In a country where we give trillions for bailouts and economic recovery employment projects and have a national debt of more than $70-trillion (as per the recent UofC study of actual real national debt), it's hard to take sums like $180b seriously, anymore. Especially when they're amortized.
It's kind of amusing, because after two terms of Clinton, I was ready for something new and refreshing. Things surely had to improve (and, in retrospect they were generally pretty good during his terms). Then we had Bush. After two terms of Bush, I was with most of America in agreeing that ANYONE was better. Granted, McCain would be total shit and Obama would be total shit. Something all the young highschool kids voting for the first time didn't comprehend as they were sure the universe had just been waiting 200+ years for THEM to exist and vote to finally set the world right. But hey -- it wouldn't be George "The Decider" Bush and his scummy criminal cronies and revolving-door administration. And -- hey -- a black dude! Holy fucking shit, we got a black dude! I never thought I'd live to see this day and I'm fucking impressed that my country would elect him! Okay, if nothing else comes out of this, at least we've moved on from that whole "there'll never be anything but a white male president" thing! And hey -- the world is actually kind of liking us again after we shit on them and their sympathy and friendship after 9-11! Things are looking up!... and then... the last five or six years.
I think most people used to understand that the election was shit and our results would always be shit, but it would mostly just be the status-quo. After this president, I think we have this new fear that we can not ever predict just how low the next administration will go. What they will take away from us. What they will impose upon us. How they will represent us to the rest of the world. We literally live within a government that fifteen years ago we taught about in text books in high school history or civics classes and had a hard time comprehending the reality of. We live in a time where the reality of our government actually matches much of what we've laughed at conspiracy nuts about the last few decades.
What's most frightening about all of it is how fast the people will find themselves accustomed to these changes and revelations and stop complaining about them. They'll just accept them and go back to being upset about the selection in their office vending machine. And they'll be convinced that the guy they vote for in 2016 is finally going to fix everything and be a stand-up guy. They'll be convinced that each successive election is the bearer of hope and change.
Really? It's pretty all-encompassing, frankly. It says that government has no authority except for those specifically laid out within the document and that free people are free.
The people who like to go on about how it's a "living document" and "up for interpretation" -- as if it was derived from a fucking seance and ouija board are those who want to change or ignore it (*ESPECIALLY* the ninth and tenth amendments). I mean, gosh, all those amendments like "congress shall make no laws abridging free speech" or "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude[...] shall exist within the US or any place subject to their jurisdiction"... Damn, what could those possibly mean? They're just so... open for discussion. They change in the eye of the beholder. The constitution.. golly gee, it's more interpretive than modern dance!
When people assert shit like that, it reminds me of weasels like Bill Clinton contesting the definition of "is" or Richard Nixon stating that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal".
The best way to strip your rights and freedoms away from you is to convince you that your rights and freedoms are subject to a very difficult and complex interpretation that you could not possibly understand.
A colleague of mine gave notice as they were offered an incredible job at another company. When it came time to get the reference from their former manager, the manager refused. They basically stated that they were concerned that giving a positive reference to an employee that had left the company might look bad on them as a manager (and the manager was constantly in fear of losing their job).
In America, employment is "at will", so either party terminates whenever the hell they like with whatever notice they do or do not want to bother giving. Everything else is simply about professionalism and not burning bridges. You want references, after all. Not to mention future networking and the possibility to return to the same company in a different role, some day.
However, I've found that in the professional world, contracts generally lay out the lengths of notice and other terms required to be met by either the employer or the employee should either one decide to terminate.
30 days? If they want 30 days they can _PAY_ and I'll work late hours for them. Very few new jobs will wait a month. What you are suggesting basically implies quitting before you find a new job.
When you are offered a job, they typically ask when you could start and you tell them that you need to give your current employer two weeks notice. This is entirely common and as they want the same consideration from you in the future, they understand extending it to your current employer.
As for the other way around -- at least at Sun Microsystems, back in the day -- if they laid someone off, they were given sixty days notice but were not allowed to work as of the morning they were given notice that they were being laid off. They would pay you for the sixty days and you would continue to be "employed" during that time. You just wouldn't have access to any of your logins, the network, the buildings, etc and would basically spend that time (I guess) at home looking for a new position.
I never had or watched cable until I was about 20 or 21 in the late 90s. I haven't watched cable (or over the air) since I was about 26, in 2003. I find the stuff people are watching when I go over to their house to be really depressing and, frankly, I don't want internet entertainment to simply offer what television/cable offers. If that's all we can accomplish, then we might as well all mass-suicide, right now.
However, even today the average American watches about 5 hours of television per day. Fucking five hours! That presumably doesn't count time they spend online, playing videogames, reading books, working, or anything else. That is about a third of all waking time... spent watching fucking What To Wear and Kitchen Nightmares and Oprah. What the actual fuck, people?! Figure you're lucky enough to spend only an hour total commute each day. So that's about 10 hours working or getting to/from work. And 100% of all the time you're not working or driving to work is . . . watching television?!?!?!?!
Frankly, these guys should be thinking less about how we can move all the television content to internet distribution and thinking more about simply moving people off of "television" as a concept -- rather than where it is consumed. And don't get me wrong -- there are a few good things on television during any given time of the year -- but not 35 hours per week worth . . . that number indicates that people are literally just rotting in front of their sets because they can't think of anything else to do with their lives.
Most television is absolute shit. Go watch Hulu for a week if you don't believe me. There isn't even $8 worth of non-shitty brain-drivel content on the whole thing per month.
I haven't bothered with Cable television (or even over the air) in more than a decade. Between Netflix, Amazon Prime, podcasts, and other stuff online I have *more* content than I can even possibly keep up with.
Yeah, sure, it's hard to replace actual television if you're the type of person that spends all day and night sitting on the couch watching shitty talk shows hosted by the mom of the daughter-famous-for-getting-fucked-on-a-home-video whose dad was an accomplished lawyer and reality television and mind-numbingly stupid sit-coms . . . but for people who aren't rotting away in a recliner, there is a fuck-ton of endless video content outside of paying $100-$200/mo for cable or even having an antennae for over the air.
The McGonigal sisters aren't going to let that prevent them from milking either gamers (who are eager to accept anyone promoting them in any way, because theyr'e so desperate to be seen in any light other than the dorito-munching basement dwellers we usually are) or those gullible to goofy self-help mumbojumbo (her sister is a psychologist who writes books about "Yoga for Pain Relief" and "A Compassion-Based Program for Personal Transformation").
That they've both given TED Talks doesn't impress me, in and of itself, either.
Having to undergo surgery and having problems with the black-magic-art that anaesthesia is absolutely terrifies me and occupies more of my mind than it probably should. Anything that could potentially make that dark-art less ambiguous would be fantastic.
The same way this has been going on for years in the US and we have known about it, but nobody ever even bothered to give a shit or give it any news coverage until it was revealed that journalists were being targeted and then that politicians/congressmen may have been targeted. Until that, politicians didn't give even half the fuck they currently barely give and journalists gave even fewer fucks than that. They're almost as bad as the new wave of sudden Reddit-warriors who didn't give a damn about the issue until the last few months and now that *they* give a fuck, they act like they fucking *invented* giving a fuck about this issue.
Exactly. I was going to say "don't fall for this, Germany -- we have an agreement for our government not to spy on us, too... it's called the Constitution... which our current Constitutional Lawyer president and former presidents have completely shit upon".
In the rest of the world, you could watch the episode on Netflix the same evening for like $8 USD/mo on your television, laptop, ipad, iphone, or desktop.
In the US, you could watch the episode on AMC with your $150-$200/mo cable subscription on your television.
Or, in the US, you can wait about a year or so and watch it on Netflix for $8 USD/mo.
Could it have anything to do with the growing number of people that don't want to spend $200/mo on a cable subscription, fees, taxes, surcharges, digital tuners, HD subscrpitions/tuners, and DVRs?
When you have assholes like Gore and everyone else promoting end-of-the-world global-warming (oh, wait, it's "climate change" now) when they are also responsible for creating and profiting massively off the whole "carbon credits" market that they built around it (which do nothing for the climate and environment and only serve to make these profiteers wealthier), you can't really blame skeptics for being even more skeptical.
Additionally, $60 trillion isn't that much. The last number I saw for our estimated *real* US debt is something like $72 trillion. If one government can suck down a $72 trillion debt, the entire planet can suck down $60t.
And by "cuts" you mean "a reduction in the initially projected growth". That brilliant government scam where planning to increase a budget by 20% but then only increasing it by 10% counts as a 10% (or 50%, depending on how you phrase it!) "spending/budget cut".
Anyway, the defense budget is something along the lines of at least $700,000,000,000.00 (700-billion) per year. That is $7,000,000,000,000.00 (trillion) over the next decade. Cutting the budget by $15b/yr to even $50b/yr is fucking meaningless, even if you give them benefit of the doubt that they're talking about real cuts in real spending and not "cuts in increases".
If they really want to make meaningful cuts, they could knock off the "war against the world" bullshit and save a few hundred billion every year.
I don't think Comcast even has a residential service that you can get for $50 (especially not after you add their shitty modem rental fees, taxes, misc other fees and surcharges, and penalty for not bundling their other services).
My business service was only $100, three years ago. They have raised it at least once, every year. It has increased 25% over less than three years.:/
Oh, and if you want to save $25 on your phone or service at Ting, use the link below. This has NOTHING to do with me. This is a link from This Week In Computer Hardware with Ryan Shrout on the TWiT network which I also have nothing to do with (other than I subscribe to the podcast).
It's hard not to sound like a shill for Ting, after you've dealt with traditional cell providers for so long. When you finally find one that has great prices, treats you like an important customer, has real people helping you (and fast) and eliminates all the bullshit gimmicks and fees and everything else . . . well, it's hard not to get over-excited when you try to show other people that they can jump off the shit-train of Sprint/Verizon/AT&T and so on.
(Also, you'll notice that I'm such a fan of Ting that I never post a referral link when I recommend their service -- it's so cheap that I don't need $25 for referring a customer and I'd rather people check it out without feeling slimy about it).
I dunno, I would call a couple thousand text messages and at least a couple thousand minutes of voice per month for around $50 to be pretty damn decent. My Sprint plan was more than $50/mo and I only got something like 1,000 minutes and zero texts. And if I didn't use all of those minutes, it was just tough shit. The MVNO I have been with the last two years can give me 2,000 texts and 2,000 minutes for cheaper than the Sprint plan and if I use less than that, I just don't have to pay for it. The months where I use 0 everything, I pay $6. The months where I use 3,000 minutes, I pay about $52 or so. The months where I use a couple thousand minutes and a couple thousand text messages, I pay about $50.
The only way it would probably become a bad deal is if I used gigabytes of data per month (compared to an unlimited plan somewhere) . . . but since I use a phone as (gasp!) a phone, I would use data for jack shit.
Yep... even if I didn't use a single minute of time on my Sprint plan, it ran $50/mo or more. That doesn't include any data or any texts. I had to have it just a slightly big enough plan, in case I needed to use it a bit more one month than usual, for work. I really hated eating $50/mo for nothing.
Then I saw an ad for ting.com, which uses Sprint on the backend. My average phone bill has been $12/mo for the last two years (and that includes using phone and texting). And if I need to use a lot more one month than another? No problem, because they don't do brackets. Pay for what you use (and the more you use, the cheaper per unit it actually becomes). No bullshit extra fees or any other shit. And the one time I and to talk to customer service, a fucking HUMAN answered on the FIRST RING. Who does that anymore? With Sprint, I had to jump through lots of hoops, enter account numbers, remember secret codes, and wait 10-30 minutes on hold.
I suggest Ting (just based on personal experience) to people any time I can, unless maybe they use a ridiculous amount of *data* where it would actually maybe work out cheaper to just go with some generic unlimited data plan somewhere else.
Demand? Really? I can't imagine there's still much demand for Pirate Bay. Wasn't there that whole thing where they sold themselves to another company and then the torrent stuff was shut down and so they went to work on the whole "opentorrents" tracker type stuff but then they were either never sold or were sold, but the torrent stuff was not actually shut down and and and and and and....
Pirate Bay is a thing that I sometimes remember actually exists, but that has not really been relevant in at least five or six years.
Slashdot Mirror
In a country where we give trillions for bailouts and economic recovery employment projects and have a national debt of more than $70-trillion (as per the recent UofC study of actual real national debt), it's hard to take sums like $180b seriously, anymore. Especially when they're amortized.
It's kind of amusing, because after two terms of Clinton, I was ready for something new and refreshing. Things surely had to improve (and, in retrospect they were generally pretty good during his terms). Then we had Bush. After two terms of Bush, I was with most of America in agreeing that ANYONE was better. Granted, McCain would be total shit and Obama would be total shit. Something all the young highschool kids voting for the first time didn't comprehend as they were sure the universe had just been waiting 200+ years for THEM to exist and vote to finally set the world right. But hey -- it wouldn't be George "The Decider" Bush and his scummy criminal cronies and revolving-door administration. And -- hey -- a black dude! Holy fucking shit, we got a black dude! I never thought I'd live to see this day and I'm fucking impressed that my country would elect him! Okay, if nothing else comes out of this, at least we've moved on from that whole "there'll never be anything but a white male president" thing! And hey -- the world is actually kind of liking us again after we shit on them and their sympathy and friendship after 9-11! Things are looking up! ... and then ... the last five or six years.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
I think most people used to understand that the election was shit and our results would always be shit, but it would mostly just be the status-quo. After this president, I think we have this new fear that we can not ever predict just how low the next administration will go. What they will take away from us. What they will impose upon us. How they will represent us to the rest of the world. We literally live within a government that fifteen years ago we taught about in text books in high school history or civics classes and had a hard time comprehending the reality of. We live in a time where the reality of our government actually matches much of what we've laughed at conspiracy nuts about the last few decades.
What's most frightening about all of it is how fast the people will find themselves accustomed to these changes and revelations and stop complaining about them. They'll just accept them and go back to being upset about the selection in their office vending machine. And they'll be convinced that the guy they vote for in 2016 is finally going to fix everything and be a stand-up guy. They'll be convinced that each successive election is the bearer of hope and change.
Really? It's pretty all-encompassing, frankly. It says that government has no authority except for those specifically laid out within the document and that free people are free.
The people who like to go on about how it's a "living document" and "up for interpretation" -- as if it was derived from a fucking seance and ouija board are those who want to change or ignore it (*ESPECIALLY* the ninth and tenth amendments). I mean, gosh, all those amendments like "congress shall make no laws abridging free speech" or "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude[...] shall exist within the US or any place subject to their jurisdiction"... Damn, what could those possibly mean? They're just so... open for discussion. They change in the eye of the beholder. The constitution.. golly gee, it's more interpretive than modern dance!
When people assert shit like that, it reminds me of weasels like Bill Clinton contesting the definition of "is" or Richard Nixon stating that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal".
The best way to strip your rights and freedoms away from you is to convince you that your rights and freedoms are subject to a very difficult and complex interpretation that you could not possibly understand.
A colleague of mine gave notice as they were offered an incredible job at another company. When it came time to get the reference from their former manager, the manager refused. They basically stated that they were concerned that giving a positive reference to an employee that had left the company might look bad on them as a manager (and the manager was constantly in fear of losing their job).
In America, employment is "at will", so either party terminates whenever the hell they like with whatever notice they do or do not want to bother giving. Everything else is simply about professionalism and not burning bridges. You want references, after all. Not to mention future networking and the possibility to return to the same company in a different role, some day.
However, I've found that in the professional world, contracts generally lay out the lengths of notice and other terms required to be met by either the employer or the employee should either one decide to terminate.
30 days? If they want 30 days they can _PAY_ and I'll work late hours for them. Very few new jobs will wait a month. What you are suggesting basically implies quitting before you find a new job.
When you are offered a job, they typically ask when you could start and you tell them that you need to give your current employer two weeks notice. This is entirely common and as they want the same consideration from you in the future, they understand extending it to your current employer.
As for the other way around -- at least at Sun Microsystems, back in the day -- if they laid someone off, they were given sixty days notice but were not allowed to work as of the morning they were given notice that they were being laid off. They would pay you for the sixty days and you would continue to be "employed" during that time. You just wouldn't have access to any of your logins, the network, the buildings, etc and would basically spend that time (I guess) at home looking for a new position.
I never had or watched cable until I was about 20 or 21 in the late 90s. I haven't watched cable (or over the air) since I was about 26, in 2003. I find the stuff people are watching when I go over to their house to be really depressing and, frankly, I don't want internet entertainment to simply offer what television/cable offers. If that's all we can accomplish, then we might as well all mass-suicide, right now.
However, even today the average American watches about 5 hours of television per day. Fucking five hours! That presumably doesn't count time they spend online, playing videogames, reading books, working, or anything else. That is about a third of all waking time... spent watching fucking What To Wear and Kitchen Nightmares and Oprah. What the actual fuck, people?! Figure you're lucky enough to spend only an hour total commute each day. So that's about 10 hours working or getting to/from work. And 100% of all the time you're not working or driving to work is . . . watching television?!?!?!?!
Frankly, these guys should be thinking less about how we can move all the television content to internet distribution and thinking more about simply moving people off of "television" as a concept -- rather than where it is consumed. And don't get me wrong -- there are a few good things on television during any given time of the year -- but not 35 hours per week worth . . . that number indicates that people are literally just rotting in front of their sets because they can't think of anything else to do with their lives.
Most television is absolute shit. Go watch Hulu for a week if you don't believe me. There isn't even $8 worth of non-shitty brain-drivel content on the whole thing per month.
I haven't bothered with Cable television (or even over the air) in more than a decade. Between Netflix, Amazon Prime, podcasts, and other stuff online I have *more* content than I can even possibly keep up with.
Yeah, sure, it's hard to replace actual television if you're the type of person that spends all day and night sitting on the couch watching shitty talk shows hosted by the mom of the daughter-famous-for-getting-fucked-on-a-home-video whose dad was an accomplished lawyer and reality television and mind-numbingly stupid sit-coms . . . but for people who aren't rotting away in a recliner, there is a fuck-ton of endless video content outside of paying $100-$200/mo for cable or even having an antennae for over the air.
The McGonigal sisters aren't going to let that prevent them from milking either gamers (who are eager to accept anyone promoting them in any way, because theyr'e so desperate to be seen in any light other than the dorito-munching basement dwellers we usually are) or those gullible to goofy self-help mumbojumbo (her sister is a psychologist who writes books about "Yoga for Pain Relief" and "A Compassion-Based Program for Personal Transformation").
That they've both given TED Talks doesn't impress me, in and of itself, either.
Having to undergo surgery and having problems with the black-magic-art that anaesthesia is absolutely terrifies me and occupies more of my mind than it probably should. Anything that could potentially make that dark-art less ambiguous would be fantastic.
We're a bit more than merely "prepared" to do so. :P
The same way this has been going on for years in the US and we have known about it, but nobody ever even bothered to give a shit or give it any news coverage until it was revealed that journalists were being targeted and then that politicians/congressmen may have been targeted. Until that, politicians didn't give even half the fuck they currently barely give and journalists gave even fewer fucks than that. They're almost as bad as the new wave of sudden Reddit-warriors who didn't give a damn about the issue until the last few months and now that *they* give a fuck, they act like they fucking *invented* giving a fuck about this issue.
Exactly. I was going to say "don't fall for this, Germany -- we have an agreement for our government not to spy on us, too... it's called the Constitution... which our current Constitutional Lawyer president and former presidents have completely shit upon".
Exactly.
In the rest of the world, you could watch the episode on Netflix the same evening for like $8 USD/mo on your television, laptop, ipad, iphone, or desktop.
In the US, you could watch the episode on AMC with your $150-$200/mo cable subscription on your television.
Or, in the US, you can wait about a year or so and watch it on Netflix for $8 USD/mo.
I mean, none of this is a big mystery.
Could it have anything to do with the growing number of people that don't want to spend $200/mo on a cable subscription, fees, taxes, surcharges, digital tuners, HD subscrpitions/tuners, and DVRs?
You know who I was just thinking about this morning? Signal11...
You need scare tactics to keep the carbon-credit-market scam going.
When you have assholes like Gore and everyone else promoting end-of-the-world global-warming (oh, wait, it's "climate change" now) when they are also responsible for creating and profiting massively off the whole "carbon credits" market that they built around it (which do nothing for the climate and environment and only serve to make these profiteers wealthier), you can't really blame skeptics for being even more skeptical.
Additionally, $60 trillion isn't that much. The last number I saw for our estimated *real* US debt is something like $72 trillion. If one government can suck down a $72 trillion debt, the entire planet can suck down $60t.
And by "cuts" you mean "a reduction in the initially projected growth". That brilliant government scam where planning to increase a budget by 20% but then only increasing it by 10% counts as a 10% (or 50%, depending on how you phrase it!) "spending/budget cut".
Anyway, the defense budget is something along the lines of at least $700,000,000,000.00 (700-billion) per year. That is $7,000,000,000,000.00 (trillion) over the next decade. Cutting the budget by $15b/yr to even $50b/yr is fucking meaningless, even if you give them benefit of the doubt that they're talking about real cuts in real spending and not "cuts in increases".
If they really want to make meaningful cuts, they could knock off the "war against the world" bullshit and save a few hundred billion every year.
I don't think Comcast even has a residential service that you can get for $50 (especially not after you add their shitty modem rental fees, taxes, misc other fees and surcharges, and penalty for not bundling their other services).
My business service was only $100, three years ago. They have raised it at least once, every year. It has increased 25% over less than three years. :/
Oh, and if you want to save $25 on your phone or service at Ting, use the link below. This has NOTHING to do with me. This is a link from This Week In Computer Hardware with Ryan Shrout on the TWiT network which I also have nothing to do with (other than I subscribe to the podcast).
http://twich.ting.com
That's what I used, ages ago, and I applied it to my cheap little feature-phone (I think I wound up paying $35 for the phone).
It's hard not to sound like a shill for Ting, after you've dealt with traditional cell providers for so long. When you finally find one that has great prices, treats you like an important customer, has real people helping you (and fast) and eliminates all the bullshit gimmicks and fees and everything else . . . well, it's hard not to get over-excited when you try to show other people that they can jump off the shit-train of Sprint/Verizon/AT&T and so on.
(Also, you'll notice that I'm such a fan of Ting that I never post a referral link when I recommend their service -- it's so cheap that I don't need $25 for referring a customer and I'd rather people check it out without feeling slimy about it).
I dunno, I would call a couple thousand text messages and at least a couple thousand minutes of voice per month for around $50 to be pretty damn decent. My Sprint plan was more than $50/mo and I only got something like 1,000 minutes and zero texts. And if I didn't use all of those minutes, it was just tough shit. The MVNO I have been with the last two years can give me 2,000 texts and 2,000 minutes for cheaper than the Sprint plan and if I use less than that, I just don't have to pay for it. The months where I use 0 everything, I pay $6. The months where I use 3,000 minutes, I pay about $52 or so. The months where I use a couple thousand minutes and a couple thousand text messages, I pay about $50.
The only way it would probably become a bad deal is if I used gigabytes of data per month (compared to an unlimited plan somewhere) . . . but since I use a phone as (gasp!) a phone, I would use data for jack shit.
Yep... even if I didn't use a single minute of time on my Sprint plan, it ran $50/mo or more. That doesn't include any data or any texts. I had to have it just a slightly big enough plan, in case I needed to use it a bit more one month than usual, for work. I really hated eating $50/mo for nothing.
Then I saw an ad for ting.com, which uses Sprint on the backend. My average phone bill has been $12/mo for the last two years (and that includes using phone and texting). And if I need to use a lot more one month than another? No problem, because they don't do brackets. Pay for what you use (and the more you use, the cheaper per unit it actually becomes). No bullshit extra fees or any other shit. And the one time I and to talk to customer service, a fucking HUMAN answered on the FIRST RING. Who does that anymore? With Sprint, I had to jump through lots of hoops, enter account numbers, remember secret codes, and wait 10-30 minutes on hold.
I suggest Ting (just based on personal experience) to people any time I can, unless maybe they use a ridiculous amount of *data* where it would actually maybe work out cheaper to just go with some generic unlimited data plan somewhere else.
Demand? Really? I can't imagine there's still much demand for Pirate Bay. Wasn't there that whole thing where they sold themselves to another company and then the torrent stuff was shut down and so they went to work on the whole "opentorrents" tracker type stuff but then they were either never sold or were sold, but the torrent stuff was not actually shut down and and and and and and....
Pirate Bay is a thing that I sometimes remember actually exists, but that has not really been relevant in at least five or six years.