The cheapest family plan is $100 if you include unlimited text messaging, or $70 without it. It costs $40 to add a smartphone ($10 per line plus $30 for smartphone data). So now it's cheaper if you get less than 4GB of data. Also, $10 gets you 2 GB more, instead of 1GB for only one phone. If you use any text messages at all, it's cheaper no matter what.

It costs $10 to add a line to a family plan now, with an additional $30 if it's a smartphone, so the price has only gone up for basic phones. Also, minutes used to cost you something, and now they are included in the price of the bucket of data.

I'm currently on a family plan. I just looked at my bill, and I'm paying:
$100 for 1400 shared minutes and unlimited messaging
$10 per line
$30 per smartphone
which adds up to $180 for 2 smartphones.

With this, I would pay:
$60 for 2GB data plus unlimited messaging plus unlimited minutes
$40 per smartphone
which is $140 for 2 smartphones. If I up the data to 4GB, it's $150.

It's the same price to add a smartphone, so you just compare the new data price to the old voice+text price.

I would think that someone who is so good at reading would realize that I was being facetious about being myself unconstitutional.

Programs that transfer money from rich people to poor people are nonetheless favored by many rich people, so it's not a case of unproductive people wanting handouts and taking them at the point of a rifle (that was bought with a rich person's tax money). We have a system in place for deciding how the government works, and we used that system to come to a consensus about the powers and limits of the welfare state (the conversation is ongoing, and the consensus is changing, which I take as a sign that the system works).

There are technical arguments about the marginal value of money, aggregate utility &c, but by "benefits everyone" I meant "benefits the country as a unit" rather than "benefits every single person." Social Security (for example) didn't just happen, we created it because people too old to work were literally starving and dying because they didn't have enough money. I think some asshole who complains about "unproductive people" and calls the only way to fund a government "taking money and property away" still benefits from not living in a country where old people starve and people die every day from easily preventable and treatable medical conditions.

I marvel at how obvious you think this is, when pretty much nobody agrees with you. "The Constitution says X and Y, but not Z, DUH!" OK dude. Do you go to the theater and yell at the actors when you think their interpretation of Hamlet is wrong?

"Basic health care for everyone" sure sounds general to me, but I guess I'm not constitutional because it doesn't mention me by name.

The fact is, the language of the Constitution is ambiguous. If it were as precise as you think it is, we wouldn't have spent the last couple hundred years and change arguing about what it means. Pretty much everyone interprets "general welfare" as including protections for vulnerable groups, because we don't want to live in a society where old people eat cat food because they can't afford real food and they can't get a job. I think that benefits everyone, you clearly disagree.

Kind sir, *makes wanking motion with hand*

So Congress can spend money to provide for the general welfare of the country, and it can pass any laws which are necessary and proper to that end.

Or do you actually mean that Congress cannot pass laws that do anything for the general welfare but spend money?

"general welfare"

look it up

Traditionally, the average citizen looks at the possible candidates and chooses one whose beliefs and policy preferences line up with their own. The system you suggest would require instead that a citizen become well-informed not only on a wide range of issues, but also on legislative procedure and language, competing amendments, legislative strategy (horse-trading, or voting against one version of a bill with language one favors in order to allow another, better version to pass in its place) &c.

As someone who thinks we already vote too much (county and state judges, county board of supervisors, city council, mayor, governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state house and senate, federal house and senate and president, not to mention county, city and state referenda) for the average person to remain well-educated, can you tell me why you think direct citizen involvement in the legislative process itself might produce better outcomes?

There's a conversation about "thug culture" in general, and there's a very real effort on the part of Zimmerman's defenders to paint Martin as a thug in order to blame him for getting killed. Context matters.

I think the biggest problem with conversations about race is the trouble we have communicating about the difference between a person being a racist, and a person performing a racist action. The latter does not imply the former. I don't particularly care if Zimmerman is a racist; I don't think he is, I think calling this a hate crime cheapens the term, and I think it's irrelevant anyway. Most of the conversation I've seen is saying that the police failed to fully investigate the shooting because the victim was black.

The fraction of rapes in which an unknown assailant jumps out of the bushes and grabs the victim is far smaller than you think. Most rapes are perpetrated by acquaintances of the victims, or against a drunk or drugged victim. The idea that giving women guns is a solution to the problem of rape comes totally from this idea that America is an extraordinarily dangerous place and the only way to survive it is with a gun. It's at odds with reality. I don't think gun control laws are constitutional or a solution to the problem, though.

I'm aware of Fast and Furious; it sounds like a shitty idea. It wasn't the first operation of its kind, but it appears to have been the biggest. I think more investigation is needed, and I wouldn't be too upset if Holder lost his job, nor if someone with more direct responsibility goes to jail for negligence in the operation's execution. I think the controversy is overblown, and the Obama administration has done far worse.

This is what I'm talking about. "Thug culture" is far from the only part of our society that promotes violence against people who disrespect us. We drop bombs on people we think are disrespecting us! Tom Friedman says we had to make Iraq "suck on this." Michael Leeden says we have to "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business," and he isn't laughed out of the world. The idea that black people invented macho shit like this is preposterous. The idea that fighting back against some weirdo following you through a neighborhood you don't know well is something only a gangsta thug would do is ridiculous. It's a red herring.

I replied to my own comment right after I posted that one. I mistakenly wrote "arrests" when I meant to say "investigations, including possible arrests." The problem is that the police half-assed the investigation, making the supposed lack of probable cause a foregone conclusion.

I'm not arguing that it's inherently racist, just that it's generally racist, and especially in this case.

"Thug" is a word that gets thrown around far more casually when it's being applied to black people. It's used as a shorthand for "blacks behaving badly." When non-black people get called thugs, it's generally warranted; when black people get called thugs, it's because they spoke their minds far more often than for any actually thuggish behavior.

When people throw the word "thug" into a conversation about a young black man getting shot by a neighborhood watch member, they use it to imply that the black guy had it coming. That is why it's racist.

On its own, no. If we weren't having a conversation about this particular incident, I think we could have a very productive conversation on the negative effects of "gangsta thug culture," both in the black community and in society at large (where I agree it is prevalent). I would say yes, it (specifically the violence and macho posturing that sometimes comes with it) is a negative influence on our society.

The problem with bringing it up in this context is that there's no evidence beyond Zimmerman's statements that Martin did anything that could be construed as "thuggish." Bringing up "thuggish" behavior Martin engaged in previously (smoking pot, flipping off a camera, whatever sort of delinquency he got into) smacks of blaming the victim, in my opinion.

Talking about this incident, I'd say that "neighborhood watch," vigilante behavior and gun fetishism have a far more negative influence on our society. Promoting the idea that guns are necessary for self-defense has the effect of turning the prejudices of individuals into actual violence. The NRA promoting the idea that Obama and Holder are going to come take your guns away leads to increased sales for gun manufacturers and retailers, and a lot of those guns are being sold to paranoid racist lunatics, the last people we ought to encourage to arm themselves.

Bringing up "thug culture" is problematic because it's at best a secondary issue in the case at hand, and it's blown way out of proportion to the actual harm it inflicts on society, to the exclusion of more relevant and damaging issues.

You don't see the pattern? The three black people get called thugs because they criticize people, or because they do their jobs. The others are only called thugs when they try to intimidate someone recovering from surgery; otherwise, their name comes up because they called black people thugs, or someone else called black people thugs for something the black people said about them.

If you don't see the pattern, it's because you don't want to. I don't really know what else to say.