This is about credit card interchange and transaction fees, which have recently gone up as a result of congressional price controls on debit card (but not credit card) fees and other regulations that closed a few avenues banks used to have for making money. Another cause is the rise of 'rewards' cards over the last decade -- if you get 1-2% back on your transactions, whether via 'points' or cash back, almost all of that is coming from the merchants who pay these fees and not your credit card bank. Predictably, they raised rates on other things to try and make up the difference. Transaction fees on credit cards have skyrocketed over the last 5-6 years, especially for Internet 'card not present' transactions. I handle ecommerce for a non-profit that does about 1.5 mil a year through us, and only after a lot of haggling were we able to get something like 2.29% + 21 cents per charge, which on your average Verizon wireless bill is right around or even over $2. Some places will hit you for closer to 3%, though a company as big as Verizon undoubtedly has a lower rate.

These fees don't apply to ACH/bank transfers, so Verizon wants you to use those. If my business accepted credit cards for payment, we'd probably want to do the same thing, but Verizon is a big bad phone company and so it's easy to pile on them. I'm glad I'm an AT&T customer in this case (since they don't have anything like this ... yet).

The story is being spun a bit as 'Verizon wants you to mail in a check and why are they charging me to do their work for them.' Verizon doesn't want you to mail in a check. Verizon wants you to pay from your bank account, as tons of people do in Europe. It's a perk for me to be able to pay most of my bills - business and personal - via credit card (which I pay off every month) because I get 1-2% back and because the credit card companies will go to bat for me if there is a problem with a charge, whereas once an ACH is complete there is not an easy mechanism to reverse it. Right now, AT&T is paying about $4/month (of my $150 bill) for me to have those perks. Since AT&T is a huge company and most of its customers are 'the little guy,' you could argue that we're entitled to those perks and AT&T should pay for it - to which my response (were I AT&T) would be that we have no problem paying something for it, but rates are now high enough that it's worth considering the big PR hit of adding a fee like this.

Most of us wouldn't switch carriers over a $2/mo fee. Most of us would set up the automatic bank transfer and grumble about it, and Verizon knows that.

I get the author's objection. It's a fair criticism. The melodrama is a but much. 'Offensive'? You may be a little thin-skinned if the bookshelf UI offends you.

I'm not interested in mandating the draft at all. I'm interested in you having to do your part to retain the status of United States Citizen that every other United States Citizen is required to do. You know, one of those '99%/1%' things.

You think that, because you also hold UK citizenship, that somehow this makes it impossible for you to comply with US law. It doesn't. Maybe there are cases where it would, bu this isn't one of them. You fill out a selective service card when you're 18, mail it in, and forget about it. You didn't do this and now you're blaming 'the system' for being unfair. You think you're a special case. You aren't.

In fact, you have extra rights and privileges as a dual citizen. You can work in the Euro zone very easily. I can't. You can work in the US (even if only the private sector) far more easily than a UK citizen. I don't see you rejecting any of the perks of your situation, and yet you have the audacity to reject the grave responsibility of mailing in an index card?

You are a self-important twit with a tremendous sense of entitlement and no corresponding sense of justice or the law.

You seem to be under the impression that Selective Service is optional. It isn't. You were required by law to register for it within 30 days of turning 18. Being abroad doesn't exempt you from this requirement.

Your attitude of blowing off selective service has probably got to do with the fact that nobody has been drafted in decades, but if they instituted a draft tomorrow, they can't just start collecting the information they need then - they have to maintain a database of eligible conscriptees. It sucks but that's the way of the world. If the worst that happened to you is that you can't get a federal loan or a government job, I'd say you got off pretty easy compared to, I don't know, going to Vietnam.

That you so lightly prefer 'gulags' to the 'bigotry' you have received tells me that you have never seen a real gulag, and also that you've probably never experienced real bigotry. May you be reincarnated as a Tsarist after the Bolshevik revolution or a Japanese American during the internment camps. You'll probably bitch less about gulags and bigotry in 2011.

As the guy who hires people like you for his small business, this is the biggest thing I care about. Show me what you've done. A college degree is nice but these days everybody has one and so it's difficult to assign a lot of meaning to the degree itself rather than the stuff that was accomplished while pursuing one.

Other big things (for me, anyway, YMMV): Show me you can write well, communicate with normal (non-technical) humans politely and professionally (references would be great), and that you have an active interest in improving yourself and your skillset. I hardly ever hire anybody because they know the language or languages I need right then. I try to hire smart people who have proven that they can learn on the job.

(Shameless plug: Go to recruiterbox and search for 'inLeague' if this is you!)

Nor is it supposed to. It is merely an agreed-upon basis for resolving questions like your GPS example. It isn't an answer key.

My point was just that there's going to be a huge difference both in outcome and in reasoning if you had 9 people whose job it was to decide whether shit was fair versus having the same 9 people decide the same cases based entirely on what the Constitution says. There's still a lot of interpretation and reasoning going on, but it's a lot less arbitrary.

They are supposed to evaluate based on the Constitution of the United States.

'On the merits' is arbitrary because whomever is evaluating will do so according to their own ideas of good and bad, of what works and what doesn't. In some cases, this kind of freedom to decide on whatever basis you like can be interesting or liberating, but it's not the point of SCOTUS.

Obviously there will still be their own ideas on good and bad even with an agreed-upon standard, but having to explain your legal reasoning relative to the Constitution versus just having to explain your reasoning are two very different tasks. Writing a good dissent is just as challenging as writing a good ruling.

I have worked with two large nonprofits that rely on Google Maps to varying degrees, in some cases for mission-critical purposes and in other cases for ancillary tasks.

From my developer's POV, Maps API is easy to use and the terms of service are more than fair, given that they're providing a tremendous service. Google Maps is one of those life-changing technologies (which Google did not invent, of course, but which they have perfected more than their competitors, IMO) and I wouldn't take it for granted.

Both applied for (and one has received) the 'Premier' grants. Both dealt with the same single Google employee, who was very helpful, but who would sometimes take months to reply to an email. My sense is (and this isn't surprising) that Google is so overwhelmed with these applications from non-profits that they just don't have the people to process them all. I'm sure they're doing something about this but it was a little surprising to see such a popular program (the Nonprofits premier grants) run by a handful of people.

I'm glad they're moving to this model, though. I'd rather build in the Maps API to a client application and start getting alerted when we're going over limits than just have it shut down or refuse a request.

The only avenue in which my politics enter into this equation at all is that I'm not going to sign off on anything that means I have to lay people off unless somebody can make a strong case for it without insinuating that, simply because I'm responsible for people other than myself, I'm somehow too shortsighted to come around to your enlightened viewpoint.

I'm not tired of it in the least. Other replies to my OP have offered some insightful remarks and cited some interesting studies. I'm just tired of internet jerks who think that ad hominem attacks are a substitute for argument. You aren't being asked to do much -- recycle, don't buy an SUV, stuff anyone with an ounce of responsibility has been doing for a decade - but you have no problem asking me (or 'me' in the 'class' sense) to make drastic changes to how we do business that will unquestionably result in people who rely on us for their well being to lose their jobs. And you can't even be bothered to do anything other than act self-righteous about the fact that, yeah, I have some questions about this doomsday scenario on whose account you're asking me to make these sacrifices.

Seems to me that you're more interested in congratulating yourself on how much better you are than conservatives (which I must be, because there are no liberal business owners...? huh?) than in dialogue. You can take that attitude and fuck right off with it.

2% of GDP is about two million jobs. That's a tremendous sacrifice, and a very tough case to make - but if that's what has to be done, then that's what has to be done, right?

I don't see a lot of politicians who favor things like cap and trade talking about that, though (unsurprisingly). I see them making the claim that we can make the necessary adjustments without anybody actually having to pay a price except for 'big business' and 'billionaires,' but those two million jobs won't be CEOs - it'll be middle class workers in industries most affected by the regulations required to pull off what you're talking about.

Even if you accept the Stern Review, though (and thank you for that link), you're still left with the problem that it's no good if just the UK, or even just the UK, the US, Canada, and Western Europe commit to the necessary changes. You need every industrialized country in the world to sign on, and honestly sign on, because otherwise the countries that don't play nice will be able to undercut the whole rest of the world in output and cost of doing business.

I can certainly accept the possibility that the Stern review is correct (though it seems to have its share of detractors) but even then, I agree with another response to my OP that we're much better at solving problems like 'we need an energy source that doesn't belch xyz emissions, pronto' than we are at making huge, collective sacrifices. We've already got high unemployment in Europe and in the US - you would need to be a dictator to be able to get away with laying off two million more in the US alone. So what do we do?

It isn't going to hurt me. My business is a service business and the worst we'll feel from cap and trade is increased energy costs, and we can afford those. I thought I distanced myself from a big personal investment in the outcome here by pointing this out earlier, but I guess you saw 'business owner' and assumed 'greedy corporate pig.'

What massive, pervasive governmental intervention are you talking about? The only massive, pervasive governmental intervention I'm aware of is the Clean Air act, which was done for smog and health reasons and not climate change reasons, and fuel efficiency standards, which I will freely admit did spur more fuel efficient vehicles than the free market would have, because in an unregulated market you wouldn't see that kind of investment in fuel efficiency until it became far more cost-prohibitive to get fossil fuels out of the ground.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I'm not accusing you of fabricating governmental intervention - I'm honestly curious what it is you're talking about when you give the government credit for the 'status quo.'

I also have yet to see any convincing evidence that climate change is going to 'hit like a hurricane' except for the UN studies a while back talking about millions of climate refugees that a) never happened and b) got scrubbed from the UN's web site as it was an embarrassing prediction. There is a political and industrial agenda behind the notion that we absolutely must do something right now just as there is a political and industrial agenda behind the notion that the whole thing is overblown and what we're doing now is working just fine. My point is that it's very, very difficult to separate fact and legitimate science (on both sides) from people who either just grew up thinking that all industry is evil and raping the Earth -- that is to say, most people my own age who went to liberal arts universities, as I did -- or people who are so bitter and jaded and accustomed to hearing people from the first group shrieking about whatever it is they're doing that they overlook the very real possibility that something major may really need to be done about this problem ASAP.

You have said nothing insightful and cited nothing of use. You've made an ad hominem attack on me and my motives about which you could not be more mistaken. If cap and trade were enacted tomorrow, it won't be me who suffers, because web services aren't going to bear the brunt of it. It will be two million jobs in the part of our economy that actually still create products. That is the cost of the massive, pervasive change you are talking about, and it's foolish to pretend otherwise. So if you want to make your case, then the case to be made is 'this is such an important problem, and the consequences of doing nothing so severe, that a 2% reduction in GDP (which comes out to about two million jobs) is really the least worst course.'

Possibly the case for AGW would be working out better if it had more adherents who could patiently explain to people like me what the terms of the discussion are and what our options are, and fewer people whose entire social network consists of people who agree with them and whose only means of dealing with anyone who questions their dogma is to personally attack them.

By the way, as I have to head out of town for a while and won't have a chance to continue this delightful conversation, and since you already reduced it to ad hominen attacks, people like your father are the reason why good schools and people who are actually more concerned with the children than with their union are getting sued by the NAACP (but winning, thankfully). There's nothing that the NEA and AFT hate more than successful, non-union schools. The people whose lottery I'm writing now have five lawsuits pending but are in the top 5% of public schools in New York, despite their almost exclusively Harlem & Bronx demographic. Which you'd know if you were interested in facts.

If I were the son of a CEO talking about corporate pay practices you wouldn't even give me the time of day. People like you assume that everybody behind a charter school or a non-union effort is just out to bilk teachers or make themselves rich, probably because of fifty years of people like your dad doing just that for themselves. They aren't getting rich. They're teaching kids, and they're doing it ten times more effectively than your dad's union has ever let people do it.

Due process doesn't mean you are entitled to hit your employer with a six figure tab to fire you, but I guess talking to a union shill about entitlements is a waste of time.

The Center for Union Facts is citing major newspapers. Are they also bullshit organizations? 47 out of 100,000 being fired is a very clear number: it means that, in NY and NJ, about 0.5 to 0.6% of teachers are fired (not laid off) every year. Compare this to any part of the private sector and you see that teachers get 'due process' an order of magnitude more than anybody else, except perhaps other government workers.

My solution is that a school, as an employer, should have the same freedom in hiring and firing as any business, if not more freedom. Even using the term 'due process' is misleading; that refers to your rights when you are involved in a criminal case. You can make a case about a shitty principal firing a teacher without cause. That happens in every job, and while it's hardly a good thing, the solution to it is not to take away from the institution the ability to hire and fire based on merit.

'Due process' in the civilian job market is a union invention. For everybody else, if they do their job poorly, they'll get a warning or two and then fired, and the only way lawyers get involved is if the person losing their job thinks they got shafted. There is no reason whatever that teachers should be exempt from this, and even if there were, that reason is not worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on litigation every time somebody needs to be let go.

Imagine if we actually spent all that money paying good teachers rather than providing an army of lawyers to every shitty teacher.

Fair assumptions but I don't know that the answer is as simple as you say.

It's still a political problem as well as an engineering one, unless the political solution is 'let's invest tons of resources into new stuff that doesn't pollute as much as old stuff' and not any retardation of human activity (and this would not please a big chunk of the electorate).

Humans are bad at long-term decisions even when it will affect their own lifetime. We're even worse at long-term decisions that will affect people who haven't been born yet. Corporations get a lot of crap for this when they make decisions that benefit their shareholders in the short-term, but this isn't just a corporate thing. Give us a problem to solve and we're all over it. Tell us that we have to pay double for gas or that taxes are going through the roof so that we are better global citizens (while citizens in Indonesia, India, and China aren't doing the same things) and you're going to have a hard time.

The extent to which CO2 has consequences or not has surely got nothing to do with the facile suggestion that, because some by-products are harmful, we should cease ... what? Existing? Every industrial process has by-products. I don't think anyone suggests that these are 'good' things. The point is to mitigate the level of bad things, and to do that, we have to know which ones are bad, and how bad they are.

I haven't taken the position that CO2 has no effect on the environment, but reasoning like this is why debates on AGW go into the toilet. You aren't trying to analyze the effect of CO2 on the environment, you're just taking the tired, far-left position that having ANY impact on the planet whatever is terrible. You're also retroactively making the assumption that, every time we come up with a new technology, we know right away what its effects on the environment will be. Sometimes we do, and sometimes greedy people don't care and employ it anyway. But this kind of 'humans are ruining the earth with their technology' fearmongering doesn't bring us any closer a mechanism through which we might actually try and determine what the impact of anything we use in our daily lives is on the environment.