Because we are still a barbaric world where basic human courtesy doesn't apply.
Such as turning off your phone when in a meeting, dinner date or at the movies, not trying to get one car ahead by jamming your vehicle into the six foot space, not walking across the middle of the street and expecting traffic to stop on a dime, not using a curse word every three seconds because you think it's cool or being edgy, answering a question with "Read the fucking manual!"
In that sense health insurance is far more important than auto insurance.
No, it's not. If I am perfectly healthy (which I am) and able to pay my medical bills from my own savings, why should I have to have the added financial burden of paying for YOUR medical bills? That is what medical insurance is about after all, and something this administration has repeatedly said in the form of, "We need as many healthy people as possible to sign up so they can pay for the sick."
Health insurance is a cost which is never recovered. Ever. It's actually worse than car insurance because the insurance companies are betting you will stay healthy while you are betting you will get sick or injured.
That's not reasoning; that's manipulation.
No, it is reasoning by illustrating one of many reasons the colonists broke away from England. They were tired of BEING manipulated by government. They were tired of having to send the product of their labors back to England and then being told they had to buy finished products, made from their labors, only from England. They were tired of having their taxes go to expand the British Empire, tired of being used as pawns against the French, and so on. Their lives, to use your example, existed solely for the benefit of someone else. What they wanted did not matter. Thus, revolution and independence.
The rest of the world sees through these political and corporate planted "opinions" as nothing more than a way to protect profits.
Corporate planted? How is arguing AGAINST giving my money to a company a corporate planted opinion? I'm arguing against giving companies free money. If anything, I should be heralded by the Slashdot crowd for fighting against corporate governance and greed. The only one who is protecting profits is the Obama administration who gave insurance companies this windfall.
Your government tells you what to do and buy all the time you twit
Really? Explain how that works. Do they tell me I must buy my cable service from a specific company? Phone/cell service? Broadband (local government yes, but not Federal)? How about what food I must buy? The car I drive? Name one item the government tells me I must buy. Remember, this is on the Federal level we're talking about.
You don't oppose health care for "freedom" and you know it. You oppose it because you are told to.
No, I oppose being told I have to pay for your health insurance while you can continue to smoke, be obese, be an alcoholic or do drugs without having to change your ways. I oppose being told I must give up the fruit of my labors to people who won't take personal responsibility for their lives (going back to your original comment). I oppose having the government reach into my bank account and forcibly extracting my money and handing it over to a private company because I didn't "voluntarily" hand over the money to the company.
Health care and unhealthy American food are pretty much as far apart as things can get.
No, they're not. Americans eating junk food has a very high correlation to bad health. Witness the most recent result which shows why medical costs are so high in the U.S.: The reason what you think. Diabetes and heart disease come from two main issues: regularly eating food which is bad for you and not having an active lifestyle.
But if you would care to explain how keeping society healthy and productive, doing it cheaper than the American system and reducing crime is not a good thing
Considering UACA doesn't keep costs down or make people productive, it's a moot point. Nowhere in the bill are costs contained. The only thing this bill does is force people like me to pay for those who can't, or won't, take care of themselves. That is all. There will be no cost redu
I assume that in United States' law you are required to hold private insurance on your motor vehicle?
Maybe, maybe not. In some states you can opt not to have insurance if you provide proof you have a certain amount of assets or put up a certain amount of money.
Further, the car analogy fails because there is no government requiring you to own a car. There are many people in this country how don't own a car and never will. That is their choice.
Contrast that with this Un-ACA where the federal government has dictated everyone must hand over their money to a private company or face having that same government reach into their personal bank account and forcibly extract money because one didn't hand over money to a private company.
How can you continue to assert the awfulness of these systems when they've proven themselves highly successful?
The difference between here and elsewhere is we don't consider a nanny state a good thing. We don't (well, most rational people at least) expect the government to insinuate itself into every minute aspect of ones life. One of the contributing reasons to our revolt from Britain was the fact that the Crown was dictating to the colonists in the form of who they could buy products from (only England), how they should worship (The Church of England), and so on.
When our Constitution was written it was deliberately worded so the power of the central government was limited in scope. While one can argue its reach has significantly expanded over the centuries, never has the central government been granted the power to tell people what they must buy. Ever. Under any circumstance. Until now.
I realize looking in from a country where your every need is taken care seems like a good thing, but we don't see it that way. We like to make our lives on our own terms without the government saying, "You must do this, or else." Some take this notion to the extreme but most people just want as little government interference in their lives as possible with the understanding there will always be a need for some government.
Just because something is successful doesn't necessarily make it a good thing. By that logic the success of McDonald's hamburgers is a good thing for the food industry.
that is, an individual's problem is everyone's problem.
Bullshit, bullshit, BULLSHIT! Your problem is your problem, not mine, unless you are saying because it's your problem I get to solve it in which case I get to yank the cigarette from your mouth when you're walking down the street because it's known to significantly raise the risk of getting cancer. By doing so, I will be getting a better bang for my buck since I'm the one who has to pay for your medical care (based on your false assumption).
If your premise were true, that would also mean I get to harangue you when I see you at a restaurant shoveling high fat, high cholesterol food into your 300+ lb gullet, put up signs at bars and package stores notifying them not to sell you alcohol because you're an alcoholic and when you're busted for using drugs, force you into treatment, no matter how severe as well as have you tell me where you get the stuff so they can be prosecuted.
That is what you meant when you said your individual problem is everyone else's problem, right? Or did you mean everyone gets to pay, and pay, and pay some more so you don't have to have any personal responsibility for your actions?
That's what got us into this mess in the first place.
No, what got us into this mess is people like you believing everyone else should pay for your lifestyle choices. You want to smoke, go for it. Just don't expect me to pay for your replacement lung or cancer treatment. You want to be obese, fine. You pay for lapband or other surgeries, not to mention paying for your diabetes treatments. You think doing drugs is cool and doesn't hurt anyone, then don't expect people to revive you when you OD or care for you when your brain is fried. You made the choice, you pay for it. You're not my responsibility.
Car insurance isn't for your benefit, directly, it's for the other guy when you hit them. The difference between these two concepts is when I'm driving there is a very slight but still non-zero chance I may hit you. If that event occurs, my insurance will pay you for your troubles or I will pay you due to my deductible. Or both.
If I break my arm, that's on me and me alone. You are in no way affected by me breaking my arm.
There is no way to opt-out of health insurance,
Sure there is. Don't buy it. If you have the money to cover your bills why should you buy it?
The bill was retitled from something completely unrelated.
I have the option of using public transportation and not paying for car insurance. Under this law, I have no right except to hand over money to private companies.
As to 238 years ago, the British forced the Colonies to send their raw products to English companies who then resold finished products to the Colonies. The Colonies were only allowed to buy products from these companies, not just EITC, and trying to circumvent this resulted in penalties.
Why should the government be allowed to force me to buy something if I don't want it? Should they be allowed to force people to buy something else as well? If I have enough money to cover my medical bills, why should they care? It's none of their business any more than it's their business to know what's in your emails or what web sites you visit.
So no, not fail, completely rational and well thought out.
It's a bit disingenuous to say the whole law is broken because of the website.
No, the original poster is correct. The law is broken because:
It's not a tax since it raises no revenue
The bill did not originate in the proper house of Congress. It was a retitled bill.
How anyone can think the government can force people to hand money to private companies is simply insane. The last time a government tried this was 238 years ago, and we all know the result of that experiment.
It violates ones privacy under the 9th Amendment and most likely several portions of HIPPA.
Plain and simple, the law is broken and only exists because the activist Republican Justice John Roberts doesn't grasp basic Constitutional issues such as limitations on governmental power over the people.
Then maybe God shouldn't have given us free will or made us so fallible that one of our sexes succumb to eating forbidden fruit and screwed all her offspring to eternal damnation.
If we have free will, then God can't complain about the outcome. If we don't, then it screwed up in our creation. Which is it?
Maybe our allies should start picking up their portion of their defense tab rather than relying on the U.S. taxpayer to constantly foot the bill.
and leave our defense wide open.
Like what, goatse? The danger now is rarely military in nature but electronic. The military industrial complex even admits this. They are more worried about state-sponsored electronic infiltration than they are about some nation developing jets or missiles.
Take a look at the 2011 proposed budget and how much national defense gets. You mean to tell me we couldn't cut that budget by 10% and still be secure?
Considering that is 20% of our total expenditure, and is nothing but a money sink since we get almost nothing in return, I think we can cut the fat a bit and still have a juicy steak.
does the company even know what it's going to be doing 10 years down the line?
Probably not, though in Tesla's case if they keep having their cars burst into flames when they get into an accident, they may not be around in 10 years (that's not a slap, just a comment).
Does SAP make it any easier to change as you company evolves over the next 10 years?
Hell no! SAP doesn't make it easy to change, PERIOD.
SAP isn't something you can just install and forget about it.
Don't worry. Once you install SAP you can never forget about it with the constant changing of screens to perform the simplest of operations.
Similar to SharePoint, except bigger.
If you were trying to extoll the virtues of SAP, you failed miserably.
It doesn't do anything on it's own.
It doesn't do much when you're using it other than get in your way.
You have to do a lot of work to make it work for you.
I thought the purpose of SAP (and Oracle) was to make my life easier. Why should I have to do a lot of work to make it work?
It's a meeting. You're supposedly discussing something which requires the attention and input of everyone there. If that phone call is that important then get up and go outside. You don't sit in the meeting discussing something else.
It's called common courtesy and common sense. If you consider those two items such a burden, then obviously so are you to the organization.
You haven't looked at your electric bill, have you? Here in PA, where we have electric choice, you can choose your electricity provider to get the best rate, BUT your electric company still charges you for distributing that power.
Those costs usually represent almost half your total bill.
I don't fly anymore. Having to deal with morons every day who think their texts/emails/whatever are more important than having their eyes on the road, or people who randomly walk into moving traffic while talking on their phone is bad enough. Having to sit through a multi-hour flight full of people talking on their phones or bipping and bopping on their tablets would be a nightmare.
My sentiments exactly. Whether you're talking software written by multi-billion dollar companies such as Oracle or SAP, to smaller companies or homegrown software, the current state of software is abysmal.
"Throw more RAM at it!" is the usual response, as if that solves the underlying problem. Worse, you can have identical machines and get different results when installing the same piece of software.
The biggest problem is no one is held accountable for this nonsense. Unlike building a bridge where you can check to see if the designers did their job, the engineers did their job and the construction folks did their job, there is nothing similar in software. At best, you have to wait for a patch which might, maybe, possibly, fix some issues, but then again, maybe not.
If Apple has no reason to censor, then why are the comments disappearing from the forum? If people are legitimately experiencing wi-fi connection issues, shouldn't others be aware of it and Apple take the appropriate action?
Or is Apple following the path of Nikon which refused to acknowledge the oil-on-the-censor issue on some non-insignificant portion of their D600 camera, then less than a year later released the D610 which miraculously doesn't have the issue but which is the exact same camera? Is that possibly why Apple just pushed out the 7.3 update?
However, if people are having issue with wi-fi, how are they supposed to get the update since updating requires a wi-fi connection?
Have to agree. We're deploying iPhones to replace Blackberries and the number of hoops I had to jump through just to create Appled ID accounts for corporate use was mindnumbing. Not to mention the constant pestering with every update.
Yes, Enable Location Services. No, don't use iCloud. No, I don't want to answer security questions. I told you this when I set up the phone the first time, and every time I've updated. Why do you keep asking me?
Not to mention the joke with ID accounts themselves. You set one up then, when you go to load your first app, you're told you have to review/update your information so you can sign into iTunes! WTF?! I don't want to sign into iTunes. I want to install a free, non-Apple app.
There is no way I can recommend an iPhone to anyone. Sure, they look cool and work (mostly), but the nagging and Big Brother nonsense just doesn't make them worth the effort.
Considering how much spying Israel does on the U.S., and all the secrets they've stolen from us in exchange for unequivocal support at the UN, and then ask to have their spies returned to them because they're "heroes", this shouldn't surprise anyone.
Bullshit. Street lighting has been found to reduce pedestrian crashes by approximately 50%.
peed bumps increase traffic crashes and reduce safety
Double bullshit. Overall, the treated streets experienced a 39 percent decrease in crashes per year after speed bumps are installed. The 39 percent decrease on speed bump streets is a statistically significant difference (t = 2.8) from 1.39 to 0.85 crashes/year, meaning crashes most likely do decrease on speed bump streets due to bump installation.
As well as this gem which asks a different question but which provides the same evidence against your "common sense".
Slashdot Mirror
Because we are still a barbaric world where basic human courtesy doesn't apply.
Such as turning off your phone when in a meeting, dinner date or at the movies, not trying to get one car ahead by jamming your vehicle into the six foot space, not walking across the middle of the street and expecting traffic to stop on a dime, not using a curse word every three seconds because you think it's cool or being edgy, answering a question with "Read the fucking manual!"
Hackers are not dangerous, they are misunderstood,
You steal my personal data, sell it to someone else who uses that data to commit crimes, you are a dangerous person.
Stop trying to make excuses when people commit crimes. They're a criminal, pure and simple.
In that sense health insurance is far more important than auto insurance.
No, it's not. If I am perfectly healthy (which I am) and able to pay my medical bills from my own savings, why should I have to have the added financial burden of paying for YOUR medical bills? That is what medical insurance is about after all, and something this administration has repeatedly said in the form of, "We need as many healthy people as possible to sign up so they can pay for the sick."
Health insurance is a cost which is never recovered. Ever. It's actually worse than car insurance because the insurance companies are betting you will stay healthy while you are betting you will get sick or injured.
That's not reasoning; that's manipulation.
No, it is reasoning by illustrating one of many reasons the colonists broke away from England. They were tired of BEING manipulated by government. They were tired of having to send the product of their labors back to England and then being told they had to buy finished products, made from their labors, only from England. They were tired of having their taxes go to expand the British Empire, tired of being used as pawns against the French, and so on. Their lives, to use your example, existed solely for the benefit of someone else. What they wanted did not matter. Thus, revolution and independence.
The rest of the world sees through these political and corporate planted "opinions" as nothing more than a way to protect profits.
Corporate planted? How is arguing AGAINST giving my money to a company a corporate planted opinion? I'm arguing against giving companies free money. If anything, I should be heralded by the Slashdot crowd for fighting against corporate governance and greed. The only one who is protecting profits is the Obama administration who gave insurance companies this windfall.
Your government tells you what to do and buy all the time you twit
Really? Explain how that works. Do they tell me I must buy my cable service from a specific company? Phone/cell service? Broadband (local government yes, but not Federal)? How about what food I must buy? The car I drive? Name one item the government tells me I must buy. Remember, this is on the Federal level we're talking about.
You don't oppose health care for "freedom" and you know it. You oppose it because you are told to.
No, I oppose being told I have to pay for your health insurance while you can continue to smoke, be obese, be an alcoholic or do drugs without having to change your ways. I oppose being told I must give up the fruit of my labors to people who won't take personal responsibility for their lives (going back to your original comment). I oppose having the government reach into my bank account and forcibly extracting my money and handing it over to a private company because I didn't "voluntarily" hand over the money to the company.
Health care and unhealthy American food are pretty much as far apart as things can get.
No, they're not. Americans eating junk food has a very high correlation to bad health. Witness the most recent result which shows why medical costs are so high in the U.S.: The reason what you think. Diabetes and heart disease come from two main issues: regularly eating food which is bad for you and not having an active lifestyle.
But if you would care to explain how keeping society healthy and productive, doing it cheaper than the American system and reducing crime is not a good thing
Considering UACA doesn't keep costs down or make people productive, it's a moot point. Nowhere in the bill are costs contained. The only thing this bill does is force people like me to pay for those who can't, or won't, take care of themselves. That is all. There will be no cost redu
I assume that in United States' law you are required to hold private insurance on your motor vehicle?
Maybe, maybe not. In some states you can opt not to have insurance if you provide proof you have a certain amount of assets or put up a certain amount of money.
Further, the car analogy fails because there is no government requiring you to own a car. There are many people in this country how don't own a car and never will. That is their choice.
Contrast that with this Un-ACA where the federal government has dictated everyone must hand over their money to a private company or face having that same government reach into their personal bank account and forcibly extract money because one didn't hand over money to a private company.
How can you continue to assert the awfulness of these systems when they've proven themselves highly successful?
The difference between here and elsewhere is we don't consider a nanny state a good thing. We don't (well, most rational people at least) expect the government to insinuate itself into every minute aspect of ones life. One of the contributing reasons to our revolt from Britain was the fact that the Crown was dictating to the colonists in the form of who they could buy products from (only England), how they should worship (The Church of England), and so on.
When our Constitution was written it was deliberately worded so the power of the central government was limited in scope. While one can argue its reach has significantly expanded over the centuries, never has the central government been granted the power to tell people what they must buy. Ever. Under any circumstance. Until now.
I realize looking in from a country where your every need is taken care seems like a good thing, but we don't see it that way. We like to make our lives on our own terms without the government saying, "You must do this, or else." Some take this notion to the extreme but most people just want as little government interference in their lives as possible with the understanding there will always be a need for some government.
Just because something is successful doesn't necessarily make it a good thing. By that logic the success of McDonald's hamburgers is a good thing for the food industry.
that is, an individual's problem is everyone's problem.
Bullshit, bullshit, BULLSHIT! Your problem is your problem, not mine, unless you are saying because it's your problem I get to solve it in which case I get to yank the cigarette from your mouth when you're walking down the street because it's known to significantly raise the risk of getting cancer. By doing so, I will be getting a better bang for my buck since I'm the one who has to pay for your medical care (based on your false assumption).
If your premise were true, that would also mean I get to harangue you when I see you at a restaurant shoveling high fat, high cholesterol food into your 300+ lb gullet, put up signs at bars and package stores notifying them not to sell you alcohol because you're an alcoholic and when you're busted for using drugs, force you into treatment, no matter how severe as well as have you tell me where you get the stuff so they can be prosecuted.
That is what you meant when you said your individual problem is everyone else's problem, right? Or did you mean everyone gets to pay, and pay, and pay some more so you don't have to have any personal responsibility for your actions?
That's what got us into this mess in the first place.
No, what got us into this mess is people like you believing everyone else should pay for your lifestyle choices. You want to smoke, go for it. Just don't expect me to pay for your replacement lung or cancer treatment. You want to be obese, fine. You pay for lapband or other surgeries, not to mention paying for your diabetes treatments. You think doing drugs is cool and doesn't hurt anyone, then don't expect people to revive you when you OD or care for you when your brain is fried. You made the choice, you pay for it. You're not my responsibility.
have banned kindergarten students from touching each other during recess.
But touching themselves is still allowed. Huzzah!
The last time we did that was with car insurance,
Car insurance isn't for your benefit, directly, it's for the other guy when you hit them. The difference between these two concepts is when I'm driving there is a very slight but still non-zero chance I may hit you. If that event occurs, my insurance will pay you for your troubles or I will pay you due to my deductible. Or both.
If I break my arm, that's on me and me alone. You are in no way affected by me breaking my arm.
There is no way to opt-out of health insurance,
Sure there is. Don't buy it. If you have the money to cover your bills why should you buy it?
The personal mandate raises no revenue.
The bill was retitled from something completely unrelated.
I have the option of using public transportation and not paying for car insurance. Under this law, I have no right except to hand over money to private companies.
As to 238 years ago, the British forced the Colonies to send their raw products to English companies who then resold finished products to the Colonies. The Colonies were only allowed to buy products from these companies, not just EITC, and trying to circumvent this resulted in penalties.
Why should the government be allowed to force me to buy something if I don't want it? Should they be allowed to force people to buy something else as well? If I have enough money to cover my medical bills, why should they care? It's none of their business any more than it's their business to know what's in your emails or what web sites you visit.
So no, not fail, completely rational and well thought out.
No, the original poster is correct. The law is broken because:
Plain and simple, the law is broken and only exists because the activist Republican Justice John Roberts doesn't grasp basic Constitutional issues such as limitations on governmental power over the people.
No bid awards typically have far less to due with performance and more to do with maximizing payment.
So like Halliburton being given sole ownership of contracts for supplying the troops who invaded Iraq. Gotcha.
but also told sinners to stop doing so.
Then maybe God shouldn't have given us free will or made us so fallible that one of our sexes succumb to eating forbidden fruit and screwed all her offspring to eternal damnation.
If we have free will, then God can't complain about the outcome. If we don't, then it screwed up in our creation. Which is it?
Seems on awful lot like entrapment to me
Except it's not since these people would have done this anyway. They were not forced into doing this.
This web site gives a good description of what is and is not entrapment.
lets just leave all our allies dangling,
Maybe our allies should start picking up their portion of their defense tab rather than relying on the U.S. taxpayer to constantly foot the bill.
and leave our defense wide open.
Like what, goatse? The danger now is rarely military in nature but electronic. The military industrial complex even admits this. They are more worried about state-sponsored electronic infiltration than they are about some nation developing jets or missiles.
Take a look at the 2011 proposed budget and how much national defense gets. You mean to tell me we couldn't cut that budget by 10% and still be secure?
Considering that is 20% of our total expenditure, and is nothing but a money sink since we get almost nothing in return, I think we can cut the fat a bit and still have a juicy steak.
does the company even know what it's going to be doing 10 years down the line?
Probably not, though in Tesla's case if they keep having their cars burst into flames when they get into an accident, they may not be around in 10 years (that's not a slap, just a comment).
Does SAP make it any easier to change as you company evolves over the next 10 years?
Hell no! SAP doesn't make it easy to change, PERIOD.
SAP isn't something you can just install and forget about it.
Don't worry. Once you install SAP you can never forget about it with the constant changing of screens to perform the simplest of operations.
Similar to SharePoint, except bigger.
If you were trying to extoll the virtues of SAP, you failed miserably.
It doesn't do anything on it's own.
It doesn't do much when you're using it other than get in your way.
You have to do a lot of work to make it work for you.
I thought the purpose of SAP (and Oracle) was to make my life easier. Why should I have to do a lot of work to make it work?
with her very own Mustang GT500
Poor girl can't be living too much of the dream if that's what she's driving.
When you treat everyone as a criminal, you shouldn't be surprised when something like this happens.
And now that it has happened, you can justify using even more force/hiring more people.
It's a wonderfully self-fulfilling prophecy
Bottomline, don't be a fucking Nazi.
It's a meeting. You're supposedly discussing something which requires the attention and input of everyone there. If that phone call is that important then get up and go outside. You don't sit in the meeting discussing something else.
It's called common courtesy and common sense. If you consider those two items such a burden, then obviously so are you to the organization.
Then charge a distribution fee.
You haven't looked at your electric bill, have you? Here in PA, where we have electric choice, you can choose your electricity provider to get the best rate, BUT your electric company still charges you for distributing that power.
Those costs usually represent almost half your total bill.
I don't fly anymore. Having to deal with morons every day who think their texts/emails/whatever are more important than having their eyes on the road, or people who randomly walk into moving traffic while talking on their phone is bad enough. Having to sit through a multi-hour flight full of people talking on their phones or bipping and bopping on their tablets would be a nightmare.
What do you know, there is an upside to the TSA!
It's all useless, poorly written crap
My sentiments exactly. Whether you're talking software written by multi-billion dollar companies such as Oracle or SAP, to smaller companies or homegrown software, the current state of software is abysmal.
"Throw more RAM at it!" is the usual response, as if that solves the underlying problem. Worse, you can have identical machines and get different results when installing the same piece of software.
The biggest problem is no one is held accountable for this nonsense. Unlike building a bridge where you can check to see if the designers did their job, the engineers did their job and the construction folks did their job, there is nothing similar in software. At best, you have to wait for a patch which might, maybe, possibly, fix some issues, but then again, maybe not.
When I created all the Apple IDs, I documented the password for each of them. There is no chance of them being lost.
Apple has no reason to censor anything,
If Apple has no reason to censor, then why are the comments disappearing from the forum? If people are legitimately experiencing wi-fi connection issues, shouldn't others be aware of it and Apple take the appropriate action?
Or is Apple following the path of Nikon which refused to acknowledge the oil-on-the-censor issue on some non-insignificant portion of their D600 camera, then less than a year later released the D610 which miraculously doesn't have the issue but which is the exact same camera? Is that possibly why Apple just pushed out the 7.3 update?
However, if people are having issue with wi-fi, how are they supposed to get the update since updating requires a wi-fi connection?
Have to agree. We're deploying iPhones to replace Blackberries and the number of hoops I had to jump through just to create Appled ID accounts for corporate use was mindnumbing. Not to mention the constant pestering with every update.
Yes, Enable Location Services. No, don't use iCloud. No, I don't want to answer security questions. I told you this when I set up the phone the first time, and every time I've updated. Why do you keep asking me?
Not to mention the joke with ID accounts themselves. You set one up then, when you go to load your first app, you're told you have to review/update your information so you can sign into iTunes! WTF?! I don't want to sign into iTunes. I want to install a free, non-Apple app.
There is no way I can recommend an iPhone to anyone. Sure, they look cool and work (mostly), but the nagging and Big Brother nonsense just doesn't make them worth the effort.
Considering how much spying Israel does on the U.S., and all the secrets they've stolen from us in exchange for unequivocal support at the UN, and then ask to have their spies returned to them because they're "heroes", this shouldn't surprise anyone.
Streetlamps for pedestrian safety reduce safety
Bullshit. Street lighting has been found to reduce pedestrian crashes by approximately 50%.
peed bumps increase traffic crashes and reduce safety
Double bullshit. Overall, the treated streets experienced a 39 percent decrease in crashes per year after speed bumps are installed. The 39 percent decrease on speed bump streets is a statistically significant difference (t = 2.8) from 1.39 to 0.85 crashes/year, meaning crashes most likely do decrease on speed bump streets due to bump installation. As well as this gem which asks a different question but which provides the same evidence against your "common sense".