You don’t think so?
I hear: “Ah-choo!” followed by “Bleshoo” as a matter of course.
I’m saying the ‘bless you’ rejoinder comes without thinking and, yes, has virtually evolved into an instinctual response on the part of the blesser.
You know, I looked into that a couple of years ago, but dentists here were just using lasers for tooth whitening, not cavities. Using them on cavities would be awesome (and better methods for all other stuff you need done on your teeth, too).
…don’t allow gays to marry because of some throwaway, possibly mistranslated passage in the bible. Come on, people. We should know better by now.
…have to make disclaimers in biology classrooms about how evolution is “just a theory.” Way to completely misunderstand the very thing you’re supposed to be teaching about.
…act like jerks to servers and clerks just because they’re paid less. It’s a freaking recession, you’d think people would respect the fact that there are ANY jobs available.
…have teleportation and lightsabers and time travel! (Well, okay, but seriously, that would be awesome.)
…there’s still savagery in the world (Amazon Basin and Papua New Guinea) and what’s worse there are people opposed to civilising them.
The movie theatre I occasionally attend has great big screens for the menu at the concession stand. It’s 12 of em, portrait, lined up all the way across the bar. (I figger it’s a computer with a four output card and some kinda signal splitter)
and I can watch youtube from my cellphone.
If that doesn’t shout future, I can’t help ya!
That damn phone has TEN freekin’ radios innit. Makes my balls tingle just THINKING about it…and not in a good way.
I wonder why, in the 21st Century, we need dentists at all for the routine things they currently do.
Teeth that develop holes on the surface or rotteness at their roots? How positively primitive.
and charlatans who take in enough money from this and other types of fortunetelling to rent storefronts in large cities, and then pay the rent or mortgage on their residences as well.
For me, personally, this happens because it simply isn’t as comfortable to read a document in portrait format, or a book, on a typical computer screen which is landscape. If you mean short documents such as letters and the like, I take your point. But for longer documents print is the way to go. It’s a nuisance to have to scroll to the bottom of a page continually.
Or, at least a spelling system that all English-speaking countries could agree one (my spell checker doesn’t like your spelling of “rationalize”).
I agree here as far as telecommuting is concerned. As far as I can see current technology and bandwidth makes it feasible collaborate with others as well as you can in person; by the same token it’s even simpler for supervisors to monitor attendance and productivity. Staggered hours are more problematic. When you have shifts starting anywhere from 5 to 10am and ending anywhere from 2 to 7pm, that means one thing: all meetings have to be at lunchtime, since that’s often the only time you can get everybody together.
- allow call centres to exist.
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I don’t like call centers either but I don’t know why they shouldn’t exist. Or does call center mean something else where you’re from (the UK, I presume)?
…use ethnocentric terms such as “savage.”
Actually, according to the site, the anticipated purchase price is a less-out-of-this-worldly $194,000.
I can’t believe we don’t have clean drinking water available to everyone on the planet. And I’m not just talking about the hinterlands of Africa. From Health Canada:
Webpage here for official reference.
There’s a major difference between outbound call centers (telemarketers and the like) and inbound call centers (answering services like the one I work at), a detail your broad brush seems to have swept aside.
Let me share some friendly advice with you: As one of the very, very few Imperialist/Colonialists on the boards here, I can safely say that pretty much nobody else is going to agree with you on this one, seeing as Colonialism went out of fashion sometime shortly after the end of World War II.
And even I fail to see the problem with jungle dwelling tribes going about their business deep in the rainforest unmolested, as long as they aren’t bothering anyone else as they do so.
True.
What I was objecting to is the dislocation between the part of the company that provided the goods or services and the part of the company that I am supposed to talk to if something goes wrong.
A long time ago, I would go to a store and buy something from a man called Dan. If the thing turned out to be faulty, I’d go back and see Dan. He would know that he dealt with me and that he sold me the thing, and he’d try to look after me as a customer - by giving me a replacement or fixing it or showing me where the problem was.
With many small-to-medium-sized businesses, this still holds true. But a great many larger companies engineer a huge gulf between the people who are supposed to sell me stuff and the people I’m supposed to talk to when things go wrong, and this can give rise to lots of problems for me, as the customer. It is often the case that the people in the store don’t care about any problems and don’t want to know - they’re job is just to sell stuff, and since they know they don’t have to deal with the fallout if the goods turn out to be crap, they really don’t care.
The people at the call centre, meanwhile, usually have a ‘one script’ fits all way of working that suits their purpose but doesn’t suit mine. May I just take your account details? Can I just ask you two security questions? Can you just verify the amounts and dates of your last two payments? Can you just give me the authentication code that was printed in tiny digits on a small scrap of paper we sent with the packaging that we never told you you had to keep handy? Can I just mention we have a special offer on something you’re not interested in today?
All of this while I’m paying for a premium-rate phone call, and I’m just trying to tell them that I stayed in yesterday for the repair man to arrive as promised and he didn’t.
Then of course there are all the other problems, such as the ‘Let me just put you on hold for a moment…’ and then the line goes dead and I have to go through the entire telephone tree again and start over with a new worker droid, explaining everything from the beginning.
Screw that, why can’t I *beam *places, like on Star Trek? It’d be awfully nice to spend the minimum two hours a day I spend getting to and from work doing something more productive (or at least more enjoyable).
And Homophobia. It’s the 21st century. I can’t believe we still have to have a civil rights movement in America. And that it’s still a 50/50 split issue.
YEAH! I demand better teeth!
I’m not ethnocentric, and let me ask you is a culture that pratices cannibalism, human sacrifice, and etc. not savageic?
I am not an Imperialist or a Colonialist first of all. Also if the people want to stay in the jungle and act like cavemen they are free to do so but the problem is that some are opposed to anyone contacting them and offering them the new oppourtunities of civilization. Besides the condition among them are pretty bleak with short, brutish lives spent in hardship, infant mortality, cannibalism, female circumcision, and etc. To oppose civilizing them I think is immoral.
Space Travel. Dammit, I want to see some Wookiees!!!
(Oh, and I want a jetpack AND a lightsaber, dammit! Then I could be like, a Jedi version of Boba Fett!)
-No gay marriage, government healthcare. And some of the lack of medical advances – it amazes me some of the diseases we still suffer from. We’ve come so far…but it still seems so primitive, at times.
-Haven’t gotten much longer life-spans. Shouldn’t we be living three digit spans by now?
(And I thought the point of horoscopes in the newspaper were just for fun? At least, that’s the only reason I ever read mine – just for shits and giggles. I never took it seriously)
… in some countries, lose our right to vote for periods between 1 and 6 months if we move, because that’s how long the law says it takes for the new Census Register to become valid. Oh, and apparently pointing out that nowadays the documents should be electronic and not travel by diplomatic pouch makes you a technocrat.
I’d like to see a cite for your claim that these tribes currently practice cannibalism.
… can’t vote online.