they don't get a lot of say in the Executive. Executive branch representation should be based on the wants of the majority of citizens.
That wasn't the reasoning though. The reasoning was that the average person wasn't educated enough to understand the issues well enough to pick the best person.
It's not about Joe Farmer not having sufficient opportunity to weight the merits of candidate A's 4 hour speech vs Candidate B's 4 hour speech. It's about Joe Farmer voting based on the phase of the moon, or the direction the tobaccy plant leaned in.
In short, the founding fathers thought the people were largely a bunch of morons, and they wanted the actual votes to be filtered through the worldview of a bunch of wealthy, educated landowners (e.g. the electoral college).
On a purely practical level, it's an excellent way to make sure the colony doesn't just decide to vote itself back to being a part of england.
In short I think the GP was more nearly correct. The FF's didn't really trust the people to do the right thing.
Why not? I've lived in plenty of states where my vote for any national election was absolutely pointless, because 80% of the population always voted the other way. If you don't care about local politics, and you can't change national politics, why vote?
(I personally do care about the local crap, but if I didn't, I don't know that I'd bother going out without a close senate/house race)
The electoral college was put in place so that there would be a check on the power of the uneducated masses...Originally the EC didn't have to vote with the state!
Winner take-all-vote distribution is disgusting. If I live in a state that goes 49% for party X, and 51% for party Y, you can't even argue that giving 100% of our states votes to party Y makes the least bit of sense.
Who knows? The thing is, once you have 1000 people, the critical mass of pointy-hairs will make Exchange a requirement.
Still, 70 bucks a seat sounds expensive when your budget is in the hundreds of thousands. When your budget is in the millions, that's like 1 manager's salary, so you fire the guy you like least, and buy exchange for the company.
I am often at a loss to explain business decisions though. We use this huge proprietary design system, and for years we were shackled to the old version of the system by costs of the hardware upgrade (old solaris mainframes). I sat down one day and took the new version of the system (which we had for free, since we were paying support), and made it work on open solaris on x86 hardware.
Took it to my boss expecting a raise, and maybe, you know, some appreciation. Got told off because my solution didn't account for the need to buy ~40 CS3 licenses (around 30k, for some new copies, and some upgrades).
Fast forward 6 months, and we went out and bought a NEW system to do the same thing for more than 10 times what my upgrade would have cost. The new system only replaces half of the old system, so we still have half a crappy old system to maintain, and, AND, we still had to buy the fucking CS3 licenses!
Front to back it cost us probably half a million dollars and the new system is universally hated for its crap speed and crap stability (it's running, I shit you not, on virtualized win2k boxes...I could fucking weep).
The thing is, my solution was impossible because it couldn't be put on the capital budget because it was over the max budget for an in-house upgrade. But the much more expensive system could because it was under the budget for a purchased system. Penny wise, pound foolish.
The reason it's been a problem is that the vast majority of Windows admins don't know what the hell they're doing.
If it's properly configured, and properly deployed behind a shitload of OSS-based hardening, it'll hardly ever have problems...Our corporate exchange setup hasn't had a virus in years...We have far far far more trouble with people who still use IE and people who bring in thumbdrives full of crap from home.
Yea, it's a pain to protect it, but once you do it works fine.
Sexual misconduct, accusations of criminal activity, accusations of carrying a disease, and accusations that might impinge on the subjects ability to run their business: these are all special exceptions to the rule. It's best not to "believe" things like this in public if you don't have proof.
However, the "farm animals" slur probably still wouldn't fly because it's too outlandish to be believed without any substantiation. The judge could likely rule that no one would reasonably believe the falsehood, therefore no damages.
Clearly you've never used the beauty and wonder that is Entourage. [/sarcasm]
You're right, and you're wrong. The assumption is that you just don't need fancy calendar apps, and mail server based collaboration and crap like that if you're a unix/linux shop. I know how it is. Even mutt is decadent to a hardcore unix freak, just grep the mail spool you pussy!
And really, the Exchange infrastructure is massive overkill if you're a small shop anyway.
But for a decent sized corporation it really helps to be able to manage all that crap. Where I am we have about 40 major business units, and we're forever passing off projects from one property to the next, so it makes for constant meetings and crap, and it's really nice to just have a massive shared calendar and scheduling system that works with your email.
Even the subset (of which I am a member) of the corp that does only linux/unix stuff gets a lot of mileage out of Exchange. We hate to admit it, but it's impossible to coordinate it on a traditional mail system, and our various message boards are too crowded for that crap, and it doesn't manage groups well, so you have to know everybody you want to talk to at 40 properties, etc.
I guess I'm saying, it can still be nice, even if you're all about the unix.