Tempe, where the downtown area is dominated by the ASU campus, set up a free WiFi system a while back in the downtown slightly-off-campus area. As far as I know it is still operating but it was simply to attract people with computers to the bars and restaurants. It isn't that large an area and probably doesn't cost that much to operate. Hopefully the Tempe taxpayers - who are paying for it - find it not too objectionable.
Chandler got hooked up with a company called KiteNet which put access points on lightpoles in a fairly large area of the center of the city - much larger than the downtown area. They were sellling it as an alternative to the cable companies, except with cable you could get 10-20Mbs and their wireless configuration was a mesh with only a few connections to the Internet. Hence, the speeds would be pretty low with a lot of latency as the signal bounced from access point to access point finding its way to a wired connection. You might have 10-20 access points to go through or possibly even more in some places. Today the access points are still on the lightpoles and still powered up as far as I know - but the connection to the Internet was terminated years ago. Nobody signed up to pay and therefore the company closed down.
Nobody was going to pay for wireless access that is really slow but wireless with the sole advantage that they could connect to it on the streetcorner half a block from their house. No, they didn't have coverage in major parks or really anywhere that someone might sit around.
Municipal WiFi can be a taxpayer-funded gift and stick around as long as the taxpayers want to keep on giving the gift away. The problem with this comes when the gift starts to intersect with commercial offerings - unless we want the government to act as an active competitor to business it is an area they should stay out of. And for the significant percentage of the population that really has no interest in WiFi anything, who is going to make the compelling case for them funding it for the folks that want it?
More to the point, I think even a lot of businesses have figured out that you can't make WiFi pay. If it is free in a coffee shop then if the coffee is good people might use it - but the majority of customers aren't interested. If it isn't free in a coffee shop nobody is going to pay and hopefully they are there for the coffee anyway. Most of the "municipal" or bar-and-restaurant-area open area WiFi systems have figured this out by now. Even airports have started figuring out that if it isn't free there will not be enough users to pay for the equipment maintenance and connection fees - so they need to figure out some other way paying for it.
WiFi doesn't pay for itself. Hotels are probably the last remaining bastion where paid WiFi access is common and mostly that is outside of the US. You can't make it pay for itself no matter what you do without a captive audience and there are few places where you have a captive audience that needs to have a WiFi connection.
The problem is we are talking about people's lives here. You want to forfeit your life for a prank or to make a point? OK, thought not. Well, neither do most of the folks currently being given an opportunity to plead to a lesser charge today.
The justice system for the most part sees the scum of the earth and very rarely are these people even technically innocent. They know it and are just interested in doing as little time as they possibly can. They already know the system is broken because they have gotten away with many, many crimes for years before being caught. If it wasn't so badly broken, they would have been caught already.
You see, there is a really simple truth at work here. People know they might get caught but they seriously underestimate the likelyhood of it because based on anecdotal evidence it looks like most people do not get caught. The reality is only about 20% of individual crimes do end up with someone receiving some kind of punishment. But, these are individual crimes - at some point the law of averages catches up with you so on your 40th crime or so it is almost a dead certainity that you are going down for it. The people in the criminal justice system - on the receiving end - do not think this through all they way and see only the few of their friends that are getting caught.
Sure, every once in a while a truely innocent person is hauled into court. At that point they have maybe only a 50/50 chance of escaping undeserved punishment because of the way things work. Would it be nice to fix that? Sure. But to fix it we are going to have to start training children to be more like Beaver and less like Eddie - right now, Eddie is winning out because it looks like he has a lot more fun. Problem is, the Eddies of the world do indeed have more fun but we would really like to live in a world populated with as few Eddies as possible - while it may be fun for Eddie it isn't so much fun for the people around him. We are talking about trying to undo 40 or 50 years of pop culture conditioning and 40 or 50 years of real live experiences in the inner cities of the US.
See, today when you end up in court the guy before you is really guilty and the guy after you is really guilty. The overwhelming number of people are really guilty, so much so that it shades everyone's expectations. Everyone is assumed at one level or another to be guilty because... for the most part they are. If even 1 in 10 was truely innocent there might be a chance of the system being able to recognize an innocent person but they are so incredibly rare as to make it impossible for the people running the system to recognize them. There may be varying shades of guilt, but even with that the number of people in the system that are in fact guilty, know they are guilty and just wanting to get the smallest pain in their life possible makes the plea bargining system work the way it does.
What is this concept "interest earned"? For the last 10 years or so "interest earned" has been something of a joke. You can walk into any bank or credit union and someone will tell you their savings account offers an interest rate of 0.01% on an annual basis.
This of course is in contrast to a time when interest on savings was 3.5% and home loans were 4.5%.
I recently was offered by someone in all seriousness an interest rate of 1.11% on 300K in a 48 month CD. That is pretty much an assured loss of more than 1% a year with inflation factored in.
If your money is in a savings account, you aren't saving anything but simply losing money slowly. This is especially important for folks that counted on a nice steady income from CDs during their retirement. There is no such income any longer - because interest is simply not paid.
Do you understand the concept of liability insurance?
Insurance companies do not want people doing this kind of work and they will make it difficult for anyone to hire people to do it. The reason is that is high risk and it is going to be expensive for an insurance company. Partly because they are going to have to pay out to either a beneficiary or lawyers when someone gets hurt or killed - and it is an absolute certainty someone will be hurt or killed.
The problem isn't so much the worker but their family. Someone pops up and manages to convince a lawyer to take their case on contingency to sue the maintenance company for not properly disclosing the risks or having them work under difficult conditions or some other silliness. The end result is it just costs money to make it go away one way or another.
Same problem with roofers. Talk to an insurance person about roofers. They do not want to insure them and state worker's compensation insurance is so expensive that it makes it almost impractical to own a roofing company. Almost. But trust me, nobody wants to get into that business today.
Has anyone in the US Military stopped to notice what critical supplies are manufactured solely in China today? I do not mean just armaments, but stuff that the US military would be utterly unable to move without. Stuff like light bulbs. Fuel filters. Glass containers. Simple little things that the last US manufacturer closed down for either recently or as far back as 1980.
Do we still make toilet paper in the US? I suspect there may only be one factory that does and it will probably close down soon. It is much cheaper to have it made over there and shipped here.
We cannot possibly win a conflict with China - they would cut off our supply of manufactured items and the military would just grind to a halt.
Sure, they could probably shut down a couple of factories making classified munitions, but who cares? They figured out that troops don't fight without toilet paper in WW I and trust me, it hasn't gotten any better. They cut off our supply of toilet paper and the US population would storm Washington and demand an end to the conflict immediately. I am not kidding here.
What this proves is that it is possible in the 21st Century to pull the plug and shut down a good part of the electrical grid.
Think of the possibilities in the US... we could turn off the coal plants tomorrow and the air might get cleaner. It would certainly reduce the CO2 emissions and we could all sit around and wait to see if it had an effect on the climate. It might be a little darker at night and there might be a lot fewer computers available, but some folks certainly think it would be worth it. We are getting ready to re-elect one of them for another four years of somewhat questionable guidance.
So, what would the US look like without coal plants? Would we just buy lots of power from Canada encouraging them to build coal generating plants to sell us the electricity? How about an economic boom for Mexico, building power plants? No, I think the clear way forward would be to just bite the bullet and live with a lot less. Electricity, to start and then shortly after that just about everything else.
One thing to keep in mind is that it is very difficult to charge an electric car when there isn't enough electricity to go around as it is. The US might be building a couple of nuclear plants - construction has started - but they aren't going to be going online for maybe 10 years.
Now, you want to be really bold and daring? How about shutting down the coal plants and the nuclear plants together? There are certainly some folks that think that would be a really good idea. That would cut what, 80% of the electricity supply in the US... might be a bit of a challange there.
Face it, your employer is going to know all about that stuff after six months on the job anyway.
If you have problems with people knowing who you are as a person - things like sexual orientation, marital status, etc. - you aren't going to fit in anywhere except maybe as a WalMart drone.
And in the US, unlike a lot of Western European countries, they can fire you after six months once they figure out that you are being a secretive asshole that behaves like a jerk to fellow employees.
Pricing structure needs adaptation, too. There is no reason for the Kindle version to cost the same as the dead tree version.
Why do you think that? Is it that you believe the price of the book is because the paper is so expensive? Or the shipping? Or is it that the retailer deserves no part and you should just be buying direct from the author?
The problem is authors are generally OK with putting words together but not so great at actually producing a book. Talk to any published author and see if they think they could just get rid of the publisher, editor, copy editor, proofreaders, cover artist, etc. There might be a few that would say they can do it all themselves - but from the results I have seen on Amazon it isn't all that great "going it alone." Most of the authors out there are extremely happy with the staff of people that helped them take their collection of words and turn it into a polished finished product. And all of these people need to get paid.
As far as the costs of paper, shipping and so forth go, books are very cheap to produce. Your average soft-cover book might cost about $2.50 to print in reasonably large quantities, and shipping is almost a joke - put 20 in a box and ship it for $10. Or even less. Book publishers get insane discounts from UPS because of the amount they ship.
I would not expect the prices of ebooks to ever come down to $1 - unless you are looking for something done on a lark by someone. Sure, if I write something small and spend absolutely no time on polishing it it might be possible to have it listed somewhere for $1... and if thousands of people pay $1 I might be pretty happy about it. But to spend any real time on it apart from what I do normally to pay the bills would require getting a lot more than that from it. So at $1 you are going to get books written as a hobby by people that wouldn't understand what is wrong with it and how it isn't finished. You are also going to get ego-driven books where the author knows they have written a masterpiece that rivals all the works of literature over the last thousand years. Expect them to be promoting their book to college professors and saying their book needs to be part of their course on American Literature.
The problem that nobody seems to want to talk about is I, Bystander B is watching and recording the police dealing with Citizen A. Citizen A is very loudly disclaiming that he had anything whatsoever to do with Woman W, who is also standing by the police clearly accusing Citizen A of doing something nasty and wanting the police to "do something about it".
I take my recording home and realize Citizen A just recently had their picture in the news as some supposedly upstanding person. I now have easy blackmail material or can simply sell my recording to the same news organizations for a tidy profit.
It doesn't matter what Citizen A was or was not doing - their public life will be filled with innuendo and snarky comments. If they happen to be married, that might be over now as well. Just having a recording of someone interacting with the police is grounds for termination from any number of public-facing jobs. So with one recording you get to destroy someone's entire life.
Now, if you are Citizen A and making the recording yourself that is a whole different matter. But what the public wants and news organizations will pay for is Bystander B's recording. Today in most jurisdictions attempting to do something like this openly will get you a trip to the jail and your recording device confiscated - you might get it back if you apply in person and pay the $50 fine. Or you might not. You can assume that if these laws are unconstitutional and go unenforced anyone with a life they value will just run from any interaction with the police for fear of it being recorded and used against them.
Sure, the right attitude is that if there is no conviction there is no crime. But that isn't how things work today. If you are publiclly arrested and questioned about rape or child molestation you can figure it will get out and your life is over - no matter if they have the wrong person or not. Having a recording of some school principal getting a traffic ticket when they were complaining about student drivers is going to be lots of fun for people. So this could really stack up to be quite entertaining.
Partly the volume and complexity of the ballot is because back in the 1950s virtually the entire country stopped for a day while 70-80% of the people voted. We are still assuming things are going to work that way. They don't.
Today you might wait in line for 30 minutes to vote. In the 1950s you might have waited a couple of hours in some places. Then they brought in the new voting machines that mechanically tallied votes and this was the beginning of it all. But still it took a lot of people (volunteers as well as the voters) out of the workplace for the day or at least a good part of it.
Today we are tailoring the idea of an election around the idea that it is a huge holiday and no businesses like it. Instead the reality is that it really doesn't affect businesses any longer because instead of 70-80% turnout we have 30%. And all the undocumented workers in the warehouse aren't voting anyway although folks keep trying to sign them up.
How about someone with limited vision who lives alone? What, they have to ask the neighbor to vote for them?
How about someone without the use of their hands? While they could poke a stylus at a screen with their mouth, they can't fill in a scanned box on a paper ballot.
How about someone that insists their ballot must be in Spanish, French, Urdo or Navajo?
Sorry paper ballots aren't going to work in the US.
In the US it got decided that handicapped people should be able to vote. This meant that 99% of the existing systems in place could no longer be used. How do you have a blind person vote without assistance? How about someone that has lost the use of their arms? Then there are the issues of having to have ballots in the language of the voter's choice. This is the sort of thing that has gotten us where we are today with electronic voting machines.
I think the "right" answer is to tell the handicapped that they need to have a "voter" that they bring in to help them or they just don't get to participate. Because that is a lot simpler than all of the other solutions and impacts the fewest number of votes. Same thing with folks that insist they must have a ballot in Urdo - the answer there is English is the official language and no government documents need be in any other.
The other problem is "subjective voting strategies" like the hanging chads. Clearly, this was proven not to be working and worse, more and more chads got punched out the more the cards were handled. Meaning a perfectly valid ballot (card) was invalidated because another punch was made simply by handling it too much. This clearly needed to go.
Arizona uses paper ballots which are electronically scanned. Handy for the polling place but not so good for blind people and those with serious vision problems. The "bad ballot" problem where someone makes too many or too few (or too light) marks is handled immediately because the ballots are scanned when you hand them to the attendant. But it doesn't satisfy the requirements for allowing nearly all handicapped voters to participate. Nor does it solve language problems - Arizona is pretty simple where they need to print only about 25 different language ballots to meet all of the citizen's needs. But imagine a place like LA or New York with hundreds of different languages mandated by the state to be supported. Every election brings new protests that ballots are not in the "right" languages.
Electronic machines that make paper ballots might be the only way that works, but there is no getting away from the electronic machines. They are the only way to deal with the language problems and the handicapped problems. So we aren't getting rid of electronic voting, ever. We just might make it a lot more complicated though.
I certainly agree that Internet voting is so insecure as to be an absurd idea.
If you could get the police to believe that a bitcoin has value to anyone other than a dedicated cult, they might.
However, most local police just pass any "cyber" investigations on to a federal agency, they probably aren't going to do anything anyway. The federal minimum is $25,000 in loss - if you don't have that, they aren't interested. So for a $15,000 loss there probably will be no law enforcement action no matter what.
Credit card fraud (now called Identity Theft by the FBI and reported as such) is almost never prosecuted. It isn't worth it because it is essentially a victimless crime.
No, the card holder is never liable for anything. Not even the $50 they claim they might charge you. In practice the card holder never, ever loses anything.
The credit card company simply does not pay the merchant so they lose nothing. This is part of the merchant agreement that they don't pay fraudulent charges.
If the merchant is worried about this - and all the big ones are - they take out insurance which covers their loss. Fraud happens, the insurance pays and the merchant loses... nothing. I guess you could say that the merchant is the victim in having to have insurance which covers this, but the insurance also covers a lot of other things so they would have it anyway.
So of course when you report credit card fraud they say not to worry, it is all taken care of. Nothing happens and often the merchandise is really delivered. Most of the "work from home" jobs are in reality dealing with the sort of laundering that goes on from this kind of operation - you send out stuff that was obtained this way to an Ebay customer and then forward the money to the folks running the scheme. Too bad when you get caught with a garage full of the stuff - because that is "receiving stolen goods" and you can end up in jail just for thinking you had it great "working from home".
By the way, I understand that a current credit card number is worth about $0.50 when sold in bulk. So the next time you hand your card to a waiter understand that he needs to collect 100 of them to get $50. Which, considering the way these folks are paid, you can expect a good number of them are supplementing their income in this way.
Sure, GM paid to scrap a lot of streetcar systems that were in place - except in a lot of cases these were just barely hanging on anyway. In the Chicago area the decisions were pretty simple - massive subsidies to continue a failing mass transit system in suburbs or just scrap it. Ridership has pretty much fallen at a steady pace since the 1950s and nothing seems to be able to stop it. All of the suburban bus lines were discontinued and the service taken over by a regional bus company with considerably reduced service. Even in Chicago itself the mixed elevated/subway trains have been cut back because of lack of ridership.
I suspect most US cities have had similar experiences. The problem is really a chicken-and-egg problem: to have a large robust mass transit system you need a lot of ridership which will not materialize without a large robust system. There is no way to "build up" a mass transit system because until you have the geographical coverage and schedule people will just use cars.
Now, the way to force mass transit in the US would be to first mandate that all companies have to be located in the city center and not in far-flung suburban locations. Except in most US cities the city center is a decaying mess that has been abandoned. Even the police don't want to be there. So there is a lot of crime on people left over that didn't escape or have come to see the sights - muggings, rapes, and robberies. So you need a safe, clean and well-maintained city center before you mandate companies move there. Of course, over the last 80 years or so the infrastructure (restaurants, shops, etc.) all left the city center as well, so you need to figure out how to get them back too - or companies can't move there because there is no supporting infrastructure left.
OK, so after passing some draconian laws about where a company can be located and forcing other businesses to locate in the city center you now have a safe and secure city center all ready for workers. You can get rid of all the parking lots as well and mandate that people use mass transit to get to work. Except the transit companies sold off the train cars because they weren't needed with reduced ridership. So now you have to give money to the transit companies to rebuild their fleet of trains and buses to cope with the increased ridership. And you need to do that first before the people need it.
Sure, it could all be done. Except it would take a big city to spend billions on infrastructure and mass transit and still force - by rule of law - companies to spend billions collectively to relocate to city centers. I don't think there is that much money laying around right now to do that with. Certainly no city would be able to do that today without massive government support.
Should the US government enact a program like this to remake the country back to the way transit was in 1955? I would offer that a lot of people would say that instead of looking back we should be looking forward with whatever that means. So the decision is anything but clear. I'd say mass transit in the US is dead and or dying and destined to be permanently so. It has taken 60+ years to remake the cities the way they are now and it might take another 60 years to move in a different direction - if everyone could agree on a direction.
Do notr forget that IBM was one of the first companies distributing source code for all their software products. You licensed the product, you got the source code.
Originally, nearly all of it was in straight Assembler language. Except the Fortran IV complier which had substantial parts written in POP, a custom language for writing a Fortran compiler. Later on, they introduced PL/S which was far less usable.
Exactly; murder is inappropriate in today's society. However you shouldn't be sent to jail for 30 years for thinking about murder.
Well, the context of a "hate crime" is exactly that - punishing someone for what they are thinking. Perhaps 30 years is not the right number, but if you think about killing a minority you are indeed committing a hate crime. Today they may wait until you commit a few more crimes before they prosecute you, but this doesn't change the fact that it is a crime.
I believe that when murder is combined with "hate crime" in some states this makes you eligible for the death penalty.
Sorry, but that last sentance says it all. "Assange will hold him to that campaign promise" No, that isn't the way the world works. Non-entity individuals DO NOT get to "hold presidents to promises" and the sooner the Internet community understands that the better it will be for everyone.
What is going to happen is Mr. Assange will be made an example of. Somehow, in some really significant public way it will be made clear to everyone that if you get material that damages a lot of high ranking political figures you do something besides making it freely available. Because if it becomes available you will wish someone killed you before you ever got the stuff. That is Mr. Assange's fate.
Now, the US government overall is just screwed up enough to drop the ball on this. The effect will be that after all the saber-rattling that nobody ever believes a single thing to come from a politician ever again. No government will have any credibility - which is perhaps the right course. We deserve a worldwide revolution in the name of credibility, but we really don't deserve the governments that would replace what we have now. I'd expect someone with "ultimate credibility" to end up as a world leader with most of the planet under their thumb, and there are only a couple of sources of "ultimate credibility" Allah is the big one of course.
So are we ready for all/most Western governments to be replaced by one omnipotent Caliph? Better hope someone has some credibility left when the dust settles then. People really don't like knowing their governments are impotent liars, which is the case today. People respond to this by picking someone with some kind of credibility and putting them in charge so there is someone they can believe in. Want to know more? Hitler was someone they could believe in. They believed in Lenin. Mohammad started a poltical movement that lasted over 600 years because people believed in him - and they still do.
The geekier among us have never been much for either standing together, organization or any other sort of unified action. The end result is that there will be no "flexing of muscle" unless you consider Terry Childs to be a prime example. He decided he has some principles and then tried to exercise them in a really stupid way.
Joe Sixpack will not put up with his entertainment being disrupted, and the politicians know this. Should someone honestly decide to turn off some electric power in the name of Internet Freedom the politicians have three clear choices: they can capitulate, they can negotiate or they can make an example. You know which they are going to do before I even describe it.
The technically competent aren't going to organize so the rest is fantasy. Without organization, all that is going to happen is a few people could be made an example of - likely by being dragged out of their office and shot. Yes, shot. Screwing with Joe Sixpack's entertainment is not something that can be tolerated. Joe Sixpack might want to rise up and confront politicians and have enough motivation to actually organize and force some real changes. That can't be allowed, so the response will be immediate and severe. Expect the National Guard or Army to enforce this - it is going to have to be way too severe for the police force.
We are starting to get into the idea that there are different sorts of hate and different degrees of it. Hate against a protected class (say, a minority) is a different level of hate under this thinking. Clearly different from the sort of hate that many African Americans have against white people because they have been brought up to believe that all white people are slavers and want nothing more than to re-enslave the black race.
No, sorry, you don't get to do that. Hate is hate. It is a destructive emotion but it is little more than emotion. Once we start prosecuting hate we are a short way away from prosecuting "conservatism" which to many is far more destructive than hate. Any internal throught process is then fair game regardless of its expression in actions. As much as I would like to prosecute Pollyanna-ish liberals for their beliefs in a "go along to get along" world, it is not the way to organize a society unless one is actively striving for 1984. Because if it were possible to do such prosecutions, you can bet it would be fashionable to prosecute all sorts of undesirable attitudes or the "wrong sort of thinking."
Once you start prosecuting people for what they believe, trouble is bound to follow. And by definition "hate crimes" are clearly prosecuting someone for what they believe or are thinking.
If you want to make the world safe for homosexuals, the place to start is not with what people are thinking but what they are doing. Simlarly, if you want to make the world safe for Jews "enhancing" sentances for swastica-painters because of what they believe is not the right way to do it. Instead, increase the penalties for external actions - like painting a swastica - which is something at least everyone can see.
There is clear evidence that the political correctness movement of society demands that when something that can be considered to be "hate" it must be so. There is no room for interpretation here - if we are going to criminalize hate then it must be done forcefully and completely with no options for wiggling out through supposed ignorance. This makes for a very uncomfortable legal environment for a lot of people, myself included. I believe the idea of a "hate crime" is nonsense and trying to enhance penalties for ordinary crimes because of "hate" being a factor is a bad idea. This clearly is delving into the area of trying to decide what people are thinking internally and externalizing it in some way. What does it matter what someone is thinking and why should we increase penalties for certain thoughts?
The legal system should not be considering thoughts but only actions. Unfortunately, that is not the direction we are going.
In the US today we have "protected classes". These are classes of people that must not be assailed in any way. Women are a protected class and any treatment of them that singles them out because of their gender is illegal today. Similarly, minorities are a protected class in this manner - if you treat an African-American male as an African-American, that is illegal. However, if you treat an African-American male as a male, well, that isn't a protected class. It can get pretty confusing.
The idea of a protected class apart from others is not how one builds an equal society but one where some are more equal than others. There is no condition that I can agree with that says minorities should receive treatment under the law that is different from anyone else. Especially because they are a member of a minority. The law should be minimizing the fact of their differences from the "rest of us" rather than attempting to maximize the differences.
It is somewhat an open question how much homosexuals are a protected class. There are some states having laws that offer blanket protected class status to homosexuals and make it illegal to consider sexual orientation in any manner or for any purpose. Other states have less clear laws and there may only be certain situations where sexual orientation is forbidden from being considered. For example, while many would consider it to be inappropriate for a gay male to be teaching a sexual education class to young girls. In some states it is illegal to bar them from this activity whereas in others it may actually be forbidden by law for them to do it. Very confusing, especially when you get into transsexuals. Court cases are beginning to pop up where it starts to become necessary to discuss what sort of anatomy the is present and what sort of anatomy is desired regardless of what is present.
In the US we are clearly moving into some very interesting territory, one that encompasses the outer edges of what consent can be considered to be. In the US we have been conditioning ourselves to think of unequal power relationships as bad between men and women. But when you get into sexual behaviors where one party is clearly dominant and the other (often permanently) submissive we are supposed to throw all that conditioning away and embrace "the new way". For a lot of people this is very difficult to absorb and they are going to consider unequal power relationships - where one party is clearly in control and the other just has to follow along and do what they are told - as a bad thing. The fact that the US has just gone through, and is still going through, efforts to establish women as equal to men with bra burning, effective birth control and significant changes in the legal framework makes it even more difficult.
Probably a far better question is when your purchases at a grocery store are scanned who owns the scan data? Right now the grocery store sells it to a marketing company which analyzes is and sells the aggregated data back to manufacturers and the like.
So if you are in the business of selling toothbrushes wouldn't you like to know if your brand is being beat out by some upstart in Whole Foods stores but not in the low-cost no-frils stores? Would that not tell you something important? Literally, this is the life or death of manufacturers today because if they don't have accurate data they are going to make bad decisions and lose money. Most manufacturers of consumer products are operating on a very thin margin as it is so they can't afford to make mistakes.
Sure, there is a lot of data that Google collects and is selling the same way, but it happening everywhere in the world, not just on the Internet.
No, I don't believe for a second that the US government is going to try to restrict this or regulate it in any way. There is too much of it happening and it is too big a part of the way manufacturers and retailers work today.
In fact, the main reason I hate the IRS is because my tax dollars are going to fund operations like the TSA. I have no problem with paying taxes, provided they're used responsibly and productively. That's simply not the case here.
Wow, that is a good one. Can you think of any department or agency of the federal government that isn't mired in 50% or more waste? I can't. From the Army to the National Zoo I believe there is a floor of at least 50% waste and some cases it is better than 90%.
I do not believe the "Independence Day" explanation for $40,000 toliet seats - that this money isn't being spent there but is instead being syphoned off to black programs. I am quite sure the government is capable of procuring $40,000 toliet seats and doing so in preference to vendors offering gold-plated ones that meet the same standards for $20,000 because the $40,000 vendor assisted in writing the specification so that it can only be met with their product. If you haven't been in on the federal procurement and bidding process you have no understanding of what is going on.
I would have no problem with paying taxes if they were used responsibly and productively. I believe in most cases the current taxes fund at least 50% waste, abuse and absurd procurement processes. The remaining 50% could stand a chance of being used for the well being of the country. And all I hear about is how the government needs more and more money.
One other thing you need to add: search any site that feeds information back to Google.
Two that I know of are Amazon and Newegg. Do any search there and you will start seeing ads for what you searched for on every Google ad site there is. Not sure if they are paying Amazon and Newegg for this information or what, but I would imagine any online merchant of any size is feeding their searches into Google for tracking and such.
They probably connect it up with the credit card information so Google has your name and address to go with your salable information. Important for good demographics. There is no point in sharing the credit card number - the fact that you are searching for high-end tequila from a particular zip code is more valuable than your credit card number anyway.
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Tempe, where the downtown area is dominated by the ASU campus, set up a free WiFi system a while back in the downtown slightly-off-campus area. As far as I know it is still operating but it was simply to attract people with computers to the bars and restaurants. It isn't that large an area and probably doesn't cost that much to operate. Hopefully the Tempe taxpayers - who are paying for it - find it not too objectionable.
Chandler got hooked up with a company called KiteNet which put access points on lightpoles in a fairly large area of the center of the city - much larger than the downtown area. They were sellling it as an alternative to the cable companies, except with cable you could get 10-20Mbs and their wireless configuration was a mesh with only a few connections to the Internet. Hence, the speeds would be pretty low with a lot of latency as the signal bounced from access point to access point finding its way to a wired connection. You might have 10-20 access points to go through or possibly even more in some places. Today the access points are still on the lightpoles and still powered up as far as I know - but the connection to the Internet was terminated years ago. Nobody signed up to pay and therefore the company closed down.
Nobody was going to pay for wireless access that is really slow but wireless with the sole advantage that they could connect to it on the streetcorner half a block from their house. No, they didn't have coverage in major parks or really anywhere that someone might sit around.
Municipal WiFi can be a taxpayer-funded gift and stick around as long as the taxpayers want to keep on giving the gift away. The problem with this comes when the gift starts to intersect with commercial offerings - unless we want the government to act as an active competitor to business it is an area they should stay out of. And for the significant percentage of the population that really has no interest in WiFi anything, who is going to make the compelling case for them funding it for the folks that want it?
More to the point, I think even a lot of businesses have figured out that you can't make WiFi pay. If it is free in a coffee shop then if the coffee is good people might use it - but the majority of customers aren't interested. If it isn't free in a coffee shop nobody is going to pay and hopefully they are there for the coffee anyway. Most of the "municipal" or bar-and-restaurant-area open area WiFi systems have figured this out by now. Even airports have started figuring out that if it isn't free there will not be enough users to pay for the equipment maintenance and connection fees - so they need to figure out some other way paying for it.
WiFi doesn't pay for itself. Hotels are probably the last remaining bastion where paid WiFi access is common and mostly that is outside of the US. You can't make it pay for itself no matter what you do without a captive audience and there are few places where you have a captive audience that needs to have a WiFi connection.
The problem is we are talking about people's lives here. You want to forfeit your life for a prank or to make a point? OK, thought not. Well, neither do most of the folks currently being given an opportunity to plead to a lesser charge today.
The justice system for the most part sees the scum of the earth and very rarely are these people even technically innocent. They know it and are just interested in doing as little time as they possibly can. They already know the system is broken because they have gotten away with many, many crimes for years before being caught. If it wasn't so badly broken, they would have been caught already.
You see, there is a really simple truth at work here. People know they might get caught but they seriously underestimate the likelyhood of it because based on anecdotal evidence it looks like most people do not get caught. The reality is only about 20% of individual crimes do end up with someone receiving some kind of punishment. But, these are individual crimes - at some point the law of averages catches up with you so on your 40th crime or so it is almost a dead certainity that you are going down for it. The people in the criminal justice system - on the receiving end - do not think this through all they way and see only the few of their friends that are getting caught.
Sure, every once in a while a truely innocent person is hauled into court. At that point they have maybe only a 50/50 chance of escaping undeserved punishment because of the way things work. Would it be nice to fix that? Sure. But to fix it we are going to have to start training children to be more like Beaver and less like Eddie - right now, Eddie is winning out because it looks like he has a lot more fun. Problem is, the Eddies of the world do indeed have more fun but we would really like to live in a world populated with as few Eddies as possible - while it may be fun for Eddie it isn't so much fun for the people around him. We are talking about trying to undo 40 or 50 years of pop culture conditioning and 40 or 50 years of real live experiences in the inner cities of the US.
See, today when you end up in court the guy before you is really guilty and the guy after you is really guilty. The overwhelming number of people are really guilty, so much so that it shades everyone's expectations. Everyone is assumed at one level or another to be guilty because ... for the most part they are. If even 1 in 10 was truely innocent there might be a chance of the system being able to recognize an innocent person but they are so incredibly rare as to make it impossible for the people running the system to recognize them. There may be varying shades of guilt, but even with that the number of people in the system that are in fact guilty, know they are guilty and just wanting to get the smallest pain in their life possible makes the plea bargining system work the way it does.
What is this concept "interest earned"? For the last 10 years or so "interest earned" has been something of a joke. You can walk into any bank or credit union and someone will tell you their savings account offers an interest rate of 0.01% on an annual basis.
This of course is in contrast to a time when interest on savings was 3.5% and home loans were 4.5%.
I recently was offered by someone in all seriousness an interest rate of 1.11% on 300K in a 48 month CD. That is pretty much an assured loss of more than 1% a year with inflation factored in.
If your money is in a savings account, you aren't saving anything but simply losing money slowly. This is especially important for folks that counted on a nice steady income from CDs during their retirement. There is no such income any longer - because interest is simply not paid.
Do you understand the concept of liability insurance?
Insurance companies do not want people doing this kind of work and they will make it difficult for anyone to hire people to do it. The reason is that is high risk and it is going to be expensive for an insurance company. Partly because they are going to have to pay out to either a beneficiary or lawyers when someone gets hurt or killed - and it is an absolute certainty someone will be hurt or killed.
The problem isn't so much the worker but their family. Someone pops up and manages to convince a lawyer to take their case on contingency to sue the maintenance company for not properly disclosing the risks or having them work under difficult conditions or some other silliness. The end result is it just costs money to make it go away one way or another.
Same problem with roofers. Talk to an insurance person about roofers. They do not want to insure them and state worker's compensation insurance is so expensive that it makes it almost impractical to own a roofing company. Almost. But trust me, nobody wants to get into that business today.
Has anyone in the US Military stopped to notice what critical supplies are manufactured solely in China today? I do not mean just armaments, but stuff that the US military would be utterly unable to move without. Stuff like light bulbs. Fuel filters. Glass containers.
Simple little things that the last US manufacturer closed down for either recently or as far back as 1980.
Do we still make toilet paper in the US? I suspect there may only be one factory that does and it will probably close down soon. It is much cheaper to have it made over there and shipped here.
We cannot possibly win a conflict with China - they would cut off our supply of manufactured items and the military would just grind to a halt.
Sure, they could probably shut down a couple of factories making classified munitions, but who cares? They figured out that troops don't fight without toilet paper in WW I and trust me, it hasn't gotten any better. They cut off our supply of toilet paper and the US population would storm Washington and demand an end to the conflict immediately. I am not kidding here.
What this proves is that it is possible in the 21st Century to pull the plug and shut down a good part of the electrical grid.
Think of the possibilities in the US... we could turn off the coal plants tomorrow and the air might get cleaner. It would certainly reduce the CO2 emissions and we could all sit around and wait to see if it had an effect on the climate. It might be a little darker at night and there might be a lot fewer computers available, but some folks certainly think it would be worth it. We are getting ready to re-elect one of them for another four years of somewhat questionable guidance.
So, what would the US look like without coal plants? Would we just buy lots of power from Canada encouraging them to build coal generating plants to sell us the electricity? How about an economic boom for Mexico, building power plants? No, I think the clear way forward would be to just bite the bullet and live with a lot less. Electricity, to start and then shortly after that just about everything else.
One thing to keep in mind is that it is very difficult to charge an electric car when there isn't enough electricity to go around as it is. The US might be building a couple of nuclear plants - construction has started - but they aren't going to be going online for maybe 10 years.
Now, you want to be really bold and daring? How about shutting down the coal plants and the nuclear plants together? There are certainly some folks that think that would be a really good idea. That would cut what, 80% of the electricity supply in the US... might be a bit of a challange there.
Face it, your employer is going to know all about that stuff after six months on the job anyway.
If you have problems with people knowing who you are as a person - things like sexual orientation, marital status, etc. - you aren't going to fit in anywhere except maybe as a WalMart drone.
And in the US, unlike a lot of Western European countries, they can fire you after six months once they figure out that you are being a secretive asshole that behaves like a jerk to fellow employees.
Why would they want to hire someone with "medical issues" that would drive up their insurance cost?
Pricing structure needs adaptation, too. There is no reason for the Kindle version to cost the same as the dead tree version.
Why do you think that? Is it that you believe the price of the book is because the paper is so expensive? Or the shipping? Or is it that the retailer deserves no part and you should just be buying direct from the author?
The problem is authors are generally OK with putting words together but not so great at actually producing a book. Talk to any published author and see if they think they could just get rid of the publisher, editor, copy editor, proofreaders, cover artist, etc. There might be a few that would say they can do it all themselves - but from the results I have seen on Amazon it isn't all that great "going it alone." Most of the authors out there are extremely happy with the staff of people that helped them take their collection of words and turn it into a polished finished product. And all of these people need to get paid.
As far as the costs of paper, shipping and so forth go, books are very cheap to produce. Your average soft-cover book might cost about $2.50 to print in reasonably large quantities, and shipping is almost a joke - put 20 in a box and ship it for $10. Or even less. Book publishers get insane discounts from UPS because of the amount they ship.
I would not expect the prices of ebooks to ever come down to $1 - unless you are looking for something done on a lark by someone. Sure, if I write something small and spend absolutely no time on polishing it it might be possible to have it listed somewhere for $1... and if thousands of people pay $1 I might be pretty happy about it. But to spend any real time on it apart from what I do normally to pay the bills would require getting a lot more than that from it. So at $1 you are going to get books written as a hobby by people that wouldn't understand what is wrong with it and how it isn't finished. You are also going to get ego-driven books where the author knows they have written a masterpiece that rivals all the works of literature over the last thousand years. Expect them to be promoting their book to college professors and saying their book needs to be part of their course on American Literature.
The problem that nobody seems to want to talk about is I, Bystander B is watching and recording the police dealing with Citizen A. Citizen A is very loudly disclaiming that he had anything whatsoever to do with Woman W, who is also standing by the police clearly accusing Citizen A of doing something nasty and wanting the police to "do something about it".
I take my recording home and realize Citizen A just recently had their picture in the news as some supposedly upstanding person. I now have easy blackmail material or can simply sell my recording to the same news organizations for a tidy profit.
It doesn't matter what Citizen A was or was not doing - their public life will be filled with innuendo and snarky comments. If they happen to be married, that might be over now as well. Just having a recording of someone interacting with the police is grounds for termination from any number of public-facing jobs. So with one recording you get to destroy someone's entire life.
Now, if you are Citizen A and making the recording yourself that is a whole different matter. But what the public wants and news organizations will pay for is Bystander B's recording. Today in most jurisdictions attempting to do something like this openly will get you a trip to the jail and your recording device confiscated - you might get it back if you apply in person and pay the $50 fine. Or you might not. You can assume that if these laws are unconstitutional and go unenforced anyone with a life they value will just run from any interaction with the police for fear of it being recorded and used against them.
Sure, the right attitude is that if there is no conviction there is no crime. But that isn't how things work today. If you are publiclly arrested and questioned about rape or child molestation you can figure it will get out and your life is over - no matter if they have the wrong person or not. Having a recording of some school principal getting a traffic ticket when they were complaining about student drivers is going to be lots of fun for people. So this could really stack up to be quite entertaining.
Partly the volume and complexity of the ballot is because back in the 1950s virtually the entire country stopped for a day while 70-80% of the people voted. We are still assuming things are going to work that way. They don't.
Today you might wait in line for 30 minutes to vote. In the 1950s you might have waited a couple of hours in some places. Then they brought in the new voting machines that mechanically tallied votes and this was the beginning of it all. But still it took a lot of people (volunteers as well as the voters) out of the workplace for the day or at least a good part of it.
Today we are tailoring the idea of an election around the idea that it is a huge holiday and no businesses like it. Instead the reality is that it really doesn't affect businesses any longer because instead of 70-80% turnout we have 30%. And all the undocumented workers in the warehouse aren't voting anyway although folks keep trying to sign them up.
How about someone with limited vision who lives alone? What, they have to ask the neighbor to vote for them?
How about someone without the use of their hands? While they could poke a stylus at a screen with their mouth, they can't fill in a scanned box on a paper ballot.
How about someone that insists their ballot must be in Spanish, French, Urdo or Navajo?
Sorry paper ballots aren't going to work in the US.
In the US it got decided that handicapped people should be able to vote. This meant that 99% of the existing systems in place could no longer be used. How do you have a blind person vote without assistance? How about someone that has lost the use of their arms? Then there are the issues of having to have ballots in the language of the voter's choice. This is the sort of thing that has gotten us where we are today with electronic voting machines.
I think the "right" answer is to tell the handicapped that they need to have a "voter" that they bring in to help them or they just don't get to participate. Because that is a lot simpler than all of the other solutions and impacts the fewest number of votes. Same thing with folks that insist they must have a ballot in Urdo - the answer there is English is the official language and no government documents need be in any other.
The other problem is "subjective voting strategies" like the hanging chads. Clearly, this was proven not to be working and worse, more and more chads got punched out the more the cards were handled. Meaning a perfectly valid ballot (card) was invalidated because another punch was made simply by handling it too much. This clearly needed to go.
Arizona uses paper ballots which are electronically scanned. Handy for the polling place but not so good for blind people and those with serious vision problems. The "bad ballot" problem where someone makes too many or too few (or too light) marks is handled immediately because the ballots are scanned when you hand them to the attendant. But it doesn't satisfy the requirements for allowing nearly all handicapped voters to participate. Nor does it solve language problems - Arizona is pretty simple where they need to print only about 25 different language ballots to meet all of the citizen's needs. But imagine a place like LA or New York with hundreds of different languages mandated by the state to be supported. Every election brings new protests that ballots are not in the "right" languages.
Electronic machines that make paper ballots might be the only way that works, but there is no getting away from the electronic machines. They are the only way to deal with the language problems and the handicapped problems. So we aren't getting rid of electronic voting, ever. We just might make it a lot more complicated though.
I certainly agree that Internet voting is so insecure as to be an absurd idea.
If you could get the police to believe that a bitcoin has value to anyone other than a dedicated cult, they might.
However, most local police just pass any "cyber" investigations on to a federal agency, they probably aren't going to do anything anyway. The federal minimum is $25,000 in loss - if you don't have that, they aren't interested. So for a $15,000 loss there probably will be no law enforcement action no matter what.
Credit card fraud (now called Identity Theft by the FBI and reported as such) is almost never prosecuted. It isn't worth it because it is essentially a victimless crime.
No, the card holder is never liable for anything. Not even the $50 they claim they might charge you. In practice the card holder never, ever loses anything.
The credit card company simply does not pay the merchant so they lose nothing. This is part of the merchant agreement that they don't pay fraudulent charges.
If the merchant is worried about this - and all the big ones are - they take out insurance which covers their loss. Fraud happens, the insurance pays and the merchant loses ... nothing. I guess you could say that the merchant is the victim in having to have insurance which covers this, but the insurance also covers a lot of other things so they would have it anyway.
So of course when you report credit card fraud they say not to worry, it is all taken care of. Nothing happens and often the merchandise is really delivered. Most of the "work from home" jobs are in reality dealing with the sort of laundering that goes on from this kind of operation - you send out stuff that was obtained this way to an Ebay customer and then forward the money to the folks running the scheme. Too bad when you get caught with a garage full of the stuff - because that is "receiving stolen goods" and you can end up in jail just for thinking you had it great "working from home".
By the way, I understand that a current credit card number is worth about $0.50 when sold in bulk. So the next time you hand your card to a waiter understand that he needs to collect 100 of them to get $50. Which, considering the way these folks are paid, you can expect a good number of them are supplementing their income in this way.
Sure, GM paid to scrap a lot of streetcar systems that were in place - except in a lot of cases these were just barely hanging on anyway. In the Chicago area the decisions were pretty simple - massive subsidies to continue a failing mass transit system in suburbs or just scrap it. Ridership has pretty much fallen at a steady pace since the 1950s and nothing seems to be able to stop it. All of the suburban bus lines were discontinued and the service taken over by a regional bus company with considerably reduced service. Even in Chicago itself the mixed elevated/subway trains have been cut back because of lack of ridership.
I suspect most US cities have had similar experiences. The problem is really a chicken-and-egg problem: to have a large robust mass transit system you need a lot of ridership which will not materialize without a large robust system. There is no way to "build up" a mass transit system because until you have the geographical coverage and schedule people will just use cars.
Now, the way to force mass transit in the US would be to first mandate that all companies have to be located in the city center and not in far-flung suburban locations. Except in most US cities the city center is a decaying mess that has been abandoned. Even the police don't want to be there. So there is a lot of crime on people left over that didn't escape or have come to see the sights - muggings, rapes, and robberies. So you need a safe, clean and well-maintained city center before you mandate companies move there. Of course, over the last 80 years or so the infrastructure (restaurants, shops, etc.) all left the city center as well, so you need to figure out how to get them back too - or companies can't move there because there is no supporting infrastructure left.
OK, so after passing some draconian laws about where a company can be located and forcing other businesses to locate in the city center you now have a safe and secure city center all ready for workers. You can get rid of all the parking lots as well and mandate that people use mass transit to get to work. Except the transit companies sold off the train cars because they weren't needed with reduced ridership. So now you have to give money to the transit companies to rebuild their fleet of trains and buses to cope with the increased ridership. And you need to do that first before the people need it.
Sure, it could all be done. Except it would take a big city to spend billions on infrastructure and mass transit and still force - by rule of law - companies to spend billions collectively to relocate to city centers. I don't think there is that much money laying around right now to do that with. Certainly no city would be able to do that today without massive government support.
Should the US government enact a program like this to remake the country back to the way transit was in 1955? I would offer that a lot of people would say that instead of looking back we should be looking forward with whatever that means. So the decision is anything but clear. I'd say mass transit in the US is dead and or dying and destined to be permanently so. It has taken 60+ years to remake the cities the way they are now and it might take another 60 years to move in a different direction - if everyone could agree on a direction.
Do notr forget that IBM was one of the first companies distributing source code for all their software products. You licensed the product, you got the source code.
Originally, nearly all of it was in straight Assembler language. Except the Fortran IV complier which had substantial parts written in POP, a custom language for writing a Fortran compiler. Later on, they introduced PL/S which was far less usable.
Exactly; murder is inappropriate in today's society. However you shouldn't be sent to jail for 30 years for thinking about murder.
Well, the context of a "hate crime" is exactly that - punishing someone for what they are thinking. Perhaps 30 years is not the right number, but if you think about killing a minority you are indeed committing a hate crime. Today they may wait until you commit a few more crimes before they prosecute you, but this doesn't change the fact that it is a crime.
I believe that when murder is combined with "hate crime" in some states this makes you eligible for the death penalty.
Sorry, but that last sentance says it all. "Assange will hold him to that campaign promise" No, that isn't the way the world works. Non-entity individuals DO NOT get to "hold presidents to promises" and the sooner the Internet community understands that the better it will be for everyone.
What is going to happen is Mr. Assange will be made an example of. Somehow, in some really significant public way it will be made clear to everyone that if you get material that damages a lot of high ranking political figures you do something besides making it freely available. Because if it becomes available you will wish someone killed you before you ever got the stuff. That is Mr. Assange's fate.
Now, the US government overall is just screwed up enough to drop the ball on this. The effect will be that after all the saber-rattling that nobody ever believes a single thing to come from a politician ever again. No government will have any credibility - which is perhaps the right course. We deserve a worldwide revolution in the name of credibility, but we really don't deserve the governments that would replace what we have now. I'd expect someone with "ultimate credibility" to end up as a world leader with most of the planet under their thumb, and there are only a couple of sources of "ultimate credibility" Allah is the big one of course.
So are we ready for all/most Western governments to be replaced by one omnipotent Caliph? Better hope someone has some credibility left when the dust settles then. People really don't like knowing their governments are impotent liars, which is the case today. People respond to this by picking someone with some kind of credibility and putting them in charge so there is someone they can believe in. Want to know more? Hitler was someone they could believe in. They believed in Lenin. Mohammad started a poltical movement that lasted over 600 years because people believed in him - and they still do.
Two points that you might want to consider:
The technically competent aren't going to organize so the rest is fantasy. Without organization, all that is going to happen is a few people could be made an example of - likely by being dragged out of their office and shot. Yes, shot. Screwing with Joe Sixpack's entertainment is not something that can be tolerated. Joe Sixpack might want to rise up and confront politicians and have enough motivation to actually organize and force some real changes. That can't be allowed, so the response will be immediate and severe. Expect the National Guard or Army to enforce this - it is going to have to be way too severe for the police force.
We are starting to get into the idea that there are different sorts of hate and different degrees of it. Hate against a protected class (say, a minority) is a different level of hate under this thinking. Clearly different from the sort of hate that many African Americans have against white people because they have been brought up to believe that all white people are slavers and want nothing more than to re-enslave the black race.
No, sorry, you don't get to do that. Hate is hate. It is a destructive emotion but it is little more than emotion. Once we start prosecuting hate we are a short way away from prosecuting "conservatism" which to many is far more destructive than hate. Any internal throught process is then fair game regardless of its expression in actions. As much as I would like to prosecute Pollyanna-ish liberals for their beliefs in a "go along to get along" world, it is not the way to organize a society unless one is actively striving for 1984. Because if it were possible to do such prosecutions, you can bet it would be fashionable to prosecute all sorts of undesirable attitudes or the "wrong sort of thinking."
Once you start prosecuting people for what they believe, trouble is bound to follow. And by definition "hate crimes" are clearly prosecuting someone for what they believe or are thinking.
If you want to make the world safe for homosexuals, the place to start is not with what people are thinking but what they are doing. Simlarly, if you want to make the world safe for Jews "enhancing" sentances for swastica-painters because of what they believe is not the right way to do it. Instead, increase the penalties for external actions - like painting a swastica - which is something at least everyone can see.
There is clear evidence that the political correctness movement of society demands that when something that can be considered to be "hate" it must be so. There is no room for interpretation here - if we are going to criminalize hate then it must be done forcefully and completely with no options for wiggling out through supposed ignorance. This makes for a very uncomfortable legal environment for a lot of people, myself included. I believe the idea of a "hate crime" is nonsense and trying to enhance penalties for ordinary crimes because of "hate" being a factor is a bad idea. This clearly is delving into the area of trying to decide what people are thinking internally and externalizing it in some way. What does it matter what someone is thinking and why should we increase penalties for certain thoughts?
The legal system should not be considering thoughts but only actions. Unfortunately, that is not the direction we are going.
In the US today we have "protected classes". These are classes of people that must not be assailed in any way. Women are a protected class and any treatment of them that singles them out because of their gender is illegal today. Similarly, minorities are a protected class in this manner - if you treat an African-American male as an African-American, that is illegal. However, if you treat an African-American male as a male, well, that isn't a protected class. It can get pretty confusing.
The idea of a protected class apart from others is not how one builds an equal society but one where some are more equal than others. There is no condition that I can agree with that says minorities should receive treatment under the law that is different from anyone else. Especially because they are a member of a minority. The law should be minimizing the fact of their differences from the "rest of us" rather than attempting to maximize the differences.
It is somewhat an open question how much homosexuals are a protected class. There are some states having laws that offer blanket protected class status to homosexuals and make it illegal to consider sexual orientation in any manner or for any purpose. Other states have less clear laws and there may only be certain situations where sexual orientation is forbidden from being considered. For example, while many would consider it to be inappropriate for a gay male to be teaching a sexual education class to young girls. In some states it is illegal to bar them from this activity whereas in others it may actually be forbidden by law for them to do it. Very confusing, especially when you get into transsexuals. Court cases are beginning to pop up where it starts to become necessary to discuss what sort of anatomy the is present and what sort of anatomy is desired regardless of what is present.
In the US we are clearly moving into some very interesting territory, one that encompasses the outer edges of what consent can be considered to be. In the US we have been conditioning ourselves to think of unequal power relationships as bad between men and women. But when you get into sexual behaviors where one party is clearly dominant and the other (often permanently) submissive we are supposed to throw all that conditioning away and embrace "the new way". For a lot of people this is very difficult to absorb and they are going to consider unequal power relationships - where one party is clearly in control and the other just has to follow along and do what they are told - as a bad thing. The fact that the US has just gone through, and is still going through, efforts to establish women as equal to men with bra burning, effective birth control and significant changes in the legal framework makes it even more difficult.
Probably a far better question is when your purchases at a grocery store are scanned who owns the scan data? Right now the grocery store sells it to a marketing company which analyzes is and sells the aggregated data back to manufacturers and the like.
So if you are in the business of selling toothbrushes wouldn't you like to know if your brand is being beat out by some upstart in Whole Foods stores but not in the low-cost no-frils stores? Would that not tell you something important? Literally, this is the life or death of manufacturers today because if they don't have accurate data they are going to make bad decisions and lose money. Most manufacturers of consumer products are operating on a very thin margin as it is so they can't afford to make mistakes.
Sure, there is a lot of data that Google collects and is selling the same way, but it happening everywhere in the world, not just on the Internet.
No, I don't believe for a second that the US government is going to try to restrict this or regulate it in any way. There is too much of it happening and it is too big a part of the way manufacturers and retailers work today.
In fact, the main reason I hate the IRS is because my tax dollars are going to fund operations like the TSA. I have no problem with paying taxes, provided they're used responsibly and productively. That's simply not the case here.
Wow, that is a good one. Can you think of any department or agency of the federal government that isn't mired in 50% or more waste? I can't. From the Army to the National Zoo I believe there is a floor of at least 50% waste and some cases it is better than 90%.
I do not believe the "Independence Day" explanation for $40,000 toliet seats - that this money isn't being spent there but is instead being syphoned off to black programs. I am quite sure the government is capable of procuring $40,000 toliet seats and doing so in preference to vendors offering gold-plated ones that meet the same standards for $20,000 because the $40,000 vendor assisted in writing the specification so that it can only be met with their product. If you haven't been in on the federal procurement and bidding process you have no understanding of what is going on.
I would have no problem with paying taxes if they were used responsibly and productively. I believe in most cases the current taxes fund at least 50% waste, abuse and absurd procurement processes. The remaining 50% could stand a chance of being used for the well being of the country. And all I hear about is how the government needs more and more money.
One other thing you need to add: search any site that feeds information back to Google.
Two that I know of are Amazon and Newegg. Do any search there and you will start seeing ads for what you searched for on every Google ad site there is. Not sure if they are paying Amazon and Newegg for this information or what, but I would imagine any online merchant of any size is feeding their searches into Google for tracking and such.
They probably connect it up with the credit card information so Google has your name and address to go with your salable information. Important for good demographics. There is no point in sharing the credit card number - the fact that you are searching for high-end tequila from a particular zip code is more valuable than your credit card number anyway.