Or if you don't want to be stuck talking to them, just play along until they ask you for your credit card number, tell them, "oh, I have to find my wallet" -- and then set the phone down and do something else.

I once got one of them to waste fifteen minutes on me by picking up the phone every few minutes and making some new excuse.

Gee, I wish I had a login for the government...

In other words, you value having broadband very highly.

I don't blame you for wishing prices were lower, but there's nothing unethical about a company charging what you're willing to pay.

Presumably, if you're paying a particular rate in exchange for service, that's because you believe that the service has at least that much value to you. As long as that's the case, then the company providing the service isn't "ripping you off."

As a customer, there's going to be some upper limit to how much you're willing to pay for a service. For the company, there's some lower limit to the price that they can afford to offer. Obviously every customer would like the price to be set at that lower limit -- so skewed as much in the customer's favor as possible -- but it's not unethical for the company to set their pricing elsewhere.

While I don't disagree that the storing videos in GIF format is incredibly inefficient (and annoying), I somehow don't think that "meme-based image sites" are actually a significant fraction of internet bandwidth use compared to websites that use more standard video formats.

Even if you believe that the be the case, how does another complete joke of a law fix anything?

I don't think you understand what "voting with your wallet" means, because it's exactly what you are doing when you choose to order online rather than buy locally for any reason. It doesn't matter if that reason is price, convenience, merchandise selection, political views, or anything else. You are choosing which business receives your financial support, and will therefore be more successful. That is fundamentally what voting with your wallet is.

And if you don't think that people choosing to spend their money online rather than at a local retailer is a problem, then why are you complaining about it?

You missed my point. Ordering online is voting with your wallet. Your real problem is that people are voting with their wallets -- but they're voting the wrong way.

Yeah! Voting with your wallet will never happen, because it's far to easy to vote with your wallet.

Would you guys mind taking this argument to somewhere where it's relevant?

Turns out that it's easy to measure the weather with a cell phone tower.

• If cell phone tower casts a shadow, the sun is shining.
• If tower is wet, it is raining.
• If tower is white, it is snowing
• If tower is swaying back and forth, there is a high wind.

...

To be fair, "let's make our smartphone bigger!" isn't exactly groundbreaking innovation. It's exactly what everybody else has been doing for a few years now.

Not hard, but does it actually make sense to do so? Serious question, since I don't read the reports in question, but if they're so standardized it would seem like it would be easier for everyone involved to just stick with a tabular format of some sort, rather than trying to translate it into a "written" report.

I've got a better idea: how about not requiring me to pay for somebody else's elective health care, regardless of whether it's for contraception or not, and regardless of what my religious beliefs (if any) are?

After going through customs a couple times, I'm pretty sure the US government considers them to be the same thing.