My water bill is just as bad. Half of it is fees that you pay even if you turn off the valve at the street and never use it. We tore out our lawns and went low water landscape, cutting our usage in half. Our bill went down by around 25%. Then they jacked up the prices the next year because people were using less water, so it's steadily creeping back up to where it originally was.

Well, was Dodge open about what they were doing and why? Or did it take a lot of digging after people wondered why their cars felt a decrease in performance before Dodge owned up to the fact that they gimped everyone's engine below the advertised specs without announcement? To me, it's less the act of doing what was done and more the total lack of information and transparency regarding it. Keeping something like this hidden just reeks of ill intent. If they came out and said "We're worried about blowing up your engines so here's what we're doing...", that's completely acceptable. Apple was not that forthcoming.

It's less about the technical facts and more about the intent. Did they truly slow these phones down for the sole intent of managing aging batteries, or did they do it knowing full well that it may discourage users of these phones enough that they would then see purchasing a new phone as the best course of action? If you cripple working phones in order to drive sales, is that not something you would want the government to investigate? Imagine if you had an older car and the manufacturer, without your knowledge or consent, dropped the performance of the engine down to a level that caused it to be sluggish and aggravating to drive. Would you not have a problem with this, no matter what reason they coughed up when pressured for an explanation?

BMW, Honda, and Yamaha have already built them. The future is here, and it looks boring as hell.

Did they promise 100Mbps, or "up to 100Mbps"? That's always been their game. "We'll give you 'up to' the advertised speed, but that includes anything down to and including zero". On a side note, have them come out and check your wire. I'm about to call them again to have them replace the line from the pole for the third time. They just can't hang those things to save their lives, and two of them have broken at the anchor point on my eaves. This third one they ran directly through a bushy tree, and the wind is tearing it up.

Starting salaries for college grads may be higher, but what is the average starting salary for someone fresh out of school, with no prior work history? "College grad" is a large, vague group of people that includes new graduates all the way up to (and beyond?) retirement age. How many of these fresh grads are severely underemployed for the first few years after they get their degree, and don't actually start making a decent amount until later? I bet you can walk into any Starbucks, throw a stick, and hit someone with a degree. I actually work with a person right now who is finishing up a masters, but can't get a job in their field and worked at Starbucks prior to joining up with us doing gopher work.

My situation was not a tragedy, nor extreme. I started work right out of high school, and spent the next 8 years realizing I didn't what to do what I was doing anymore. It gave me the motivation to do well in school, and gave me a goal. I also didn't know what I wanted to do as a career until I knew what I didn't want to do. It was tiring, with long nights, but I had fun and it felt like an accomplishment to pull it off with a 4.0gpa. I believe everyone should work while they go to school. Colleges can't teach you how to function within a business organization. They don't teach you people skills, office politics, what not to say to the boss even when he's wrong, how to make your measly paycheck last until the next one and beyond, etc. Living in the bubble that is college, and then being thrown to the wolves as soon as you're done, has got to be a terrifying experience. It benefited me greatly to experience all the crap that goes along with employment in a job that I was all to happy to be leaving.

College education is hugely important for living well in this day and age. Asking adults to start working to pay for their college is a great lesson in life: nothing is actually free. You set them up with a 4 year 'free' ride, then expect them to be instantly successful living in this big scary world afterwards is just setting them up for failure, especially since they're leaving the gates with a massive debt load. If you want to make an argument, it should be 'college should be cheaper', which I won't disagree with. "College should be 'free', except not really and by the way good luck kid" is not a great system for positive outcome.

I had a full time job for 6 years before I went back to school, and continued to work full time while going to school at night. Employment and education are not mutually exclusive. Between my employer's education benefits and tax breaks, school cost me little more than time and effort. I think those who live completely off of loans for 4 years, and then expect to find immediate employment above what they could have been doing all along, are foolish.

The interstates are generally well maintained. The freeways in and around the LA/OC area are a fucking travesty. Potholes everywhere. Some roads are crumbling and coming apart in chunks. They only fix the worst of the worst, and it takes them several years to get to it. I work in the north SFV area, and I've only seen them repave 4 streets in the ~5 miles around my office in the last decade, and only just recently. Meanwhile, the freeways are constantly "under construction" but you rarely see them working on them, even late at night. They like to start 15 projects, tear everything to shit, then spend the next 6 years slowly putting one of them back together. For such a car-centric metro area, our roads are in a totally unacceptable level of disrepair. This isn't New Hampshire, this is Car City USA. Fix the fucking roads. And don't even get me started on the sidewalks.

Welcome to California. Sucks to your assmar, and sucks to your constituion!

California: Oh boy, here I go banning shit again!

It was more likely just a $200 bottle of alcohol. Past a certain point, no molecules of the original substance should be present in the dilution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Honeypots are not entrapment. They have not forced or coerced you into doing something you weren't setting out to do anyway. I believe the concept of entrapment can only be applied to law enforcement entities, as well.

Unfortunately, in states like California (where I reside), the electoral college system completely nullifies the votes of those outside the big cities. If you look at the voting results by county, the major metro areas (SF, LA, SD) vote severely Democrat. The further north you head, and away from the coast, the vote tends to learn more Republican. California is a huge state, but most of the population is concentrated on the coastal areas of the lower half. If you vote Republican in California, your vote simply does not count with the current system. Going to a popular vote would at least give those who live outside the big cities SOME voice. As it is, you might as well throw your presidential vote in the round file.

It's not so much the number of people we've sent up there, but the huge number of scientific and technological advances we've made because of our efforts to get there. Human spaceflight is obviously not comparable in every day utility to hyperloop, but if we had the "It's too hard/expensive, why bother" mindset, look at all the things we'd be missing. Even if hyperloop flops spectacularly, we're bound to learn something along the way that benefits humanity somehow.

Sounds an awful lot like the manned spaced flight program. Should we have just stuck to flapping our arms and staring longingly at the moon as well?