Being a resident does not mean that you're a citizen. As a legal, permanent resident of the U.S., it is the law that I have my green card in my possession at all times.
Where do I start with this one? "Working hard?", "talent?". So folks working in fast food restaurants, cleaning businesses, pumping gas (I live in Oregon) don't work hard and don't deserve a living wage? Not everyone is lucky to have the chance, and talent, to be a surgeon, a software developer, an investment banker, etc.
People shouldn't be consigned to a live of just scraping by just because you feel they're not worthy. Having access to decent housing, funds for your retirement, reasonable healthcare and some semblance of a live outside of work has bugger all to do with being wealthy. It should be the default option for anyone working in the U.S. By and large it is for anyone living in Scandinavia or western Europe.
That's pretty much how our local cable operator works. Basic is pretty much the 4 networks, religious and shopping channels. That's it for $20 per month. Want anything more and it's $48.99 per month for ESPN, HGTV, USA, A&E, TNT, etc. Of course, boxes, DVR's and the like are extra on top, to the tune of $15 or so each per month for a DVR.
Personally, I'd love to have channels delivered a la carte. I don't need, or want, ESPN which apparently costs $4.69 per month per subscriber according to various sources. Looking though my $48.99 per month list of channels, I probably watch 8 or 9 of them at best. There's another 5 I''d watch if I could pay for them individually, but buggered if I'm going to pay $14.99 for an "entertainment" package, $14.99 for a "sports" package and $16.99 for an HBO package in order to watch Fox Soccer, BBC America and HBO.
As for ads, they suck. I record to an HTPC and auto removed the things.
Not everyone lives in an urban area. Here in my neck of the woods, open wi-fi (or any wi-fi) is few and far between once you get out of town. The 3G coverage is slow, but at least it's there.
Even in built up areas, wi-fi can be sketchy. I had the fortune to stay at the Polo (Fawlty) Towers in Las Vegas not so long ago. Their wi-fi was down for my entire stay. The nearest free wi-fi? At Starbucks in the Planet Hollywood hotel. After a long day at a conference, I really didn't feel like hanging out in Starbucks. My VM mi-fi device worked a treat. Nothing to heavy on the data usage but at least I could catch up on e-mail and the news.
Don't bet on the employers of manual labor not doing the same thing. The link below is an article regarding the hiring of 254 foreign workers for forestry work. The company contracted to do the work advertised the positions in tiny, out-of-the-way newspapers in California and Washington state. even so, 146 US workers applied, but none were offered a job.
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/10/federal_stimulus_money_for_ore.html
This is the route I'm taking. I'm hitting the 30 year experience mark. That counts for a lot. People respect that amount of experience rather than seeing it as a detriment. Being in the security consulting field is somewhere where being older, and hopefully wiser, can be an asset.
I checked my Linkedin password against the list to see if it was there or not. It turns out it wasn't but I thought I'd change it anyway to be on the safe side. I checked my 2nd, 3rd and 4th choices on the leaked list before changing. All of those were on the list. It surprised me a little because they're not common passwords or particularly obvious. I guess it shows if you get a large enough group of people together, similar though processes are going to lead to similar passwords.
Another nitpick. I record a show from my cable provider using my home brew DVR.. I remove the ads from it automagically before watching. Still illegal? Is it any less moral than downloading a copy via bit torrent or Usenet with the ads already removed?
For the UK, a Prius costs around 24000UKP and returns 70mpg. A VW Golf Bluemotion costs 18000UKP and gets 74mpg. Not quite sure what the motivation would be to drive a Prius in that case. It's a shame we don't have access to small turbo-diesel cars in the U.S.
So what? It took my wife the best part of an hour on the phone to find a doctor that was even accepting new patients. When she did, it was a 3 week wait for an appointment. A few months ago, I was suffering from a kidney stone. Couldn't get in to see my doctor that day so ended up at an urgent care center. That place wasn't in network, so I ended up paying $3,500 for treatment instead of $20. Welcome to the U.S.A. Be proud and thankful for the NHS.
Why did you need to "fix" anything to keep your U.S. citizenship? My wife is a dual UK/US citizen and had no issues with her US citizenship after getting her British passport.
Legally there is no right to vacation days for U.S. workers. The key here is that you work for your state. My current employer offers no vacation days and just Labor day, Memorial day, 4th July, Thanksgiving and Christmas as holidays. That's it. 5 days a year and they're pretty typical for this area. Of course, the city, state and federal employees get everything off in sight.
Also, to answer your other question, back in the UK I could "cash in" 15 days of my 30 day vacation allowance. Those 30 days were in addition to 9 days of statutory holidays.
Three points I'd like to make. The first one is based on my time spent working in Europe (UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany) and the U.S. In Europe, there is much more emphasis on preventative care compared to what I've seen in the U.S. Being a cynic, you could say that's there's more money to be made from letting people get sick and then treating them as opposed to stopping them getting sick in the first place.
Secondly, is the insurance aspect. My wife and I both go to the same primary care clinic. I have insurance, she doesn't (her choice which I don't agree with but that's another story). Last bills for an office visit - $395 for me and $90 for her. Out of pocket I paid less ($20) but I'm always surprised at how much less the un-insured rate is at medical practices in my area.
Then take the case of the facility I work at. Out of 60 or so people working here (it's an ambulatory surgery center), 6 spend most of the day arguing with insurance companies over billing and denials. Another 3 handle the actual billing. That's a big administrative overhead to have.
Lastly, there seems to be a huge number of medical facilities in any town in the U.S. Back in Europe, most issues were either handled by my primary care doctor or referred to a specialist at a local hospital. For my last issue I ended up going to 5 different facilities around town, who all sent my insurance company their separate bills. How inefficient is that?
Size matters. I hate to burst your bubble but were you under the impression that your small town banks employ crack info security teams or something because they're in the financial industry?
Worryingly enough, one of our local banks still advertises for NT4 and Exchange 5.5 admins.
That's just asking for trouble. A young friend of mine thought of a good way of drumming up business for his business (just him!). He drove around town connecting to open wireless networks at various businesses. He'd then browse to network shares on other computers on that network. Then he'd go into the business, show them what he'd found and offer to fix it for a fee. It doesn't take much imagination to see where this is going. After the 3rd accusation of being a hacker and a blackmailer, he decided it wasn't such a great idea after all.
Of course, to this day (and this was 4 years ago), there are still businesses around here, including accountants, healthcare providers and lawyers, with fully open wireless networks connected straight into their main server(s) and desktops.
Source? The FB data center gets their electricity from Pacific Power. They buy most of their energy in from external sources. 63% of the power they provide to their customers is from coal-fired power stations. The other provider in the area, the Central Oregon Electricity Co-Op does make use of power from hydro sources.
Here in Oregon you can buy beer and wine from the grocery store, but anything harder has to come from state-controlled stores. However, we can buy liquor direct from local distilleries. As a Brit, it all seems pretty strange and contrived. Still can't pump our own gas either, but that's another story................
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Neither is a green card, other than proving you're a citizen of somewhere else I guess.
So as a British subject with an SSN and an Oregon DL, I'm not a foreigner? News to me.
Being a resident does not mean that you're a citizen. As a legal, permanent resident of the U.S., it is the law that I have my green card in my possession at all times.
Not Obama, but according to this link someone was for talking about Bush Jr. http://www.diggers.org/freecitynews/_disc1/00000039.htm
Where do I start with this one? "Working hard?", "talent?". So folks working in fast food restaurants, cleaning businesses, pumping gas (I live in Oregon) don't work hard and don't deserve a living wage? Not everyone is lucky to have the chance, and talent, to be a surgeon, a software developer, an investment banker, etc. People shouldn't be consigned to a live of just scraping by just because you feel they're not worthy. Having access to decent housing, funds for your retirement, reasonable healthcare and some semblance of a live outside of work has bugger all to do with being wealthy. It should be the default option for anyone working in the U.S. By and large it is for anyone living in Scandinavia or western Europe.
Yep. They broke http://crazedlist.org/ but http://searchtempest.com/ appears to still work although it is only pulling in results from the last 7 days.
That's pretty much how our local cable operator works. Basic is pretty much the 4 networks, religious and shopping channels. That's it for $20 per month. Want anything more and it's $48.99 per month for ESPN, HGTV, USA, A&E, TNT, etc. Of course, boxes, DVR's and the like are extra on top, to the tune of $15 or so each per month for a DVR. Personally, I'd love to have channels delivered a la carte. I don't need, or want, ESPN which apparently costs $4.69 per month per subscriber according to various sources. Looking though my $48.99 per month list of channels, I probably watch 8 or 9 of them at best. There's another 5 I''d watch if I could pay for them individually, but buggered if I'm going to pay $14.99 for an "entertainment" package, $14.99 for a "sports" package and $16.99 for an HBO package in order to watch Fox Soccer, BBC America and HBO. As for ads, they suck. I record to an HTPC and auto removed the things.
Not everyone lives in an urban area. Here in my neck of the woods, open wi-fi (or any wi-fi) is few and far between once you get out of town. The 3G coverage is slow, but at least it's there. Even in built up areas, wi-fi can be sketchy. I had the fortune to stay at the Polo (Fawlty) Towers in Las Vegas not so long ago. Their wi-fi was down for my entire stay. The nearest free wi-fi? At Starbucks in the Planet Hollywood hotel. After a long day at a conference, I really didn't feel like hanging out in Starbucks. My VM mi-fi device worked a treat. Nothing to heavy on the data usage but at least I could catch up on e-mail and the news.
Considering the Verizon 3G around here delivers 0.3 Mbps down and 0.35 Mbps up, just how severely throttled could VM's data be in comparison?
Don't bet on the employers of manual labor not doing the same thing. The link below is an article regarding the hiring of 254 foreign workers for forestry work. The company contracted to do the work advertised the positions in tiny, out-of-the-way newspapers in California and Washington state. even so, 146 US workers applied, but none were offered a job. http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/10/federal_stimulus_money_for_ore.html
This is the route I'm taking. I'm hitting the 30 year experience mark. That counts for a lot. People respect that amount of experience rather than seeing it as a detriment. Being in the security consulting field is somewhere where being older, and hopefully wiser, can be an asset.
Of course not. It's p@ssw0rd. Shit! Now I'll have to change it again!
I checked my Linkedin password against the list to see if it was there or not. It turns out it wasn't but I thought I'd change it anyway to be on the safe side. I checked my 2nd, 3rd and 4th choices on the leaked list before changing. All of those were on the list. It surprised me a little because they're not common passwords or particularly obvious. I guess it shows if you get a large enough group of people together, similar though processes are going to lead to similar passwords.
Another nitpick. I record a show from my cable provider using my home brew DVR.. I remove the ads from it automagically before watching. Still illegal? Is it any less moral than downloading a copy via bit torrent or Usenet with the ads already removed?
If it ran on Verizon, you could have probably used it on PagePlus for $12 per month assuming it was out of contract and unlocked.
It's a security feature, surely?
For the UK, a Prius costs around 24000UKP and returns 70mpg. A VW Golf Bluemotion costs 18000UKP and gets 74mpg. Not quite sure what the motivation would be to drive a Prius in that case. It's a shame we don't have access to small turbo-diesel cars in the U.S.
So what? It took my wife the best part of an hour on the phone to find a doctor that was even accepting new patients. When she did, it was a 3 week wait for an appointment. A few months ago, I was suffering from a kidney stone. Couldn't get in to see my doctor that day so ended up at an urgent care center. That place wasn't in network, so I ended up paying $3,500 for treatment instead of $20. Welcome to the U.S.A. Be proud and thankful for the NHS.
Why did you need to "fix" anything to keep your U.S. citizenship? My wife is a dual UK/US citizen and had no issues with her US citizenship after getting her British passport.
Legally there is no right to vacation days for U.S. workers. The key here is that you work for your state. My current employer offers no vacation days and just Labor day, Memorial day, 4th July, Thanksgiving and Christmas as holidays. That's it. 5 days a year and they're pretty typical for this area. Of course, the city, state and federal employees get everything off in sight. Also, to answer your other question, back in the UK I could "cash in" 15 days of my 30 day vacation allowance. Those 30 days were in addition to 9 days of statutory holidays.
Three points I'd like to make. The first one is based on my time spent working in Europe (UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany) and the U.S. In Europe, there is much more emphasis on preventative care compared to what I've seen in the U.S. Being a cynic, you could say that's there's more money to be made from letting people get sick and then treating them as opposed to stopping them getting sick in the first place. Secondly, is the insurance aspect. My wife and I both go to the same primary care clinic. I have insurance, she doesn't (her choice which I don't agree with but that's another story). Last bills for an office visit - $395 for me and $90 for her. Out of pocket I paid less ($20) but I'm always surprised at how much less the un-insured rate is at medical practices in my area. Then take the case of the facility I work at. Out of 60 or so people working here (it's an ambulatory surgery center), 6 spend most of the day arguing with insurance companies over billing and denials. Another 3 handle the actual billing. That's a big administrative overhead to have. Lastly, there seems to be a huge number of medical facilities in any town in the U.S. Back in Europe, most issues were either handled by my primary care doctor or referred to a specialist at a local hospital. For my last issue I ended up going to 5 different facilities around town, who all sent my insurance company their separate bills. How inefficient is that?
Size matters. I hate to burst your bubble but were you under the impression that your small town banks employ crack info security teams or something because they're in the financial industry?
Worryingly enough, one of our local banks still advertises for NT4 and Exchange 5.5 admins.
That's just asking for trouble. A young friend of mine thought of a good way of drumming up business for his business (just him!). He drove around town connecting to open wireless networks at various businesses. He'd then browse to network shares on other computers on that network. Then he'd go into the business, show them what he'd found and offer to fix it for a fee. It doesn't take much imagination to see where this is going. After the 3rd accusation of being a hacker and a blackmailer, he decided it wasn't such a great idea after all. Of course, to this day (and this was 4 years ago), there are still businesses around here, including accountants, healthcare providers and lawyers, with fully open wireless networks connected straight into their main server(s) and desktops.
Source? The FB data center gets their electricity from Pacific Power. They buy most of their energy in from external sources. 63% of the power they provide to their customers is from coal-fired power stations. The other provider in the area, the Central Oregon Electricity Co-Op does make use of power from hydro sources.
Here in Oregon you can buy beer and wine from the grocery store, but anything harder has to come from state-controlled stores. However, we can buy liquor direct from local distilleries. As a Brit, it all seems pretty strange and contrived. Still can't pump our own gas either, but that's another story................