I'm going to contact them about a texting only package where they disable voice capability and you have to oay one year upfront at like 20 bux a month!
1,876 karma · joined February 19, 2018
Not even trying to start an argument, I didn't think they had that much bandwidth. I suppose they do voice calls but definitely not video or pictures?
I would be thoroughly, thoroughly, infinitely pleased to switch to a satellite only texting service. I've been seriously considering just making the switch now and porting all of my news consumption habits to text files that are texted to me.
Their lowest tiers I think are 19.99 a month but only allow 10-40 text messages?
For example, I use Dillo on my Linux laptop. Anything that is not formatted for HTML is completely rejected. I would prefer to set how stringently filtered I want sites to be.
Try browsing zerohedge.com or any local news site. It is an abomination of autoplay video ads, forced scrolling, 70% toolbars covering screen, photos every 5 sentences...
And like 40kb of text.
Alternatively everyone can just stop making 5MB websites. My 1kb/s mobile Verizon connection can't handle it
Considering that I spend $30 a month for Verizon prepaid, where the cell coverage is hilariously spotty and data is 1kb/s, an extra $20 a month seems entirely worth it, especially if you go off the beaten path like I do in random countries.
Hooray commerce!
It is so comfortable, cheap, and convenient that I legitimately am stumped why anyone would ever spend more than $125 on a king mattress as a result. It's incredible.
Anyone spending hundreds or thousands on a mattress has been thoroughly duped and that's why there is such a war between mattress companies.
They have our understanding of physics but seemingly way more ability to mass produce and launch these items into interstellar space in specific ways for stars to collide with them.
Or it's a 2 billion year old sandblasted rock that caught some weird gravity assists :)
The scientist who is hoping that Oumuamua is a solar sail is a Harvard scientist under the employ of Zuck et al. to make a solar sail and send it to Alpha Centauri. He does a good job of countering some of the arguments against Oumuamua being anything other than a rock.
1) Ouamuamua, according to him, is either cigar shaped or pancake shaped, based on the way it is reflecting light. He allges it is even just millimeters thick, and that we've never seen a rock naturally form this way.
2) He argues that the lack of radio activity from the object is due to the object either being inactive, or only send data back to its host system in a ray, not an omnidirectional cloud. So, Earth wouldn't detect the radio signals.
3) He argues there is nothing to gain by calling it a rock and thinks that some civilization many thousands of years ago maybe have created billions of solar sails and sent them to any and every star on a whim. He argues that the sail was deployed as a buoy that would sit in place until our system came roaring past it. We weren't targeted directly, but the object was designed to flyby our habitable zone.
-- All in all I think he does an interesting job of explaining why the object is different from the thousands of rocks we have observed, but I have no way of confirming if his analysis is true. Based on the red spectral data, the tumbling nature of the light reflected at us, and the artist's impression of the 150m ish object, I thought the scientific consensus was that it was just a really weird rock formed in chaotic conditions that has drifted in the galaxy for eons.
I guess we will have to start building some sails to find out :)
It sounds like we could ball-park the number at 33% of Americans being in high cost of living areas.
Additionally, it sounds like we agree that that percentage might change based on if you're looking at urban, suburban, or rural areas, and if you are factoring in dependents or retirees.
I think the question we ask from here is, "how do we increase the number of people who are able to have a large chunk of discretionary income coming in?"
For this the answer is probably political, contentious, and complex. Not everyone can be a programmer, as there's only 4 million computer professionals in the US right now. Not everyone can be a licensed employee either, who tend to make more money (health care, law), because labor supply is strictly regulated for these professions.
I think if we were to somehow reduce rent-seeking behavior in the economy (real estate and health insurance prices are pretty good indicators of state-enforced supply restrictions), then prices and salaries would begin to approach the mean again, which is around 50k per person.
I guess what I'm saying here is I think the roofer who makes 37k a year in Newark NJ is being underpaid, and the physician's assistant who makes 100k a year in Scottsdale AZ is being overpaid. I would wager their labor is of equal value, but is being artificially disrupted.
This hardly sounds like a steal to me because it is exactly what I am paying in NY. I make $2200 post tax per month, which is bang on the median income in this area. Half of my money goes to rent, the other half to car/food/health insurance and so on.
Were I to lose my job or have kids, the situation would be completely unaffordable in a matter of months as opposed to years, which is the type of cushion the earlier generations had.
Most of the kids in NY state are living under the care and support of their parents and aren't working, therefore they shouldn't even be a factor in population/labor force participation metric.
Additionally, many of the old people who aren't working shouldn't be factored in either because they are receiving quite high pensions to live from, as well as social security.
When you factor this in, my initial ratios still stand. Out of the 325m people living in the USA, 45% are working (145m). When subtracting the 30% of Americans who are retired or under the care of parents, you are removing 100m people.
Therefore, as you say, the "prime age" labor force participation rate is 65% (145m/225m).
Applying this ratio to my original numbers, 45.5 million people are laborers in the Northeast. The other 25m either used to be laborers or are protected financially by laborers.
We cannot possibly say that an area like Amarillo TX, with just 100,000 laborers, is indicative of some nationally sustainable trend where cost of living is cheap and wages are still high.
This denies the existence of an extremely large block of humans, who are struggling despite earning decent money.
However, I would urge you not to discount the existence of 50m people in the Northeast megacorridor[1]. I am not particularly aware of what services are received that directly benefit people living here other than the ones that I have personally experienced, which are unemployment income and pension income for teachers (my parents).
In fact, 90% of property taxes in NY are sent to our school districts. I don't have kids, so I can only benefit from this in the abstract.
Additionally, I think it's important to note that in the last 20 years, wages have not risen in NY more than a dollar or two per hour, yet property values have risen from 100k to about 300k on Long Island.
I think these are serious headwinds for anyone pulling in 30k a year post tax, such as myself.
The price of rent/mortgage is directly affected by property tax.
Believe me, I want all of us to be like Texas.
Amarillo TX population: 265,000
NY, LA, CHI, DAL, HOU, DC, MIA: 70,000,000
Of course this is a pretty dumb risk to take, even if you were able to resell the valuable items you bought like TVs, tools, and jewelry
Do we assume "incompetence", or "deliberate action", in misidentifying the source of this sound?
I always assume good faith and that honest mistakes happen, but in the realm of politics, "mistakes", whether rightly or wrongly, lead to hundreds of deaths [1]
[1] Korea Air shootdown, USS Vincennes shootdown, US bombing of Chinese embassy Belgrade [2]
[2] "Sorry, intern put in the wrong bombing coordinates"
Highway robbery :_(
I completely agree with your points. The menu was horribly complex, such that orders were always wrong. Getting things remade took forever, and it often wasn't my fault. Either the customer would forget to specify something, or the cook wouldn't read the ticket correctly. In a less busy restaurant, things can be fixed easily, but not in this one.
Payment was also quite slow, as you noted. Constant trips, constant check errors. Constant haggling about wanting things for free because of some slight error.
The place should have offered 10 standard dishes. The amount of food inventory and wine inventory spoiling because of disuse/no space was abominable.
The kitchen was always a frantic mess and the cooks frequently undercooked things or cross contaminated. There was no room for carefulness because the line was always out the door.
I ultimately left because at 7.50 an hour, supporting myself was hard. Tips were frequently better at lunch because the kitchen could prepare meals better. But $400 a week was not cutting it in NY, with no health insurance.
I praise automats as the future!!
He also bought Bank of America at all time lows, and now its a massively profitable company, so he is neither always right nor always wrong.
And I'm sure a number of them can also be dismissed as "bad doctors", but not all.
I am commenting more specifcally about institutional analysts (Goldman, Oppenheimer, Morgan Stanley, Jeffries, and so on).
They have been recommending people purchase Apple stock for the whole year now, saying the fair value for the stock is $220. As you and I know, it was not long ago that it was more fairly valued at $70-110.
I don't know how anyone in good conscience can recommend such overvalued prices on a clearly parabolic chart!
Lehman Bros news broke around September 2008. The stock market didn't reach its lowest lows until March of 2009.
Losing 45% in 3 months is a failure. Maybe not a catastrophic one, but whoever was recommending buying apple in September 2018 is now revealed as having literally zero idea of what they're talking about.
I always feel bad for anyone who trusts institutional advice and buys stocks at all time highs.
Imagine having someone this unethical as a business partner or investor. How can you trust a word out of their mouth?
Just go get legit warm introductions through hard work and merit.