Pfft, I mentioned STEM fields as a place where college degrees make sense. Read it again.

STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

I'd probably say that most IT people can learn through mentorship programs versus college, though.

Yes, I routinely turn away customers.

I am proud of the product we provide, the price we aim for, and the overall quality of the people I've hired.

In the 25 years I've been running businesses (since back in the BBS days), I've had this attitude. It's my product. I am buying your money with my product. For my payment in services, I am expecting cash-sellers who have a good attitude and aren't part of the every-growing sissy-entitled mentality that has taken over the average Joe in this country.

I don't care if you don't like me. Some of my regular customers actually hate me (and have told me so), but they're willing to shut their traps about their political ideologies because I run damn fine businesses.

And what's wrong with that?

The entitlement mentality for those with college degrees in almost every field is astounding. Completely jaw-dropping in some cases.

Other than STEM fields, I can't imagine what a college degree will bring to a person's ability to make a happy customer and a profitable company.

All of my businesses are those where degrees have replaced internships and mentorship programs. Most of my top earning employees have moved on to other companies -- companies that didn't even consider their lack of a degree because they had actual job skills earned by working for me and learning from my people.

I look at all my friends who have graphic design degrees but can't design. I look at friends with business degrees but they can't run a business. Administrative assistants who went to college? For what, to answer the phone, manage customers and file paperwork? For real?

Even in accounting there is much more to be learned on-the-job than in any 4 year program.

Fuck if I care -- 90% of my client base is non-degreed. 90%. And the 10% who are degreed? They can barely afford our services across the board, usually due to their debt burden.

I own businesses in the Midwest and South Florida. When I post a job listing (usually through Craigslist), I specifically request people with no degree apply.

In the past 9 years, 100% of people I've hired were undegreed. These were the people I wanted, because they specifically weren't indoctrinated into the college mentality. I want self-starters, people I can later on invite to become a business partner. I also don't want political correctness, feminism or any of the other progressive mindsets in any of my businesses. Those people can hit the road -- I don't even want them as customers.

I also hate having employees with major debt.

I pay better than average wages, and I purposely look through applications for the non-degreed folks.

I'd love to see a job search website that focuses on people bright enough to skip 4 years of college and just hit the employment roles.

Of course, I don't have HR departments, I would never hire an MBA, and I go out of my way to work with the millions of entrepreneurs out there who also didn't go to college but are earning bank.

Maybe with luck society will separate into two groups: the politically correct nauseated degreed folks and the self-driven and determined entrepreneurial type.

...recent Western culture has shown that a higher percentage of men have become fathers in the past few generations than before that.

As more and more males become adjusted to the instant high of popular culture, we'll just return to the times when a tinier percentage of men were having all the babies.

Marriage is already on a decline, in some races good husbands are hard to find so women have more biracial babies, and the powerful men won't stop spreading their seed.

Does it matter to me if the weak male class doesn't have kids? Hell no -- and they make good employees, too. Maybe better ones.

50% of your body hasn't wasted away by the time you turn 35. You're lucky if the opposite doesn't happen.

They never said:

1. Unlimited speeds
2. Unlimited data

The term "unlimited" is from the AOL-centric dial-up days where you had a limited amount of connection hours.

Unlimited still means *unlimited connection time*.

It's been discussed before. Read your TOS and the fine print on advertising.

Primes have no patterns, so why not just map sounds/beats to prime numbers?

I have two B&N nooks, and I've always been able to share any of the books I buy with friends.

There's a limitation (8 weeks or something), and you can't loan the same book to the same friend twice.

I can also "check out" books from my local library via their website, and I've done that before trips where I won't have good Internet coverage.

How does B&N get away with being able to do it, but Amazon can't?

If they would let the developers choose to add sponsored results within the map (with a category to pick so as not to compete), maybe they can offset the price.

I wouldn't have a problem if my map showed Taco Bell or Red Box locations.

Of course, I guess the app or website could filter the sponsored results out, but I'm sure Google's smart spiders and human TOS verifiers could detect it and remove the free access. If only 0.35% of their API users are affected, it's not like they've got that much work to confirm proper TOS compliance.

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

I think a lot of a woman's security has to do with city and neighborhood, too. I have a few friends who are college educated or better and who also have entered the amateur porn field (here in Chicago there are plenty of jobs and they pay well) -- none of them feel the least bit afraid of stalkers and fans. One gal I know has been performing mostly solo work (full nudity, though) and she has guys come up to her at bars and during the day and are all really nice.

On the other hand, practically EVERY waitress I know who works a late shift (diner or bar) has people follow her home -- even in the dead of Chicago's winter.

Dr. Sbaitso? Is that you???

I spit out a solid half finger of good Scotch whisky at that.

Haven't laughed this hard in weeks.

Good work.