Except this isn't a symptom of being poor, rather it's a symptom of poorly managing your finances. It's really *really* easy to get a free checking account, but if you're a dumbass and regularly get NSF on checks you write, then you'll eventually get blacklisted and nobody will give you shit. This is incredibly easy to avoid doing, just most people who are poor typically have no idea how to manage money (which is part of the reason why they're poor -- I can't tell you how many people I know who have better income than I do yet live really poor, and it's mainly because they don't know shit about managing money.)
I remember getting my first checking account when I was 18 without having to get my parents to sign for anything, and I got that checking account because the bank offered a free $20 gas card for doing so. I really didn't need it because I already had a savings account, but I so rarely withdrew money from it that I never had to worry about any fees (my withdrawals always come in spurts.)
I'm one of those people (apparently rare) who uses nothing but credit cards to buy everything, yet never pays a dime in interest because I pay the balance long before it is due. In fact just this month my bank gave me $130 free on my credit card as a rewards bonus, so I actually get paid to use a credit card.
They use a dated payroll system and haven't bothered to modernize. This is mainly just a symptom of "get off my lawn" or "why would I use that when this already works just fine" syndrome from older business owners, because using direct deposit is not only easier but it's also cheaper.
Actually I'd like you to cite please; in fact I'm going to pull the "I call BS" card as well. There's actually an official list of people who have renounced their citizenship each quarter for tax purposes, published by the IRS, and it isn't all that large (2,963 in 2013 to be precise, and 2013 was a big year for this.) Just how many people on that list do you actually know? Almost all of them are filthy rich. What, are you the captain of their yacht club or something?
Some go so far as to say that the U.S. tax and disclosure laws are downright oppressive.
No group is more severely impacted than U.S. persons living abroad. For those living and working in foreign countries, it is almost a given that they must report and pay tax where they live. But they must also continue to file taxes in the U.S. What’s more, U.S. reporting is based on their worldwide income, even though they are paying taxes in the country where they live.
Many can claim a foreign tax credit on their U.S. returns, but it generally does not eliminate all double taxes.
The law that will have you extradited is called FATCA.
Permitting organs from dead bodies to be sold can lead to some.... unpleasant markets cropping up.
I'm fine with putting legal restrictions on it, but it's really not necessary. Nobody ever harvests organs from dead bodies...certain tissues maybe, like corneas, bones, skin, but never actual organs. Cadaverous organs come from somebody who is technically alive in that they are on life support but are brain dead. If the person comes to the hospital already not breathing and without a pulse, they won't bother harvesting the organs. Your organs don't last long at all without oxygen (your brain just happens to be the first one to go, but the others are effectively destroyed very shortly afterwards.)
I think it is only some 3% of all deaths that have viable organs for harvesting, which is a major factor in the organ shortage. Many of these end up not happening because the family declines to permit harvesting, even if the person who died said they were fine with it. If you did something like offer to pay for all of the funeral expenses (dying is expensive, I know because my dad died recently) I bet you'd end up with a lot fewer people who decline. Those funeral expenses would be a tiny fraction of the cost of some of the overall costs of these organ transplants; I think lungs for example is upwards of a million dollars for the entire process, whereas a funeral would top out at $20k.
Even if you don't have a funeral, it's expensive. Almost all states have laws requiring that you have a licensed mortician pick up the body from the coroner's office, and they often charge about a grand just to do that. The "death industry" is a fucking ripoff, and the government forces you to get suckered into it. The law didn't even allow me to clean up the blood my dad left behind on my own, they wanted me to hire a biohazard team for $500 an hour to do it. (The police said it was against the law but they wouldn't bother us if we did it on our own though, they even told us how to do it.)
Anyways, if these costs were subsidized by tissue/organ donation, I'm sure you'd get more people on board.
Except that scenario pretty much never happens. The transplant teams evaluate both donor and recipient, with a very long exclusion criteria for the donor. This is to pretty much guarantee that they won't see any ill effects until after at least the age of 80 where organ failure is already common anyways (and people continue to live long afterwards.)
I say pretty much, because the only time these checks are skipped is on the black market. The current laws encourage black markets, which as it stands now only the super rich can afford. So your current system that you uphold on moral grounds already grants favoritism towards the rich and disregards the well being of the seller.
But the black market is illegal right? Try telling Al Capone and the Purple Gang to observe the 18th amendment.
We've already seen what happens when you can openly sell organs without the need for a black market, namely because Iran does exactly that: There is no shortage of organs there. Unlike in the US, people don't die while waiting on transplants in Iran. Likewise, there aren't any horror stories of donors suffering ill effects from selling their organs. The worst you get is some derp who blew through all of the money he got really fast and regrets doing it, but you get the same "horror" story from lottery winners who can't win the lottery again after they spent it all. In other words, it's a non-issue.
Dude he's just joking, lighten up. Besides, Greece isn't a race. It reminds me of the jokes I crack at the Canadians I hang out with about living in igloos, and jokes about Americans being fat.
I think being politically correct douchebags on a large scale causes worse problems than people making offensive/racist jokes on a large scale. At the worst the later might offend somebody so they hang out somewhere else, but the first has a tendency to make life suck because you have to take things too seriously at every possible place you can work at because if I make a joke about my 50 year old friend having one foot in the grave, or telling him he has a severe case of old, (which even he laughs at) I could get fired.
Amazon has already been doing this a little. One time they sent me a printer cartridge and some baby wipes that I never ordered. I asked them what I should do with them and they said to just keep it. The baby wipes actually had sunscreen so I used them on myself while cycling last summer, and the printer ink I gave to staples for a $80 store credit, which I then used to get a free soda stream. It was actually pretty great!
That's a horrible argument. Your house is an asset even if you own it free and clear, same with your car, yet bankruptcy courts won't even bother looking at how much those are worth even if you live in a mansion - it's completely off limits. So why would they look at an organ as an asset when they already ignore real estate and cars?
No, it doesn't do that at all. Have you ever looked at the exclusion criteria for living donors? It's fucking long. They make it long like that because the transplant team want to GUARANTEE that the donor will live the rest of their life without seeing any negative impact.
It is a good idea, it will both save lives AND save money. Dialysis costs the government $100,000 per person who is on it. Even if somebody wanted to sell their kidney for that amount, that one time cost is a lot cheaper than a lifetime of dialysis.
I really don't see the argument against it at all. If somebody wants to sell their organs, why not let them? They get money, somebody else lives longer. The donor doesn't sacrifice any quality of life; the transplant teams take a ton of precautions to ensure that. So how is that such an evil thing to do?
Yes, there are risks in donation, however we already allow people to take these medical risks for money anyways. Donating eggs for example carries much bigger risk than organ donation, yet they only pay about $3,000 for that. Some clinical trials where they pay the patient to take drugs carry worse risks than donation as well. Organ donation on the other hand has been so well refined and done so many times since the 70's that it is very very safe for the donor compared to these other things.
Uh no, not everybody who needs an organ transplant is rich.
I'm actually in need of a kidney transplant myself, but being able to buy a kidney is a lot more viable than just waiting for somebody I don't even know to give me one. Donating a kidney isn't exactly an easy process for one, and for two everybody who has volunteered to give me theirs is ineligible to do so (they have other health issues preventing it - it's actually pretty easy to be excluded as a living kidney donor; the list of exclusions is quite long.)
If the government had a program where they bought kidneys for say $25,000 a pop, that would be a LOT LOT LOT cheaper than dialysis. Dialysis costs upwards of $100,000 per year to be on, whereas a kidney transplant is a one time cost of about $100,000. Bumping that figure up to $125,000 and greatly reducing the number of dialysis patients would be a huge money saver, not to mention people would be dying a lot less. Hell, bump that figure up to $50,000 and the government STILL saves an assload of money on medicare/medicaid costs.
But instead we have pundits like you saying that people voluntarily giving up their organs in exchange for money is just such an evil thing to do. I mean being offered money to save lives is such a crime against humanity, how dare we ever allow such a thing to exist.
I'm one of the lucky ones who isn't bad enough to be on dialysis yet, but is still bad enough that I'm a candidate for transplant. Fortunately it's extremely likely that by the time I need to go on dialysis, I'll have been on the transplant list for long enough that I'll never have to start dialysis (which by the way, they prefer that transplant recipients haven't started dialysis as it makes the graft acceptance much better.)
Actually I think if Google was even aware of this at all, they would probably act, if they haven't begun to act already. Google really doesn't like it when its search results are screwed with by anything at all; it's sort of their sacred cow. They've used the court system to block people from screwing with the search results for even stuff in IE.
They could probably just levy the fines as a tax, and have them extradited for tax evasion through existing tax treaties.
The US already does something similar, and there is a large body of signing countries to this convention. If you live abroad you still have to pay US taxes even if you never make use of any US services. If you renounce your citizenship, you have to pay the US government a large tax as if you have sold every single asset that you presently own (so basically 30% of everything you have) plus some other fees and levies - if you don't do this, then the US will have you extradited and jailed. (This is why those complaining about those ex-patriots who renounced their citizenship to avoid future taxation have unfounded complaints - they already had to pay more than their pre-existing dues just to renounce their citizenship; they just want to avoid paying future taxes to a government that doesn't provide any services to them whatsoever.)
I'm thinking this is due to Plex working as a library rather than a blind playback system. What this means is that if it can't associate your video clip with the name of any movie it finds on IMDB (or something similar, whatever it uses) then it won't advertise it to the clients, assuming you've put it in that mode anyways (which I think it does by default if you categorize them as movies.) You can probably address this by putting it into a folder with a name exactly matching the IMDB entry along with the year in parenthesis.
Well I don't think it was during the movie, TFA mentions it was during the previews. I personally don't mind if people talk or text during previews because I didn't pay to see the previews and people are still finding their seats during previews anyways; during the movie is something else entirely though.
I remember in the Matrix I was impressed that they used an actual IP address instead of something like 345.734.342.925.123.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal?
on
If I Had a Hammer
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Actually the money issue could very well turn into a non-issue. Namely, look at how much cheaper food has become these days...it's cheaper than it has ever been in fact. Technology and automation is largely to credit for that. We're basically to the point that food is pretty much just a "gimme," i.e. it's so easy to obtain that generally price isn't an issue, whereas in the past we've had plenty of times where you were lucky if you got enough food at all.
What ends up becoming the issue is purchasing power; namely how much things cost vs how much you earn. The only thing I could see causing problems later on is minimum wage, which even some of the more liberal economists will tell you causes more problems than it solves, and that will probably get worse over time if we keep raising it. If you do away with minimum wage, things could be even cheaper, and people could actually compete with machines.
I don't know about you but I haven't seen bus stops that have busses there 24/7; in fact there's usually at least 30-60 minutes between busses at any one stop. I figure it would be pretty easy to schedule their busses so that a Google bus would never be at a stop at the same time a public bus would otherwise be there.
Besides that, even if such a situation arose, what's to stop one bus from parking behind the other one while both of them loaded passengers? Oh no, some of the passengers might have to walk another 10 feet! Whatever shall they do?
By doing that you also send the people with money away; probably not a good thing to do to your local economy. France is currently finding this out the hard way -- their prime minister thought it would be a good idea to tax the rich until either they are no longer rich, or they just flat out leave the country. He got his way alright for the most part, but it really didn't work out how he intended; that country now has some of its highest unemployment rates ever in some areas.
You know who else shared your views by the way? Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, and Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Their countries became pretty poor and oppressive after the glorious revolution to get rid of the rich folks.
I'm not sure if you'd consider my area to be flyover country as it is the 6th largest city in the US, yet my 3 bedroom 2 bath (with a pool) house is $700 a month (which I split because I don't live here alone.) It's a pretty nice house too; probably far more comfortable to live in than something four times the price in SF.
Slashdot Mirror
Except this isn't a symptom of being poor, rather it's a symptom of poorly managing your finances. It's really *really* easy to get a free checking account, but if you're a dumbass and regularly get NSF on checks you write, then you'll eventually get blacklisted and nobody will give you shit. This is incredibly easy to avoid doing, just most people who are poor typically have no idea how to manage money (which is part of the reason why they're poor -- I can't tell you how many people I know who have better income than I do yet live really poor, and it's mainly because they don't know shit about managing money.)
I remember getting my first checking account when I was 18 without having to get my parents to sign for anything, and I got that checking account because the bank offered a free $20 gas card for doing so. I really didn't need it because I already had a savings account, but I so rarely withdrew money from it that I never had to worry about any fees (my withdrawals always come in spurts.)
I'm one of those people (apparently rare) who uses nothing but credit cards to buy everything, yet never pays a dime in interest because I pay the balance long before it is due. In fact just this month my bank gave me $130 free on my credit card as a rewards bonus, so I actually get paid to use a credit card.
They use a dated payroll system and haven't bothered to modernize. This is mainly just a symptom of "get off my lawn" or "why would I use that when this already works just fine" syndrome from older business owners, because using direct deposit is not only easier but it's also cheaper.
Actually I'd like you to cite please; in fact I'm going to pull the "I call BS" card as well. There's actually an official list of people who have renounced their citizenship each quarter for tax purposes, published by the IRS, and it isn't all that large (2,963 in 2013 to be precise, and 2013 was a big year for this.) Just how many people on that list do you actually know? Almost all of them are filthy rich. What, are you the captain of their yacht club or something?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ke...
Some go so far as to say that the U.S. tax and disclosure laws are downright oppressive.
No group is more severely impacted than U.S. persons living abroad. For those living and working in foreign countries, it is almost a given that they must report and pay tax where they live. But they must also continue to file taxes in the U.S. What’s more, U.S. reporting is based on their worldwide income, even though they are paying taxes in the country where they live.
Many can claim a foreign tax credit on their U.S. returns, but it generally does not eliminate all double taxes.
The law that will have you extradited is called FATCA.
Permitting organs from dead bodies to be sold can lead to some.... unpleasant markets cropping up.
I'm fine with putting legal restrictions on it, but it's really not necessary. Nobody ever harvests organs from dead bodies...certain tissues maybe, like corneas, bones, skin, but never actual organs. Cadaverous organs come from somebody who is technically alive in that they are on life support but are brain dead. If the person comes to the hospital already not breathing and without a pulse, they won't bother harvesting the organs. Your organs don't last long at all without oxygen (your brain just happens to be the first one to go, but the others are effectively destroyed very shortly afterwards.)
I think it is only some 3% of all deaths that have viable organs for harvesting, which is a major factor in the organ shortage. Many of these end up not happening because the family declines to permit harvesting, even if the person who died said they were fine with it. If you did something like offer to pay for all of the funeral expenses (dying is expensive, I know because my dad died recently) I bet you'd end up with a lot fewer people who decline. Those funeral expenses would be a tiny fraction of the cost of some of the overall costs of these organ transplants; I think lungs for example is upwards of a million dollars for the entire process, whereas a funeral would top out at $20k.
Even if you don't have a funeral, it's expensive. Almost all states have laws requiring that you have a licensed mortician pick up the body from the coroner's office, and they often charge about a grand just to do that. The "death industry" is a fucking ripoff, and the government forces you to get suckered into it. The law didn't even allow me to clean up the blood my dad left behind on my own, they wanted me to hire a biohazard team for $500 an hour to do it. (The police said it was against the law but they wouldn't bother us if we did it on our own though, they even told us how to do it.)
Anyways, if these costs were subsidized by tissue/organ donation, I'm sure you'd get more people on board.
Except that scenario pretty much never happens. The transplant teams evaluate both donor and recipient, with a very long exclusion criteria for the donor. This is to pretty much guarantee that they won't see any ill effects until after at least the age of 80 where organ failure is already common anyways (and people continue to live long afterwards.)
I say pretty much, because the only time these checks are skipped is on the black market. The current laws encourage black markets, which as it stands now only the super rich can afford. So your current system that you uphold on moral grounds already grants favoritism towards the rich and disregards the well being of the seller.
But the black market is illegal right? Try telling Al Capone and the Purple Gang to observe the 18th amendment.
We've already seen what happens when you can openly sell organs without the need for a black market, namely because Iran does exactly that: There is no shortage of organs there. Unlike in the US, people don't die while waiting on transplants in Iran. Likewise, there aren't any horror stories of donors suffering ill effects from selling their organs. The worst you get is some derp who blew through all of the money he got really fast and regrets doing it, but you get the same "horror" story from lottery winners who can't win the lottery again after they spent it all. In other words, it's a non-issue.
Dude he's just joking, lighten up. Besides, Greece isn't a race. It reminds me of the jokes I crack at the Canadians I hang out with about living in igloos, and jokes about Americans being fat.
I think being politically correct douchebags on a large scale causes worse problems than people making offensive/racist jokes on a large scale. At the worst the later might offend somebody so they hang out somewhere else, but the first has a tendency to make life suck because you have to take things too seriously at every possible place you can work at because if I make a joke about my 50 year old friend having one foot in the grave, or telling him he has a severe case of old, (which even he laughs at) I could get fired.
Amazon has already been doing this a little. One time they sent me a printer cartridge and some baby wipes that I never ordered. I asked them what I should do with them and they said to just keep it. The baby wipes actually had sunscreen so I used them on myself while cycling last summer, and the printer ink I gave to staples for a $80 store credit, which I then used to get a free soda stream. It was actually pretty great!
That's a horrible argument. Your house is an asset even if you own it free and clear, same with your car, yet bankruptcy courts won't even bother looking at how much those are worth even if you live in a mansion - it's completely off limits. So why would they look at an organ as an asset when they already ignore real estate and cars?
No, it doesn't do that at all. Have you ever looked at the exclusion criteria for living donors? It's fucking long. They make it long like that because the transplant team want to GUARANTEE that the donor will live the rest of their life without seeing any negative impact.
It is a good idea, it will both save lives AND save money. Dialysis costs the government $100,000 per person who is on it. Even if somebody wanted to sell their kidney for that amount, that one time cost is a lot cheaper than a lifetime of dialysis.
I really don't see the argument against it at all. If somebody wants to sell their organs, why not let them? They get money, somebody else lives longer. The donor doesn't sacrifice any quality of life; the transplant teams take a ton of precautions to ensure that. So how is that such an evil thing to do?
Yes, there are risks in donation, however we already allow people to take these medical risks for money anyways. Donating eggs for example carries much bigger risk than organ donation, yet they only pay about $3,000 for that. Some clinical trials where they pay the patient to take drugs carry worse risks than donation as well. Organ donation on the other hand has been so well refined and done so many times since the 70's that it is very very safe for the donor compared to these other things.
Uh no, not everybody who needs an organ transplant is rich.
I'm actually in need of a kidney transplant myself, but being able to buy a kidney is a lot more viable than just waiting for somebody I don't even know to give me one. Donating a kidney isn't exactly an easy process for one, and for two everybody who has volunteered to give me theirs is ineligible to do so (they have other health issues preventing it - it's actually pretty easy to be excluded as a living kidney donor; the list of exclusions is quite long.)
If the government had a program where they bought kidneys for say $25,000 a pop, that would be a LOT LOT LOT cheaper than dialysis. Dialysis costs upwards of $100,000 per year to be on, whereas a kidney transplant is a one time cost of about $100,000. Bumping that figure up to $125,000 and greatly reducing the number of dialysis patients would be a huge money saver, not to mention people would be dying a lot less. Hell, bump that figure up to $50,000 and the government STILL saves an assload of money on medicare/medicaid costs.
But instead we have pundits like you saying that people voluntarily giving up their organs in exchange for money is just such an evil thing to do. I mean being offered money to save lives is such a crime against humanity, how dare we ever allow such a thing to exist.
I'm one of the lucky ones who isn't bad enough to be on dialysis yet, but is still bad enough that I'm a candidate for transplant. Fortunately it's extremely likely that by the time I need to go on dialysis, I'll have been on the transplant list for long enough that I'll never have to start dialysis (which by the way, they prefer that transplant recipients haven't started dialysis as it makes the graft acceptance much better.)
Actually I think if Google was even aware of this at all, they would probably act, if they haven't begun to act already. Google really doesn't like it when its search results are screwed with by anything at all; it's sort of their sacred cow. They've used the court system to block people from screwing with the search results for even stuff in IE.
No, but tax evasion is, if they do what I described in a previous post.
They could probably just levy the fines as a tax, and have them extradited for tax evasion through existing tax treaties.
The US already does something similar, and there is a large body of signing countries to this convention. If you live abroad you still have to pay US taxes even if you never make use of any US services. If you renounce your citizenship, you have to pay the US government a large tax as if you have sold every single asset that you presently own (so basically 30% of everything you have) plus some other fees and levies - if you don't do this, then the US will have you extradited and jailed. (This is why those complaining about those ex-patriots who renounced their citizenship to avoid future taxation have unfounded complaints - they already had to pay more than their pre-existing dues just to renounce their citizenship; they just want to avoid paying future taxes to a government that doesn't provide any services to them whatsoever.)
I'm thinking this is due to Plex working as a library rather than a blind playback system. What this means is that if it can't associate your video clip with the name of any movie it finds on IMDB (or something similar, whatever it uses) then it won't advertise it to the clients, assuming you've put it in that mode anyways (which I think it does by default if you categorize them as movies.) You can probably address this by putting it into a folder with a name exactly matching the IMDB entry along with the year in parenthesis.
You mean like Obama giving Apple a free pass on patent infringement while they sue everybody else?
Well I don't think it was during the movie, TFA mentions it was during the previews. I personally don't mind if people talk or text during previews because I didn't pay to see the previews and people are still finding their seats during previews anyways; during the movie is something else entirely though.
Both, actually.
I remember in the Matrix I was impressed that they used an actual IP address instead of something like 345.734.342.925.123.
Actually the money issue could very well turn into a non-issue. Namely, look at how much cheaper food has become these days...it's cheaper than it has ever been in fact. Technology and automation is largely to credit for that. We're basically to the point that food is pretty much just a "gimme," i.e. it's so easy to obtain that generally price isn't an issue, whereas in the past we've had plenty of times where you were lucky if you got enough food at all.
What ends up becoming the issue is purchasing power; namely how much things cost vs how much you earn. The only thing I could see causing problems later on is minimum wage, which even some of the more liberal economists will tell you causes more problems than it solves, and that will probably get worse over time if we keep raising it. If you do away with minimum wage, things could be even cheaper, and people could actually compete with machines.
Compared to what? France? Yeah I'd say it's doing pretty damn good compared to them.
I don't know about you but I haven't seen bus stops that have busses there 24/7; in fact there's usually at least 30-60 minutes between busses at any one stop. I figure it would be pretty easy to schedule their busses so that a Google bus would never be at a stop at the same time a public bus would otherwise be there.
Besides that, even if such a situation arose, what's to stop one bus from parking behind the other one while both of them loaded passengers? Oh no, some of the passengers might have to walk another 10 feet! Whatever shall they do?
Careful what you wish for.
By doing that you also send the people with money away; probably not a good thing to do to your local economy. France is currently finding this out the hard way -- their prime minister thought it would be a good idea to tax the rich until either they are no longer rich, or they just flat out leave the country. He got his way alright for the most part, but it really didn't work out how he intended; that country now has some of its highest unemployment rates ever in some areas.
You know who else shared your views by the way? Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, and Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Their countries became pretty poor and oppressive after the glorious revolution to get rid of the rich folks.
I'm not sure if you'd consider my area to be flyover country as it is the 6th largest city in the US, yet my 3 bedroom 2 bath (with a pool) house is $700 a month (which I split because I don't live here alone.) It's a pretty nice house too; probably far more comfortable to live in than something four times the price in SF.
Probably not informative because Silk road wasn't a retailer according to any definition I've ever seen.
That would be like saying ebay is a retailer.