Principal investigators are paid fairly well. Research assistants and technicians might not. A good PI brings in millions of dollars to a state university and that is how they fill those budget voids. Our research overhead is 55%. That is money taken right off the top for the privilege of working in a university owned lab building. All equipment and supplies come out of the rest. Those grants need a good PI name to get funded.

And in AU, disparaging the boot is a bootable offense.

Most people in rural areas have done with out house to house deliver for years here in Nova Scotia.

Did you mean without house to house or with outhouse to house? I think the former would be acceptable, but I'll pass on the latter.

The only people who have to pay this 'tax' are the ones who break the rule on texting while driving. Therefore it is not a tax it is a punishment[...]

And the only people who pay the cigarettte tax are those who smoke. Is that a punishment too? Lots of people would love to make that behavior illegal too. It affects others. It can be deadly. And second hand smoke is probably just as dangerous to innocent bystanders.

as if the freedom to do something extremely dangerous to themselves and others is a freedom that should be defended.

And here we differ. As I have already said before. If it was extremely dangerous, we would be seeing a lot more accidents. I see it multiple times EVERY day during commutes. You just have no idea about the estimation of risk. You must be a safety fanatic that thinks everyone who does not drive with both hands on 10 and 2 are maniacs who should have their money confiscated from them by the state. And yes. I value freedom. I do not want any whiny pussy deciding what behavior is permissible based upon some paranoid delusion about their risk. I risk more every time I drive around the block on my motorcycle.

[...]however when I see people texting away at 90mph I want them to be punished

And here we come to the real meat of the matter. You have an authoritarian streak. You do not say that you want people punished when someone texting nearly runs you off the road or cuts you off or nearly rear ends you. You just don't want them to text because it pisses you off. You see them text as they go by and you can't stand the fact that they are doing something that you think they shouldn't be doing. You overestimate the safety risk and instantly want to hurt them. You feel taking away some of their hard earned money is a good way to hurt them, but it only hurts the ones who don't have money. There are much better ways to curtail the behavior, but buying SUVs and peeping in windows is not it. It is really only good for bringing in more money. And as I said, you're too pigheaded to see it.

Being fined is NOT a punishment. Having your license suspended is a punishment. Being sentenced to jail is a punishment. Being fined is a tax. It may be a inconvenient tax, but it is a tax. If being well paid means that there is absolutely no deterrent to the behavior that you find so abhorrent, then you cannot argue that a fine is a punishment. If the state of New York intended to "punish" texters, they would do more than just fine them. There would also be no financial incentive to purchase unmarked SUVs to peep into people's cars. It's all about the dollars and the whiny pussies lap it all up patting themselves on the back for "doing something" about the problem.

And I don't know how you managed to bring up Somalia. It's usually the nanny state apologist's last line of defense. Just for the record, I support taxes. I want good schools. I want my roads repaired. I expect the fire department to come when I call. I DO NOT expect the local police to walk around with AR-15s and armored personnel carriers when responding to a domestic disturbance. I also don't want to see them driving around brand new Mustangs, Challengers and whatever vehicles they managed to confiscate. When there is a large financial incentive to take from the public and very little oversight, is all too often abused. This New York SUV purchase is a case-in-point. It is a huge tax-payer expense whose only purpose is to bring in more taxes. This is just another variation of the red-light cameras with shortened caution timing. It's about taking in money.

If the punishment was a suspended license, New York would never have bought these. It's also probable they would have never enforced this law except as a afterthought because it's not the huge issue that you think it is. As I said: It's all about the dollars. You're just too pigheaded to see it.

Easy money collected by the state is an problem. When the local police show up with tens of millions of dollars of military hardware just because some asshole doesn't want to come out of his house, we have a problem of overfeeding the beast. Fines are not a punishment; they are a way to increase taxes without angering the "law-and-order" types. Do you not see a problem that the state has to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on special vehicles to try to peer into people's cars to try to catch them doing something that apparently has no other appreciable effect on their driving? Otherwise, if their driving was noticeably affected, police would not need to peek in their windows to "catch" these horrible criminals. This is not a law against distracted driving, it is a law against a behavior that certain whiny pussies don't like.

And you would be wrong in your "guess." I don't text while driving, although I do answer my phone if I recognize the ringtone. I, however, would be willing to guess though that you are one of those "fucktards" that think that everything you don't like should have a specific law to prohibit despite other existing laws that could be easily applied to the case. You believe that perfect safety and security should always trump liberty and personal freedom. It is this kind of bullshit reasoning that creates our tangled system of laws that no human being can possibly understand or remember. Life is a risk. Get over it.

Despite the whining that you and all the other safety-at-all-costs contingent seems to dwell upon, texting or talking while driving is a minor issue for public safety. It's annoying and occasionally causes an accident, but so do medical conditions, tiredness, animals on the road, road rage, talking to passengers and a whole host of other things. From all the paranoid ranting and obsessing, one would think that there were people dying in the thousands every day on the roads. I, for one, am tired of the very vocal, "there ought to be a law against that" bunch. If you are so insecure that you need the government to protect you against every thing you don't like and don't think anybody else should do because it hurts your sensibilities so bad, maybe you ought to find some nice gated community to hide. The rest of us are willing to accept the risk of living in the real world.

You misunderstand. I should have said 6" while flaccid. I never said tall...

You are looking at this all wrong. These SUVs are not an expense. They are an investment. This is simply a cost of revenue and are expected to pay for themselves within the allocated depreciation period. How else do you expect to implement the new business model, I mean, enforce the new texting ban laws?

I want the police to arrest dangerous drivers thanks.

Except they aren't arresting anybody. They are handing them a civil fine. This is not about promoting public safety any more than stoplight cameras are. It's all about increasing revenue. They have a nice new law that allows the state to collect some more of that easy money. These SUVs are an investment which the state expects to deliver a nice return on that investment.

The "retarded" people are the ones deluding themselves to think otherwise. But hey... You go nurture that indignant attitude and smile.

Did you ever consider that not everyone's midpoint is in the same relative position? Not all 6'4" people are created equal. Some of us have more height in our torso than our legs. I'm only 6" and I have problems with many cars and most compacts having insufficient headroom. And maybe not everyone wants to drive a Suburban or Escalade just to keep their head off the headliner.

I had to use the same threat. I had a debt collector calling my home phone for 6 months at least once a day and never answered the line when I picked up. Finally when I spoke to someone live, they admitted they were trying to collect on a debt for someone who shared a name with my 9 year old son. They harassed me for another 3 months until I finally blew my stack. The next time I got a live person, I immediately asked for the supervisor and threatened legal action if I ever received another call from them. I told them my next call was going to be to the State Attorney General and then my own attorney and I would be filing charges for harassment. They never called me again.

Last week I had a debt collector calling my cell phone and my home phone asking for my ex-wife. We have been divorced for 7 years and we never shared either of these phone numbers.

Debt collectors are fucking scum.

I'm not sure I even know what you mean. Are you complaining about net metering, avoided cost, or feed in tarrif? Or some other exotic rate structure? And do you think that increasing the power available to the grid during peak times is a bad thing? Or is decentralized power generation a bad thing? What exactly are you bitching about?

I presume you are British/Commonwealth due to the spellin of "offence." Therefore, why do you spell the word licenCe as such, while you write "unlicenSed?" I am not being snarky, I'm just curious.

Blockbuster's overwhelming shortcoming was their utter contempt for their customers. All these other insights are merely manifestations of that contempt.

My last trip to Best Buy was to get my Nexus 4 phone. They wanted to sell me one subsidized on a plan. I told them I wanted the unlocked, no-contract version. They wanted $45 more than ordering direct from Google. I told them they were crazy. There was no way I wanted instant gratification at that price. I left and ordered from Google. That was in April.