Larger cellphone networks are cheaper per unit served than smaller networks. The first cellphone provider offering combined networks with no roaming charges must be attracting hordes of customers for almost no additional costs, maybe even lower unit costs. In a free market, providers with roaming charges would not survive.
That roaming charges are extinct in the US is a sign that a free market must have worked there. That roaming charges are still rampant in the EU means that something or someone here is busy preventing the free market from doing its job.
I think this has something to do with the fact that T-Mobile, Vodafone and very few others are covering all of Europe and everyone is profiteering very well from roaming charges from an increasingly roaming European population. Vodafone could win over half the market share of T-Mobile by abandoning roaming charges and vice versa. Both are raking in roaming profits with no one trying to make a move. This one stinks.
Your post is correct except that cell phone roaming is anything but a free market.
A free market is making people rich, a monopoly is making everyone else dirt poor. Destroying monopolies is one of the core functions of the government, because otherwise we would long be living under the boot of something like "Omni Consumer Products Inc.", which is bad for everyone, not only dirty hippies.
There are at max 2-3 cell phone networks per country. Most of them are local subsidiaries of transnational companies. For example, T-Mobile NL sets the roaming charge for T-Mobile BE and vice versa. Base fee is similar in both countries, call rates are similar, network fees as well. Both are paid in Euro. Both traffic goes through the same data centers. Population density in both countries is similar. And yet, roaming charges for customers between them are sky high.
Networks get cheaper per unit when they cover more units. Cellphone networks have the same economies of scale as everyone else. Larger networks are perfectly feasible (see T-Mobile UK, T-Mobile DE) and a combined NL and BE network should be cheaper per unit served. They still have two different networks with customers in the border areas occasionally using the "wrong" network when their phones are still in automatic network search mode. Great for both companies.
What is stopping T-Mobile BE and T-Mobile NL from creating a unified product for NL and BE customers? Vodafone/Orange is in the exact same situation. With the exact same results and eerily similar roaming charges, not offering a unified product either.
There are thousands of people traveling between these countries, for work or whatever. A unified product with acceptable prices would bring some hundred thousand customers to that network operator who makes the first move. As the added costs for connecting these networks would be quite reasonable, a unified network could offer an extremely enticing product, one that would crush most competition in that market - for the 2 years these phone contracts usually run.
Yet no one is doing anything. Both are having the same roaming charges. Both happily coexist for years with no one trying to make a first move that would rock the boat between them.
We are talking about companies that have completely saturated their home markets and are looking for new opportunities. In the European roaming market, we have high price signals, perfectly feasible operation, advantageous cost situations, high demand and an extremely high first mover advantage. But not a single offer, everyone holds still and adheres to the same high prices.
Mental health days are also called "vacation days" and everyone needs them every once in a while. If you need more mental health days than the contract allows, you're mentally sick and need help. Professional help. And of course, then you can take your sick days.
If you need much more mental health days than the average worker in your company, prepare for unlimited unpaid days off.
Don't work in a company that damages your health or join a union to improve working conditions.
I say sick days are for being sick and vacation days are for vacations.
Sick/personal days just mean that people will keep the personal days personal and go to work when sick.
A company that merges sick and vacation days will sooner or later have a flu-infected zombie show up at work to protect his dear vacation days, infecting everyone.
To avoid a flu-zombie apocalypse at your workplace, please leave SICK days for the actually sick, so sick people don't get an incentive to go to work and zombiefy you.
If you demand more free time, demand more vacation days. That's not being a good prole, but having common sense.
So you're telling us that if one side violates the contract, the most rational and sensible measure is not to bring the other side back in adherence to the contract, but simply trash it to Hell yourself?
Eye for an eye, right?
I say Wrong.
If one side violates the contract, demand further adherence to the contract, maybe demand compensation for large excursions from the contract or terminate it.
"You screw me, I screw you" is not only terribly immature, but also a sure-fire way to drama and mayhem.
In any case, for three weeks of highly illegal 70-hour-weeks, 3 days of fake "sick" leave is a meager compensation, no matter if there's detectives at the Bowling alley or not.
Trying to steal from thieves is not a clever strategy. Join a union or found one.
While I usually approve of all flat-rate, all-encompassing agreements that save everyone's time and effort for trivial transactions, I think including vacation and sick leave in a single Paid-Time-Off contingent is dangerous.
Of course x days paid leave is factored in by the employer, but if vacation and sick days are the same, it presents a number of problems:
- People *will* show up at work when they are actually, HSSE-critically sick just to save a few days for their vacation. Infecting everyone if they're contagious, ruining machinery or falling off high places if they're foggy-headed.
It also has a number of advantages: - Healthy people get more "vacation" days, so doing exercise and caring for your health translates into tangible benefits.
But one worker falling to their doom when sick at work ruins the entire plan.
In this time and age, we are paying people by their demands, not their abilities. The fact that upper classes are shamelessly funneling away billions - CEO incomes that increased a hundredfold compared to average worker incomes - has hidden that the lower classes are essentially turning the entire financial situation around: not getting paid by their abilities, their deeds, their talents, but according to their demands and simple societal average.
Working people have to work doubly hard to increase their abilities, their standing and their income. Non-working people simply have to shag their wife some more kids.
2 responsible adults will probably have 2 kids that probably turn out being responsible themselves. 2 irresponsible adults could have 6 kids that probably turn out being irresponsible themselves just by learning from their parents. After three generations, irresponsible people will outnumber and crush the responsible population. Unless that is changed, we will head further down the abyss. Irresponsible people will starve some day, but we can pretend we can postpone that indefinitely so it hits them harder when it finally happens.
If someone abuses SICK days for anything else than actually being SICK, they've no one to blame but them. Taking unpaid leave for "personal matters" would be much cleaner.
If they're out to get you, be cautious. If you're doing actually doing anything questionably, doubly so.
Taking sick days when not sick is not the same as not answering police questions when done nothing wrong.
Actually, I have no pity for people who call in sick, go bowling with their friends and then get caught. There's a fine line between privacy for privacy's sake and "privacy" invoked to hide actual misconduct.
Sick days are for being sick. People abusing are to blame, not employers wanting their employees to fulfill their contract.
If the employment contract is too unfair to fulfill, please join a union and do something about it. Going AWOL from a crappy contract is like cheating an ugly wife you do not love. It may be fun while it last, but it isn't going to help anyone and much drama if something finds out. So take the high road instead and do something with a little more forethought. Please.
In a habitat where welfare cheques are available, being virile and irresponsible could be considered a genetic advantage. Strength and intelligence are only advantageous if there's any real fights to win. Individuals in a zoo only need to be cute and reproductive.
Have many surviving offspring: check. Have many surviving offspring reproduce: check. Have many surviving offspring have surviving offspring themselves: check, check and cheque.
Anyone who doesn't impregnate any fertile female he can find isn't taking full evolutionary advantage of this historically unique environment. Any female that is currently fertile but not pregnant is wasting evolutionary credit points.
Welfare supplies won't last forever and when (not if) they peter out someday, the genetic material of those "irresponsible" people are an overwhelming majority. Guess who really was irresponsible then?
We can delude ourselves that it is different than that, but we can't delude evolution.
How people outside of a comfy office are expected to work when 67 years old is beyond my imagination. Grandpas doing construction work, on scaffolding 500m above ground, at 7am in the morning, in 4 degree cold and rain? Who would or could do that?
I can assure you, over here in Western Europe, we are all equally broke.
Except for maybe Germany, but everyone else is completely and fully broke. They just keep telling money lenders that they will be able to pay their dues, but the new credit taken out every year is just enough to pay interest on the loans already on the books.
Europe's key mistakes are, in my largely conservative viewpoint: - not deciding between the two ultimate leftist utopias, completely open borders and completely sufficient welfare state, - not recognizing that both are absolutely mutually exclusive lest a few remaining taxpayers in Europe pay welfare to the entire planet - not acknowledging that politics are nothing without financing - overly focusing on properly distributing state money, but largely disrespecting how to increase state income (simply increasing this or that tax rate until everyone is strangled by them doesn't really count) - steadily reducing individual discomfort for bad luck and bad decisions AND steadily reducing individual profit from luck and good decisions - not daring to decide between bad luck (eg. 1 year unemployed) and bad decisions (eg. 10 years unemployed) and act accordingly
Any of these facts are a suicide pact for state finances. As no Western European country except maybe Switzerland and Norway are even daring to name one of these as potentially problematic to say the least, I fully expect all of them making the news sooner or later.
With Germany bailing them out of course, then they waste some more, get bailed out and rinse, repeat until German bonds and credit rating are as wasted as Greece's. Then Germany raises their taxes, pension ages and the cycle continues once a again. Redistribution of wealth will never stop on this continent and if all Hell breaks loose, it is of course blamed on Capitalism.
Squandering more funds in a year than the previous generation earned in a lifetime doesn't sound like an accomplishment to me, but that's why I'm conservative. Financially, first and foremost. Or it could be that I'm German and hate working full-time until I'm 70 while losing half my income in taxes.
Web sites get defaced, file servers get broken into, FTP/WebDAV/whatever sites are made into downloading/warez-zombies. Happens once in a blue moon. But usually right before that project milestone, customer meeting or other all-important deadline.
Printers get clogged beyond easy repair, client machines break down, keyboards need to be replaced after a coffee spill.
The "incident response" team doesn't need to come crashing through the windows when the fax machine breaks and they don't need to send a signal to the Batcave, but someone someday will have to fix what's broken. If all you have is the usual student relative of a coworker, it may take a while to get back to work. Depending on your work, that can be something between 10 or 10.000 dollars wasted.
It was a response to the GP who warned everyone with outsourced data centers from farmers cutting their lines as the main danger to services in the cloud. And we all know how often Google - which is hosted in their own cloud - is going down, i.e. never.
If you do any of these, raising the floor by a few cms and putting a couple of floor tiles on it are probably the least of your financial worries. A 20-people company will go bust long before that if they build a data center, no matter how small.
And if they skimp on backups, availability, incident response, security and best-practice maintenance, they go bust even faster.
Google's main business is IT, so it would be idiotic to outsource everything of their strategic advantage.
The NGO this article was about certainly isn't strategically selling IT services, on the contrary, they just need something to work with.
Companies that do something which isn't in their core interest are one of these cases: - If they do it in full quality anyway, they're wasting money. - If they don't reach a quality or flexibility level typical for commercial services, they're missing out on opportunities. - If they do it perfect, for perfect budgets, they still squander funds, staff and management attention to something that is not providing enough profit (compared to their core product) - And if they profit from it enough, do it perfect, for a perfect budget and it's not their core product, management has named the wrong product their "core".
Full control is needed for services that can bring you down the instant anything goes even slightly wrong or hamper you for years if it isn't flexible enough to change with your business. If the outside commercial market is better AND cheaper than you on these services, you better not buy any stock in the company. If that company still decides to do everything themselves, you should sell any and all shares immediately. And update your resume, if you happen to work there.
Flame him for actually asking something in the Ask Slashdot section. Since we're all doing our jobs, it is totally uninteresting to see other's solutions to problems similar do our daily business. After all, we're doing our jobs and that requires not asking anyone and never comparing notes. Engineers work ALONE.
Yeah. Build everything on your own. For those 20 people, it is totally cost efficient to ditch all those buzzword-toting salespeople and roll your own. Your own certified infrastructure, your own incident team, your own UPSs, your own false floors, your own operating systems, compiled with all optimizer switches on, of course, and your own client PC images, complete with in-house developed software distribution and policies.
After about 300 man-years worth of training, you're able to surpass most commercial offers. 300 man-years more and you're doing stuff in-house even Google dreams about. Then it's definitely cost-effective.
I can't understand how one of the largest publicly owned companies like Google can trust all their data to the cloud. With all those farmers killing backbone cables daily, it's a miracle that their so-called "homepage" is even available for five minutes per week.
Assume that for all transactions they do, 1 penny gets cut off (not rounded up, not rounded down, just cut off) and every time to their disadvantage. If they do 20 transactions per day and live for 80 years, the upper bound of their loss is 20*365*80*0,01 = 5.840. For an entire life of being cheated for every penny, it's nothing to lose the retirement fund about...
Personal choice for exclusively using cards means that bad credit, technical errors, overbearing payment processors, irresponsible data gatherers and card-erasing magnet fields didn't yet have hit home on you and your friends. Which probably means a younger age for the group involved, where time * risk didn't yet accumulate enough to succeed to strike.
Credit cards are like cigarettes. They use is usually recreational and single doses are mostly harmless. If enough people repeat it a few times a day for several decades, some of them will suffer devastating breakdowns.
Are the messages transferred through their system their property?
Does the US postal service has the right to look into letters to see if there's illegal content or opinions unfavorable to the USPS inside?
Has UPS? AT&T? Google Mail? Can Skype interrupt all calls that talk negatively about Skype's call quality? Is it admissible for Apple iPhones to block websites that advertise HTC smartphones and vice versa?
Since the consequences of this are endless, and in the appropriate political settings much more sinister, even deadly, we the people have decreed that everyone should stay out of our private communication, all the time, for whatever reason.
Slashdot Mirror
And they still have roaming charges between their provinces.
It is "China Mobile" all over, but change the province, pay roaming.
There's a reason why most Chinese phones are dual SIM...
Larger cellphone networks are cheaper per unit served than smaller networks. The first cellphone provider offering combined networks with no roaming charges must be attracting hordes of customers for almost no additional costs, maybe even lower unit costs. In a free market, providers with roaming charges would not survive.
That roaming charges are extinct in the US is a sign that a free market must have worked there. That roaming charges are still rampant in the EU means that something or someone here is busy preventing the free market from doing its job.
I think this has something to do with the fact that T-Mobile, Vodafone and very few others are covering all of Europe and everyone is profiteering very well from roaming charges from an increasingly roaming European population. Vodafone could win over half the market share of T-Mobile by abandoning roaming charges and vice versa. Both are raking in roaming profits with no one trying to make a move. This one stinks.
Your post is correct except that cell phone roaming is anything but a free market.
A free market is making people rich, a monopoly is making everyone else dirt poor. Destroying monopolies is one of the core functions of the government, because otherwise we would long be living under the boot of something like "Omni Consumer Products Inc.", which is bad for everyone, not only dirty hippies.
There are at max 2-3 cell phone networks per country. Most of them are local subsidiaries of transnational companies. For example, T-Mobile NL sets the roaming charge for T-Mobile BE and vice versa. Base fee is similar in both countries, call rates are similar, network fees as well. Both are paid in Euro. Both traffic goes through the same data centers. Population density in both countries is similar. And yet, roaming charges for customers between them are sky high.
Networks get cheaper per unit when they cover more units. Cellphone networks have the same economies of scale as everyone else. Larger networks are perfectly feasible (see T-Mobile UK, T-Mobile DE) and a combined NL and BE network should be cheaper per unit served. They still have two different networks with customers in the border areas occasionally using the "wrong" network when their phones are still in automatic network search mode. Great for both companies.
What is stopping T-Mobile BE and T-Mobile NL from creating a unified product for NL and BE customers? Vodafone/Orange is in the exact same situation. With the exact same results and eerily similar roaming charges, not offering a unified product either.
There are thousands of people traveling between these countries, for work or whatever. A unified product with acceptable prices would bring some hundred thousand customers to that network operator who makes the first move. As the added costs for connecting these networks would be quite reasonable, a unified network could offer an extremely enticing product, one that would crush most competition in that market - for the 2 years these phone contracts usually run.
Yet no one is doing anything. Both are having the same roaming charges. Both happily coexist for years with no one trying to make a first move that would rock the boat between them.
We are talking about companies that have completely saturated their home markets and are looking for new opportunities. In the European roaming market, we have high price signals, perfectly feasible operation, advantageous cost situations, high demand and an extremely high first mover advantage. But not a single offer, everyone holds still and adheres to the same high prices.
This one reeks of cartel.
Mental health days are also called "vacation days" and everyone needs them every once in a while. If you need more mental health days than the contract allows, you're mentally sick and need help. Professional help. And of course, then you can take your sick days.
If you need much more mental health days than the average worker in your company, prepare for unlimited unpaid days off.
Don't work in a company that damages your health or join a union to improve working conditions.
I say sick days are for being sick and vacation days are for vacations.
Sick/personal days just mean that people will keep the personal days personal and go to work when sick.
A company that merges sick and vacation days will sooner or later have a flu-infected zombie show up at work to protect his dear vacation days, infecting everyone.
To avoid a flu-zombie apocalypse at your workplace, please leave SICK days for the actually sick, so sick people don't get an incentive to go to work and zombiefy you.
If you demand more free time, demand more vacation days. That's not being a good prole, but having common sense.
So you're telling us that if one side violates the contract, the most rational and sensible measure is not to bring the other side back in adherence to the contract, but simply trash it to Hell yourself?
Eye for an eye, right?
I say Wrong.
If one side violates the contract, demand further adherence to the contract, maybe demand compensation for large excursions from the contract or terminate it.
"You screw me, I screw you" is not only terribly immature, but also a sure-fire way to drama and mayhem.
In any case, for three weeks of highly illegal 70-hour-weeks, 3 days of fake "sick" leave is a meager compensation, no matter if there's detectives at the Bowling alley or not.
Trying to steal from thieves is not a clever strategy. Join a union or found one.
While I usually approve of all flat-rate, all-encompassing agreements that save everyone's time and effort for trivial transactions, I think including vacation and sick leave in a single Paid-Time-Off contingent is dangerous.
Of course x days paid leave is factored in by the employer, but if vacation and sick days are the same, it presents a number of problems:
- People *will* show up at work when they are actually, HSSE-critically sick just to save a few days for their vacation. Infecting everyone if they're contagious, ruining machinery or falling off high places if they're foggy-headed.
It also has a number of advantages:
- Healthy people get more "vacation" days, so doing exercise and caring for your health translates into tangible benefits.
But one worker falling to their doom when sick at work ruins the entire plan.
Post is head on.
In this time and age, we are paying people by their demands, not their abilities. The fact that upper classes are shamelessly funneling away billions - CEO incomes that increased a hundredfold compared to average worker incomes - has hidden that the lower classes are essentially turning the entire financial situation around: not getting paid by their abilities, their deeds, their talents, but according to their demands and simple societal average.
Working people have to work doubly hard to increase their abilities, their standing and their income. Non-working people simply have to shag their wife some more kids.
2 responsible adults will probably have 2 kids that probably turn out being responsible themselves. 2 irresponsible adults could have 6 kids that probably turn out being irresponsible themselves just by learning from their parents. After three generations, irresponsible people will outnumber and crush the responsible population. Unless that is changed, we will head further down the abyss. Irresponsible people will starve some day, but we can pretend we can postpone that indefinitely so it hits them harder when it finally happens.
If work conditions are unfair, don't allow for some slight and slow increase in savings, change jobs, change states or join unions.
If someone abuses SICK days for anything else than actually being SICK, they've no one to blame but them. Taking unpaid leave for "personal matters" would be much cleaner.
If they're out to get you, be cautious. If you're doing actually doing anything questionably, doubly so.
Taking sick days when not sick is not the same as not answering police questions when done nothing wrong.
Actually, I have no pity for people who call in sick, go bowling with their friends and then get caught. There's a fine line between privacy for privacy's sake and "privacy" invoked to hide actual misconduct.
Sick days are for being sick. People abusing are to blame, not employers wanting their employees to fulfill their contract.
If the employment contract is too unfair to fulfill, please join a union and do something about it. Going AWOL from a crappy contract is like cheating an ugly wife you do not love. It may be fun while it last, but it isn't going to help anyone and much drama if something finds out. So take the high road instead and do something with a little more forethought. Please.
In a habitat where welfare cheques are available, being virile and irresponsible could be considered a genetic advantage. Strength and intelligence are only advantageous if there's any real fights to win. Individuals in a zoo only need to be cute and reproductive.
Have many surviving offspring: check.
Have many surviving offspring reproduce: check.
Have many surviving offspring have surviving offspring themselves: check, check and cheque.
Anyone who doesn't impregnate any fertile female he can find isn't taking full evolutionary advantage of this historically unique environment. Any female that is currently fertile but not pregnant is wasting evolutionary credit points.
Welfare supplies won't last forever and when (not if) they peter out someday, the genetic material of those "irresponsible" people are an overwhelming majority. Guess who really was irresponsible then?
We can delude ourselves that it is different than that, but we can't delude evolution.
Current pension age in Germany is 67. Was raised from 65 a few years ago.
Currently, politicians test the waters every few months in demanding a raise to 69 years. (see German magazine Focus (large MSM news) in 2009 http://www.focus.de/politik/weitere-meldungen/rentenalter-anhebung-auf-69-jahre-sei-schlechter-scherz_aid_418805.html)
How people outside of a comfy office are expected to work when 67 years old is beyond my imagination. Grandpas doing construction work, on scaffolding 500m above ground, at 7am in the morning, in 4 degree cold and rain? Who would or could do that?
I can assure you, over here in Western Europe, we are all equally broke.
Except for maybe Germany, but everyone else is completely and fully broke. They just keep telling money lenders that they will be able to pay their dues, but the new credit taken out every year is just enough to pay interest on the loans already on the books.
Europe's key mistakes are, in my largely conservative viewpoint:
- not deciding between the two ultimate leftist utopias, completely open borders and completely sufficient welfare state,
- not recognizing that both are absolutely mutually exclusive lest a few remaining taxpayers in Europe pay welfare to the entire planet
- not acknowledging that politics are nothing without financing
- overly focusing on properly distributing state money, but largely disrespecting how to increase state income (simply increasing this or that tax rate until everyone is strangled by them doesn't really count)
- steadily reducing individual discomfort for bad luck and bad decisions AND steadily reducing individual profit from luck and good decisions
- not daring to decide between bad luck (eg. 1 year unemployed) and bad decisions (eg. 10 years unemployed) and act accordingly
Any of these facts are a suicide pact for state finances. As no Western European country except maybe Switzerland and Norway are even daring to name one of these as potentially problematic to say the least, I fully expect all of them making the news sooner or later.
With Germany bailing them out of course, then they waste some more, get bailed out and rinse, repeat until German bonds and credit rating are as wasted as Greece's. Then Germany raises their taxes, pension ages and the cycle continues once a again. Redistribution of wealth will never stop on this continent and if all Hell breaks loose, it is of course blamed on Capitalism.
Squandering more funds in a year than the previous generation earned in a lifetime doesn't sound like an accomplishment to me, but that's why I'm conservative. Financially, first and foremost. Or it could be that I'm German and hate working full-time until I'm 70 while losing half my income in taxes.
Web sites get defaced, file servers get broken into, FTP/WebDAV/whatever sites are made into downloading/warez-zombies. Happens once in a blue moon. But usually right before that project milestone, customer meeting or other all-important deadline.
Printers get clogged beyond easy repair, client machines break down, keyboards need to be replaced after a coffee spill.
The "incident response" team doesn't need to come crashing through the windows when the fax machine breaks and they don't need to send a signal to the Batcave, but someone someday will have to fix what's broken. If all you have is the usual student relative of a coworker, it may take a while to get back to work. Depending on your work, that can be something between 10 or 10.000 dollars wasted.
It was a response to the GP who warned everyone with outsourced data centers from farmers cutting their lines as the main danger to services in the cloud. And we all know how often Google - which is hosted in their own cloud - is going down, i.e. never.
If you do any of these, raising the floor by a few cms and putting a couple of floor tiles on it are probably the least of your financial worries. A 20-people company will go bust long before that if they build a data center, no matter how small.
And if they skimp on backups, availability, incident response, security and best-practice maintenance, they go bust even faster.
There is no "try" when doing IT infrastructure.
Google's main business is IT, so it would be idiotic to outsource everything of their strategic advantage.
The NGO this article was about certainly isn't strategically selling IT services, on the contrary, they just need something to work with.
Companies that do something which isn't in their core interest are one of these cases:
- If they do it in full quality anyway, they're wasting money.
- If they don't reach a quality or flexibility level typical for commercial services, they're missing out on opportunities.
- If they do it perfect, for perfect budgets, they still squander funds, staff and management attention to something that is not providing enough profit (compared to their core product)
- And if they profit from it enough, do it perfect, for a perfect budget and it's not their core product, management has named the wrong product their "core".
Full control is needed for services that can bring you down the instant anything goes even slightly wrong or hamper you for years if it isn't flexible enough to change with your business. If the outside commercial market is better AND cheaper than you on these services, you better not buy any stock in the company. If that company still decides to do everything themselves, you should sell any and all shares immediately. And update your resume, if you happen to work there.
Flame him for actually asking something in the Ask Slashdot section. Since we're all doing our jobs, it is totally uninteresting to see other's solutions to problems similar do our daily business. After all, we're doing our jobs and that requires not asking anyone and never comparing notes. Engineers work ALONE.
Yeah. Build everything on your own. For those 20 people, it is totally cost efficient to ditch all those buzzword-toting salespeople and roll your own. Your own certified infrastructure, your own incident team, your own UPSs, your own false floors, your own operating systems, compiled with all optimizer switches on, of course, and your own client PC images, complete with in-house developed software distribution and policies.
After about 300 man-years worth of training, you're able to surpass most commercial offers. 300 man-years more and you're doing stuff in-house even Google dreams about. Then it's definitely cost-effective.
I can't understand how one of the largest publicly owned companies like Google can trust all their data to the cloud. With all those farmers killing backbone cables daily, it's a miracle that their so-called "homepage" is even available for five minutes per week.
That's why everyone on this ARPANET is raving crazy about its routing algorithm.
Assume that for all transactions they do, 1 penny gets cut off (not rounded up, not rounded down, just cut off) and every time to their disadvantage. If they do 20 transactions per day and live for 80 years, the upper bound of their loss is 20*365*80*0,01 = 5.840. For an entire life of being cheated for every penny, it's nothing to lose the retirement fund about...
Personal choice for exclusively using cards means that bad credit, technical errors, overbearing payment processors, irresponsible data gatherers and card-erasing magnet fields didn't yet have hit home on you and your friends. Which probably means a younger age for the group involved, where time * risk didn't yet accumulate enough to succeed to strike.
Credit cards are like cigarettes. They use is usually recreational and single doses are mostly harmless. If enough people repeat it a few times a day for several decades, some of them will suffer devastating breakdowns.
Are the messages transferred through their system their property?
Does the US postal service has the right to look into letters to see if there's illegal content or opinions unfavorable to the USPS inside?
Has UPS? AT&T? Google Mail? Can Skype interrupt all calls that talk negatively about Skype's call quality? Is it admissible for Apple iPhones to block websites that advertise HTC smartphones and vice versa?
Since the consequences of this are endless, and in the appropriate political settings much more sinister, even deadly, we the people have decreed that everyone should stay out of our private communication, all the time, for whatever reason.
I think we should stick to that principle.