I have received scam calls that had spoofed caller ID as "County Tax Collection" or other municipal or government offices. I don't even pick up any calls unless the phone number is in my contact list.

People in general are very bad at understanding a statistical models... It amounts to extra taxation on the poor, because rich people don't play state lotteries much

Has it ever occurred to you that one don't need any understanding of statistical models when it dawns on people, rich or poor, that lotteries are a voluntary tax that only a damn fool would pay?

But no, you had to drag in the tired worn out poor vs rich knee-slap argument.

I have been a happy cable cutter since 2000 primarily due to intrusive frequent ads. Not just between program breaks but also "infomercials" disguised as news articles. I got tired of surfing through channels looking for something entertaining to watch and only finding ads ads ads. The ads are so frequent that a 90 minute movie can stretch to three hours. I'm old enough to remember enjoying cable TV because there were way fewer ads than the over-the-air networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, etc); when the cable channels increased the ads, the value of subscription became poor enough that I finally cut the cable.

Whenever I stay at a hotel and turn on the TV, I no longer miss it. Now the ratio of program material to ads is 50/50 (I clocked it) - Those 90 minute movies show 10 minutes of movie then ten minutes of ads. Absolute waste of my time.

Shortly after I cut the cable, I eagerly embraced entertainment on DVDs. I do not stream nor do I download entertainment. With DVDs, I watch commercial-free entertainment and I can stop in the middle for a phone call or a snack or bathroom break, or resume the movie another day.

I also started routing DVD audio to my stereo system (I don't want 5.1 surround sound). There's a stereo compressor between the DVD player and my stereo system; this not only tames the loud pre-movie ads, it tames the ridiculous dynamics between whisper soft dialogue and loud noises from scenes with traffic, explosions, etc. If a DVD had non-skippable ads before the movie (read: Disney), the speakers are turned off while I perform other household tasks.

I just couldn't understand that way of thinking.

Entitlement minded

We had a subcontract engineer with an MBA who was smart, but he insisted on a specific role and refused to perform his job. This was a company that hired many MBAs and PhDs, but his contract was not renewed and he was not hired.

Ads between posts in a thread are the reason why Yahoo groups became a ghost town. After too many dustballs tumbling in the wind, Yahoo deleted the groups.

For years there has been a continuous exodus of high tech talent out of NY. It is an expensive state to run a business and expensive for private sector employees/retirees to live in. High taxes, high utility bills, high unemployment, crushing regulations, overgenerous public welfare. Covid lockdown killed my 14 year engineering job along with 300 others in 2020. With employment opportunities in NY in heavy decline and 300 fresh workers thrown to the streets, I saw no point competing for the scarce jobs so I joined the exodus for better job better cost of living. And I am not moving back to NY.

NY has a high ratio of public sector to private sector workers, whose wages come from taxes on private sector workers. With more citizens leaving, the taxes to pay those public employees goes up for the private sector ones still living there. It is a vicious cycle that is accelerating. Public sector retirees enjoy a 100% state income tax deduction of state pension income, which is not available to the rest of us. State pension is dangerously underfunded from stock investment, when the economy is sour and the stock market tanks the comptroller has to raise taxes to fill in the gap. State government is corrupt, financial irresponsibility is rampant, and all three chambers are dominated by NYC politicians who are hostile to success and to the Constitution. Employers and talented employees have left NY for greener pastures, and they are not moving back. Companies can't attract recruits to move to NY, and college graduates won't stay in NY. A friend of mine is a senior architect for a global software company and they have trouble attracting recruits to work in NY.

The one and only time I disclosed my bank account credentials to a third party, it was a wire transfer to provide the down payment on my house for a mortgage provider.

I will NEVER store my bank account credentials on a vendor customer database that is vulnerable to hacking and draining my bank account. Passwords are not reliable security.

I will NEVER store my bank account credentials on any compact media or mobile device that is easily lost/hacked and can expose my savings to a thief or hacker.

I don't care how attractive or convenient the vendor broadcasts of the service, they involve extreme risks that they conveniently omit.

Credit Card providers and PayPal/Zelle/etc provide fraud protection. Instant bank payment services do not.

For services like PayPal/Zelle/etc, I use a separate bank account with zero connection to my primary bank. Any transactions are withdrawn/deposited for the amount, and the account stays at the minimum balance to evade monthly fees. This insulates my primary bank against thieves.

I suspect that 10k would be move more appropriate.

Minimum $20K for a fully furnished house, especially if moving out of a state where a large exodus is underway with moving companies in big demand.

In 2021, I accepted a job offer with relocation from PA to FL. The relocation package covered not just the moving company but also moving the vehicles, four day house hunting trip before start of work all expenses paid, sale of house, one month temporary living (later extended), three months storage of household goods until a house is found, realtor services and fees, transportation/meals/boarding during final move to new location, the works.

The year after that, I studied the invoice for relocation expenses during income tax season and was shocked that the total was a whopping $37K. All of it paid by the employer, and I had zero tax liability to those benefits.

$4K is a pittance for moving expenses. Armed with what I just shared, those employees are asked to suddenly break their piggy bank to relocate, if they have that much available. Plus you're buying another house at today's high housing values and high mortgage interest which means a larger monthly payment. Renting is no longer a cheaper housing option. Keep all moving expenses recorded for income tax deductions. This company is asking that their employees relocate by September 30 - good luck scheduling a moving company during the busiest season of the year on that short a notice.

I see no good side to this and would recommend that the affected employees find another job.

How long before United offers extra fees for ad-free travel?

How long before the fees go up and up, like Amazon YouTube and others have done?

I'll skip the fees, bring a good book to read, and wear a hat with a bill that blocks the screen while reading the book. Then United will add fees for wearing such hats...

You mean the same WalMart that drove mom-n-pop stores out of business and trained their employees how to sign up for public assistance like Medicaid (at the expense of taxpayers) because WalMart's health insurance coverage is intentionally designed to be inadequate compared to public assistance?

WalMart does not fit my definition of "good corporate citizen", and is the reason I stopped shopping there since 2002. Not to mention that most of the store products are junk.

I would argue that a multitrack recording of Yoko Ono singing harmonies of integer intervals does not fit the Pythagoras definition of "beautiful".

You might have missed my previous post, I agree and want to add that to me it is even a bit more than that.

There is a complex interaction when you see a milk jug full of water hit by a bullet, or see the flow of plasma on the sun twisted by gravity and magnetic fields, or the plasma of the big bang as the expansion of the universe pulls it apart.

But they can be summed up as a expanding force vs a force of cohesion in all of them. Gravity is a force of cohesion on a cosmic scale, but so is magnetism. And at the great inflation, the lingering cosmic filaments of stars and galaxies look very similar to the water spreading from a hit from bullet where the cohesion is from more molecular forces.

If there was a "then a miracle occurs" part of cosmology that still existed, it would be the dark energy that continues to accelerate the expansion of the universe.

But it has one other side effect that isn't spoken of much -- creating clean entropy. How did we go from a homogeneous plasma at the big bang to such different hot/cold regions in the universe? Expansion, which has a similar effect on condensing gasses into liquids and even freezing them into solids. Only in this case some of that condensation ignites and creates the starts, pinpoints of very clean entropy to power whole solar systems. Expansion is what winds the clock of entropy, creating the differentials that then re-mix and make work happen.

So I completely agree, and if you ask me the story of creating entropy differentials for the universe to do work is the "then a miracle occurs" part of the story that still remains.

I was a Windows user since WFW311. MS products were getting worse with each new release. My WIN2K machine was randomly disabling my peripherals for no reason. I tried a WIN7 netbook but my preferred firewall (BlackIce) no longer worked on anything after WIN2K, and the Windows firewall doesn't - I had to take the netbook offline after one too many drive-by malware downloads.

Along comes Vista and it required replacing EVERYTHING even my printers. Since I had to spend that much money, I jumped ship and bought a Mac Pro "cheesegrater" tower with 12-core option. The transition between Windows and MacOS was easier than I feared and MacOS was very intuitive. Installing peripheral drivers is much easier. While each new Windows release obsoleted drivers and/or peripherals, I never once needed to update anything between MacOS updates and I'm still happily on the same printers and other peripherals since 2013.

The only malfunction I had was a drained coin battery on the motherboard, which is easily replaced. It is probably too old now for latest OS upgrades, but I have been happy with High Sierra.

I have no regrets at all changing to Mac, which is a far superior product. I will never go back to any MS product. A lot of my friends converted to MacOS too.