Well, maybe what we need to do is only band cell phone use for people who think they CAN drive and talk at the same time. They are obviously mistaken. Those who think that they CANNOT talk and drive are legally allowed to (but won't) talk on the phone and drive at the same time.
Seriously, eating a Big Mac from the drive thru takes more concentration from the road than talking on the cell phone.
Having done both, I would argue that the cell phone takes more concentration.
Talking on a phone IS worse than talking to someone in a passenger seat. Due to limited frequency range, it takes more effort to understand a voice coming through a phone and a voice in the passenger seat. Also, a voice in the passenger seat is hopefully also paying attention and knows when to shut up and let you drive.
You do know that most major racing groups use radios to communicate to their drivers? That Rally car racing drivers are constantly talking to their navigators.
Yes, but they are not having to stare down at a phone pecking in numbers. They have a direct link that requires no effort on their part other than to start talking. Also, they are professionals and have trained from day one to use the equipment. Also, when they get into a situation where a crash has just occurred in front of them, their attention completely shifts to the task at hand and they will stop communicating with the pit until they can spare the cycles to do so.
Dude, if the car moving forward at 60 mph becomes a wall moving 0 mph instantly WITH NO BREAK LIGHTS it sure the hell fucks the driver behind that wall.
No, it doesn't because the driver is not responsible only for avoiding the driver directly in front of him but also every other driver ahead of that driver. If the pickup rear-ended somebody, the bus driver should already have been taking into consideration the person the pickup was about to hit.
The realtors always tell you you should buy the most house that you can possibly afford. Considering that mortgage rates are usually quite low compared to other loans and that houses usually appreciate, and mortgage interest is tax deductible that seems like good advice. But one also has to factor in that your house could go down in value, which was never seen as a real possibility until recently. Also, one has to consider that insurance, utilities and property taxes are going to go up at a rate that outpaces inflation, while your salary will probably underperform inflation. After looking at all that, it makes more sense to buy and live conservatively. But that is not in the best interests of the realtor. Unfortunately, learning stuff like that comes from experience, and the "ooh, shiny" of a large house can override the caution that experienced friends, parents,etc.. may give you.
I hope you recover from your foreclosure and are able to take advantage of that unfortunate situation to give you an advantage in the future.
That problem suggests its own solution: poison the well by pre-emptively polluting Facebook etc. with fake profiles carrying garbage (but non-specific, non-damaging) information.
There are some that would say this has already been done.
Ah, but Facebook is requiring authentication via a phone number for its accounts of late.
Oh, so that wasn't a scam? One of my girls wanted a facebook account, and it came up and asked for a phone number for authentication. It sounded like a scam, so I said "no way".
In fact, the formula favor having access to lots of debt that isn't utilized. It shows you can be trusted not to blow all of your money.
In fact, that is correct only for small amounts of debt. having access to a really large empty credit line is a negative. They fear that you could get a loan from them, then suddenly go off on a bender and load up your credit line and not be able to pay anybody back.
Really? In 2008, I make nearly 4k by using my credit card as a source of credit. I had more than 100k credit borrowed from credit cards at 0% + no fee, and stashed it in savings accounts returning >3% interest. I never realized I was doing it wrong. Thanks for correcting my mistake.
That's good for you, but you have to really keep on top of the credit card companies to make that work. I paid off a higher balance card with a 0% introductory offer from Bank of America. First of all, they get you with fees up front, usually around 2% (balance transfer fee). Then, in my case, they changed my monthly due date up by over a week, resulting in a late payment and thus they jacked the rate back up. They don't like you paying low rates and do whatever they can to get you into a higher rate.
If you have a low introductory rate, and you buy something else on the card, it will be at the higher rate, and they will pay off the lower rate stuff first. before you know it, your stuck with a high interest charge on your card that is racking up interest every month and you can't pay it off without paying off your entire low interest rate balance first.
And in the EU there are data protection and privacy laws that could be used to deter this kind of thing.
The same is true in the U.S. This is a bullcrap story. Can't happen.
And you are also not a typical facebook user. A typical facebook user friends just about anybody who asks them. So there is even LESS statistically correlated useful information in a sampling of their friends.
Even if there is some correlation to creditworthiness to be found in facebook, the thing is, it is 100 times easier to find that information out of their credit report. That is why we HAVE credit reporting agencies: to centralize this information.
It could be that his situation was more recent (although I think it was likely just exaggerated). I can tell you that 10 years ago, they were handing out loans like candy to anyone with a pulse, partly because they were required to by the government, and partly because they got bonuses for making loans. Now, it has become much more difficult to get a loan. I am attempting to refinance right now to take advantage of low rates, and it ha thus far cost me nearly $1,000 and about 8 months of time and I have still not gotten refinanced. The banks always tell me that it will be no problem at the beginning of the process, then charge me fees for appraisals, then something goes wrong and they back out. i have good credit, I have about 120k to 200k equity in the house depending on whether you go by appraisals or the county assessor, and if I am able to afford my payments now, I should obviously be able to afford them when they are $1,000 a month lower, but something always goes wrong.
The first bank at least didn't cost me any money. They just looked at my numbers and said I can't afford the house I'm in after the appraisal.
The next one fell through because the bank didn't like the comps that were used for the appraisal. Well, excuse me, but the appraiser was chosen by the bank, and he found 5 comps when he was only required to find 3, and it appraised for more than it needed to. If they don't like it, they need to work with the appraiser to find more comps, or give me my money back. Of course, they did not give me my money back.
The next bank would not use that same appraisal and insisted on a new one, so then I was out another $400, and supposedly we were going to close first week of December, but then they started asking for more information (that I had already given them) again. The rate lock expires on the 27th of December, and they haven't even talked to me in about two weeks.
So, yeah, the rates are the lowest they have been in a long, long time, but you can't get a loan. It's like when Best Buy advertises a 62" TV for $200, and when you get there you find out they don't have any, and probably never did.
also to grill your boss about what the chances are that you're going to get fired in the next 1-2 years.
Well, that would have been illegal for them to ask and illegal for your boss to answer. Did you sue them and your boss?
Everything what you say is true if the Credit Agencies play it fair. Unfortunately we all know that they do not give a shit about fairness.
That is true. They don't care about fairness. They only care about putting what is sent to them into their database. Credit Agencies do no digging of their own. They receive all of their information from creditors. The information that is reported to them does not allow for fields such as "Who are these people friends with" or "who have they friended on facebook." They have pretty much the same information on their database as you see on your credit report: Revolving balances, structured loans, outstanding amounts, monthly payments, creditors name and phone number, past due balances, judgements, writeoffs, previous addresses, psuedonyms and that's about it.
I worked for a time as senior database administrator at Transunion. This whole article is bullcrap. The scenario described in the summary is illegal.
Then why don't all of the 'true' Republicans out there vote out all of the 'fake' Republicans YOU ALL VOTED INTO OFFICE!
Because the fake republicans are preferable to the genuine democrats.
I've always said, I hate the Republicans because they tell me they will do things that sound good to me, but when elected they don't. Whereas I hate Democrats because they tell me they will do things that sound bad to me, and when elected they do.
Why are they probably paid on impressions, when almost nobody is paid that way these days?Well, I didn't know that most everybody is paid by clicks now. In that case, I'm surprised they still let me on the internet considering that I have never ever clicked on an ad and if there is any hope for humanity then nobody else does either.
I've been offered the option of turning them off, and I don't take it. I like the site and don't mind if that's what it takes to preserve it.
I've been offered that as well, and also don't take it. The ads on slashdot don't interfere with what I am reading. I have never, ever, ever clicked on an ad, and never will, but slashdot is probably paid on impressions and not clicks. Or perhaps they are paid on both, but paid more for clicks. At any rate, if the internet ever went to a click only ad payment system most sites would probably stop serving information to people like me.
Advertisement is a waste of money, but fortunately for us leeches, most companies are duped by marketing into believing that advertising makes them more money. I have to hand it to marketing, the one thing that they can sell effectively is their own services.
Teaching to a standardized test makes the standardized test irrelevant. Same as building a CPU to excel at a set of benchmarks. It doesn't say anything about the performance of the CPU in real world applications, just shows how good at coding to a particular benchmark the engineers are. Teaching to a standardized test similarly just shows how good a teacher can teach raw facts that can be forgotten later.
Now, teaching to a standard curriculum and then later testing on how well that curriculum was absorbed, although sounding only slightly different, is actually a useful measure.
School board members aren't influential. They are just busybodies with a "think of the children" complex. They aren't educators themselves, and for the purpose they serve (or rather, the lack of purpose which they don't need to serve) does not require them to know thing 1 about education or even to be educated. School Board member used to be a volunteer position. Now it is a paid position, and that, combined with huge overhead of administration is why our school system is unable to provide a quality education despite receiving 10 times the funding in constant dollars that they did 30 years ago,
Lies. I offer you the BMW 335d sedan [bmwusa.com] producing 265 HP, 425 lb-ft torque, and gets 36 mpg. Granted it doesn't come with a manual but it is a 6 speed auto and you can probably put it into sport mode for tire boiling fun like with my 540i with the sport package
How is it a lie to say that there are no Diesel Sports Sedans with manual transmission other than VW? You say the BMW 335d is one, but doesn't come with a manual transmission. Well, then, it is not a Diesel Sports Sedan with a manual transmission, is it? Go to autos.msn.com and go to the "Help me choose" page. Choose "sedan" and "diesel". If you expand your search to all price ranges, it will come back with 5 models. The VW Jetta and Passat, which both have a manual transmission available and the BMW 335d, Mercedes E-Series and S-Series, none of which come with a manual transmission.
I feel your pain with the VW. Somebody here at work has a VW diesel. He does get great gas mileage, but he has had to have somebody jump start him several times in recent weeks. It seems that the VW diesels are not very reliable.
This does not bode well for the Audi A4 TDI, which is coming next year (and has been coming next year for at least 5 years). It uses the same engine, from what I hear as the VW.
Well that is a shame, because one of the two reasons I have not bought a new car recently is that there are no diesel powered manual shift sports sedans available. Well, other than the VW Jetta or whatever it is. The other reason is that, like 95% of Americans, I can't afford a new car, but unlike most Americans, I don't buy things when I can't afford them.
You shouldn't have mentioned pickup trucks. Pickup trucks disprove your point because huge Diesel pickup trucks are even more manly than huge gas powered pickup trucks.
It's also a lot harder to absorb them in the cost of doing business when your competitors aren't.
You are exactly right. This is why it is a race to the bottom as soon as one salesman lies or one company starts inserting a line item for a charge that should be include.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe what we need to do is only band cell phone use for people who think they CAN drive and talk at the same time. They are obviously mistaken. Those who think that they CANNOT talk and drive are legally allowed to (but won't) talk on the phone and drive at the same time.
Seriously, eating a Big Mac from the drive thru takes more concentration from the road than talking on the cell phone.
Having done both, I would argue that the cell phone takes more concentration.
Talking on a phone IS worse than talking to someone in a passenger seat. Due to limited frequency range, it takes more effort to understand a voice coming through a phone and a voice in the passenger seat. Also, a voice in the passenger seat is hopefully also paying attention and knows when to shut up and let you drive.
You do know that most major racing groups use radios to communicate to their drivers? That Rally car racing drivers are constantly talking to their navigators.
Yes, but they are not having to stare down at a phone pecking in numbers. They have a direct link that requires no effort on their part other than to start talking. Also, they are professionals and have trained from day one to use the equipment. Also, when they get into a situation where a crash has just occurred in front of them, their attention completely shifts to the task at hand and they will stop communicating with the pit until they can spare the cycles to do so.
Dude, if the car moving forward at 60 mph becomes a wall moving 0 mph instantly WITH NO BREAK LIGHTS it sure the hell fucks the driver behind that wall.
No, it doesn't because the driver is not responsible only for avoiding the driver directly in front of him but also every other driver ahead of that driver. If the pickup rear-ended somebody, the bus driver should already have been taking into consideration the person the pickup was about to hit.
The realtors always tell you you should buy the most house that you can possibly afford. Considering that mortgage rates are usually quite low compared to other loans and that houses usually appreciate, and mortgage interest is tax deductible that seems like good advice. But one also has to factor in that your house could go down in value, which was never seen as a real possibility until recently. Also, one has to consider that insurance, utilities and property taxes are going to go up at a rate that outpaces inflation, while your salary will probably underperform inflation. After looking at all that, it makes more sense to buy and live conservatively. But that is not in the best interests of the realtor. Unfortunately, learning stuff like that comes from experience, and the "ooh, shiny" of a large house can override the caution that experienced friends, parents ,etc.. may give you.
I hope you recover from your foreclosure and are able to take advantage of that unfortunate situation to give you an advantage in the future.
That problem suggests its own solution: poison the well by pre-emptively polluting Facebook etc. with fake profiles carrying garbage (but non-specific, non-damaging) information.
There are some that would say this has already been done.
Ah, but Facebook is requiring authentication via a phone number for its accounts of late.
Oh, so that wasn't a scam? One of my girls wanted a facebook account, and it came up and asked for a phone number for authentication. It sounded like a scam, so I said "no way".
In fact, the formula favor having access to lots of debt that isn't utilized. It shows you can be trusted not to blow all of your money.
In fact, that is correct only for small amounts of debt. having access to a really large empty credit line is a negative. They fear that you could get a loan from them, then suddenly go off on a bender and load up your credit line and not be able to pay anybody back.
Really? In 2008, I make nearly 4k by using my credit card as a source of credit. I had more than 100k credit borrowed from credit cards at 0% + no fee, and stashed it in savings accounts returning >3% interest. I never realized I was doing it wrong. Thanks for correcting my mistake.
That's good for you, but you have to really keep on top of the credit card companies to make that work. I paid off a higher balance card with a 0% introductory offer from Bank of America. First of all, they get you with fees up front, usually around 2% (balance transfer fee). Then, in my case, they changed my monthly due date up by over a week, resulting in a late payment and thus they jacked the rate back up. They don't like you paying low rates and do whatever they can to get you into a higher rate.
If you have a low introductory rate, and you buy something else on the card, it will be at the higher rate, and they will pay off the lower rate stuff first. before you know it, your stuck with a high interest charge on your card that is racking up interest every month and you can't pay it off without paying off your entire low interest rate balance first.
And in the EU there are data protection and privacy laws that could be used to deter this kind of thing.
The same is true in the U.S. This is a bullcrap story. Can't happen.
And you are also not a typical facebook user. A typical facebook user friends just about anybody who asks them. So there is even LESS statistically correlated useful information in a sampling of their friends.
Even if there is some correlation to creditworthiness to be found in facebook, the thing is, it is 100 times easier to find that information out of their credit report. That is why we HAVE credit reporting agencies: to centralize this information.
It could be that his situation was more recent (although I think it was likely just exaggerated). I can tell you that 10 years ago, they were handing out loans like candy to anyone with a pulse, partly because they were required to by the government, and partly because they got bonuses for making loans. Now, it has become much more difficult to get a loan. I am attempting to refinance right now to take advantage of low rates, and it ha thus far cost me nearly $1,000 and about 8 months of time and I have still not gotten refinanced. The banks always tell me that it will be no problem at the beginning of the process, then charge me fees for appraisals, then something goes wrong and they back out. i have good credit, I have about 120k to 200k equity in the house depending on whether you go by appraisals or the county assessor, and if I am able to afford my payments now, I should obviously be able to afford them when they are $1,000 a month lower, but something always goes wrong.
The first bank at least didn't cost me any money. They just looked at my numbers and said I can't afford the house I'm in after the appraisal.
The next one fell through because the bank didn't like the comps that were used for the appraisal. Well, excuse me, but the appraiser was chosen by the bank, and he found 5 comps when he was only required to find 3, and it appraised for more than it needed to. If they don't like it, they need to work with the appraiser to find more comps, or give me my money back. Of course, they did not give me my money back.
The next bank would not use that same appraisal and insisted on a new one, so then I was out another $400, and supposedly we were going to close first week of December, but then they started asking for more information (that I had already given them) again. The rate lock expires on the 27th of December, and they haven't even talked to me in about two weeks.
So, yeah, the rates are the lowest they have been in a long, long time, but you can't get a loan. It's like when Best Buy advertises a 62" TV for $200, and when you get there you find out they don't have any, and probably never did.
also to grill your boss about what the chances are that you're going to get fired in the next 1-2 years.
Well, that would have been illegal for them to ask and illegal for your boss to answer. Did you sue them and your boss?
Everything what you say is true if the Credit Agencies play it fair. Unfortunately we all know that they do not give a shit about fairness.
That is true. They don't care about fairness. They only care about putting what is sent to them into their database. Credit Agencies do no digging of their own. They receive all of their information from creditors. The information that is reported to them does not allow for fields such as "Who are these people friends with" or "who have they friended on facebook." They have pretty much the same information on their database as you see on your credit report: Revolving balances, structured loans, outstanding amounts, monthly payments, creditors name and phone number, past due balances, judgements, writeoffs, previous addresses, psuedonyms and that's about it.
I worked for a time as senior database administrator at Transunion. This whole article is bullcrap. The scenario described in the summary is illegal.
Then why don't all of the 'true' Republicans out there vote out all of the 'fake' Republicans YOU ALL VOTED INTO OFFICE!
Because the fake republicans are preferable to the genuine democrats.
I've always said, I hate the Republicans because they tell me they will do things that sound good to me, but when elected they don't. Whereas I hate Democrats because they tell me they will do things that sound bad to me, and when elected they do.
Why are they probably paid on impressions, when almost nobody is paid that way these days?Well, I didn't know that most everybody is paid by clicks now. In that case, I'm surprised they still let me on the internet considering that I have never ever clicked on an ad and if there is any hope for humanity then nobody else does either.
I've been offered the option of turning them off, and I don't take it. I like the site and don't mind if that's what it takes to preserve it.
I've been offered that as well, and also don't take it. The ads on slashdot don't interfere with what I am reading. I have never, ever, ever clicked on an ad, and never will, but slashdot is probably paid on impressions and not clicks. Or perhaps they are paid on both, but paid more for clicks. At any rate, if the internet ever went to a click only ad payment system most sites would probably stop serving information to people like me.
Advertisement is a waste of money, but fortunately for us leeches, most companies are duped by marketing into believing that advertising makes them more money. I have to hand it to marketing, the one thing that they can sell effectively is their own services.
Teaching to a standardized test makes the standardized test irrelevant. Same as building a CPU to excel at a set of benchmarks. It doesn't say anything about the performance of the CPU in real world applications, just shows how good at coding to a particular benchmark the engineers are. Teaching to a standardized test similarly just shows how good a teacher can teach raw facts that can be forgotten later.
Now, teaching to a standard curriculum and then later testing on how well that curriculum was absorbed, although sounding only slightly different, is actually a useful measure.
School board members aren't influential. They are just busybodies with a "think of the children" complex. They aren't educators themselves, and for the purpose they serve (or rather, the lack of purpose which they don't need to serve) does not require them to know thing 1 about education or even to be educated. School Board member used to be a volunteer position. Now it is a paid position, and that, combined with huge overhead of administration is why our school system is unable to provide a quality education despite receiving 10 times the funding in constant dollars that they did 30 years ago,
Lies. I offer you the BMW 335d sedan [bmwusa.com] producing 265 HP, 425 lb-ft torque, and gets 36 mpg. Granted it doesn't come with a manual but it is a 6 speed auto and you can probably put it into sport mode for tire boiling fun like with my 540i with the sport package
How is it a lie to say that there are no Diesel Sports Sedans with manual transmission other than VW? You say the BMW 335d is one, but doesn't come with a manual transmission. Well, then, it is not a Diesel Sports Sedan with a manual transmission, is it? Go to autos.msn.com and go to the "Help me choose" page. Choose "sedan" and "diesel". If you expand your search to all price ranges, it will come back with 5 models. The VW Jetta and Passat, which both have a manual transmission available and the BMW 335d, Mercedes E-Series and S-Series, none of which come with a manual transmission.
I feel your pain with the VW. Somebody here at work has a VW diesel. He does get great gas mileage, but he has had to have somebody jump start him several times in recent weeks. It seems that the VW diesels are not very reliable.
This does not bode well for the Audi A4 TDI, which is coming next year (and has been coming next year for at least 5 years). It uses the same engine, from what I hear as the VW.
Well that is a shame, because one of the two reasons I have not bought a new car recently is that there are no diesel powered manual shift sports sedans available. Well, other than the VW Jetta or whatever it is. The other reason is that, like 95% of Americans, I can't afford a new car, but unlike most Americans, I don't buy things when I can't afford them.
You shouldn't have mentioned pickup trucks. Pickup trucks disprove your point because huge Diesel pickup trucks are even more manly than huge gas powered pickup trucks.
Well you probably also have to not pay for a while and call up customer service a lot to get down to a 0 or 1.
It's also a lot harder to absorb them in the cost of doing business when your competitors aren't.
You are exactly right. This is why it is a race to the bottom as soon as one salesman lies or one company starts inserting a line item for a charge that should be include.