"...attempts to retain customers at any cost."

I use this to my advantage.

1. A competing trash service sent me a flier offering the same service at about 60% of the price I was paying. The current service matched the price for 1 year. Even if they're not making a dime on me they're dividing their fuel cost one more way.

2. Last month I called Time Warner and told them I wanted them to match the introductory price of competing internet service (~75% of regular price for 1 year). They did. This is the second time I've had my price lowered to an introductory rate without being a new customer.

When these prices run out I'll call again and get the rate lowered again. Or I'll cancel and go to the competitor. Either way, these add up to about $360 saved this year for two 15-minute phone calls. Pretty good $/hr.

You do realize that settlements are basically private contracts right?

There is no such thing as a "private contract". A contract, by nature, is an agreement that the state will enforce. State actions are not private. If two people make an agreement and will never disclose that agreement to anyone else under any circumstances, then a court will never see it, and it is in no meaningful way a contract.

Of course that only goes double when one of the parties is a government agency. Nothing a government agency does is private.

Now we need the quasi-obligatory response that this is really a government problem, and if government weren't in there mucking about with needless regulation the free market would address the problem and we'd all be in broadband utopia at reasonable prices.

If that's true, plankton might be found all over the solar system.

"My God! It's full of plankton!"

They may be the "dark matter" we've been searching for.

Took 5-seconds to find:

http://www.zdnet.com/the-true-...

http://www.biznix.org/whylinux...

"[W]hite western women" are not "the most privileged creatures on this planet", as things like wage disparity

What wage disparity exists, comes as a result of what career paths women choose to take. So says a number of studies. Giving women the same wages as men, despite them being in less demanding jobs, is pure man-hating, women-are-perfect, political correctness gone completely awry.

sexual abuse

Huge populations of men are doing long jail terms and then being made unemployable and homeless for the rest of their lives, due to ever more strict laws that conflate rape with any and every other legal infraction that happens to have any minor sexual component.

access to healthcare

Men pay considerably more for health insurance, specifically to subsidize the higher cost of providing health care for women. Whatever the problems with the US health care system system, women aren't being disproportionally affected by it.

Why is it that sexism is only banned in one direction?

Who said it was? Rape jokes directed at men are banned now, too.

How it'll actually pan-out remains to be seen, and I can only hope it doesn't turn into the man-hating women's club everyone is expecting.

It wasn't that long ago that Fark stopped posting nudie pics every day, and spun that off to a separate Foobies site that next to nobody visits.

No, that's completely different than the scenario I described, and completely useless and unnecessary.

But I shouldn't be forced to hire them or make them my friends.

No one is forcing you to make anyone your friend.

Commerce, on the other hand, by its nature involves the state. (At least beyond the trivial. Your lemonade stand generally flies under the radar here.)

If you want the state to issue a charter for your corporation or register your partnership, if you want to call the cops to use force against people your want removed from your place of business, if you want the government to enforce your business contracts, if you want to engage in interstate commerce and use the economic infrastructure that the state has created, you don't get to complain that the state is interfering with your "private choices" when it requires that your business not be racist, sexist, etc.

1. Censorship only applies to governments.

No. It doesn't. "censor...To review in order to remove objectionable content from correspondence or public media, either by legal criteria or with discretionary powers".

Please stop spreading the mis-definition that claims that private interests with control over information flow cannot engage in censorship.

A website or a store deciding that they do to carry a product is not.

If they decide "we won't carry this because our customers won't buy this", it's not censorship. If they decide "we won't carry this because we object to it", it is censorship.

I sure as fuck chose my lifestyle, thanks. Three bad engagements to women, and I made up my mind to date men after that.

Sounds like you're a bisexual person who made a choice to date only men. Ok, fine. Congratulations, even. But most of us could no more choose which gender to date, and to be sexually attracted to, than we could choose which sort of music we like.

Linux, plain and simple, is not user friendly

It's not incredibly HOME-user or POWER-user friendly...

But locked-down CORPORATE-user friendly? HELL YEAH.

Your IT department sets-up a computer with just 5 big bright icons on the desktop. These are the only applications you use for your job. You can't do anything else but launch these applications. It just keeps working like that 99.999% of the time. When something doesn't work, you call IT about it, move yourself to another computer and resume your work there. There is no way for any computer to possibly be more user-friendly than that.

Linux does it, Windows doesn't.

If you spend more than 2 days total over the course of an employees time at a company to convert them from MS Windows and Office to Linux you've lost money, even on the lowest paid employee you have.

Unless you're at EOL on your Windows and Office version... Then you're going to have-to upgrade them to a new version that works completely differently, anyhow. ANY time spent training them on the new version of Windows and Office is money lost, in addition to the license fees, with NO benefit.

At least the time/money lost on training to use Linux has a payoff period.