"Those who have never experienced it, or who fell by the wayside, won't understand the rewards of working under this technique. But the proof is in the results."
Sorry, but what you wrote really sounded inhumane to me. Maybe people are stronger or supposedly getting used to abuse where you live.
Probably what the original writer experienced is similar to the essentiall hazing that goes on in many fields. North American medical residents are often subjected to insane work schedules, and those who survive come to believe that it is the only way to train doctors, absent any actual evidence to support that, for example.
Take any group of people and toss out or force everyone who does not fit the mold you are striving for, and you will end up with a surviving group of people who do fit that mold - no big surprise. What is more challenging is to show that other less-destructive methods are effective at producing larger numbers of people with excellent skills. Even more challenging is to convince those in power, who themselves went through the earlier "trial-by-fire" system, to make changes to the training system to increase its humanity, even when those changes would increase the effectiveness.
"I'm also wondering how many days I'll need to stay away from the rifle range before I won't show any particulate explosives at one of these checkpoint."
Simple: just don't carry your BOARDING PASS to the RIFLE RANGE.
Oh yeah, and don't touch your boarding pass with your hands.
The whole point of this type of thing is to be sensitive enough so that it can detect the person who assembled a bomb and put it into his luggage and then picked up his boarding pass from the ticket agent, walked across the airport and handed that boarding pass to the gate attendant. It needs to be able to work even if the bad-guy took a shower after packing the bomb away and before touching the boarding pass.
it'll be easier to upgrade and eventually replace a handful of coal-fired power stations than to replace potentially millions of cars.
Too true. Electrical power is "fungible" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility - ok, the generation of power is fungible) in that from the car's point of view it doesn't matter how the electricity was generated. A gas-powered vehicle is pretty much stuck running on gasoline. The option to switch the generating system from "bad" systems like coal or burning puppies and children, to "good" systems like wind, solar and angle farts is really worthwhile.
The three objectives of punishment in the criminal justice system are punishment, rehabilitation and deterrence. It's not correct to say it's only for one of them.
Unless punishment serves the goals of deterrence and/or rehabilitation - it would seem a bit pointless. I suggest that "punishment" should not be an objective, even if it might be on of the tools to obtain the actual objectives.
Maybe is is part of "revenge"? Should that be one of the three objectives?
It doesn't actually seem to be talking about "disposable income", but rather what they call "total economic benefit". Basically taking the earned wages, subtracting the taxes, then adding all of the possible tax credits and program benefits possible. The $60,000 earner comes out to have a net calculation of a bit over $34k, while the $14,500 earner by this calculation has a net calculation of just under $38k. Even if accurate, this doesn't mean that this family has $38k to spend as they see fit, but rather that they qualify for things like Medicare (priced at $16,500 in this calculation) food-stamps, and school lunch programs, for example.
I don't know that it shows that a family would be happier to be bringing in the $14.5k rather than the $60k - mostly I think it shows how vital the support provided by medicare and other such programs actually is - clearly the low income family would no be able to pay for $16,500 of medical care without societal support. $60k for a family of four doesn't get you a lot these days, eh?
Their argument that "no one wants ugly cell towers because of NIMBY" is specious, since they can be placed on the top of any building inside a weather dome, and even if they're not in a dome, they don't have to be ugly
NIMBY is not just about ugly - it is also about fear of heath impacts. Much harder to placate.
The difference is that if you are a player in say, the NFL, you will make a ton of money, and after 8-12 years retire and draw a pension from the NFL. Bench warmers make 150K+ a year, so if you're even halfway decent you will be making good money.
What fraction of high school football players go on to play in college? What fraction of those get into the NFL? What fraction of those manage to last the years necessary to draw a decent pension? A $14,500 average pension rate doesn't seem very viable to me.
Similar figures exist for baseball, basketball, and hockey - though I think hockey and baseball have more developed minor league systems to make it possible to earn a (perhaps marginal) living while not being in the major leagues.
We have been pretty fortunate that the nights have been pretty cool. As soon as outdoor temp drops below indoor temp, we turn on a box fan in the attic that blows out, and open windows on the lowest floors. That vents the hottest air and fills the house with the cool night air. Then early in the morning everything gets shut pretty tight. We have pretty good shading from trees, so the whole stays pretty comfortable all day. Even if the night doesn't get particularly cool on a single we can still have a pretty livable indoor temp, but a few days running with hot nights doesn't work too well.
Ceiling fans, and box fans and a window AC unit help a lot too.
I suspect that the water used by a swamp cooler is insignificant when compared to the water lost to evaporation in local agricultural uses - especially in "ornamental" ones like pretty lawns.
My argument is this: because they were going to have to ram it through against the wishes of all Republicans, the bill they ended up ramming through wasn't a "compromise", it was the bill they actually wanted. The talk about it being a "compromise" was in fact nonsense, because the only people they were compromising with was themselves.
If they'd wanted a public option, it would have been in the bill. It wasn't, so they didn't really want it.
That may be true - they may have needed to water it down to gain the support of all the people who eventually did vote for it (even if that was only "themselves"), but my understanding was that they did have the votes to get through the public option but decided to scrap that in order to get more support for the rest of the bill.
Of course my perceptions, actual history, and the currently believed history as well as current rhetoric are quite likely completely unconnected.
So the public option is there, but at a state rather than federal level.
I always thought that the state level was where this should have been in the first place. The Canadian model was started by one province providing coverage (a bunch of commies at the time), but then everyone in the other provinces said "gimmie some of that!" until the feds finally brought in legislation to ensure country-wide standards, after the ideas had been widely accepted.
The public option IS putting the profit motive right in front of the health care issue. 20% of medicare and medicaid claims are _fraud_. The politicians will ensure that their "pals" will get to drink from the government trough with little to no accountability. When was the last time the government created a large government program and then cancelled it because it was ineffective? Their only response is to guarantee if we fund it MORE, it will do what we want. Then when we fund these programs more, they still do not do what we want.
Fundamentally, if we were not willing to implement the changes we needed under a free-market system to reform medical coverage (such as tort reform), there is no way that we will be willing to fix what is broken in a large socialized medicine behemoth.
I'd like to see a citation that medicare fraud is as large as you claim, and that fraud in the rest of the "private" medical system is significantly better than that in medicare. All of my sources indicate that medicare has significantly lower overhead than the private for-profit insurers.
Accountability is a concern, but it is equally a concern in the for-profit companies. The combination of desire for profit and competition are powerful motivators, but they do not always magically produce the results that we want - they often result in many of the same "drinking from the public/consumer trough" behaviors. There are many dangers and challenges of public systems, but there are lots of examples from around the world of systems that work better than the one in the US.
Tort reform is a nice idea, but usually it is code for "limiting corporate liability", and in the current system, legal costs are a fairly small fraction of the total medical bill. Completely eliminating the legal cost portion of the bill would do little in controlling prices and could arguably greatly reduce incentives for good consumer care.
This was at the point when the Democrats could have shoved through any bill they wanted to, because the Republicans had already decided they were all voting against it in both the House and Senate.
Once it became clear that "compromise" was not going to be acceptable to any of the "other side", the dems probably should have rammed through the bill that they actually wanted - it seems hard to believe that the "other side" could be any more incensed than they seem to be with the bill that actually did get passed.
My reading of irs.gov is that if you pay off your primary residence (or have a mortgage less than $1m), you can buy a "second home," say a condo in Hawaii for example, and stay there 1 month a year. Then you can rent it out the rest of the year, but still claim the interest deduction on that mortgage, up to a total mortgage value of $1m across both homes.
My memory of various tax jurisdictions may be off, but in general it doesn't really matter whether you take the deduction against rental income as part of the business expense or as a "homeowner", since they both end up as a deduction from your total income. The business expense can be used in more situations since you can use it even if you chose to use the "standard deduction" rather than itemize via Schedule A.
If you are not reporting your rental income on your second home, then of course you won't be declaring any rental business income so the business expense of the mortgage could not be used, and it would be "better" to declare it on Schedule A. But discussing the best way to break the tax laws and unethically, immorally, and illegally avoid taxes seems a bit slimy to talk about. And maybe a bit foolish in a not-completely anonymous forum, particularly in a country that gives financial rewards to people who turn in tax cheaters via Form 3949-A.
The mortgage interest deduction is only for the home that you are living in (or the fractional part they are living in).
People who are renting out a building or parts thereof can deduct interest payments against income from that rental - it is a cost of providing the lodging, just like maintenance and property taxes and capitol depreciation.
Every one of the numbers tossed around in this article make me gag. Those wages, even pre-raise, are ridiculously high for an entry level retail job. And as for your $30 and hour for the "genius" bar?? Please. My sister is an RN - you know - the people in the hospital that save your life? - and she gets about $25 an hour. I've NEVER heard of an IT position, especially one attached to a retail operation, making that.
There seems to be a lot of focus on what other jobs pay and that in comparison one of the rates is too high. Maybe neither is to high, but rather both are too low, with one being a bit less "too low".
I keep thinking about the overall increase in economic output of the "western world" since the 1900s and if that if only a small fraction of that increase had been spread around to everyone in society we would all have real living wages and 10/hour per week jobs. What has actually happened is that the majority of the gains have got to the top of the pyramid : http://xkcd.com/980/ In 2007 dollars: Average 1965 production worker pay $19.61/hour, CEO $490/hour; Average 2007 production worker pay: $19.71/hour, CEO $5420/hour
To me it seems that there could be no argument possible that could justify the production worker's stagnant income in comparison to the more than 10-fold increase in CEO compensation. I can understand why it has happened, but do not think it is good for society in general that it has happened.
I have no good idea how to structure a system that would more fairly widely distribute economic gains without imposing excessive undesired side-effects of cheaters, freeloaders, decreased incentives to innovate and strive for advancement, etc. On a worldwide basis, I am certainly in the 1% and am not particularly interested in decreasing my standard of living so others can increase their, but there must be a way that we could structure stuff so that increases go more toward the bottom of the pile than towards the top.
Of course that sounds a lot like communism, and we have seen how poorly that has been implemented.
Historical reasons - Nigeria had (and still has) a huge home grown industry of international fraud cases like this, going back decades - dating from the 1980s according to Wikipedia:
Insa Nolte, a lecturer of University of Birmingham's African Studies Department, stated that "The availability of email helped to transform a local form of fraud into one of Nigeria's most important export industries."
the first one I got, well over a decade ago, also made me wonder: is this legitimate, is this real, it certainly sounded quite real but the whole thing was just too unlikely to be trusted.
A buddy of mine got one *on paper* in the mail to his school address in the early 1990s - maybe as late as 1995. At the time it seems as though there were still significant numbers of "old school" scammers who eventually all went Internet, but were then still using mail/fax/phone operations. When we looked up info online (pre-Google as I recall - how did we do it?) we learned that some huge fraction of the fax numbers in Nigeria were devoted to scams of this nature and 900 number phone charging schemes.
Same with marketing phone calls. Far better to get them to hang on while you 'check the spuds' and waste two minutes of their time rather than simply tell them to fuck off.
Automated phone calls are another one where I do this when possible. Having the speaker phone by my desk listing off the great things I would get if I would only "press 1 to enter into the contest" or whatever ends up keeping one of their phone lines in use with no profit for them while preventing it from calling someone else to be bothered - and it doesn't really tie up my time at all as I am busy working while they are "talking".
Enlisting in a hostile foreign enemy is an automatic revocation of one's citizenship. Al Qaeda arguably is a de facto foreign power, a hostile foreign enemy.
That is not actually true - intent to give up citizenship is necessary:
"As a result of several constitutional decisions, 349(a) of the current Immigration and Nationality Act ("INA") provides that U.S. nationality is lost only when the U.S. citizen does one of the specified acts described in INA 349, voluntarily and with the intent to give up that nationality. If any one of these requirements is lacking, nationality is not lost. "
You cannot lose your citizenship unless you actually intend to do so (or the courts find that you had that intent even if you later deny it.) Thus, serving in a foreign military does not automatically qualify, as much as we might think it should.
Ah, but serving in a foreign military can cause one to lose one's citizenship, especially if that foreign military is in conflict with the United States.
I would argue that since Al Qaeda controlled territory at one point and has committed attacks against the country, a US Citizen's allegiance with Al Qaeda constitutes an action that would nullify one's citizenship, in the same fashion that serving in a foreign military would. Since a major goal of Al Qaeda is to set up a Caliphate and their own religious theocracy nation (in their own concept of what that means) then they're essentially declaring themselves to be a foreign power.
The thing is, it is not up to the executive branch to decide if someone has given up their citizenship. Such a thing can only be done via a legal court type of thing - you know, due process. Legislation stripping individuals of their citizenship for whatever reason has been repeatedly struck down by the courts as something the legislature does not actually have the power to do.
"As a result of several constitutional decisions, 349(a) of the current Immigration and Nationality Act ("INA") provides that U.S. nationality is lost only when the U.S. citizen does one of the specified acts described in INA 349, voluntarily and with the intent to give up that nationality. If any one of these requirements is lacking, nationality is not lost. "
You cannot lose your citizenship unless you actually intend to do so (or the courts find that you had that intent even if you later deny it.) Thus, serving in a foreign military does not automatically qualify, as much as we might think it should.
Slashdot Mirror
"Those who have never experienced it, or who fell by the wayside, won't understand the rewards of working under this technique. But the proof is in the results."
Sorry, but what you wrote really sounded inhumane to me. Maybe people are stronger or supposedly getting used to abuse where you live.
Probably what the original writer experienced is similar to the essentiall hazing that goes on in many fields. North American medical residents are often subjected to insane work schedules, and those who survive come to believe that it is the only way to train doctors, absent any actual evidence to support that, for example.
Take any group of people and toss out or force everyone who does not fit the mold you are striving for, and you will end up with a surviving group of people who do fit that mold - no big surprise. What is more challenging is to show that other less-destructive methods are effective at producing larger numbers of people with excellent skills. Even more challenging is to convince those in power, who themselves went through the earlier "trial-by-fire" system, to make changes to the training system to increase its humanity, even when those changes would increase the effectiveness.
"I'm also wondering how many days I'll need to stay away from the rifle range before I won't show any particulate explosives at one of these checkpoint."
Simple: just don't carry your BOARDING PASS to the RIFLE RANGE.
Oh yeah, and don't touch your boarding pass with your hands.
The whole point of this type of thing is to be sensitive enough so that it can detect the person who assembled a bomb and put it into his luggage and then picked up his boarding pass from the ticket agent, walked across the airport and handed that boarding pass to the gate attendant. It needs to be able to work even if the bad-guy took a shower after packing the bomb away and before touching the boarding pass.
it'll be easier to upgrade and eventually replace a handful of coal-fired power stations than to replace potentially millions of cars.
Too true. Electrical power is "fungible" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility - ok, the generation of power is fungible) in that from the car's point of view it doesn't matter how the electricity was generated. A gas-powered vehicle is pretty much stuck running on gasoline. The option to switch the generating system from "bad" systems like coal or burning puppies and children, to "good" systems like wind, solar and angle farts is really worthwhile.
The three objectives of punishment in the criminal justice system are punishment, rehabilitation and deterrence. It's not correct to say it's only for one of them.
Unless punishment serves the goals of deterrence and/or rehabilitation - it would seem a bit pointless. I suggest that "punishment" should not be an objective, even if it might be on of the tools to obtain the actual objectives.
Maybe is is part of "revenge"? Should that be one of the three objectives?
I can't find the article either - though I did find this summation: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b2d_1327531142&comments=1
It doesn't actually seem to be talking about "disposable income", but rather what they call "total economic benefit". Basically taking the earned wages, subtracting the taxes, then adding all of the possible tax credits and program benefits possible. The $60,000 earner comes out to have a net calculation of a bit over $34k, while the $14,500 earner by this calculation has a net calculation of just under $38k. Even if accurate, this doesn't mean that this family has $38k to spend as they see fit, but rather that they qualify for things like Medicare (priced at $16,500 in this calculation) food-stamps, and school lunch programs, for example.
I don't know that it shows that a family would be happier to be bringing in the $14.5k rather than the $60k - mostly I think it shows how vital the support provided by medicare and other such programs actually is - clearly the low income family would no be able to pay for $16,500 of medical care without societal support. $60k for a family of four doesn't get you a lot these days, eh?
Their argument that "no one wants ugly cell towers because of NIMBY" is specious, since they can be placed on the top of any building inside a weather dome, and even if they're not in a dome, they don't have to be ugly
NIMBY is not just about ugly - it is also about fear of heath impacts. Much harder to placate.
The difference is that if you are a player in say, the NFL, you will make a ton of money, and after 8-12 years retire and draw a pension from the NFL. Bench warmers make 150K+ a year, so if you're even halfway decent you will be making good money.
What fraction of high school football players go on to play in college? What fraction of those get into the NFL? What fraction of those manage to last the years necessary to draw a decent pension? A $14,500 average pension rate doesn't seem very viable to me.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_pension_for_an_NFL_player
Similar figures exist for baseball, basketball, and hockey - though I think hockey and baseball have more developed minor league systems to make it possible to earn a (perhaps marginal) living while not being in the major leagues.
We have been pretty fortunate that the nights have been pretty cool. As soon as outdoor temp drops below indoor temp, we turn on a box fan in the attic that blows out, and open windows on the lowest floors. That vents the hottest air and fills the house with the cool night air. Then early in the morning everything gets shut pretty tight. We have pretty good shading from trees, so the whole stays pretty comfortable all day. Even if the night doesn't get particularly cool on a single we can still have a pretty livable indoor temp, but a few days running with hot nights doesn't work too well.
Ceiling fans, and box fans and a window AC unit help a lot too.
I suspect that the water used by a swamp cooler is insignificant when compared to the water lost to evaporation in local agricultural uses - especially in "ornamental" ones like pretty lawns.
My argument is this: because they were going to have to ram it through against the wishes of all Republicans, the bill they ended up ramming through wasn't a "compromise", it was the bill they actually wanted. The talk about it being a "compromise" was in fact nonsense, because the only people they were compromising with was themselves.
If they'd wanted a public option, it would have been in the bill. It wasn't, so they didn't really want it.
That may be true - they may have needed to water it down to gain the support of all the people who eventually did vote for it (even if that was only "themselves"), but my understanding was that they did have the votes to get through the public option but decided to scrap that in order to get more support for the rest of the bill.
Of course my perceptions, actual history, and the currently believed history as well as current rhetoric are quite likely completely unconnected.
So the public option is there, but at a state rather than federal level.
I always thought that the state level was where this should have been in the first place. The Canadian model was started by one province providing coverage (a bunch of commies at the time), but then everyone in the other provinces said "gimmie some of that!" until the feds finally brought in legislation to ensure country-wide standards, after the ideas had been widely accepted.
The public option IS putting the profit motive right in front of the health care issue. 20% of medicare and medicaid claims are _fraud_. The politicians will ensure that their "pals" will get to drink from the government trough with little to no accountability. When was the last time the government created a large government program and then cancelled it because it was ineffective? Their only response is to guarantee if we fund it MORE, it will do what we want. Then when we fund these programs more, they still do not do what we want.
Fundamentally, if we were not willing to implement the changes we needed under a free-market system to reform medical coverage (such as tort reform), there is no way that we will be willing to fix what is broken in a large socialized medicine behemoth.
I'd like to see a citation that medicare fraud is as large as you claim, and that fraud in the rest of the "private" medical system is significantly better than that in medicare. All of my sources indicate that medicare has significantly lower overhead than the private for-profit insurers.
Accountability is a concern, but it is equally a concern in the for-profit companies. The combination of desire for profit and competition are powerful motivators, but they do not always magically produce the results that we want - they often result in many of the same "drinking from the public/consumer trough" behaviors. There are many dangers and challenges of public systems, but there are lots of examples from around the world of systems that work better than the one in the US.
Tort reform is a nice idea, but usually it is code for "limiting corporate liability", and in the current system, legal costs are a fairly small fraction of the total medical bill. Completely eliminating the legal cost portion of the bill would do little in controlling prices and could arguably greatly reduce incentives for good consumer care.
Seriously, if the US government pushed Britain's NHS on Americans there'd be another revolution within a week.
Yeah, cause like every other developed country is cursing their socialized medicine and wishing for a system like the USA's.
Oh, right, they are not. They are all pretty much looking at the USA and wondering "WTF do those people think they are doing? Are they all nuts?".
This was at the point when the Democrats could have shoved through any bill they wanted to, because the Republicans had already decided they were all voting against it in both the House and Senate.
Once it became clear that "compromise" was not going to be acceptable to any of the "other side", the dems probably should have rammed through the bill that they actually wanted - it seems hard to believe that the "other side" could be any more incensed than they seem to be with the bill that actually did get passed.
But, but, but - that's communism!
Yeah, see my reply to sibling post.
My reading of irs.gov is that if you pay off your primary residence (or have a mortgage less than $1m), you can buy a "second home," say a condo in Hawaii for example, and stay there 1 month a year. Then you can rent it out the rest of the year, but still claim the interest deduction on that mortgage, up to a total mortgage value of $1m across both homes.
My memory of various tax jurisdictions may be off, but in general it doesn't really matter whether you take the deduction against rental income as part of the business expense or as a "homeowner", since they both end up as a deduction from your total income. The business expense can be used in more situations since you can use it even if you chose to use the "standard deduction" rather than itemize via Schedule A.
If you are not reporting your rental income on your second home, then of course you won't be declaring any rental business income so the business expense of the mortgage could not be used, and it would be "better" to declare it on Schedule A. But discussing the best way to break the tax laws and unethically, immorally, and illegally avoid taxes seems a bit slimy to talk about. And maybe a bit foolish in a not-completely anonymous forum, particularly in a country that gives financial rewards to people who turn in tax cheaters via Form 3949-A.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903352704576540840395329676.html
http://dontmesswithtaxes.typepad.com/dont_mess_with_taxes/2007/01/ratting_out_tax.html
Based on my experience in Canada, here's what you can expect:
1. the cost of your insurance will go up.
blah
blah
blah
Canada pays way less on a per capita basis than the US, and has similar outcomes.
The mortgage interest deduction is only for the home that you are living in (or the fractional part they are living in).
People who are renting out a building or parts thereof can deduct interest payments against income from that rental - it is a cost of providing the lodging, just like maintenance and property taxes and capitol depreciation.
Every one of the numbers tossed around in this article make me gag. Those wages, even pre-raise, are ridiculously high for an entry level retail job. And as for your $30 and hour for the "genius" bar?? Please. My sister is an RN - you know - the people in the hospital that save your life? - and she gets about $25 an hour. I've NEVER heard of an IT position, especially one attached to a retail operation, making that.
There seems to be a lot of focus on what other jobs pay and that in comparison one of the rates is too high. Maybe neither is to high, but rather both are too low, with one being a bit less "too low".
I keep thinking about the overall increase in economic output of the "western world" since the 1900s and if that if only a small fraction of that increase had been spread around to everyone in society we would all have real living wages and 10/hour per week jobs. What has actually happened is that the majority of the gains have got to the top of the pyramid : http://xkcd.com/980/
In 2007 dollars: Average 1965 production worker pay $19.61/hour, CEO $490/hour; Average 2007 production worker pay: $19.71/hour, CEO $5420/hour
To me it seems that there could be no argument possible that could justify the production worker's stagnant income in comparison to the more than 10-fold increase in CEO compensation. I can understand why it has happened, but do not think it is good for society in general that it has happened.
I have no good idea how to structure a system that would more fairly widely distribute economic gains without imposing excessive undesired side-effects of cheaters, freeloaders, decreased incentives to innovate and strive for advancement, etc. On a worldwide basis, I am certainly in the 1% and am not particularly interested in decreasing my standard of living so others can increase their, but there must be a way that we could structure stuff so that increases go more toward the bottom of the pile than towards the top.
Of course that sounds a lot like communism, and we have seen how poorly that has been implemented.
Historical reasons - Nigeria had (and still has) a huge home grown industry of international fraud cases like this, going back decades - dating from the 1980s according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_scam
Insa Nolte, a lecturer of University of Birmingham's African Studies Department, stated that "The availability of email helped to transform a local form of fraud into one of Nigeria's most important export industries."
the first one I got, well over a decade ago, also made me wonder: is this legitimate, is this real, it certainly sounded quite real but the whole thing was just too unlikely to be trusted.
A buddy of mine got one *on paper* in the mail to his school address in the early 1990s - maybe as late as 1995. At the time it seems as though there were still significant numbers of "old school" scammers who eventually all went Internet, but were then still using mail/fax/phone operations. When we looked up info online (pre-Google as I recall - how did we do it?) we learned that some huge fraction of the fax numbers in Nigeria were devoted to scams of this nature and 900 number phone charging schemes.
Same with marketing phone calls. Far better to get them to hang on while you 'check the spuds' and waste two minutes of their time rather than simply tell them to fuck off.
Automated phone calls are another one where I do this when possible. Having the speaker phone by my desk listing off the great things I would get if I would only "press 1 to enter into the contest" or whatever ends up keeping one of their phone lines in use with no profit for them while preventing it from calling someone else to be bothered - and it doesn't really tie up my time at all as I am busy working while they are "talking".
Good idea, as long as you trust them not to get the wrong house - like potentially the neighbor's (ie yours).
Enlisting in a hostile foreign enemy is an automatic revocation of one's citizenship. Al Qaeda arguably is a de facto foreign power, a hostile foreign enemy.
That is not actually true - intent to give up citizenship is necessary:
http://www.americanlaw.com/dualcit.html [americanlaw.com]
"As a result of several constitutional decisions, 349(a) of the current Immigration and Nationality Act ("INA") provides that U.S. nationality is lost only when the U.S. citizen does one of the specified acts described in INA 349, voluntarily and with the intent to give up that nationality. If any one of these requirements is lacking, nationality is not lost. "
You cannot lose your citizenship unless you actually intend to do so (or the courts find that you had that intent even if you later deny it.) Thus, serving in a foreign military does not automatically qualify, as much as we might think it should.
Ah, but serving in a foreign military can cause one to lose one's citizenship, especially if that foreign military is in conflict with the United States.
I would argue that since Al Qaeda controlled territory at one point and has committed attacks against the country, a US Citizen's allegiance with Al Qaeda constitutes an action that would nullify one's citizenship, in the same fashion that serving in a foreign military would. Since a major goal of Al Qaeda is to set up a Caliphate and their own religious theocracy nation (in their own concept of what that means) then they're essentially declaring themselves to be a foreign power.
The thing is, it is not up to the executive branch to decide if someone has given up their citizenship. Such a thing can only be done via a legal court type of thing - you know, due process. Legislation stripping individuals of their citizenship for whatever reason has been repeatedly struck down by the courts as something the legislature does not actually have the power to do.
http://www.americanlaw.com/dualcit.html
"As a result of several constitutional decisions, 349(a) of the current Immigration and Nationality Act ("INA") provides that U.S. nationality is lost only when the U.S. citizen does one of the specified acts described in INA 349, voluntarily and with the intent to give up that nationality. If any one of these requirements is lacking, nationality is not lost. "
You cannot lose your citizenship unless you actually intend to do so (or the courts find that you had that intent even if you later deny it.) Thus, serving in a foreign military does not automatically qualify, as much as we might think it should.