Your reply is well reasoned, insightful, and calm. It is a shame that it is in reply to a rabid anti-gun zealot. Unfortunately, logic and reason will never appeal to those who are terrified of other people and their own mortality.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may 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.
There were a few Zunes sold. I bought a Zune for my daughter years ago despite recommending against it. For some reason only know to her, that's what she wanted. It was actually a decent little piece of hardware, but it was God awful trying to connect it to a computer and load it. When she finally broke the display, we replaced it with an iPod. Lots of accessories available for Apple, NONE for Zune.
The other item that I failed to mention is that they always slow down at green lights. I have never lived in a location before where people drop 10 - 15 mph at each and every green light. It drives me nuts as we approach the next light, it's green, and the brake lights come on. As soon as we pass, they throttle back up. You think at first that they are lost and reading street signs, but then you start to recognize the same people, cars and license plates day after day.
And if next spring is hot as hell, will you then proclaim that global warming is obviously the culprit too? Or if next spring is totally unremarkable, will you indignantly claim that weather is not climate?
I have 15 traffic lights for my 4.4 miles of daily work commute. The traffic engineers have timed all the lights except one such that if you drive the speed limit, you will cruise through all the lights green. When I get behind some "asshole" that will not drive the speed limit, or worse, takes a half mile or more to get up to the speed limit, I can easily double my commute time idling at lights. And each and every light requires a new acceleration.
Unfortunately for me, my town is populated with Civil War widows that can't seem to understand that they are legally permitted to drive at the speed limit or to comprehend the principle of sequenced traffic lights.
The difference is that the Republicans know that income taxes, in any amount, are absolutely toxic to business, and that raising them will harm the economy.
Is that the talking point these days? I guess I missed that one. I had always heard that it was capital gains taxes that were death on the economy. I was misled that tying up capital that couldn't be freed and reallocated because of oppressive tax rates would hinder growth and that's why capital gains were lowered in the 80s. Here all this time, it was income taxes that were the culprit.
Maybe it's that you just don't like the idea of any taxes to fund government.
I already use Google. The problem was weaning off all the people who were used to calling/texting my old cell number. The stubbornness is hard to overcome unless you port to Google or just turn texting off like you suggest and hope you don't miss something important. The point is moot now anyway. With my new service, I have unlimited texting and more for the same cost (sometimes less) as my old AT&T account.
Your apathy is the reason Verizon and AT&T can continue to screw their customers. I left AT&T last year and went with an AT&T MVNO and never looked back. My cost may be about the same, but it's at a much higher level of service. I got tired of watching my minutes and paying an extra $6 or $7 ala carte charges each month caused by friends who love to text. I bought a Nexus 4 and paid a whole $150 more than I did for my last "subsidized" phone.
I am no longer forced to choose between contract churn every two years or continue to pay "subsidized phone" rates after finishing the contract. I am much happier and I always know exactly how much my bill will be each month. I will never step back on the contract treadmill.
Expect to see New York's self appointed munchkin nanny, Michael Bloomberg, to call for legislation to ban high capacity pressure cookers too. "You should be able to feed a family of four with a three quart cooker if you weren't so fat."
And Cuomo will want to close the "yard sale loophole" and eliminate straw purchases for pressure cookers too.
It sounds like you have the same plan with T-Mobile that a friend of mine has. For 4 lines, it is hard to beat. I spend about $70 for three phones, but the Tracfones are limited. My problem is that I have to use AT&T networks due to circumstances. T-Mobile's Wi-Fi calling is sporadic at my place of employment so that reduces my options to AT&T and MVNOs.
T-Mobile was my second choice and I may go that route when the kids are older and drop my landline. They are the most competitive of all the carriers.
Yes and no. Three years ago I would have agreed with you entirely, but the landscape has changed drastically. Prepaid is no longer necessarily more expensive and in fact oftentimes much cheaper. I switched from AT&T to Straight Talk last year and have way more service, the same coverage and the same network for the equal cost.
I paid off my contract in 2010 and for a year and a half I watched as my options open up. After paying off my phone subsidy, AT&T never reduced my bill. In fact, they instead raised the price of my text messages since I had no bundle option. Despite AT&T's incessant marketing, I refused to sign on for another "free" phone in return for two more years of indentured servitude. I bought my own phone and left AT&T and I will never again agree to another postpaid contract. I am now free to change providers any time I find a better deal or service plan that is better tailored to my usage patterns.
Are my kids' Tracfone's expensive? It depends on your criteria. I spend about $10 per month on average for each of their phones. Good luck finding any postpaid plan that costs so little; even as an add on. The price per minute is expensive, but the total cost is low. The added benefit is that it does teach responsibility, delayed self gratification, and prioritization. As they near high school, I may look into family prepaid plans.
As for a legislative approach. I believe that the market has finally responded to that need. The whole point of a postpaid account is that you can receive services you don't anticipate throughout the month. What you are advocating is essentially a prepaid account, paid in arrears. I do agree in principle, however, that you should be able to place restrictions on maximum liability for your account.
The use of the words denier/denialist is an obvious attempt at a pejorative meant to conflate skeptics with those who deny the Holocaust. The AGW proponent propaganda machine obviously has no depths to which they will sink in order to proselytize their peculiar brand of religion. Now skeptics are branded "children" or inept and irrational. Anyone who asks that AGW models be accurate, predictive and repeatable before spending large amounts on mitigation are now equated with ignorant mortgage borrowers that precipitated the housing crisis.
I think the people who are beyond reasoning exist squarely in the AGW camp.
[...] you don't get to reject hypotheses if you have no other way to explain the data
WRONG!
Clearly the data is contradictory. Despite your careful measurements of the speedometer, visual observation clearly contradicts it. Therefore neither your hypothesis nor your measurement method can be confirmed. I.E. It must be rejected.
Since mitigation is already costing more than we are spending on prevention
Citation? And make sure you offer some proof of actual AGW mitigation, not costs due to active weather phenomena. AGW religious zealots always want to point out that there's a huge difference when pointing to observations.
Best Buy tried similar shit. I was going for instant gratification when my ancient iPhone wouldn't hold a charge any longer, but when they said it was $450 for a no-contract unlocked phone, I started laughing. I thought she was joking. I said, you do know that they are $300 directly from Google, don't you? Then I remembered why I don't ever go to Best Buy.
I went home and ordered Monday from Google Play. I had it on Thursday. $150 is kinda pricey for that kind of instant gratification.
That's why my kids have Tracfone. Use up you minutes and you no talkee, no textee. Then they wait until next payment cycle to have a phone. It teaches management skills.
First of all, no states that I am aware of require licensed "Realtors." Realtor is a trademark term for members of the National Association of Realtors, a trade organization. States require licensed real estate agents in order to sell real estate on behalf of others. You are perfectly welcome to sell your own home and save the commission. The licensing requirement is to prevent dumbasses from having their life savings extracted from them by con artists or worse, other dumbasses trying to help a friend sell their home.
Licensed real estate agents are required to know the law and legal requirements which most home sellers are totally ignorant of. You are right about one thing. It does weed out the retards who can't add two numbers with the help of a calculator or remember which HUD form is required for the title agency to close the loan.
When purchasing or disposing of the largest asset AND liability on my balance sheet, I think I'd like an insider navigating me through the ropes so I don't end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit because the other party was unhappy that I forgot something.
Trans-dimensional? The point is moot due to the fact that their existence is conjectured as a single dimension entity. It must obey laws of physics within the realm of observation since it is reported within the scope of the observable universe.
Observations within the known universe describe it as both pink and invisible, a physical impossibility.
If that were the case they would be formerly pink invisible unicorns. It still stands that two mutually exclusive properties cannot coexist without differing physical specificity which is not given in the presented form. Therefore, as a matter of physical laws, they cannot exist. You can alter the specificity of the conjecture, but it does not alter the outcome of the original proposition.
"Invisible pink unicorns have not yet been proven to exist, therefore I will act under the working assumption that they do not exist."
It is demonstrable that in order for something to be classified as pink (visible coloring) it cannot be invisible. Therefore, it can be proven that they do not exist due to mutually exclusive properties.
If the government regulates everything but sex, why does the local news spend about 5 minutes out of 30 every single day reporting on the arrests for voyeurism, public indecency, rape, gross sexual imposition, child porn, prostitution, sexting, and whatever other laws they constantly dream up?
Slashdot Mirror
Your reply is well reasoned, insightful, and calm. It is a shame that it is in reply to a rabid anti-gun zealot. Unfortunately, logic and reason will never appeal to those who are terrified of other people and their own mortality.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may 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
Yet another Brit puts his two pence in. Guess what? You guys are the reason we have the Second Amendment.
There were a few Zunes sold. I bought a Zune for my daughter years ago despite recommending against it. For some reason only know to her, that's what she wanted. It was actually a decent little piece of hardware, but it was God awful trying to connect it to a computer and load it. When she finally broke the display, we replaced it with an iPod. Lots of accessories available for Apple, NONE for Zune.
You have no idea how much it sucks.
The other item that I failed to mention is that they always slow down at green lights. I have never lived in a location before where people drop 10 - 15 mph at each and every green light. It drives me nuts as we approach the next light, it's green, and the brake lights come on. As soon as we pass, they throttle back up. You think at first that they are lost and reading street signs, but then you start to recognize the same people, cars and license plates day after day.
Can we quote you on that?
And if next spring is hot as hell, will you then proclaim that global warming is obviously the culprit too? Or if next spring is totally unremarkable, will you indignantly claim that weather is not climate?
It depends on your criteria for asshole.
I have 15 traffic lights for my 4.4 miles of daily work commute. The traffic engineers have timed all the lights except one such that if you drive the speed limit, you will cruise through all the lights green. When I get behind some "asshole" that will not drive the speed limit, or worse, takes a half mile or more to get up to the speed limit, I can easily double my commute time idling at lights. And each and every light requires a new acceleration.
Unfortunately for me, my town is populated with Civil War widows that can't seem to understand that they are legally permitted to drive at the speed limit or to comprehend the principle of sequenced traffic lights.
Is that the talking point these days? I guess I missed that one. I had always heard that it was capital gains taxes that were death on the economy. I was misled that tying up capital that couldn't be freed and reallocated because of oppressive tax rates would hinder growth and that's why capital gains were lowered in the 80s. Here all this time, it was income taxes that were the culprit.
Maybe it's that you just don't like the idea of any taxes to fund government.
I already use Google. The problem was weaning off all the people who were used to calling/texting my old cell number. The stubbornness is hard to overcome unless you port to Google or just turn texting off like you suggest and hope you don't miss something important. The point is moot now anyway. With my new service, I have unlimited texting and more for the same cost (sometimes less) as my old AT&T account.
Your apathy is the reason Verizon and AT&T can continue to screw their customers. I left AT&T last year and went with an AT&T MVNO and never looked back. My cost may be about the same, but it's at a much higher level of service. I got tired of watching my minutes and paying an extra $6 or $7 ala carte charges each month caused by friends who love to text. I bought a Nexus 4 and paid a whole $150 more than I did for my last "subsidized" phone.
I am no longer forced to choose between contract churn every two years or continue to pay "subsidized phone" rates after finishing the contract. I am much happier and I always know exactly how much my bill will be each month. I will never step back on the contract treadmill.
Expect to see New York's self appointed munchkin nanny, Michael Bloomberg, to call for legislation to ban high capacity pressure cookers too. "You should be able to feed a family of four with a three quart cooker if you weren't so fat."
And Cuomo will want to close the "yard sale loophole" and eliminate straw purchases for pressure cookers too.
For now
And did you have fun riding the short bus to school every day?
Get an iPod touch. That's how I used mine until I finally went with a smartphone. My son uses his iPod Touch 4g that way and it's pretty nice.
It sounds like you have the same plan with T-Mobile that a friend of mine has. For 4 lines, it is hard to beat. I spend about $70 for three phones, but the Tracfones are limited. My problem is that I have to use AT&T networks due to circumstances. T-Mobile's Wi-Fi calling is sporadic at my place of employment so that reduces my options to AT&T and MVNOs.
T-Mobile was my second choice and I may go that route when the kids are older and drop my landline. They are the most competitive of all the carriers.
Yes and no. Three years ago I would have agreed with you entirely, but the landscape has changed drastically. Prepaid is no longer necessarily more expensive and in fact oftentimes much cheaper. I switched from AT&T to Straight Talk last year and have way more service, the same coverage and the same network for the equal cost.
I paid off my contract in 2010 and for a year and a half I watched as my options open up. After paying off my phone subsidy, AT&T never reduced my bill. In fact, they instead raised the price of my text messages since I had no bundle option. Despite AT&T's incessant marketing, I refused to sign on for another "free" phone in return for two more years of indentured servitude. I bought my own phone and left AT&T and I will never again agree to another postpaid contract. I am now free to change providers any time I find a better deal or service plan that is better tailored to my usage patterns.
Are my kids' Tracfone's expensive? It depends on your criteria. I spend about $10 per month on average for each of their phones. Good luck finding any postpaid plan that costs so little; even as an add on. The price per minute is expensive, but the total cost is low. The added benefit is that it does teach responsibility, delayed self gratification, and prioritization. As they near high school, I may look into family prepaid plans.
As for a legislative approach. I believe that the market has finally responded to that need. The whole point of a postpaid account is that you can receive services you don't anticipate throughout the month. What you are advocating is essentially a prepaid account, paid in arrears. I do agree in principle, however, that you should be able to place restrictions on maximum liability for your account.
The use of the words denier/denialist is an obvious attempt at a pejorative meant to conflate skeptics with those who deny the Holocaust. The AGW proponent propaganda machine obviously has no depths to which they will sink in order to proselytize their peculiar brand of religion. Now skeptics are branded "children" or inept and irrational. Anyone who asks that AGW models be accurate, predictive and repeatable before spending large amounts on mitigation are now equated with ignorant mortgage borrowers that precipitated the housing crisis.
I think the people who are beyond reasoning exist squarely in the AGW camp.
WRONG!
Clearly the data is contradictory. Despite your careful measurements of the speedometer, visual observation clearly contradicts it. Therefore neither your hypothesis nor your measurement method can be confirmed. I.E. It must be rejected.
Citation? And make sure you offer some proof of actual AGW mitigation, not costs due to active weather phenomena. AGW religious zealots always want to point out that there's a huge difference when pointing to observations.
Best Buy tried similar shit. I was going for instant gratification when my ancient iPhone wouldn't hold a charge any longer, but when they said it was $450 for a no-contract unlocked phone, I started laughing. I thought she was joking. I said, you do know that they are $300 directly from Google, don't you? Then I remembered why I don't ever go to Best Buy.
I went home and ordered Monday from Google Play. I had it on Thursday. $150 is kinda pricey for that kind of instant gratification.
That's why my kids have Tracfone. Use up you minutes and you no talkee, no textee. Then they wait until next payment cycle to have a phone. It teaches management skills.
Bullshit.
First of all, no states that I am aware of require licensed "Realtors." Realtor is a trademark term for members of the National Association of Realtors, a trade organization. States require licensed real estate agents in order to sell real estate on behalf of others. You are perfectly welcome to sell your own home and save the commission. The licensing requirement is to prevent dumbasses from having their life savings extracted from them by con artists or worse, other dumbasses trying to help a friend sell their home.
Licensed real estate agents are required to know the law and legal requirements which most home sellers are totally ignorant of. You are right about one thing. It does weed out the retards who can't add two numbers with the help of a calculator or remember which HUD form is required for the title agency to close the loan.
When purchasing or disposing of the largest asset AND liability on my balance sheet, I think I'd like an insider navigating me through the ropes so I don't end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit because the other party was unhappy that I forgot something.
Trans-dimensional? The point is moot due to the fact that their existence is conjectured as a single dimension entity. It must obey laws of physics within the realm of observation since it is reported within the scope of the observable universe.
Observations within the known universe describe it as both pink and invisible, a physical impossibility.
And yes. I realize you're trolling me. LOL
If that were the case they would be formerly pink invisible unicorns. It still stands that two mutually exclusive properties cannot coexist without differing physical specificity which is not given in the presented form. Therefore, as a matter of physical laws, they cannot exist. You can alter the specificity of the conjecture, but it does not alter the outcome of the original proposition.
It is demonstrable that in order for something to be classified as pink (visible coloring) it cannot be invisible. Therefore, it can be proven that they do not exist due to mutually exclusive properties.
QED
Apparently, you're an idiot.
If the government regulates everything but sex, why does the local news spend about 5 minutes out of 30 every single day reporting on the arrests for voyeurism, public indecency, rape, gross sexual imposition, child porn, prostitution, sexting, and whatever other laws they constantly dream up?