It's called "living in a country." And, sometimes those remote locations provide a service to the rest of us like remote refueling points, Alaskan oil wells, or agriculture that makes subsidizing their quality of life an overall bargain.

Yeah, it'd be a real shame if they had to start charging the real cost of providing those services, to the people actually using them...

You want Wild West unregulated living, Somalia is accepting visas.

Well, if you're going to play that game, so is North Korea.

First off, why do you think 99% are screwed? do you think the small percent rise in stamps is that onerous?

I admit, the 99% number was made up. It's actually "only" 79.219% being screwed. They're being screwed because the government mandates that they subsidize mail delivery costs for the other 21%. 79% of the population is paying more money on behalf of the other 21%. How can are they not being screwed?

and it's not just small towns, it's also distances. How much does it cost to fed-ex a letter ? I just checked, and to gt a letter send from Oregon to New York via fed-ex is over 16 dollars and it will be there in 5 days. Slower and many times more expensive.

I don't believe you. According to the FedEx website it's only $10.22 to ship a 5 pound package from Seattle to New York in 5 days. It's also a guaranteed 5 day delivery time, which the post office isn't going to give you for a regular letter. For reference, the USPS offers 7-day delivery of a 5 pound package for $4.90, calculated here. It's cheaper, but it's being subsidized by the millions of people who have to pay too much for postage.

Besides that, you're not really getting the point. If Fedex doesn't charge noticeably more than the USPS the government would say they were competing with the PS and impose a huge fine against them. The only exception is for "extremely urgent" packages, which is why FedEx's longest standard delivery time is 5 only days, and why they're so popular for shipping things on a tight schedule.

The post office is far more efficient then pretty much every private corporation.

Then it's fucking asinine that we waste money enforcing their monopoly, because they'd just beat out their competitors anyway, right?

If you allowed private enterprises to compete unchecked, they would cherrypick the most profitable routes (hubs, basically) and quickly bankrupt the Post Office. They'd also charge less than the Post Office on short routes that the Post Office would need to subsidize the longer routes. But if you had to regulate competitors to make sure they had the same disadvantages as the Post Office, what's the point?

How can you even speculate about that? You have no idea what would happen because it's illegal for anybody to even try it.

But, basically you're saying 99% of the population should be screwed because 1% of the population doesn't want to pay the true cost of their mail delivery. Why should we favor that 1%? If they want cheap mail, they can move to the city. There are many extra expenses associated with living in the middle of nowhere, I don't see why higher prices for mail shouldn't be one of them.

Price them out vs. their competition and they are pretty darned competitive for a big government bureaucracy

Before you get too excited about how great the USPS is, you should realize that it's illegal to compete with the USPS, except for "extremely urgent" deliveries, where they get pwned by UPS and FedEx.

Silence may be ideal, but it's not very realistic where I work. If I don't listen to music I'm constantly bothered by people walking past my cube or phones ringing or people talking or ... If I listen to headphones then the music blocks out all of the external noise, and I just zone out listening to music and coding. I hardly even notice the music most of the time. I guess it's easier to tune out the more rhythmic music than it is to tune out random office noise.

Do you not understand the difference between a government entity and a business?

They can only succeed if YOU give it to them. Do not apply to these jobs, show them they cannot make money doing this.

That's actually why this is so funny. It's the city government requiring this - they're not out to make money. If they want your money then all they have to do is take it. You can let them take it, or you can go to jail. And for an extra laugh, with the poor economy they'll probably have people lining up for these jobs. <sarcasm>Good thing those city employees won't be handling important private data, like tax records.</sarcasm> LMAO.

This is another great example of why the government should be as tiny as possible.

Ok if that is true then why did these two organizations have the some of the lowest rates of "toxic assests" of all the financial lending organizations? The answer is because they were followers, not leaders in the CDO-swap maddness. To use a swimming analogy, really they only waded out into ocean up to their knees while many private firms cannonballed into it off the end of a pier.

No, the answer is that the purpose of Freddie and Fannie was to buy mortages on the secondary market, securitize them, and then resell them. In other words, the entire point was to give credibility to the loans and then sell them off to other financial firms. That's why they had so few "toxic assets"... the entire point was to resell. The secondary result was that financial firms were more willing to make bad loans because they knew Freddie and Fannie would buy them.

While those two organizations do have their problems, blaming the financial crisis on Freddie and Fannie is red herring. It is also one without even the slightest connection to reality if you listen to interviews from people who were in the private financial firms and were involved in the actual lending and trading.

Question: You're an official with a major financial institution, hoping to score some bail out money. You're high enough in the organization to speak to Congress and go on TV. Do you go in front of everybody and place the blame where it belongs, on the government, killing any chances of getting "free" money, or do you suck it up and take the fall, along with all the money that goes with it?

Businesses (especially huge, faceless businesses) don't have pride, and turning down billions of dollars of "free" money is just stupid. That's why the financial firm "insiders" are willing to take the blame.

What you have blurted out of your noise hole is directly contrary to the consensus amongst professional economists. It is also contrary to logic - if these institutions were flawed because of government intervention why did they fail when government intervention in them was reduced, not when it was greater?

Which economists do you mean? And what reductions are you talking about? In fact, until very recently, government pressure to give out sub-prime loans had been increasing.

As for the computer industry: Bletchley Park, APRANET, the World Wide Web, Linux, the Apollo Guidance Computer - all developed without your beloved profit motive. Suck on it.

And most of those were only possible because of rapid developments in semiconductors and computer equipment, which evolved even faster, and didn't need government hand outs.

Also, Linux doesn't belong on your list, as it's not supported by taxes. I'm not arguing in favor of "profit motive" - I'm arguing against having to pay for stuff I don't think is important. If you want to voluntarily donate money to sending people to Mars, feel free, but you shouldn't be able to spend my money on sending people to Mars.

Right, lets leave it to private enterprise, so they can do for spaceflight what they've done for the financial services industry.

Nice try, but it was mostly Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that fucked of the financial services industry.

Even still, maybe the private sector would do for space flight what it's done for the computer industry?

Also, even comrade Obama disagrees with you here, because as he's cutting NASA's budget he's giving out hundreds of billions of dollars to private companies in an ill conceived attempt to stimulate the private sector. Maybe you should tell him to stop spending so much money bailing out that "superstitious bullshit", and divert more of it to seemingly better causes, like the war on drugs, paying single moms to have kids, paying farmers not to farm, and sending people to Mars for no good reason.

If the media industry had caught on the track earlier and offered music at a reasonable price without any crippling DRM they would have been better off in sales. There are people willing to pay for it, if they can get it. Going torrent works for some, but some of us wants a reliable and legal source for our media.

Millions and millions of people think the music industry sells music at a reasonable price. Where do you think the music industry got all of its money?

If you don't think the price is reasonable, then don't buy it and wait till it plays on the radio or something. The world doesn't revolve around you. You don't get to set the price at which other people sell their stuff.

Sure it is. Input and output is nothing more than reading and writing to the proper memory locations.

Oh, I know - and I can think of a dozen similar ways to make the C++ version slower than the C version. But nobody with any sense would do that if they were trying to speed up the code as much as possible. The scienceblog page even went so far as to say the code was "carefully optimized". I was calling into question how "carefully optimized" it could be, given that swapping it out with the C version would be trivial and would likely cut the time in half.

I don't buy it.

The first clue is that the speed of the C++ version doesn't match the C version. Of course there's a difference between "good C++" and "good C", but if your goal is speed then you're not typically concerned about those differences.

Second, reading through the scienceblog.com article, the author calls the (unavailable) code "carefully optimized," yet he claims the C code is slower than the others because of pointer aliasing. However, any modern C compiler has pragmas and compiler optimization flags that tell it to assume no aliasing occurs. How carefully could he have optimized the code if he didn't even bother turning on compiler optimizations?

I don't think the scienceblogs guy really knows enough about C and C++ to back up his claim.

Not even close.

Communism fails because its underlying assumption is that the people being ruled are too stupid to make decisions for themselves and that some government beaureacrat hundreds or thousands of miles away, with no first hand knowledge, knows better than individual people what those people should buy, what they should produce, and how they should live their lives.

Paranoia and sabotage are minor flaws when the whole underlying idea is broken.

HOW is that not overpaid?

According to who? Large quantities of people seem to disagree with you and feel it's worthwhile to spend money watching Arnold Schwarzenegger, listening to Britney Spears, and watching professional sports. You're saying all of those people are wrong, they're too stupid to spend their own money, and they should be letting you spend it for them?

So 99.9999% of people don't even get control of their own finances, but you should get to control the finances of everybody in the entire country?

If you really think sports stars are "just playing a game" and it has nothing to do with talent, then what the fuck are you doing whining on Slashdot? Why aren't you out collecting your millions with an easy singing, acting, or sports job?