PrinceofLight2000

Iran's definition of keeping Israel "in check" is to nuke it into oblivion.

It's not that I don't know, I'm just trying to see it through your glasses, so to speak. There seemingly are a lot of things I might read and dismiss as innocent albeit playfully sarcastic chiding that you might read and find a problem with.

You're misunderstanding my use of the word permission. When I said permission in terms of coupons I wasn't speaking in terms of legality. Of course there are legally permitted dishonest behaviors. What I am having a hard time grasping is how taking advantage of a legitimate offer given by the company in the form of a coupon with their permission* can be considered dishonest. Again, this excludes the practice of using multiples of the same coupon to gain a second discount meant to be used by another consumer. If you could explain how taking what has been offered to you under the conditions given by the offering party is dishonest, please do that.I would like you to find me documentation for any case where a coupon user paid for $1500 worth of groceries with a quarter. I have never heard of such a thing. The most I've seen saved on standard groceries was $150 when $200 was the full value. Despite that, I can't see anything wrong with the situation you present. Would it be wrong to accept an expensive television for a few dollars at a garage sale when it's definitely worth much more? I don't think so. Obviously a company would like you to begin paying full price on the product you're trying out through use of the coupon. That doesn't mean you're expected or obligated to. Using a coupon is not the same as signing a contract. The main purpose of coupons is not advertisement; they already have plenty of non-coupon advertisement. It is to guarantee a single sale of the product being advertised on said coupon by giving the consumer incentive to buy it by lowering the price. If you provide service and professional excellence so worthy of such a fee that you would have people voluntarily pay that fee in exchange for that service, then yes. Regardless, this is a poorly applied analogy and also a straw man. *Redundant, but I felt like it needed to be said.

At what point does something become too heated? Could you give examples of threads? I think our perception of what is too heated and what isn't probably differs, which would explain why I tend to overlook it.

I see. Well then, I'll just do a better job at keeping an eye out.

Tax loopholes are legitimate when the government puts them in place and is permissive. Swap in coupons and businesses for tax loopholes and the government and you get the idea. The point is that activities aren't dishonest when you have been given the permission to perform them.

On just about every forum I've used, mini-modding is a punishable offense. I've always been told it's best to not get involved, report it, and let the mods handle it. If things are run differently around here and the members are allowed to police each other, then I was simply unaware of it and would be more than happy to mediate.

I'm not quite positive about what exactly you're getting at.

Well you're no fun at all. Update: Turntable - invite only beta

What I meant by that was that the person's attitude could be making their activity questionable. I'll make an edit to reflect that.

I don't think membership is of a higher value than activity. Most of the people who join this place from what I've seen are looking for advice or an answer to one specific question, and once they get it, they leave. Sure, your membership numbers go up, but how many of them are active? If the regulars start leaving, which I have seen recently, if left uncorrected the forum will inevitably degenerate to little more than a question-and-answer party. This has already happened, but to a lesser degree. So the question should be how can you keep regulars while helping to get the incidental posters to stay? I'll leave that for you and the admins to figure out.

I agree, but it's far from impossible.

What you're disagreeing with isn't obvious to me because it appears we're on the same side of the argument and are making the same point.

I'm not sure why that's so difficult. You just would have to take out the parts involving the flame-fest, not the entirety of the post. I understand that it takes time to moderate, but wouldn't it be better to have a bigger staff so that threads can be fixed instead of killed? I'd gladly do it. I know of a few users who have left because they don't think this place enables discussion enough. Wouldn't it be in the best interest of the site to address that?

My main issue with your main issue () is that new discussions (not necessarily rule-breaking ones) can often grow from old ones. I will concede, however, that advice threads or news stories made for specific situations and not general topics ought not to be resurfaced without some kind of update. Another issue I have with this, most often in the Current Events forum, is that I've often seen topics locked for being too old with the reasoning that the event itself doesn't apply anymore, or is no longer "current". This may be the case for very isolated news stories that people like to post, but I don't think every topic (at least the more ideologically/policy-oriented ones) needs an official update in order to continue discussion, because those issues affect us in different ways every day, and someone might want to post a new perspective on it. Also, sometimes I feel like the only threads around here that contain real substantial discussion (specifically in Current Events) are closed because there is a single poster making the discussion turn into a flame war, and that these closures are often based on a single offending statement amidst that person's contributing point. Wouldn't it be better to edit or delete the offensive posts or thread-ban the offender rather than killing the discussion for the rest of us innocent bystanders? It's like putting out the campfire just because you have a couple kids being stupid and sticking their hands in. Lastly, it has always seemed counter-intuitive to me that threads create greater strain on forums when they have a higher post count. Wouldn't it be more troublesome from a data storage perspective to continually make new threads about the same topics rather than to bump the ones that are supposedly "too old"?

I would modify that a little bit and say that it would be questionable (at best in terms of attitude) if they got it for close to nothing simply for the sake of getting it for close to nothing (even though I'm not sure what's wrong with that when people are willingly handing it out for next to nothing), rather than to try the new product and continue buying it if they really enjoyed it. It's usually the case that when most people do a free trial they won't be blown away enough by the product to buy it regularly. It would be stupid for companies to not take that into consideration, which is why they make sure the coupons aren't a guaranteed loss by only making offers that they can afford based on their sales numbers and research. Coupons revolve around a concept called lossleading. In effect, lossleading is intentionally sacrificing a little bit of profit in order to employ an advertising technique to get more money back over time. Sometimes it's used in the long term, to get a person attracted to a brand name that appears to be more affordable because of the discounts it offers, but let's not forget that it's also used in the short-term to guarantee a sale of their product and not to the competition. So, again, I'm not too worried about mega-coupon users taking advantage of what has been taken into account by the businesses already when they decided to make the offer. Now, if people were using the same coupon repeatedly to get free stuff, that's where things start becoming seriously ethically questionable. That would be like eating the entire bowl of samples rather than one or two, whereas coupon superusers gather their fair take from all sorts of different bowls. That's why typically you can only redeem a single coupon for a specific offer at a time.

Are you saying you don't trust us?!?! </3

I think coupons are fair game. The manufacturers and retailers give full permission for consumers to take part in coupon offers. If the coupons begin to be redeemed on a mass scale and become unprofitable, the company needs to stop offering them. That doesn't make it an unfair deal. The bottom line is that taking advantage of a legitimate offer is not dishonest. I would even go so far as to say that the wrongdoing doesn't always rest on the consumer's head even if the offer is illegitimate, because often times there is no way to verify fraudulent offers. I have a friend in the ward who's about a decade older than I am, and he told me he buys MP3s from websites that sell them for 15-25 cents. I told him that any MP3 vendor who sells that low is typically based in Russia and sells illegitimate copies because there's no practical possibility of an artist or label agreeing to be paid so small an amount. I think people are only responsible for taking fraudulent offers when they realize they're fraudulent.

Deep Elm is going to give away one album per week until the end of the year... - AbsolutePunk.net (the below isn't on my clipboard) This is hilarious. It's also hilariously convenient. If any of you could help like Deep Elm's facebook page on account of the information in that thread, I would greatly appreciate it.

This is why I don't like contact sports.

So many winners in this thread.

.... Wow.

Ordinary Wizarding Level, I think.

...so make smaller dosages/cut pills in half like we do with every other pill? I really don't see why that would be so difficult.

Another thing I don't get is why scientists can't just isolate the THC and administer that. I would think that it's possible that you don't need enough THC to get high in order for it to do its job, and that would take marijuana itself out of the equation.