The service is also a LOT more useful than it was when they set the price (back then there wasn't nearly as much stuff you could use Prime on, and you didn't get the ebooks and streaming stuff, though that's less important to me)

At 100/year its still a steal if you order a lot (I've ordered furniture from amazon using Prime... 2 day free shipping on a desk? Sectional couch? TV?

You got it!

I always joke about buying a safe on amazon and getting it shipped with Prime...

I wonder how many years of Prime membership it would take to cover shipping one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Dot...

I didn't mean elementary or middle/highschools =P. Though even some highschools will sometimes have doctor hours a few times a month to help kids that can't easily get access to a clinic.

And condoms are just one kind of contraception. And while its the one that should be used (STD and all), if its the only one easily available (or basic pills) you're going to have a teen pregnancy problem on your hands, especially when coupled with poor sex ed. Too easy to mess up.

Yeah there's that too. Since people were too busy trying to make sure a system like this was never implemented, they didn't get to put in the work to make sure it was implemented correctly.

Availability is a loaded word in this case. Go buy condoms as a 14 years old in an area where religious people want to burn people who use contraceptive on a stake....good luck (of course IMO they shouldn't need it at that age but the reality is different). You may also be in an area where your doctor will try to convince you not to get contraception. They'll prescribe it if you INSIST....

Compare that to an area where schools have someone on staff who can prescribe pills, or doctors will insist you consider it...

You end up with 2 totally different world. They're available in both cases, its just a different definition of available.

It is the same problem as in poor parts of Africa too. People don't WANT to be helped.

If you look in the areas that are against that kind of healthcare, its often poor people in the south, and the ones that are for it are frequently upper middle class in rich cities.

I'm in Boston. Pretty much everyone is for universal healthcare. No one (in my circles) would benefit from it. We all have pretty much perfect company funded healthcare with little to no deductibles, often with premiums paid by our employer, which let us go to one of the best hospital in the world (MGH) for pretty much no money. If they were to get the money from it from taxes, the same people would be disproportionately affected by them (already in upper tax brackets, at the bottom end of the groups affected by AMT....it hurts)

Yet these same people who would get NO BENEFIT from it, and would lose a lot of money in the process, are in favor of it. And those who'd get the free lunch are against.

Now, don't get me wrong. In its current implementation they have a point sometimes: poor people who aren't poor enough to get subsidies and now have to pay premiums are getting hit hard by them, especially if they see themselves invincible and haven't seen an hospital bill in their life. But that wouldn't be an issue if it was fully funded healthcare, not just the bastardized in between that we currently have.

Yeah.

Really funny

I like that quote. I live in a gentrified area of Somerville right by Boston. With my "dinky little" million dollar condo, I'm pretty much the poorest person living in the development.

While most people here have cars, pretty much nobody uses them to go to work (they do for groceries and to bring their pet to the vet or to go buy furniture...that's it).

Its all about the subway.

Competition between the techies will do it, regardless of landlords (well, I guess the landlord has to agree in the end, but...).

Reality of the world is: most places suck to live in. Most people rather not hear a dog bark all night or have people drink screaming on top of their head. And if you can help it, most people rather have conveniences near by.

That leaves a very small subset of places where people would prefer to live if they can help it. That subset generally is smaller than the amount of middle upper class people in any given metro area. So they compete against each other for them. The landlords just make popcorn and enjoy the show.

Its more pronounced with real estate, where you can actually see actual bidding wars, and then its definitely between the buyers...but real estate value going up affects rent pretty directly.

The solution to that isn't very hard honestly. Make more places that people would agree to live in. There's kind of a plateau: if your neighbors aren't too noisy, you don't hear stomping over your head, your place is clean, and there's a grocery store near by, its enough for a lot of that crowd. Not everyone wants a mansion even if they can afford it.

Actually enforce city noise ordinance, build houses in brick, not in stupid cedar that falls apart about 5 years, have actual noise insulation....all of that isn't very expensive or hard to do when compared to the price of the land. Then you have a LOT of places high salaried people are happy to live in, and it delutes the market.

The difference in cost between building a place with paper thin walls, wood finishes, and a 20 gallon water heater, vs one in brick with premium insulation and a tankless is 50-100k, not 1-2 million. Look no further than Boston to see where all that goes wrong...

Net result: everyone with money cluster around the 10-15 buildings with acceptable condition, then anything built to basic standard is advertise as "luxury living", and you end up with prices skyrocketing.

To be fair, that culture comes from both sides. When your neighbor is blasting their music at 2 in the morning or have an idiot dog barking all evening and you try and get the city laws enforced, half of the time you're told to deal with it, mind your own business, and if you don't like it, get the fuck out.

It doesn't take too many times of crap like that happening before anyone with a bit more money than average takes the hint and does just that. Which means after a while, all the rich people just isolate themselves from the rest. And since there's only so many places where they can "get the fuck out", you end up with gentrification.

So really, everyone's responsible.

Yeah, I tried Azure recently, and its pretty damn nice. Amusingly, I was looking for an environment for a node.js project, and the git integration for node.js deployment is just beautiful.

I did not expect that.

While that's obviously a problem, it isn't what the article is about, and is not at all what i was replying to.

Ironically, where I went for high school (admittedly, not in the US), basic electrician stuff (how to put circuits together, etc. Not talking about resistance and all that jazz, that was in physics) as well as basic woodworking was indeed mandatory (as part of the same class). I had to take an elementary accounting class in 12 grades too.

Auto repair though, no. Then again I'm in my 30s and still don't know how to drive, so go figures.

So you're basically like every average 20something year old ever.

When I was 25, I ate like a pig, bring in the bacon and tower cake and chocolate mousse all over, barely exercised (I'm a stereotypical nerd, though I do walk a lot as I hate driving), and honestly wasn't careful at all. All I did was go wall climbing at the local gym once every week or two. I was quite fit, had perfect weight, and never got sick.

Fast forward 6 years, I eat less and better, I exercise more, I'm way more careful, yet I'm fat, get sick every 3 months, and am out of breath going up the stairs (and I made sure I didn't get diabetes or anything like that). I'm in the process of fixing it and I'll be fine before long...

At 25, you're basically invincible. If you're lucky, at 30-35 you'll still be invincible (I wasn't lucky). It doesn't stay that way lucky or not.

The ability is off by default, you have to go pretty deep in the options to turn it on, when you do turn it on, you get all sorts of warning telling you to watch out. And if you do turn it on and do something stupid, you may get malware

That's leagues better than not having the option at all (or to have to use what basically amount to root exploits to enable it), as well as better than having the option on by default for everyone.

There's some collateral damage (the cheap bozos who wants to save 5 bucks and get owned in the process), but its worth it.

Pretty much every successful video game developers do just that... The bugs get fixed...sometimes....someday....maybe....if the stars are aligned...

Realistically, coding against video drivers (regardless of platforms) feel like web development, where you have to fight over countless (well documented ) bugs on each implementation until you're blue in the face, and if you're lucky, 5 years down the road, it will get fixed.