Rates for business can be severely adjusted by call volume. Your typical rate of say 7 cents a minute is non-negotiable if you’re the typcial legal office or something. When you start getting into excessive call volumes you can get the carriers to adjust rates as they still bill $13,000+ at 1.8 cents minute (690K minutes plus other stuff…). The next tier at which they can consider moving rates is about a million minutes per month. But, these are commitments that companies make; should they only pull 200K min of calls, they get penalized for not meeting the threshold that month. What’s nuts is that there are companies that bill millions of minutes per month, every month… I guess the prevailance of cell phones and their included minutes which you get penalized for going over prompted the question… Didn’t think about that.
As for diversity in your sense; I’d agree that all groups tend stick to themselves. I don’t entirely agree that to find people with ‘simliar experiences’ and build a ‘sense of community’ that you have to look within your own ethnic group. Hmm… Not sure how to put it actually. I don’t have a group that I fall into without conflict, and that has it’s own implications. My race has put me in situations that really have nothing to do with the actual individual that I’ve made myself, but my experiences and the people that I call and seek as friends are entirely a consequence of that indivuality (which is of course influenced by the former, but, you know what I mean I hope). The matter of race figures little when I consider the people that make up my world, save when my race has become an issue to somebody else and I need to be understood. Fortunately, life is such that that is not a constant need…
Trying to express thoughts on the matter of race in so few words is rather challenging… Trying to collect thoughts into a presentable fashion is even harder…
A late thought: I actually have very few experiences in common with any of you guys. I’m more drawn to the possibility of enjoying someone’s intellect than I am anything else. That enjoyment can be had even if your not ever there to build a bank of simliar experiences. At one point or another we all have some generally common threads, and that’s good enough for me.