Many companies have prenegotiated bulk and volume rate agreements with FedEx. Take AT&T f'rinstance. I have a VoIP TA on my desk ready to go back to AT&T. They FedEx'd me a prepaid FedEx shipping label and it's good for another 24 months. Which means whatever it costs FedEx to ship that box 2 years from now, AT&T already paid for it months ago.

Now this might be a bad deal for FedEx but there's absolutely no disincentive for AT&T to use it less.

And if you think about it, consumers already pay a premium pretty close to the anger point for retail sales. It's simply another embedded cost of which only a part goes into actual shipping. Macy's wanted to charge me $10 shipping on a gift card. Amazon charges $5-8 to slap a DVD in an envelope. I think that many people will resist more increases on that. Retailers will be forced to eat a realistic portion of that skim in order to keep bottomline prices down.

Alternatively one may think the shippers could perhaps offer slower cheaper service but that's not likely. If you need overnight you buy overnight. And 2-3 'day' service is already NOT that. 2-3 day service is closer to 7-10 end to end what with everyone excusing 'business days'. So were shippers to extend that another week there's bound to be a be backlash.

Commodity steel, recycled steel, 'ordinary' steel. You crush up cars where the cars to be crushed up, are. For the same reason that car companies like Toyota realized 25 years ago that it's cheaper and more efficient to build cars in the markets in which they are consumed. So around 1988 or so you saw the last Toyotas built in Japan. After that they were built in the US for the US.

Honestly I forget who said it decades ago but it was "The factory of the future will have two employees; a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog and the dog is there to ensure the man doesn't touch anything."

Unfortunately that isn't complete implemented yet. I went to Wal*Mart today and there were two human staffed checkout lines. The self checkout lines simply did not operate correctly, some problem with the scales or like that. So I wound up behind a long line of shopping carts, between a bored clerk who didn't look all that bright, and swarms of shoppers with a limited grasp of English. I would hope that in the next year or so Wal*Mart perfects their scanners so as to avoid that.

This column isn't about that. It's about fashion, plastic surgery, gay marriage, sex toys. And for what it's worth, it's preponderance of coverage about west Asia/mideast is more or less about what rights are afforded wealthy to middle class women who (sort of) have the freedom to ignore those restrictions anyhow. Hanging children and gays w/o trials, in public, from cranes, in the town square is simply not something discussed on Sex in the City. Sorry. Anyway....George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush

Oh so it's the Jew's fault. Thanks for clearing that up. Obama, who doesn't have overwhelming support among Jews, speaking in Detroit which also doesn't have very many Jews, shoos away Muslims, who DO support him, and it's his own operatives who do it. And it's the Jew's fault. Thanks again.

Everyone should stop exploring and drilling everywhere. After all, it won't have any measurable effect for decades, can't alter the price in any way, no matter what. Those new discoveries in Angola and Brazil? Forget it, it's a just a fake boondoggle.

No drilling. Too little too late. Check

No coal. Too dirty, hurts mountains. Check

No nuclear. Too scary. Check

Ok, so other than starving in the cold and dark, what have you got?

It's all nonsense either way. There is no such thing as terrorism in the US. Screaming about 911 is like fighting the War on Volcanoes.

Soon I won't care at all. It's all become prattle and stupidity. Anyway didn't Salon readers determine there's no such thing as sexism, only racism?

It's called an access fee and it's typically paid to the municipality. Like Cary, NC which gets 15% of Time Warner's billings in Cary, off the top for the exclusive right to deliver cable service. It's highly unlikely that municipalities are going to stand on ceremony and give up that kickback.

Now consider that POTS will eventually have to compete on equal footing with VoIP which is subject to none of the same tariffs, taxes and regulations, or Federal oversight, and you start to see the irrelevance of this whole topic soon. Unlike POTS If you want to use a strong encryption dialer for VoIP it's pretty mundane. Even the NSA would have a hard time cracking it in a cost effective manner. So perhaps in the end you just have to make it impractical for the government to spy on you.

As always, one of the most secure forms of electronic conversation in a scenario where automation is skimming all traffic looking for something relevant, as opposed to a targeted tap on a unique conversation, is a handwritten fax. Machines still have a devil of a time decoding that. Put it in a foreign language it's even harder.

Douchebag, care to elaborate? No I thought not. Fucking fool.

You're too white to have an opinion. Please sit the fuck down.