You see, the retailer is supposed to pay that tax if they pass it on to you.
I believe you are conflating two different things: those who are legitimately exempt from sales taxes, versus the mechanism of collection.
If I am not a non-profit or purchasing wholesale or other tax-exempt entity, then that sale requires a sales tax to be collected. The retailer can pass that onto me, usually in the form of an exclusive (separate line-item on the receipt) tax. Or they can charge me only the up-front price of the items and then pay the sales tax from their profits. One way or another, the retailer is liable for the sales tax. The standard way of dealing with it is simply to pass it on to me at the point of sale.
Of course religious organizations and other exempt entities don't cause the retailer to have to pay the tax. They're exempt. What I was describing in my original post is retail sales to which the tax does apply. In those cases the retailer has to pay it whether or not they pass it on. You could have figured that out since no other scenario makes sense within that context.
What a wonderful, mature, high-minded reason to bring a child into the world...
I'm guessing you didn't grow up in a family, or in a family where family is actually considered important. Especially one where there's a lot of little brothers or sisters in it.
Ah, so you could not refute what I said, yet you still didn't like the way it sounded, so now here come the thinly-veiled personal attacks concerning how inferior my life or my family must be. How transparent of you.
My answer to you is very simple. I grew up in and remain in a family where family is considered very important. It's so important, in fact, that we don't make petty "me too!" games and contests of "I got first place!" out of important life events, particularly those as life-changing as becoming a parent.
The family? Very important. Who did what first as if it's a competition? So unimportant that it isn't even on the radar.
No here's the part you don't want to face: if two women in your family actually care about who gets pregnant first, to the point that they will try to become pregnant when one or more of them otherwise wouldn't have done so, the importance of family is low on their list. High up on their list is being petty, catty, and soaking up the attention and adoration from everyone else. If pointing that out offends you, or if you're struck by the realization that there are a lot of petty immature people in the world, then maybe you should deal with that on your own terms instead of trying to make a scapegoat of me.
So they are analizing what kind of products a customer buys, and if they are products associated with pregnancy then they market them even more products associated with pregnancy. Seems like that without all that funny little anecdotes about pregnancy prediction, this is just the same algorithm everyone else uses: offering a customer the types of products they have bought in the past. Also, a pregnant woman in the second trimester is quite easy to detect by the good old method of looking at her.
Is this the US? Last time I visited, most women looked as if they were pregnant...
Pregnancy doesn't cause rolls of fat like a second pair of pseudo-breasts to grow on the shoulder blades. If you ever get confused, that's how you can tell.
And yeah, they can mod you down all they like. Simple fact is, if you respect yourself you take care of yourself. If you don't respect yourself and allow yourself to become morbidly obese, this indicates problems that are more than merely cosmetic.
The whole obesity deal is just part of the reactive mentality that never uses foresight to take responsibility for anything. If it did, then a person would only need to be 10-20 pounds overweight before saying "hey, I appear to be gaining weight; since I wasn't intending to do that, I should adjust my lifestyle and deal with it right now before it inevitably and predictably becomes a big problem that will be much more difficult to overcome." It's the same mentality that can't understand why giving certain powers to government is a bad idea, why a car loan of five years or more is a bad idea and indicates you can't really afford that car, why you should start saving up for your retirement while you're young, etc. etc.
A completely unpredictable and unforeseeable failure is an incredibly rare beast. Obesity is the same principle on a slightly more personal level. I think the obese people sense the obviousness of their mistake and feel ashamed of it, or else they'd never get so offended at the mere suggestion that maybe they failed. That kind of irritable hypersensitivity is unknown to secure people who had good reasons for doing what they did. It's well known to careless people who portray themselves as perpetual victims because they don't want to assume responsibility for their own affairs.
Yeah, data mining w/o direct consent should be illegal.
As we better understand the mechanisms of consciousness and the brain and realize this shit it possible, it should also be made illegal.
it is ridiculous that one could use these to manipulate you into buying more stuff. It goes against much of what the founding fathers of the US were against. An individuals mind must be their own.
Same goes for the propaganda networks posing as "news" programming on television. It's blatant co-opting of an individuals own faculties.
Agreed. This is one of those few cases where a legal solution may be the best. Make it illegal on a national scale and now no store has whatever competitive advantage it offers. They return to competing on a level field.
I feel the same way about this as I do about the vendorlock tactics of Microsoft and many other software companies: they're the actions of a company that does not believe in the merits of its products and their ability to compete openly on a level field. If a company indicates they do not really believe in their own products, or their own ability to honestly convince me to shop at their stores, who am I to argue with them?
Because it is true, it is SUSPICIOUS, there is increased chance you will NOT pay full amount for your TAX if you are paying by cash, it does not mean everybody, or even most people will avoid tax if they pay by cash, but it does considerably increase odds that you are ones of those that do, and need to be checked "just in case"
That makes no sense. I got that cash from a paycheck. Before I even saw the paycheck, the taxes were taken out.
If you are talking about sales taxes, the form of payment is irrelevant. And I have never asked a retailer not to collect the sales tax on a purchase I made because I already know what the answer would be. You see, the retailer has to pay that tax whether or not they pass it on to you. They're not going to give me free money.
It's not about taxes at all. It's about how much more power the government can have when anyone and everyone is a suspect.
No you don't. You hate seeing marketing material that wasn't meant for you. I feel the same way. Personally, I love the marketing material that's on the boxes of plastic toys I purchase.
The fact that you would presume to know better than he what he does and doesn't hate means you certainly do believe in marketing. That presumption carries a burden of proof, and the fact that you feel differently does not constitute proof.
The hinge of marketing is that it relies on emotional manipulation. It's least effective on people who have emotions (since they have a pulse) but are not governed by them and do not make decisions according to them. That's why they use small children in commercials, especially for cars and other things that don't have much to do with child care -- they are exploiting the innocence and the cuteness of the child to tug at your heartstrings. Since people tend to have maternal and paternal instincts, and instinct is not a matter of reason, this one is particularly effective and requires a real self-awareness to be seen for what it is.
If it works, they bypass any kind of rationality and implant a subconscious identification, a transferrance of the warm fuzzies to the product being sold. They are not saying "here are the factual reasons why we believe our products are superior" for they may not have any. If it doesn't work, it's because the recipient can see how underhanded and infernal this kind of manipulation really is, how much contempt and disrespect for the potential customer it really shows, and becomes completely turned off to doing business with that company at all.
Which one happens depends on whether the person governs their emotions and passions or is governed by them, and that's simply a matter of having two things: a spine and some character. Marketers help to undermine these two things by constantly emphasizing and legitimizing their opposites. The only thing worse than a few marketers who may merely be selfish are the masses of enablers who think this is truly a noble and acceptable way to treat one's fellow men. Of course, they would have to feel that way, because that's easier for an unprincipled ego than admitting it has strings that someone else can pull.
I have a pretty small anecdotal sample group, four sets of sisters, but my experience is sisters of similar age tend to get , or try to get, pregnant around the same time. From what I've observed it's like it's a competition to see who can pop out the first grandchild.
I think it boils down to younger siblings hate seeing the older ones get everything first. Maybe marketing has picked up on a similar trend.
What a wonderful, mature, high-minded reason to bring a child into the world...
Especially if he's the type that gets upset enough over stupid coupons implying potential pregnancy to go yell at a store manager? Yeah, I'm sure he's the first person she would tell.
Glad I'm not the only one who considered that angle.
Her decision to turn into a little slut in the first place may have been just to rebel against him.
Oh well. Her young adulthood is gone now and pursuing higher education or establishing a good career will be far more difficult. If she's really lucky, the father she so responsibly chose to have a child with will help her. If she's lucky.
Just like TFA, two months ago gmail started serving me nothing but breast pump, neonatal vitamin, and baby bottle ads. I'm a guy, but I am married so maybe they're trying to send a hint "why don't you have kids yet? Here we'll give you discount mail-order vitamins if you get busy!" But they also send me dating site ads. So if they do know I'm married, they don't have a high opinion of my marriage! Maybe that's why they want me to knock my wife up?;)
Soo... how much more competitive would their prices be, if they didn't spend money on these kinds of systems and marketing and customer tracking, and just accepted that there's nothing wrong with people buying what they want, when they decide they want it? Think they could undercut (or nearly undercut) Wal-mart while providing a more pleasant shopping experience (which wouldn't be hard)?
Consider all the effort it takes to design systems like this, to hire employees to use and maintain them, to purchase the equipment, to pay for data centers, etc. I mean if a woman gives birth she's going to be buying diapers; if she likes your store she'll buy them there on her own without this sort of manipulation. Then there's the cost of ill will -- the desire to treat my private life like your personal marketing brochure without even showing me the basic respect of asking for my permission strongly disinclines me to do business with you. It's called dignity, and I realize it's going out of style but it isn't dead yet.
So is this truly profitable in the long run, as a business practice? Or is it just another "make this quarter's numbers look good, the 'consumers' are used to bending over and taking this kind of thing anyway" type of deal?
Dude, she wasn't forced to eat anything. She was offered something else and took it. They may have not even known she had a home lunch with her. 4-year-olds aren't exactly the most forthcoming or entirely aware people in the world.
So you have government agents intruding, for no good reason, into the relationship between mother and child... and you want to quibble about how they go about it, which method of doing this is acceptable and which is not, and sweep it all under the rug? I can't be the only one to understand how dreadfully psychotic this actually is. This belief of yours, whom does this serve... you? Hah.
In a way you're right though, Obama is not personally to blame. The problem is not that Obama is the President. The problem is that the federal government was ever involved in education. Once that happened, this kind of thing became inevitable.
And yet you claim that "The School Person REPLACED the whole lunch with an ALTERNATE version, not just 'supplemented'," and then go off on a rant about the evil leftwing nanny state. You should be ashamed of spreading these hateful lies.
Sounds like they gave her an additional lunch and told her that her mother didn't pack something healthy enough. That they might have called it a supplement doesn't change the fact that it was functionally a replacement. That would be reasonable if the USDA provided objectively good nutritional standards, but instead we have an organization which has been legally required to recognize the tomato sauce on pizza as a serving of a vegetable having their standards used to second-guess a good wholesome lunch sent by the parent.
My suspicion is that this is a way for the school to bring in additional revenue. If I were the parent, I would send the school a letter saying that you had not agreed to the transaction and that you will not pay it. If they send it to collections you send a letter of dispute. If they persist, threaten to organize a class action law suit.
I don't advocate this sort of thing but in response to how bureaucratic and legalistic we're becoming as a society, I just want to remind everyone of how things were once done.
There was a time when the father would have a personal one-on-one chitchat with a government agent who, under color of authority, decided that intimidating a little girl and decided that he is better able than her parents to decide how she should live. This may involve a discussion, a shouting match, or it may also involve said government agent getting the living shit beaten out of him in a fistfight. That would depend solely on whether he admits fault and changes his policies. Of course, this was a time when two men could have a fistfight so long as it was understood that when the man stays down, he's had enough. One way or another, this kind of overreach was not tolerated and being that kind of a jackass became increasingly painful.
Was the result more people getting yelled at and beaten up? Not at all, because everyone knew there was a line that you did not cross without consequence. The result was that the school officials tried at least to appear to be reasonable. The message was, you can screw with my taxes, you can screw with my vote, maybe you can even screw with my car, and I'll go through the bullshit motions of working with the system and seeking redress etc, but if you screw with my family you're going to have a war.
We've become so pussified that we think that's somehow savage or too extreme. The truth is, when you're not going to take this kind of shit no matter what, people recognize it and they rarely if ever try it. The result is better for everyone. Why should decent people be frustrated by this kind of soft tyranny? Those who would inflict it should be frustrated at how afraid they are to try it.
I know it can't be true, but sometimes it seems like nobody appreciates what you're actually teaching the next generation of children when you train them from a very young age to expect that authority is arbitrary and can come along and screw with you for any reason or no real reason at all, that even the relationship between mother and child is not too sacred for their interference. When they're all on antidepressants and antipsychotics long before they get driver's licenses, I guess you'll blame TV and video games, right? Never having the security of boundaries that will be respected has nothing to do with it, right?
I am more concerned about them increasing the number of helicopter patrols. Where I live now, the state sends out helicopters to look for cannabis plants, then indiscriminately arrests anyone who has a cannabis plant on their property. We recently had someone in my county arrested and convicted of cultivating marijuana because the patrol spotted feral hemp on his property.
Tickets are one thing, but when you have a paramilitary force prepared to arrest or kill anyone over these plants, you are dealing with tyranny.
I am not advocating that anyone do anything illegal. So, in a strictly hypothetical sense, just imagine if the response to that was an underground campaign to scatter marijuana seeds all over the private properties of the police chief (or sheriff), various local government officials, state government officials, their friends and families, their staff, local judges, important local businessmen, etc.
It could at least change the "indiscriminately arresting with no regard for whether deliberate cultivation is happening" part of their practices. In theory, I mean.
Not only is it tyranny, but when you make crimes of such non-issues it is also institutionalized insanity*. Because it is insane, no amount of evidence that drug policy should be reformed is going to change their minds. They don't care about evidence.
* Although I am convinced that anyone who wants to control the private lives of consenting adults is already insane, for there is no sane or justifiable reason to want to do this.
Labor Activist Li Qiang wants you to know that the iPhone 4 in his pocket is not an endorsement of Apple’s policies, just an acknowledgement that the company is doing a better job of monitoring factory conditions than its peers.
It is absolutely an endorsement. These issues are so much easier if we can get past this kind of "not really my fault!" double-talk.
I'll give a probably terrible analogy. Maybe you didn't intend to stub your toe. If anyone had asked, you would have said that your intend was to avoid the obstacle on the floor and not to stub your toe on it. You meant well; good enough. But you did stub your toe and you can try arguing with your toe that it wasn't your intention, but it's not going to instantly remove the pain.
Folks, whether you really intend it, or whether your ability to understand cause-and-effect ends only with "I want this thing so I'm buying it" and your vision extends no further, I can tell you one truth: anytime you patronize a business, you are implicitly endorsing and approving of its products, business practices, policies, and staff. Buying their products and/or services is your way of telling them that what they're doing is great and that they deserve to be rewarded for it. It's a more powerful statement than any letter you could write or phone call you could make.
Of course most people don't care and can't be bothered to care. This labor activist, however, is placing himself in the group who do care. That's why he's contradicting himself (or not being fully honest) by saying "it's not an endorsement". The whole "everyone else is doing it" or "others are worse" is the kind of excuse grade-schoolers are told is not valid. If you really had a problem with the business practices of all smartphone manufacturers, you would get a feature phone. Li Qiang's statement there is simply lip service designed to be as inoffensive as possible.
If you can't see the difference it's because you refuse to.
I can see why you'd like to paint those in disagreement with you as irrational, yet we are not the one making an extraordinary claims about how 98% of scientists in the field simply aren't good enough to do their job. And what evidence to do you bring to this claim? Talking points from climate change deniers and bizarre assertions about causation. I'll go out on a limb say you're not a statistician nor even taken an entry level course on it.
If you want to find out what happens to another planet suffering from global warming, you need look no farther than the closest planet to Earth.
My position on it is "I don't know" and honestly, neither does anyone else. Anything from the lack of rigor, to the rebranding ("global warming" to "climate change" etc to help "sell" it), to the political nature, to the weather stations that were found to be overestimating temperature readings, to the straight up deliberate dishonesty revealed by many of the e-mails that were brought to light.
This is not like an engineer who builds a bridge and it either holds up under load if he's right or collapses if he's wrong. You may or may not understand the physical principles and mathematics of civil engineering, but you can look at the bridge and see whether it did, in fact, collapse. This is not like engineering. I say I don't know because as far as I can see, everyone involved has credibility problems.
The scientists (other than the dishonest ones) are doing their job just fine. I don't share this desire to make this into a personal attack against anyone, scientists included, and consider it a minor tragedy that people always want to view it that way. I am saying this is not a matter of the job they do. It's a matter of relying too heavily on theoretical models with no real ability to perform controlled experiments. It's not a readily falsifiable deal.
Now then, do I think pollution is great and should be ignored? No. There are reasons other than AGW to reduce emissions and other pollution. If humanity is going to be the steward of this planet, we should be good stewards and be mindful of our impact on it. Is that unreasonable to you?
It's a strange kind of "priesthood" that has to show its work and changes its mind when new evidence comes in.
What's the point in showing you my work if you're not qualified to understand it?
After all, the Catholic Church had plenty of Bibles written in Latin. They were not hidden. Of course, no one other than Catholic priests happened to speak/read Latin...
The point is, if you can't explain the gist of it to a reasonably intelligent layman, there's something wrong with your own understanding.
Yes, because you're the same type of person who would follow an MD's advice on heart surgery after what? maybe two concurring opinions. Yet when it comes to accepting science that conflicts with your political views, you say "Well hold on Buster. 98% of the people qualified to make an assessment isn't good enough. And I'm a victim too!. You big meanies!".
Yes, so there must then be a difference. It so happens that there is in fact a difference between modern medicine and modern climate science. Medical scientists can perform an experiment on thousands of patients, then compare the results to another control group of thousands more patients. They can clearly distinguish correlation from causation. They can modify the system (i.e. cardiovascular) with drugs; those drugs have effects also established by experiment.
How many human-inhabited planets do we have to experiment on? Do we have an easy way to say, instantly cut the CO2 level of one of those planets by 30% to see how it impacts the climate? Do we have a ton of other human-inhabited planets we can use as a control group? No? Then my heart surgeon is a tad more certain about the medical advice he gives me than anyone has been about global warming, climate change, etc.
If you can't see the difference it's because you refuse to.
Yes - intelligently questioned by people who are qualified to criticize it. And who "question" it by doing their own research, investigation, hypothesizing and testing... which is not the same as digging up spurious out-of-context quotes and raising biased, uninformed objections for political reasons.
And yet if these unqualified non-scientists believed in said theory, you would have no quarrel with them. Even though they don't believe it as a result of being qualified, doing research, investigation, hypothesizing, and testing (redundant after "investigation"?).
The unspoken, probably unacknowledged even by you, message here? "Don't question authority."
I never believed that science was meant to be a priesthood. Back when we had priesthoods and considered that normal, don't we call those times the Dark Ages? The moment you are told that you're not qualified and therefore have no business forming your own position, that's the moment you have established a priesthood.
I have an entirely different take. I think this science has a problem most sciences don't. We have only one planet that's practical to use for this model. We can't modify the system to test different variables in a rigorous way, and we can't compare what happens to a control group. There is too much uncertainty that there's no clear way to resolve. So, it becomes a political issue. It boils down to some authority's opinion concerning what makes the most sense. That's great fun when the authority is wrong, or there are multiple authorities who disagree with each other, or there's no positive way to rule those out.
If you don't understand that, you wind up passionately judging the stupidity of people you know nothing about, not because they demonstrated stupidity but as a feeble attempt at shutting them up. After all, they followed the "wrong" authority. Do you realize that popular ideas which people were absolutely certain about, and sometimes would have fought and died over, that anyone would have been ridiculed for doubting, have turned out to be wrong in the past?
Does this mean that social media will now be the blame for all the evils of society? Finally replacing D&D, and "violent video games."
Man, don't give them ideas. Busybodies never seem to be busy enough.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber
barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those
who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C.S. Lewis
Usually that phony Puritannical "morality" is most visible when the subject is drugs, pornography, or controversial speech. At least on the Internet this sort of typecast personality is really going to have a hell of a time trying to enforce it, but still, I'd rather not see them try. I'd rather they do something more worthy of their limited time on this planet, like uproot their desire to run other peoples' lives by recognizing it as more evil than anything they'd rail against. Then maybe, just maybe, they can find their own fulfillment and witness the way that really living your own life magically takes away your undue concern for how others live theirs.
it is insisting on being a horse and buggy maker in a car world
That's the goal, yes. The method by which they reach the goal is nickel-and-diming. Confusing the two led you to believe that one of them must be false.
The RIAA and MPAA are throwing away huge wads of money to cling to a business model that no longer works.
Makes you wonder how they can afford all of that if their claims of how badly piracy hurts their bottom line had merit... Imagine how much more profit their shareholders would enjoy if they saved this money instead. If you want to hit them where it hurts, reveal to those shareholders why they should be outraged about this and why they should be divesting or at least demanding an investigation. It could be as simple as demonstrating they waste more money on lawsuits and political contributions than they gain in return from deterrence of piracy. Executives do have certain legal obligations to look after shareholders' interests.
Until they declare it illegal to resell DVDs or they tie the content to a specific piece of hardware for playback.
The bittorrent pirates couldn't dream of a better justification in the popular mind.
The copyright interests enjoy some public sympathy as long as they can portray themselves as the poor victims of rampant "theft" who just want a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. This mostly depends on the general public being ignorant and not considering it worthwhile to read up on the subject and learn about its nuances. Thus, what is generally known about them comes from propaganda (aka "PR") sponsored by them. If the cartels clamp down too hard, no amount of PR will prevent it from being generally known that they are a bunch of assholes and control freaks who will never be satisfied.
What you suggest is, sadly, the kind of thing they would do. It's also the dumbest thing they could do. Seems like a balance to me.
The Judge has received some re-election funds from the MPAA
Just because you don't like the ruling, doesn't necessarily mean it's contrary to the law.
That being said, the MPAA and RIAA have been instrumental in writing the laws, so...
If I were a judge I'd never rule in favor of something I know to be wrong, excessive, or unreasonable. Modern copyright suits like this one fit all three descriptions. If the law says otherwise, let them impeach me. Then I might lose my cushy prestigious job. Then I'd say hey, at least I put something on the line to try to bring some sanity to our legal system; how many others did the same?
Yeah good thing the police are always right there preventing those murders that don't happen every single day.
Yeah, and I'll add one thing: we all know that someone using force to murder another person is exactly, precisely, in every conceivable way, just like asking them to trust someone who is not trustworthy and wouldn't pass even the most cursory smell-test.
No, unlike murder, this crime requires the "victim's" active cooperation. Anyone who doesn't recognize that difference is simply not being honest. If GP has to be deceptive to argue against my position, it reinforces my position.
Slashdot Mirror
You see, the retailer is supposed to pay that tax if they pass it on to you.
I believe you are conflating two different things: those who are legitimately exempt from sales taxes, versus the mechanism of collection.
If I am not a non-profit or purchasing wholesale or other tax-exempt entity, then that sale requires a sales tax to be collected. The retailer can pass that onto me, usually in the form of an exclusive (separate line-item on the receipt) tax. Or they can charge me only the up-front price of the items and then pay the sales tax from their profits. One way or another, the retailer is liable for the sales tax. The standard way of dealing with it is simply to pass it on to me at the point of sale.
Of course religious organizations and other exempt entities don't cause the retailer to have to pay the tax. They're exempt. What I was describing in my original post is retail sales to which the tax does apply. In those cases the retailer has to pay it whether or not they pass it on. You could have figured that out since no other scenario makes sense within that context.
What a wonderful, mature, high-minded reason to bring a child into the world...
I'm guessing you didn't grow up in a family, or in a family where family is actually considered important. Especially one where there's a lot of little brothers or sisters in it.
Ah, so you could not refute what I said, yet you still didn't like the way it sounded, so now here come the thinly-veiled personal attacks concerning how inferior my life or my family must be. How transparent of you.
My answer to you is very simple. I grew up in and remain in a family where family is considered very important. It's so important, in fact, that we don't make petty "me too!" games and contests of "I got first place!" out of important life events, particularly those as life-changing as becoming a parent.
The family? Very important. Who did what first as if it's a competition? So unimportant that it isn't even on the radar.
No here's the part you don't want to face: if two women in your family actually care about who gets pregnant first, to the point that they will try to become pregnant when one or more of them otherwise wouldn't have done so, the importance of family is low on their list. High up on their list is being petty, catty, and soaking up the attention and adoration from everyone else. If pointing that out offends you, or if you're struck by the realization that there are a lot of petty immature people in the world, then maybe you should deal with that on your own terms instead of trying to make a scapegoat of me.
So they are analizing what kind of products a customer buys, and if they are products associated with pregnancy then they market them even more products associated with pregnancy. Seems like that without all that funny little anecdotes about pregnancy prediction, this is just the same algorithm everyone else uses: offering a customer the types of products they have bought in the past. Also, a pregnant woman in the second trimester is quite easy to detect by the good old method of looking at her.
Is this the US? Last time I visited, most women looked as if they were pregnant...
Pregnancy doesn't cause rolls of fat like a second pair of pseudo-breasts to grow on the shoulder blades. If you ever get confused, that's how you can tell.
And yeah, they can mod you down all they like. Simple fact is, if you respect yourself you take care of yourself. If you don't respect yourself and allow yourself to become morbidly obese, this indicates problems that are more than merely cosmetic.
The whole obesity deal is just part of the reactive mentality that never uses foresight to take responsibility for anything. If it did, then a person would only need to be 10-20 pounds overweight before saying "hey, I appear to be gaining weight; since I wasn't intending to do that, I should adjust my lifestyle and deal with it right now before it inevitably and predictably becomes a big problem that will be much more difficult to overcome." It's the same mentality that can't understand why giving certain powers to government is a bad idea, why a car loan of five years or more is a bad idea and indicates you can't really afford that car, why you should start saving up for your retirement while you're young, etc. etc.
A completely unpredictable and unforeseeable failure is an incredibly rare beast. Obesity is the same principle on a slightly more personal level. I think the obese people sense the obviousness of their mistake and feel ashamed of it, or else they'd never get so offended at the mere suggestion that maybe they failed. That kind of irritable hypersensitivity is unknown to secure people who had good reasons for doing what they did. It's well known to careless people who portray themselves as perpetual victims because they don't want to assume responsibility for their own affairs.
Yeah, data mining w/o direct consent should be illegal.
As we better understand the mechanisms of consciousness and the brain and realize this shit it possible, it should also be made illegal.
it is ridiculous that one could use these to manipulate you into buying more stuff. It goes against much of what the founding fathers of the US were against. An individuals mind must be their own.
Same goes for the propaganda networks posing as "news" programming on television. It's blatant co-opting of an individuals own faculties.
Agreed. This is one of those few cases where a legal solution may be the best. Make it illegal on a national scale and now no store has whatever competitive advantage it offers. They return to competing on a level field.
I feel the same way about this as I do about the vendorlock tactics of Microsoft and many other software companies: they're the actions of a company that does not believe in the merits of its products and their ability to compete openly on a level field. If a company indicates they do not really believe in their own products, or their own ability to honestly convince me to shop at their stores, who am I to argue with them?
Except there's a clear defense to this particular assault. It's called cash.
That may be why so many stores use loyalty cards.
Because it is true, it is SUSPICIOUS, there is increased chance you will NOT pay full amount for your TAX if you are paying by cash, it does not mean everybody, or even most people will avoid tax if they pay by cash, but it does considerably increase odds that you are ones of those that do, and need to be checked "just in case"
That makes no sense. I got that cash from a paycheck. Before I even saw the paycheck, the taxes were taken out.
If you are talking about sales taxes, the form of payment is irrelevant. And I have never asked a retailer not to collect the sales tax on a purchase I made because I already know what the answer would be. You see, the retailer has to pay that tax whether or not they pass it on to you. They're not going to give me free money.
It's not about taxes at all. It's about how much more power the government can have when anyone and everyone is a suspect.
No you don't. You hate seeing marketing material that wasn't meant for you. I feel the same way. Personally, I love the marketing material that's on the boxes of plastic toys I purchase.
The fact that you would presume to know better than he what he does and doesn't hate means you certainly do believe in marketing. That presumption carries a burden of proof, and the fact that you feel differently does not constitute proof.
The hinge of marketing is that it relies on emotional manipulation. It's least effective on people who have emotions (since they have a pulse) but are not governed by them and do not make decisions according to them. That's why they use small children in commercials, especially for cars and other things that don't have much to do with child care -- they are exploiting the innocence and the cuteness of the child to tug at your heartstrings. Since people tend to have maternal and paternal instincts, and instinct is not a matter of reason, this one is particularly effective and requires a real self-awareness to be seen for what it is.
If it works, they bypass any kind of rationality and implant a subconscious identification, a transferrance of the warm fuzzies to the product being sold. They are not saying "here are the factual reasons why we believe our products are superior" for they may not have any. If it doesn't work, it's because the recipient can see how underhanded and infernal this kind of manipulation really is, how much contempt and disrespect for the potential customer it really shows, and becomes completely turned off to doing business with that company at all.
Which one happens depends on whether the person governs their emotions and passions or is governed by them, and that's simply a matter of having two things: a spine and some character. Marketers help to undermine these two things by constantly emphasizing and legitimizing their opposites. The only thing worse than a few marketers who may merely be selfish are the masses of enablers who think this is truly a noble and acceptable way to treat one's fellow men. Of course, they would have to feel that way, because that's easier for an unprincipled ego than admitting it has strings that someone else can pull.
I have a pretty small anecdotal sample group, four sets of sisters, but my experience is sisters of similar age tend to get , or try to get, pregnant around the same time. From what I've observed it's like it's a competition to see who can pop out the first grandchild. I think it boils down to younger siblings hate seeing the older ones get everything first. Maybe marketing has picked up on a similar trend.
What a wonderful, mature, high-minded reason to bring a child into the world...
Lying with statistics is an art, but it appears that once in a while they can be useful.
How is this "lying"? Seems to mee they are spot on.
That isn't what he said at all.
Especially if he's the type that gets upset enough over stupid coupons implying potential pregnancy to go yell at a store manager? Yeah, I'm sure he's the first person she would tell.
Glad I'm not the only one who considered that angle.
Her decision to turn into a little slut in the first place may have been just to rebel against him.
Oh well. Her young adulthood is gone now and pursuing higher education or establishing a good career will be far more difficult. If she's really lucky, the father she so responsibly chose to have a child with will help her. If she's lucky.
Just like TFA, two months ago gmail started serving me nothing but breast pump, neonatal vitamin, and baby bottle ads. I'm a guy, but I am married so maybe they're trying to send a hint "why don't you have kids yet? Here we'll give you discount mail-order vitamins if you get busy!" But they also send me dating site ads. So if they do know I'm married, they don't have a high opinion of my marriage! Maybe that's why they want me to knock my wife up? ;)
Soo... how much more competitive would their prices be, if they didn't spend money on these kinds of systems and marketing and customer tracking, and just accepted that there's nothing wrong with people buying what they want, when they decide they want it? Think they could undercut (or nearly undercut) Wal-mart while providing a more pleasant shopping experience (which wouldn't be hard)?
Consider all the effort it takes to design systems like this, to hire employees to use and maintain them, to purchase the equipment, to pay for data centers, etc. I mean if a woman gives birth she's going to be buying diapers; if she likes your store she'll buy them there on her own without this sort of manipulation. Then there's the cost of ill will -- the desire to treat my private life like your personal marketing brochure without even showing me the basic respect of asking for my permission strongly disinclines me to do business with you. It's called dignity, and I realize it's going out of style but it isn't dead yet.
So is this truly profitable in the long run, as a business practice? Or is it just another "make this quarter's numbers look good, the 'consumers' are used to bending over and taking this kind of thing anyway" type of deal?
Dude, she wasn't forced to eat anything. She was offered something else and took it. They may have not even known she had a home lunch with her. 4-year-olds aren't exactly the most forthcoming or entirely aware people in the world.
So you have government agents intruding, for no good reason, into the relationship between mother and child ... and you want to quibble about how they go about it, which method of doing this is acceptable and which is not, and sweep it all under the rug? I can't be the only one to understand how dreadfully psychotic this actually is. This belief of yours, whom does this serve ... you? Hah.
In a way you're right though, Obama is not personally to blame. The problem is not that Obama is the President. The problem is that the federal government was ever involved in education. Once that happened, this kind of thing became inevitable.
Sounds like they gave her an additional lunch and told her that her mother didn't pack something healthy enough. That they might have called it a supplement doesn't change the fact that it was functionally a replacement. That would be reasonable if the USDA provided objectively good nutritional standards, but instead we have an organization which has been legally required to recognize the tomato sauce on pizza as a serving of a vegetable having their standards used to second-guess a good wholesome lunch sent by the parent.
My suspicion is that this is a way for the school to bring in additional revenue. If I were the parent, I would send the school a letter saying that you had not agreed to the transaction and that you will not pay it. If they send it to collections you send a letter of dispute. If they persist, threaten to organize a class action law suit.
I don't advocate this sort of thing but in response to how bureaucratic and legalistic we're becoming as a society, I just want to remind everyone of how things were once done.
There was a time when the father would have a personal one-on-one chitchat with a government agent who, under color of authority, decided that intimidating a little girl and decided that he is better able than her parents to decide how she should live. This may involve a discussion, a shouting match, or it may also involve said government agent getting the living shit beaten out of him in a fistfight. That would depend solely on whether he admits fault and changes his policies. Of course, this was a time when two men could have a fistfight so long as it was understood that when the man stays down, he's had enough. One way or another, this kind of overreach was not tolerated and being that kind of a jackass became increasingly painful.
Was the result more people getting yelled at and beaten up? Not at all, because everyone knew there was a line that you did not cross without consequence. The result was that the school officials tried at least to appear to be reasonable. The message was, you can screw with my taxes, you can screw with my vote, maybe you can even screw with my car, and I'll go through the bullshit motions of working with the system and seeking redress etc, but if you screw with my family you're going to have a war.
We've become so pussified that we think that's somehow savage or too extreme. The truth is, when you're not going to take this kind of shit no matter what, people recognize it and they rarely if ever try it. The result is better for everyone. Why should decent people be frustrated by this kind of soft tyranny? Those who would inflict it should be frustrated at how afraid they are to try it.
I know it can't be true, but sometimes it seems like nobody appreciates what you're actually teaching the next generation of children when you train them from a very young age to expect that authority is arbitrary and can come along and screw with you for any reason or no real reason at all, that even the relationship between mother and child is not too sacred for their interference. When they're all on antidepressants and antipsychotics long before they get driver's licenses, I guess you'll blame TV and video games, right? Never having the security of boundaries that will be respected has nothing to do with it, right?
I am more concerned about them increasing the number of helicopter patrols. Where I live now, the state sends out helicopters to look for cannabis plants, then indiscriminately arrests anyone who has a cannabis plant on their property. We recently had someone in my county arrested and convicted of cultivating marijuana because the patrol spotted feral hemp on his property. Tickets are one thing, but when you have a paramilitary force prepared to arrest or kill anyone over these plants, you are dealing with tyranny.
I am not advocating that anyone do anything illegal. So, in a strictly hypothetical sense, just imagine if the response to that was an underground campaign to scatter marijuana seeds all over the private properties of the police chief (or sheriff), various local government officials, state government officials, their friends and families, their staff, local judges, important local businessmen, etc.
It could at least change the "indiscriminately arresting with no regard for whether deliberate cultivation is happening" part of their practices. In theory, I mean.
Not only is it tyranny, but when you make crimes of such non-issues it is also institutionalized insanity*. Because it is insane, no amount of evidence that drug policy should be reformed is going to change their minds. They don't care about evidence.
* Although I am convinced that anyone who wants to control the private lives of consenting adults is already insane, for there is no sane or justifiable reason to want to do this.
All that's new is SoC. The challenge with stopping hemp cultivation isn't a detection problem, it's an enforcement one.
It's just that crimes with a victim are so much more likely to be reported.
Labor Activist Li Qiang wants you to know that the iPhone 4 in his pocket is not an endorsement of Apple’s policies, just an acknowledgement that the company is doing a better job of monitoring factory conditions than its peers.
It is absolutely an endorsement. These issues are so much easier if we can get past this kind of "not really my fault!" double-talk.
I'll give a probably terrible analogy. Maybe you didn't intend to stub your toe. If anyone had asked, you would have said that your intend was to avoid the obstacle on the floor and not to stub your toe on it. You meant well; good enough. But you did stub your toe and you can try arguing with your toe that it wasn't your intention, but it's not going to instantly remove the pain.
Folks, whether you really intend it, or whether your ability to understand cause-and-effect ends only with "I want this thing so I'm buying it" and your vision extends no further, I can tell you one truth: anytime you patronize a business, you are implicitly endorsing and approving of its products, business practices, policies, and staff. Buying their products and/or services is your way of telling them that what they're doing is great and that they deserve to be rewarded for it. It's a more powerful statement than any letter you could write or phone call you could make.
Of course most people don't care and can't be bothered to care. This labor activist, however, is placing himself in the group who do care. That's why he's contradicting himself (or not being fully honest) by saying "it's not an endorsement". The whole "everyone else is doing it" or "others are worse" is the kind of excuse grade-schoolers are told is not valid. If you really had a problem with the business practices of all smartphone manufacturers, you would get a feature phone. Li Qiang's statement there is simply lip service designed to be as inoffensive as possible.
If you can't see the difference it's because you refuse to.
I can see why you'd like to paint those in disagreement with you as irrational, yet we are not the one making an extraordinary claims about how 98% of scientists in the field simply aren't good enough to do their job. And what evidence to do you bring to this claim? Talking points from climate change deniers and bizarre assertions about causation. I'll go out on a limb say you're not a statistician nor even taken an entry level course on it.
If you want to find out what happens to another planet suffering from global warming, you need look no farther than the closest planet to Earth.
My position on it is "I don't know" and honestly, neither does anyone else. Anything from the lack of rigor, to the rebranding ("global warming" to "climate change" etc to help "sell" it), to the political nature, to the weather stations that were found to be overestimating temperature readings, to the straight up deliberate dishonesty revealed by many of the e-mails that were brought to light.
This is not like an engineer who builds a bridge and it either holds up under load if he's right or collapses if he's wrong. You may or may not understand the physical principles and mathematics of civil engineering, but you can look at the bridge and see whether it did, in fact, collapse. This is not like engineering. I say I don't know because as far as I can see, everyone involved has credibility problems.
The scientists (other than the dishonest ones) are doing their job just fine. I don't share this desire to make this into a personal attack against anyone, scientists included, and consider it a minor tragedy that people always want to view it that way. I am saying this is not a matter of the job they do. It's a matter of relying too heavily on theoretical models with no real ability to perform controlled experiments. It's not a readily falsifiable deal.
Now then, do I think pollution is great and should be ignored? No. There are reasons other than AGW to reduce emissions and other pollution. If humanity is going to be the steward of this planet, we should be good stewards and be mindful of our impact on it. Is that unreasonable to you?
It's a strange kind of "priesthood" that has to show its work and changes its mind when new evidence comes in.
What's the point in showing you my work if you're not qualified to understand it?
...
After all, the Catholic Church had plenty of Bibles written in Latin. They were not hidden. Of course, no one other than Catholic priests happened to speak/read Latin
The point is, if you can't explain the gist of it to a reasonably intelligent layman, there's something wrong with your own understanding.
Yes, because you're the same type of person who would follow an MD's advice on heart surgery after what? maybe two concurring opinions. Yet when it comes to accepting science that conflicts with your political views, you say "Well hold on Buster. 98% of the people qualified to make an assessment isn't good enough. And I'm a victim too!. You big meanies!".
Yes, so there must then be a difference. It so happens that there is in fact a difference between modern medicine and modern climate science. Medical scientists can perform an experiment on thousands of patients, then compare the results to another control group of thousands more patients. They can clearly distinguish correlation from causation. They can modify the system (i.e. cardiovascular) with drugs; those drugs have effects also established by experiment.
How many human-inhabited planets do we have to experiment on? Do we have an easy way to say, instantly cut the CO2 level of one of those planets by 30% to see how it impacts the climate? Do we have a ton of other human-inhabited planets we can use as a control group? No? Then my heart surgeon is a tad more certain about the medical advice he gives me than anyone has been about global warming, climate change, etc.
If you can't see the difference it's because you refuse to.
> Shouldn't all science be questioned?
Yes - intelligently questioned by people who are qualified to criticize it. And who "question" it by doing their own research, investigation, hypothesizing and testing... which is not the same as digging up spurious out-of-context quotes and raising biased, uninformed objections for political reasons.
And yet if these unqualified non-scientists believed in said theory, you would have no quarrel with them. Even though they don't believe it as a result of being qualified, doing research, investigation, hypothesizing, and testing (redundant after "investigation"?).
The unspoken, probably unacknowledged even by you, message here? "Don't question authority."
I never believed that science was meant to be a priesthood. Back when we had priesthoods and considered that normal, don't we call those times the Dark Ages? The moment you are told that you're not qualified and therefore have no business forming your own position, that's the moment you have established a priesthood.
I have an entirely different take. I think this science has a problem most sciences don't. We have only one planet that's practical to use for this model. We can't modify the system to test different variables in a rigorous way, and we can't compare what happens to a control group. There is too much uncertainty that there's no clear way to resolve. So, it becomes a political issue. It boils down to some authority's opinion concerning what makes the most sense. That's great fun when the authority is wrong, or there are multiple authorities who disagree with each other, or there's no positive way to rule those out.
If you don't understand that, you wind up passionately judging the stupidity of people you know nothing about, not because they demonstrated stupidity but as a feeble attempt at shutting them up. After all, they followed the "wrong" authority. Do you realize that popular ideas which people were absolutely certain about, and sometimes would have fought and died over, that anyone would have been ridiculed for doubting, have turned out to be wrong in the past?
Does this mean that social media will now be the blame for all the evils of society? Finally replacing D&D, and "violent video games."
Man, don't give them ideas. Busybodies never seem to be busy enough.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C.S. Lewis
Usually that phony Puritannical "morality" is most visible when the subject is drugs, pornography, or controversial speech. At least on the Internet this sort of typecast personality is really going to have a hell of a time trying to enforce it, but still, I'd rather not see them try. I'd rather they do something more worthy of their limited time on this planet, like uproot their desire to run other peoples' lives by recognizing it as more evil than anything they'd rail against. Then maybe, just maybe, they can find their own fulfillment and witness the way that really living your own life magically takes away your undue concern for how others live theirs.
it is not nickel and diming
But it is.
it is insisting on being a horse and buggy maker in a car world
That's the goal, yes. The method by which they reach the goal is nickel-and-diming. Confusing the two led you to believe that one of them must be false.
The RIAA and MPAA are throwing away huge wads of money to cling to a business model that no longer works.
Makes you wonder how they can afford all of that if their claims of how badly piracy hurts their bottom line had merit... Imagine how much more profit their shareholders would enjoy if they saved this money instead. If you want to hit them where it hurts, reveal to those shareholders why they should be outraged about this and why they should be divesting or at least demanding an investigation. It could be as simple as demonstrating they waste more money on lawsuits and political contributions than they gain in return from deterrence of piracy. Executives do have certain legal obligations to look after shareholders' interests.
Until they declare it illegal to resell DVDs or they tie the content to a specific piece of hardware for playback.
The bittorrent pirates couldn't dream of a better justification in the popular mind.
The copyright interests enjoy some public sympathy as long as they can portray themselves as the poor victims of rampant "theft" who just want a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. This mostly depends on the general public being ignorant and not considering it worthwhile to read up on the subject and learn about its nuances. Thus, what is generally known about them comes from propaganda (aka "PR") sponsored by them. If the cartels clamp down too hard, no amount of PR will prevent it from being generally known that they are a bunch of assholes and control freaks who will never be satisfied.
What you suggest is, sadly, the kind of thing they would do. It's also the dumbest thing they could do. Seems like a balance to me.
The Judge has received some re-election funds from the MPAA
Just because you don't like the ruling, doesn't necessarily mean it's contrary to the law.
That being said, the MPAA and RIAA have been instrumental in writing the laws, so...
If I were a judge I'd never rule in favor of something I know to be wrong, excessive, or unreasonable. Modern copyright suits like this one fit all three descriptions. If the law says otherwise, let them impeach me. Then I might lose my cushy prestigious job. Then I'd say hey, at least I put something on the line to try to bring some sanity to our legal system; how many others did the same?
You wonder why freedoms are eroding?
Yeah good thing the police are always right there preventing those murders that don't happen every single day.
Yeah, and I'll add one thing: we all know that someone using force to murder another person is exactly, precisely, in every conceivable way, just like asking them to trust someone who is not trustworthy and wouldn't pass even the most cursory smell-test.
No, unlike murder, this crime requires the "victim's" active cooperation. Anyone who doesn't recognize that difference is simply not being honest. If GP has to be deceptive to argue against my position, it reinforces my position.