Or you can not be an asshole, and not park in the handicapped spot in the first place.
Or you could not be an asshole by making hasty assumptions. A store could have been renovated and the entrance moved, yet the signs remain in the old locations. Or you could be shopping at three in the morning in a grocery store devoid of other customers and given an invalid ticket for xyz reason. At least in Michigan, you'd have plenty of ways to appeal the citation.
I didn't have a parking pass yet, so I parked along a street where at least a dozen other cars were parked. Came out to find a ticket for having my car in a no parking zone. There were no signs to that effect, but the curb was painted yellow. However, this was in January, and the curb was completely covered with snow. Pretty lame to expect people to follow the rules when there's no practical way for them to know what the rules are.
All a higher marginal tax rate does is kill the incentive for people to earn more money.
Do you really think that Americans were completely uninterested in making more money in the 50's, the 50's that the Republicans supposedly want to return to, when we had that miserable socialist in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower?
Under a 91% tax rate, you wouldn't practically be able to have a fleet of private jets, yachts, and a dozen homes, like the Maddoff's who are facing indictment. Does that mean you wouldn't have any interest in making enough money for a private jet, a yacht, and three homes? Methinks not.
So spare us this "but but but Americans wont want to work" nonsense.
Kennedy started the tax cuts.
But he didn't slash them like Reagan did. The top marginal rate stood at 70%, a fine rate in peace time with a health economy, until the Gipper started destroying it with Voodoo Economics. But now we're stuck in two wars, will have a debt over $10 trillion, and income disparity as at the highest rate since the late 1920's. The Democrats should force the 91% tax rates down the throats of the supply siders, and leave it there until our debt is paid off, our bridges are fixed, and we have nationalized health care.
Sorry, but Ron Paul's anti-government libertarianism is completely counter-intuitive when massive government action is required. Like it is right now, on our economy, on health care, and on the environment.
And then there's the uncomfortable fact that Ron Paul is one of the libertarians who believe that the Federal government has no authority to enforce the Bill of Rights on the states. He introduced the We the People Act, which would strip federal courts of the ability to hear first amendment cases. So in other words, if your state mandates school prayer or states that only marriages performed by Southern Baptists will be recognized, you're shit out of luck.
yes, pirating is stealing and let's not quibble over the definition
So if you make an illegal u-turn while driving I can call you a murdering pedophile, right? Since all crimes are equivalent and trivial things like definitions are just "quibbling".
Let's call the immoral one stealing and hope the second disappear one day.
So I should call you a rapist if you exceed the speed limit on your way to work in the morning? You know, since all crimes are equivalent and it's just to discourage you from driving 2 miles over the limit.
I don't see how the union weighs into that -- people who want to do a good job often do anyway.
Because expecting people to be dedicated professionals while paying them peanuts is 1) a real dick move, if their job is important it's important to pay them well and 2) foolish in the real world. People start cops/teachers on $25,000 a year, and then wonder why some of these cops/teachers don't care vary much about enforcing the law/teaching kids.
You may not be all that wrong about the '50s and '60s, but it's not because we collectively thought that school was for losers. Remember that the '50s and '60s were a time of great prosperity and innovation in this country, largely because we had escaped serious damage in WWII. This gave the US a tremendous advantage over Europe and many parts of Asia.
We also had a 91% marginal tax rate, the real reason we were able to do stuff in the 50's and 60's. But that's all been trickled down the drain.
What's happened? Our culture decided sometime in the 50's-60's that doing well in school was for losers.
No, the problem is that Republicans and supply side economics took over our economy. Tax cuts didn't pay for the Interstate Highway System. Tax cuts didn't put us on the moon. And the rich, with all their tax cuts, haven't come close to even thinking about picking up that slack.
Instead, we now flush trillions of dollars down the Pentagon toilet - and most of that has gone on the national credit card.
You want stuff like this to start happening again, you need to bring back the 91% marginal tax rate - the same one that built the Interstate Highway System and started the Apollo program.
Actually, the fix is quite easy: bring back the 91% marginal tax rate while slashing defense spending to a quarter of what it is now. Pay for that high speed rail, pay for public health care, pay for public education, and pay off our national debt.
The "Amerika is roooral" argument does explain why we don't have high speed trains or high speed internet access between Bumfuck, North Dakota, and Jerkwater, Wyoming. It does not, however, explain why we don't have those services on the highly populated coasts.
No, the real reason is that movement conservatism has turned us into a cheap nation. Tax cuts didn't pay for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Private companies did not build the Interstate Highway System, the U.S. government did - with tax dollars.
When we stop putting the ability of the top 1% of 1% to make more money than the bottom 100 million Americans combined, you might start seeing things like 1 Gpbs duplex connections to your house and be able to take a high speed train from Boston to Miami.
US is huge compared to Japan. So in Japan it's significantly easier to implement a high speed wireless network.
That explains why you can't get good net access in Jerkwater, Wyoming. It does not explain why you can't get good access in San Francisco or Manhattan.
The New York subway is considerably older than the Shanghai MagLev, and it would be costly and produce too much downtime to replace it with something that only gave a marginal ROI.
Sure, but that doesn't explain why we can't have high speed rail service from NYC to D.C.
Teacher unions make it a point to always show need for more money. blah.. blah..
Because we do need more money for schools: higher salaries for higher teacher standards, smaller classrooms, replace school books held together with duck tape since 1974, and replace old buildings in need of repair.
One day soon, political boundaries will become nothing more than regulation zones. I think this happened already, but for political reasons no one wants to admit this. I work and live with friends of different nationalities. I'll travel and work at locations outside the US. I chat and play with people from around the world thanks to the internet.
Democrats are doing nothing of the sort! Neither are Republicans.
Sorry, but reality trumps your desire to maintain false equivalencies.
Pelosi is the one who said there would be NO impeachments of Bush or Cheney.
Yes, and she should be tossed out of the House for violating her oath of office (protect the Constitution). But that does not change the fact that other Democrats, like Dennis Kucinich, have moved to impeach Bush and Cheney. No doubt, there are many crappy Democrats that should be primaries (i.e. Joe Lieberman) but it's a simple fact that there are also many Democrats calling for investigations to zero Republicans.
Who exactly is calling for ANY kind of investigation?
Not my fault you don't read the news. Google for recent articles on Patrick Leahy, Sheldon Whitehouse, Henry Waxman or John Conyers.
Is it picking up ANY support?
There's only three groups of people opposed to investigations of Bush's lawbreaking:
Idiot pundits that whine about national security or how investigations wont be "bipartisan". Republicans looking to cover their parties ass. Complicit Democrats (i.e. Rockefellar) looking to cover their own asses.
I'm an independent I REFUSE to associate with being a Democrat or Republican - both are repugnant!
Unfortunately for you, if there is any accountability for Buscho, it will come from Democrats, NOT independents. Either push for more and better Democrats, or sit in the corner next to Nader and be irrelevant.
Given your statement that Obama's string's are being pulled worse than Bush's, I'm skeptical.
You can't tell the two parties apart anymore.
Really? Which Republicans are pushing for prosecutions of tortures exactly, like Pelosi and Sheldon Whitehorse are in the House and the Senate? Which Republicans tried to filibuster telecom immunity in the Senate, like Dodd and Feingold did?
He has already stated he will continue the use of kidnapping people and sending them off to secret interrigation camps. If Obama would only stand up and be a President OF THE PEOPLE and not the global elite and the bankers we would stand a fighting chance.
Which is why we need investigations of the Bushco regieme. The more we know about their dirty laundry, the harder it will be for new administrations (including Obama's) to continue those abuses. The more we know, the harder it will be to keep ignoring high officials that violated the law.
But guess who's pushing for those investigations? Democrats.
You couldn't say "I had good competition earlier from Japan", because "tit", "jap", and for some reason "lier" were banned words, even if they were parts of other words.
Don't get me wrong there are bigoted asshats aplenty for both sides of the issue
Hmm, I must have missed the ballot measure pushed by gays in California that would ban evangelical marriage. Or all teh gays going on TV and comparing evangelical sex to pedophilia, incest and bestiality.
The fact that he could take a 40% pay cut and see his pension go down, but still be happy enough with his job to excel at it and continue to earn a living only speaks to me that he was hideously over payed in the first place.
So if unions don't take pay cuts, it means they are greedy nihilists who will sink the company and cost everyone their jobs. But if they do take cuts, it means they were overpaid in the first place. Nevermind that the top executives almost never take pay cuts ahead of layoffs, when they're the ones responsible for the companies business decisions.
Do we really have to start this again? For every pro union post I've read, I've read 10 great anti-union posts where people tell horror stories of the politics and favoritism inside them.
I don't know if you've been paying any attention the last six months, but banks and investment firms that have never seen a union a day in their lives have lost TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
This is the same bullshit argument used against universal health care - some guy needed treatment XYZ in Canada, didn't get it, and died. Therefore UHC sucks, and Blue Cross is teh awesome. Nevermind that there are far worse and far more numerous annecdotes on the American side of the border (how about a miscarriage being called an elective abortion, eh?). Nevermind that Canadians live longer, healthier lives, have a lower infant mortality rate, and that it costs less per patient to cover their entire population than we spend in the United States while not providing any coverage to tens of millions of people. Nevermind that freaking embargoed Cuba has nearly as good a health care system as the U.S., while spending 1/30th per patient.
So spare us your weak sauce, boilerplate anti-union arguments from the 50's.
Mr. Blunt can try and make a case, but I don't see it holding up under legal or moral grounds (IANAL).
Morally: with an audiobook, you're paying for the voice talent in addition to the story itself. Jim Dale, who has read all of the Harry Potter books, has done such a good job that they've based some of the portrayals in the movie on his voice performances. But with text-to-speech, there is no voice actor. The audio is provided by the device, and the publisher was still paid for the story.
Legally: Amazon doesn't seem to be creating a derivative work, just another way to consume the work that you purchased. And it's for personal use, not a public performance.
So methinks Mr. Blunt is trying to sqeeze blood from a stone here. Which is a dumb thing to do, as regular audiobook CD's are easily ripped and put on PirateBay. Not so much for Kindle books - so he's looking a gift horse in the mouth while he's squeezing that stone.
The only people unions help are ones who on their own can't keep a job.
Spoken like a true ankle grabber. Heard of Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the highly praised pilot of that US Airways flight that made an emergency landing on the Hudson river? Not only is he a member of a union, but he was the safety official for the union and pushed for safety training for pilots. And just about everyone else involved in the near-perfect rescue operation was a member of a union - from the flight attendants to the flight controllers to the tug boat operators that fished passengers out of the water.
If you oppose unions and are a business owner, you're acting in your own self interest. If you're a worker and oppose unions...you're a damned fool and a tool.
Professional athletes, writers, directors and actors are rewarded for creativity and success, and can make fantastic sums of money - while being part of a union. There is nothing preventing you from being in an IT union and making that 6 figure salary you've always wanted - except your outsized ego.
And if a company/industry fall on hard times, unions can and do take cuts in order to save jobs. The aforementioned Mr. Sullenberger has seen his wages go down by 40% and his pension slashed. So stop hating workers, and start organizing.
Again, from a support perspective, not a sales perspective.
Machines get old and need to be replaced, or eventually fail. And the "System Builder License Availability" expiration date for all versions of XP was January 31st, 2009. Unless you want to pony up the $150 price tag to upgrade from Vista to XP.
Then there's cute tricks like not releasing DirectX 10 for XP, when it was almost certainly developed on XP. That's not going to impact many businesses, but it's probably the most egregious case of Microsoft's forced obsolescence.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, adding "iPhone" to the title of anything suddenly makes it 100x more newsworthy in the eyes of fanboys :)
Which naturally explains why you're commenting in this story.
So how long did it take to get the judge thrown off the bench?
Or you can not be an asshole, and not park in the handicapped spot in the first place.
Or you could not be an asshole by making hasty assumptions. A store could have been renovated and the entrance moved, yet the signs remain in the old locations. Or you could be shopping at three in the morning in a grocery store devoid of other customers and given an invalid ticket for xyz reason. At least in Michigan, you'd have plenty of ways to appeal the citation.
I didn't have a parking pass yet, so I parked along a street where at least a dozen other cars were parked. Came out to find a ticket for having my car in a no parking zone. There were no signs to that effect, but the curb was painted yellow. However, this was in January, and the curb was completely covered with snow. Pretty lame to expect people to follow the rules when there's no practical way for them to know what the rules are.
All a higher marginal tax rate does is kill the incentive for people to earn more money.
Do you really think that Americans were completely uninterested in making more money in the 50's, the 50's that the Republicans supposedly want to return to, when we had that miserable socialist in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower?
Under a 91% tax rate, you wouldn't practically be able to have a fleet of private jets, yachts, and a dozen homes, like the Maddoff's who are facing indictment. Does that mean you wouldn't have any interest in making enough money for a private jet, a yacht, and three homes? Methinks not.
So spare us this "but but but Americans wont want to work" nonsense.
Kennedy started the tax cuts.
But he didn't slash them like Reagan did. The top marginal rate stood at 70%, a fine rate in peace time with a health economy, until the Gipper started destroying it with Voodoo Economics. But now we're stuck in two wars, will have a debt over $10 trillion, and income disparity as at the highest rate since the late 1920's. The Democrats should force the 91% tax rates down the throats of the supply siders, and leave it there until our debt is paid off, our bridges are fixed, and we have nationalized health care.
Sorry, but Ron Paul's anti-government libertarianism is completely counter-intuitive when massive government action is required. Like it is right now, on our economy, on health care, and on the environment.
And then there's the uncomfortable fact that Ron Paul is one of the libertarians who believe that the Federal government has no authority to enforce the Bill of Rights on the states. He introduced the We the People Act, which would strip federal courts of the ability to hear first amendment cases. So in other words, if your state mandates school prayer or states that only marriages performed by Southern Baptists will be recognized, you're shit out of luck.
yes, pirating is stealing and let's not quibble over the definition
So if you make an illegal u-turn while driving I can call you a murdering pedophile, right? Since all crimes are equivalent and trivial things like definitions are just "quibbling".
Let's call the immoral one stealing and hope the second disappear one day.
So I should call you a rapist if you exceed the speed limit on your way to work in the morning? You know, since all crimes are equivalent and it's just to discourage you from driving 2 miles over the limit.
I don't see how the union weighs into that -- people who want to do a good job often do anyway.
Because expecting people to be dedicated professionals while paying them peanuts is 1) a real dick move, if their job is important it's important to pay them well and 2) foolish in the real world. People start cops/teachers on $25,000 a year, and then wonder why some of these cops/teachers don't care vary much about enforcing the law/teaching kids.
You may not be all that wrong about the '50s and '60s, but it's not because we collectively thought that school was for losers. Remember that the '50s and '60s were a time of great prosperity and innovation in this country, largely because we had escaped serious damage in WWII. This gave the US a tremendous advantage over Europe and many parts of Asia.
We also had a 91% marginal tax rate, the real reason we were able to do stuff in the 50's and 60's. But that's all been trickled down the drain.
What's happened? Our culture decided sometime in the 50's-60's that doing well in school was for losers.
No, the problem is that Republicans and supply side economics took over our economy. Tax cuts didn't pay for the Interstate Highway System. Tax cuts didn't put us on the moon. And the rich, with all their tax cuts, haven't come close to even thinking about picking up that slack.
Instead, we now flush trillions of dollars down the Pentagon toilet - and most of that has gone on the national credit card.
You want stuff like this to start happening again, you need to bring back the 91% marginal tax rate - the same one that built the Interstate Highway System and started the Apollo program.
I know of no easy fix for this condition.
Actually, the fix is quite easy: bring back the 91% marginal tax rate while slashing defense spending to a quarter of what it is now. Pay for that high speed rail, pay for public health care, pay for public education, and pay off our national debt.
The "Amerika is roooral" argument does explain why we don't have high speed trains or high speed internet access between Bumfuck, North Dakota, and Jerkwater, Wyoming. It does not, however, explain why we don't have those services on the highly populated coasts.
No, the real reason is that movement conservatism has turned us into a cheap nation. Tax cuts didn't pay for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Private companies did not build the Interstate Highway System, the U.S. government did - with tax dollars.
When we stop putting the ability of the top 1% of 1% to make more money than the bottom 100 million Americans combined, you might start seeing things like 1 Gpbs duplex connections to your house and be able to take a high speed train from Boston to Miami.
US is huge compared to Japan. So in Japan it's significantly easier to implement a high speed wireless network.
That explains why you can't get good net access in Jerkwater, Wyoming. It does not explain why you can't get good access in San Francisco or Manhattan.
The New York subway is considerably older than the Shanghai MagLev, and it would be costly and produce too much downtime to replace it with something that only gave a marginal ROI.
Sure, but that doesn't explain why we can't have high speed rail service from NYC to D.C.
Teacher unions make it a point to always show need for more money. blah.. blah..
Because we do need more money for schools: higher salaries for higher teacher standards, smaller classrooms, replace school books held together with duck tape since 1974, and replace old buildings in need of repair.
One day soon, political boundaries will become nothing more than regulation zones. I think this happened already, but for political reasons no one wants to admit this. I work and live with friends of different nationalities. I'll travel and work at locations outside the US. I chat and play with people from around the world thanks to the internet.
Would be nice.
Democrats are doing nothing of the sort! Neither are Republicans.
Sorry, but reality trumps your desire to maintain false equivalencies.
Pelosi is the one who said there would be NO impeachments of Bush or Cheney.
Yes, and she should be tossed out of the House for violating her oath of office (protect the Constitution). But that does not change the fact that other Democrats, like Dennis Kucinich, have moved to impeach Bush and Cheney. No doubt, there are many crappy Democrats that should be primaries (i.e. Joe Lieberman) but it's a simple fact that there are also many Democrats calling for investigations to zero Republicans.
Who exactly is calling for ANY kind of investigation?
Not my fault you don't read the news. Google for recent articles on Patrick Leahy, Sheldon Whitehouse, Henry Waxman or John Conyers.
Is it picking up ANY support?
There's only three groups of people opposed to investigations of Bush's lawbreaking:
Idiot pundits that whine about national security or how investigations wont be "bipartisan".
Republicans looking to cover their parties ass.
Complicit Democrats (i.e. Rockefellar) looking to cover their own asses.
I'm an independent I REFUSE to associate with being a Democrat or Republican - both are repugnant!
Unfortunately for you, if there is any accountability for Buscho, it will come from Democrats, NOT independents. Either push for more and better Democrats, or sit in the corner next to Nader and be irrelevant.
It doesn't matter how it affects their product
Of course it does. Since the effect is zero either way, why don't you get off your high horse already?
This does not give you a right to go in and steal their product.
Copyright infringement != stealing, dumbass. Do you also tell people that break the speed limit to stop committing arson?
In fact yes I was.
Given your statement that Obama's string's are being pulled worse than Bush's, I'm skeptical.
You can't tell the two parties apart anymore.
Really? Which Republicans are pushing for prosecutions of tortures exactly, like Pelosi and Sheldon Whitehorse are in the House and the Senate? Which Republicans tried to filibuster telecom immunity in the Senate, like Dodd and Feingold did?
He has already stated he will continue the use of kidnapping people and sending them off to secret interrigation camps. If Obama would only stand up and be a President OF THE PEOPLE and not the global elite and the bankers we would stand a fighting chance.
Which is why we need investigations of the Bushco regieme. The more we know about their dirty laundry, the harder it will be for new administrations (including Obama's) to continue those abuses. The more we know, the harder it will be to keep ignoring high officials that violated the law.
But guess who's pushing for those investigations? Democrats.
You couldn't say "I had good competition earlier from Japan", because "tit", "jap", and for some reason "lier" were banned words, even if they were parts of other words.
Don't get me wrong there are bigoted asshats aplenty for both sides of the issue
Hmm, I must have missed the ballot measure pushed by gays in California that would ban evangelical marriage. Or all teh gays going on TV and comparing evangelical sex to pedophilia, incest and bestiality.
The fact that he could take a 40% pay cut and see his pension go down, but still be happy enough with his job to excel at it and continue to earn a living only speaks to me that he was hideously over payed in the first place.
So if unions don't take pay cuts, it means they are greedy nihilists who will sink the company and cost everyone their jobs. But if they do take cuts, it means they were overpaid in the first place. Nevermind that the top executives almost never take pay cuts ahead of layoffs, when they're the ones responsible for the companies business decisions.
Epic. Fail.
Do we really have to start this again? For every pro union post I've read, I've read 10 great anti-union posts where people tell horror stories of the politics and favoritism inside them.
I don't know if you've been paying any attention the last six months, but banks and investment firms that have never seen a union a day in their lives have lost TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
This is the same bullshit argument used against universal health care - some guy needed treatment XYZ in Canada, didn't get it, and died. Therefore UHC sucks, and Blue Cross is teh awesome. Nevermind that there are far worse and far more numerous annecdotes on the American side of the border (how about a miscarriage being called an elective abortion, eh?). Nevermind that Canadians live longer, healthier lives, have a lower infant mortality rate, and that it costs less per patient to cover their entire population than we spend in the United States while not providing any coverage to tens of millions of people. Nevermind that freaking embargoed Cuba has nearly as good a health care system as the U.S., while spending 1/30th per patient.
So spare us your weak sauce, boilerplate anti-union arguments from the 50's.
Mr. Blunt can try and make a case, but I don't see it holding up under legal or moral grounds (IANAL).
Morally: with an audiobook, you're paying for the voice talent in addition to the story itself. Jim Dale, who has read all of the Harry Potter books, has done such a good job that they've based some of the portrayals in the movie on his voice performances. But with text-to-speech, there is no voice actor. The audio is provided by the device, and the publisher was still paid for the story.
Legally: Amazon doesn't seem to be creating a derivative work, just another way to consume the work that you purchased. And it's for personal use, not a public performance.
So methinks Mr. Blunt is trying to sqeeze blood from a stone here. Which is a dumb thing to do, as regular audiobook CD's are easily ripped and put on PirateBay. Not so much for Kindle books - so he's looking a gift horse in the mouth while he's squeezing that stone.
The only people unions help are ones who on their own can't keep a job.
Spoken like a true ankle grabber. Heard of Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the highly praised pilot of that US Airways flight that made an emergency landing on the Hudson river? Not only is he a member of a union, but he was the safety official for the union and pushed for safety training for pilots. And just about everyone else involved in the near-perfect rescue operation was a member of a union - from the flight attendants to the flight controllers to the tug boat operators that fished passengers out of the water.
If you oppose unions and are a business owner, you're acting in your own self interest. If you're a worker and oppose unions...you're a damned fool and a tool.
Professional athletes, writers, directors and actors are rewarded for creativity and success, and can make fantastic sums of money - while being part of a union. There is nothing preventing you from being in an IT union and making that 6 figure salary you've always wanted - except your outsized ego.
And if a company/industry fall on hard times, unions can and do take cuts in order to save jobs. The aforementioned Mr. Sullenberger has seen his wages go down by 40% and his pension slashed. So stop hating workers, and start organizing.
I'm sure the record labels pay much better for nutty speech than a bunch of writers.
Again, from a support perspective, not a sales perspective.
Machines get old and need to be replaced, or eventually fail. And the "System Builder License Availability" expiration date for all versions of XP was January 31st, 2009. Unless you want to pony up the $150 price tag to upgrade from Vista to XP.
Then there's cute tricks like not releasing DirectX 10 for XP, when it was almost certainly developed on XP. That's not going to impact many businesses, but it's probably the most egregious case of Microsoft's forced obsolescence.