There's another reason that people seem to be ignoring: something that is "past due" will change out of that status, one way or another, after a short time. Something "in collection", not so much. One has to consider why it went into collection in the first place.

Another factor that is rather passed over in OP is that despite a few changes that were made for the better some years ago, they were actually pretty weak changes and credit reporting is still egregiously one-sided today.

Most companies of any size have whole departments that regularly report "past due" debt to collection agencies. But a consumer has many time-consuming and often expensive hoops to jump through to get that back off their record. In many ways it's still guilty-until-proven-innocent.

The fact that over generations people have become used to this travesty of justice just makes it all the more insidious.

After the deductibles and co-pays. I have a "platinum" plan through my employer; better insurance than anyone else I know and the co-pays still total up to a considerable amount. No deductibles for in-network on my plan, which makes me extremely fortunate. As a single guy I can afford the co-pays even with my modest salary but I can see how quickly they would bankrupt someone with a family, particularly if said family had one or more members with a chronic illness.

Incidentally, I was just exposed to rabies a few months ago:

Strike One: The only place to get the immunoglobulin is the ER, because it's very expensive (>$4,500) and has a short shelf-life. ER co-pay: $150
Strike Two: There's a set schedule for the vaccine, Days 0, 3, 7, and 14. You can get the vaccine from your primary, in theory, but of course my primary has a months long waiting list because we're driving PCPs out of business. Bottom line, I can't get appointments with them for Days 3 or 7, so that's two more trips to the ER. Additional co-pay total: $300
Strike Three: New York State ostensibly has a fund to pay for out of pocket expenses related to rabies exposures, but they only reimburse for the rabies vaccine and immunoglobulin. Since the ER decided to give me a tetanus shot on Day 0 NYS won't reimburse me, even though my out of pocket would have been $150 with or without this extra shot. Hooray for bureaucracy!

Totaling all this up, that stupid bat that found its way into my apartment has personally cost me $465 ($450 of ER co-pays, $15 of PCP co-pay) while my insurance company is on the hook for close to $7,000. My annual premium is about $6,000. So this one incident wiped out every penny they made on me and then some. I'm an otherwise healthy 32 year old marathon runner that ought to be subsidizing those who are less fortunate. Now imagine a family of four that were all exposed to the same scenario I was.....

Scala lacks the webby web-web street cred that this list is laden with. Haskell is mentioned briefly in the article, but not considered worthy of Knowing. Meanwhile, Erlang is popular in certain buzzword compliance requirements considered key to trends in web development as of a year or two ago.

You are simply proving you don't know what you're talking about.

Almost Latour's entire thesis is that S-B law says net heat transfer is either 0 or in one direction, from the hotter area to the colder. If the roles are reversed, and the colder item becomes the hotter, then the sign changes and the net heat transfer is still only in one direction... from hotter to colder.

And you don't know this because you didn't actually do any actual research about it.You claim "his blog post is still live" but link to an web archive. You haven't researched the topic.

You ignored due diligence, and because of that your "refutation" is nothing but a straw-man, which you continue to deny, either because you know it's a straw-man, and are just doubling down, or because you still refuse to perform the due diligence necessary to make an intelligent argument. The rest of this nonsense falls down because it's all house-of-cards based on your initial misunderstanding of Latour's actual thesis.

Just to be clear: shortly after Latour published that blog post, it became clear that the language he used implied that no radiation at all was absorbed by the warmer body. So a reader could not reasonably be blamed for inferring that. But Latour quickly apologized for the unfortunate wording and corrected himself to make it very clear he was referring to net, not absolute, heat transfer.

As such, just what part of the S-B law do you find controversial?

I don't blame you for inferring -- from that one blog post, which you like to in archive -- that what he meant was any heat transfer, rather than net. But again: he corrected that right away and anybody who knows jack shit about the subject knows that. But you, on the other hand, apparently refused to be bothered with due diligence. Imagine that.

I wouldn't say it's the "cheapest" option. If you want to go strictly software, you can use something like BitTorent Sync.

Before anybody jumps on me: I wrote "something like". No, it's not open source. But using iCloud or Azure are proprietary solutions too!

I don't "trust" BitTorrent Sync's security. But odds are it's fine for this kind of use. You can also control access to files by simply putting them in different folders, and giving different people access to them, or give out temporary authorization codes.

So don't misunderstand: I would not endorse its security unless BitTorrent agreed to an open security audit. But it's also a "free" solution. And it's available for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. I think Linux too but I don't remember for sure.

Property Rights? Trespass to Chattels? No abuse of state powers for private gain? How easily the mask slips when a few cold pounds are involved.

But the people I feel really sorry for are the victims of crime in London, whose cases go unsolved due to precious police resources being wasted on internet nonsense like this.

Ah, I didn't think to look at the other societies. They do apparently have a large campus at that address, so I guess they probably have real office space for those societies there. The property was a country estate when they bought it- now it's inside the Beltway.

27, according to their website. They do cover a wide range of disciplines at least. I was going to note that the Genetics Society of America and the American Society of Human Genetics seem like they'd have a lot of overlap, but then I noticed that they're headquartered at the same address, so I imagine they came to a similar conclusion at some point.

Don't try it in any flight that might get diverted/layover in New York, or you'll get arrested for a felony.

Not a gun owner, by NY city laws are crazy, even if you are just passing through the airport.

I hope you realize that you just gave us more evidence, consisting of yet another astounding "coincidence" on top of all the others.

I hope you realize just how remarkably similar your writing is to that of khayman80, and how the timings of your replies so neatly coincide and cooperate.

Regulations? Licenses? Hmm. As it happens, we already have pertinent "regulations".

U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 10:

The (heartless) thing about it is that drugs are not too different from many other things in society that are used by rich and poor alike but harm the latter much more.

The rich are far more likely to own firearms than the poor and far less likely to shoot someone or be shot.
The rich buy far more alcohol than the poor but are far less likely to drive drunk or be alcoholics .
The rich do far more drugs than the poor but are far less likely to become non-functional addicts.
The rich are far more likely to waste their education on party schools than the poor but are less likely to suffer the career consequences.
The rich and the poor engage in about the same amount of premarital sex but the former are less likely to have kids out of wedlock.
The rich gamble more often than the poor but are far less likely to become chronic gamblers.

To my mind, this suggests that the ultimate cause of these problems isn't the particular vices, but rather the cultural and economic context around them that causes them to be destructive. We should work at fixing that context, along with providing opportunity and support for everyone to work towards their own success, rather than wasting our time on proximate causes.

You did nothing of the sort. You made the (quite incorrect) claim that Latour wasn't accounting for the fact that the subject at hand is net heat transfer. But that claim is simply incorrect. I repeat that Latour has written about this extensively, which you would know if you bothered to actually read more of what he has written than one blog post.

You took a badly-worded sentence or two and jumped on them as though Latour made a mistake. But his only mistake was wording a couple of sentences badly. He does in fact NOT suggest that warmer objects absorb no radiation, and he has written as much many times. (Which apparently you did not know. Why?) So you were tilting at windmills again... or should I say straw-men?

You have refuted NOTHING but a couple of unfortunately-worded sentences, which Latour himself publicly corrected shortly after that post appeared.

You failed. If you could actually prove his actual argument wrong, as opposed to the argument you mistakenly thought he made, you'd do it to his face or publish your results or both. Because, after all, it would be important to this cause you so avidly defend. But you haven't. Is that because you knew you were making straw-man arguments, or because you simply didn't bother to research the subject you were attempting to refute? Either one represents failure.

You have not been able to actually refute Latour. The only place a genuine "refutation" occurred is in your own mind.

Now get lost. Your totally unjustified arrogance is irritating as hell.

Since I have neither, I wouldn't know.

I would also like to point out here the absolutely amazing fact that "Layzej" stopped replying the moment you popped up. What a "coincidence".

Well, this has been an interesting evening. Not only did I catch you in an outright lie, you accomplished exactly nothing but spreading more ad-hominem and attempted "character besmirching" based on that lie.

NO, I did not. That is NOT what I wrote in the comment. That isn't even a distortion, it's just a plain old lie.

What I wrote was that I thought for a time I was being paranoid, but that the situation turned out to not be paranoia at all; it was real.

Stop lying about me. Period. Take your distortions and you lies and go crawl in a hole somewhere.