Tinder Bans Most Teens (gizmodo.com)

Tinder says it will stop allowing users aged 13 to 17 to use its app starting next week. The dating app has allowed users in the aforementioned age range to match within their age group since 2012. Gizmodo reports: The change makes sense given Tinder's status as a hookup app, its features that make it easier to find orgies, and various age-of-consent laws that could potentially land the company in hot water if anything involving a minor goes wrong. It likely won't be too hard to get around the restriction, and might just involve changing your birthday on Facebook.

Comments

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Now all the 13 year olds will be on there claiming to be 19.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

"I swear, officer, she said she was 19" will get a lot more credible now even for people who're caught with a girl that has no tits...

Re:Great

[Frosty Piss]

"I swear, officer, she said she was 19" will get a lot more credible now even for people who're caught with a girl that has no tits...

Clearly you have not seen a lot of nude 13 year old chicks...

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

HA! With all the GMOs and growth hormones in those McDonalds burgers, girls are getting tits when they're 8! By the time she's 19, she will look 35.

Re: Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay mister I'm pretty sure posts like that get you on some kind of list. Or at least I hope they do.

Re:Great

[jandrese]

Clearly you have not seen a lot of nude 13 year old chicks...

And neither should you.

Re:Great

[ImprovOmega]

Clearly you have not seen a lot of nude 13 year old chicks...

I believe Chris Hanson would like a word with you...

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Or 20-something asian women.

Re:Great

[axewolf]

There's nothing wrong with nudity you brainwashed little nerd. Unlike you, not everyone is conditioned to blow their load at the sight of a nude woman, so not everyone is afraid of developing some kind of preternatural affection toward immature girls by happening to see one without clothes on.
God I hate that people like you have kids. Neurosis may be common (and thereby justifiable to weak-minded fools like you) but it is not good.

Re:Great

[M1m3R]

if/when some of these "kids" have their own 13y/o daughters, they will think differently.

funny how we old people have clear lines about nudity and age.

Re:Great

[St.Creed]

Why? Shouldn't I take them to the sauna? I'm sure Finland will disagree. Shouldn't we go to the "natural" camping where nudity is normal and standard? Germany and large parts of the Dutch population would disagree. Why should I saddle my daughters with nudity taboos they have little use for, other than to be aware of where they are and how to respond to the neurotic ideas of the people around them?

Re: Great

[thunderclap]

Sadly, no.

Re:Great

[thunderclap]

The better question is: Where exactly have you? Outside of Nude beaches that tends to lead to much swickly illegal things.

Re:Great

[thunderclap]

I was with you until the banning. Are you suggesting that short petite youthful faced women with a cups are banned from nudity in australia because they might look under age? Seriously?
I need a link to the law please.

Re:Great

[davester666]

Or just use Roman Polanski's excuse: she was willing and able

Re: Great

[davester666]

List of politicians maybe. Or priests if you are Catholic (as a bonus, you get to see the world, going from one parish to another).

Re:Great

[danbert8]

Unless they are a doctor?

Re:Great

[danbert8]

Or unless the poster is a doctor...

Re:Great

[jandrese]

There is very little intersection between medical doctors and people who call young women "chicks".

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

You don't know a lot of doctors...

Re:Great

[danbert8]

High 5 Bro!
http://vignette2.wikia.nocooki...

Re:Great

[beastofburdon]

No, but they are banned in porn in Australia.

Re:Great

[thunderclap]

The only doctors that would be seeing naked 13 yr olds would be gynos.

Re:Great

[danbert8]

Really, you've never had an annual physical? I'm a man and not only does it involve nudity, it involves gloved contact with genitals. I don't know that women get a hernia check or whatever coughing reveals, but I'm betting it still involves a bodily examination.

Huh?

[Frosty Piss]

Why was Tinder allowing 13 year olds to access their Creepy People Database anyway? I mean, Iâ(TM)ve seen some pretty hot teens that make my wiener twitch a bit, but, uh, no. Just no.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because COPPA does not apply once you turn 13. Advertising makes me sick.

Re:Huh?

[beastofburdon]

It's perfectly legal for 13 year olds to be in a romantic relationship, they just can't marry or have sex.

In the vast majority of the world, including most US states, it is perfectly legal for a 13 year old to have sex. There are limitations on who can have sex with them though.
Also, with parental permission, it is legal for an underage person to get married, though I'm not sure what the age limit on that is. I know because one of the girls I went to high school with was married with a child when she was 14 or 15.

Others Welcome

[JustBoo]

From the verbiage in the /. article, ages zero (0) to twelve (12) are, of course, more than welcome on the site.

Re:Others Welcome

[bluefoxlucid]

The verbiage also claims Tinder has special features to help find orgies. ... like what? Last I heard it was swipe left, swipe right, you matched, hook up. Is there a setting for "Find sex parties"?

Re:Others Welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

From the verbiage in your comment, you think Tinder is a site.

Tinder Hook Up Site
Quick way to meet single women and go on casual dates. Join for free.
tinder.quickflirt.com

Tinder Dating Site
Seek romance? Take your chance, meet your match tonight!
m.tinder.flirt.com

That's from Tinders own advertising.

Huh, believe that or some weak-ass wannabe's non-opinion on the InterWannabeTubes who doesn't even know what site means. Sure...

Captha: adultery

Re:Others Welcome

[just another AC]

A couple friends of mine use it, and hearing the updates makes for interesting small talk.

Apparently there are now some kind of "group" function, whereby you create temporary groups. These groups can then match against other groups to have chat room type conversations. ... so maybe that leads to orgies?

I thought it would be so people can meet up in groups because "safety in numbers" type thing.

Re:Others Welcome

[bluefoxlucid]

Tinder groups? That's not a Kik thing? There's all kinds of ads on Craigslist about Kik swingers groups; it became a media phenomena among the self-described tabloid news (as opposed to the self-denying tabloid news that permeates American culture) after they got bored with furries and online cybersex mucks (Wired...).

Who thought it was ever a good idea

[Todd Knarr]

I want to know who at Tinder thought it was a good idea to allow that age range any access at all in the first place. I know why they thought it was, but I can't imagine the idea ever ending well no matter what restrictions were placed on it (at least as far as the law's concerned anyway, I'm sure the kids thought it was a dandy idea but they don't get a say in that).

Re:Who thought it was ever a good idea

[will_die]

The audience of gawker and tinder are probably the same so as long as the person was over the age of 4 that is perfectly acceptable.

Re:Who thought it was ever a good idea

[thegarbz]

Why? Is it suddenly illegal when it when you replace passing a note with a swipe? Since when is a 3rd party responsible for where people stick their penises?

Re:Who thought it was ever a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is since when there was a third party.

If you include an adult in between in the note-passing, who knows the respective ages and the content of the note, then you have yourself an analogy.

Re:Who thought it was ever a good idea

[Coren22]

Who are these people with multiple penises? What do they do with the second penis? Is it beside or above below?

Re:Who thought it was ever a good idea

[St.Creed]

Who are these people with multiple penises?

They're called Elon Musk, Richard Branson and John Carmack and they're having contest to see who can launch the most penises the highest.

What do they do with the second penis? Is it beside or above below?

It starts at the same level, then quickly rises, but after a while it droops again and usually ends below.

Re:Who thought it was ever a good idea

[thegarbz]

Do they know the content of the note?

Re:Who thought it was ever a good idea

[thegarbz]

Who are these people with multiple penises?

If you have to ask then you don't watch enough porn.

Re:Who thought it was ever a good idea

[omnichad]

Actual human intelligence writes the code. The "content" in this case is defined by the context of the purpose of the app.

Re:Who thought it was ever a good idea

[kwbauer]

You seriously ask that question? Obviously you haven't tried to buy some quality OTC epinephrine lately. Or some quality target/plinking tools lately.

Re:Who thought it was ever a good idea

[thunderclap]

http://totalsororitymove.com/t...
Be careful what you ask for.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...

Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[axewolf]

It was selected for mass popularity.

It's part of the trend of the "tenderizing" industry: businesses that create products that compromise people emotionally and cause them to be distracted.
It's good for the economy under the current system as a whole. But it's awful for the people.

This is literally the same as the case of tobacco companies marketing to children.

But the problem was never the tobacco companies themselves, just like the problem isn't Tinder now.
It's that the leaders of our society are the kind of people who promote and see value in these things.
The immediate harm ends up besides the point: this society is poison for 99% of everyone.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[Scott Tracy]

I guess you've got a lot of free time since timecube.com shut down?

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[bluefoxlucid]

It is technically impossible for something to be good for the economy as a whole but bad for the people.

In the short term, that which is good for the economy as a whole increases consumer spending power and creates jobs. Jobs are necessary for production of goods, and thus are created by demand for more goods. Any sustainable practice of economy which improves this flow of consumer buying power improves the lives of the people.

In the long term, the sustained strength of an economy as such reduces business risk. This reduction allows businesses to expend those resources, no longer spent on insuring themselves against uncertainty, in more risky endeavors. That means technical progress. Technical progress reduces the amount of jobs needed to produce a certain set of products, which reduces their cost; this eventually transfers to the consumer, and the consumer can buy more and better products, creating the demand for replacement jobs, ending with the same employment and more goods per person. This technical progress is responsible for such phenomena as the reduction in food costs (30% of the median household income in 1950, 11% today), the increase in access to healthcare (5% of income in 1950, 6% today buying more and better healthcare), and the viability of welfare in general.

Such stabilizing actions lengthen the deployment time of labor-reducing technologies, shorten the duration of transitional unemployment from technical progress, increase the pace of technical progress in general, and even allow us to reduce per-capita working hours in trade (instead of being 20% richer, we can all work 4 days, 32 hours per week; this is also why we no longer work 10-16 hour days 6 days per week, as was the subject of political debate in 1880-1920 before the 8-hour-day gained traction).

All business activities consume labor, producing a product or service in return. All revenue-generating business activities necessarily consume part of the income of the population, transferring part of that to consumers for later spending. That means an activity which makes the maximum amount of money may be harmful to the economy: if it consumes little labor but charges high prices, you have something called "economic rent", which leads to a reduction in employment; if it consumes large amounts of labor and produces something of little use, you have a simple reduction of wealth (we do all this work and spend all our money and we get nothing for it!).

Evaluating what's good for an economy is hard. You've seemed to sidetrack on evaluating what's good for a society, which is even more complex, and is contexted to the current state of that society. For example: Greece has a very openly-sexual society; making America more openly-sexual would necessarily expose more teenagers and younger children to the concept of sex, and our society aims to purge the very awareness of any such thing from the minds of people under roughly 14, and then minimize the amount of sexual conduct they're aware of and exposed to thereafter. Attempting to convert either of these to the other would be necessarily harmful to that society.

Tobacco is a more clear-cut case, although not entirely. While I dislike tobacco, and I understand alcohol has lower toxicity and is harmless in reasonable consumption, I also understand the immense cultural impact of tobacco and alcohol. The harm in smoking a half a gram of tobacco at the end of the day (or week!) is not comparable to the harm of smoking four packs of cigarettes, and *is* comparable to the harm (or lack thereof) of simply not smoking; and, in fact, second-hand smoke has been shown harmless (but highly annoying) by many scientific studies (exactly zero studies have found a link between second-hand smoke and *any* health effects). The harm of tobacco is largely cultural, in that we smoke entirely too much and in a harmful manner; at the same time, the image of a pipe or a detective with a cigarette is a long-standing cultural artifact of tobacco, and many people enjoy a tobacco hobby which does limit itself to small amounts on an infrequent basis. While tobacco is clearly harmful, it's not necessarily so to a great degree.

Again: analysis is highly-complex and difficult.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[axewolf]

analysis is highly-complex and difficult

that is why you have instincts, and that is why you are conditioned to shun your instincts by society

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[bluefoxlucid]

My instincts tell me the world is flat and the sun orbits the earth. You make the ridiculous argument that the moon orbits the earth, but the earth orbits the sun; how can that be true when they both cross the sky?

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[lgw]

But it can't - that wouldn't even pay for the power to the MRI machines, let alone the machines and the people to operate them.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[phantomfive]

Clearly we need to invent a tricoroder.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[axewolf]

your instincts tell you no such thing.

the multiple levels of stupid in the implication in your statement is inexcusable

stop believing revisionist history. stop being so fucking gullible. Look up the history of the idea of the flat world, just for starters.
Then put these things in perspective: in various civilizations, some of the very few artifacts that survived imply that the people who used them believed something.
The truth is the vast majority of people were not invested in believing any such thing, and that there were likely other in comparable proportion that believed something contradictory.

the phenomenon of "academic consensus" was not so widespread in ancient times as it is today in the authoritarian dogma-laden academia of today.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[bluefoxlucid]

At one point, respiration cost a lot. The original Iron Lung was basically invented in 1670, but was impractical--too complex to build; of course they could do it on that technology, and then someone could hand-operate it 24/7, and the technology to make steel could do so with ~200 times the labor of modern steel-making techniques. They'd have to hand-hammer plate steel instead of rolling it; and blast furnaces were charcoal-driven until the 1700s. Hot-blast furnaces in the 1830s century revolutionized steelmaking: previous blast furnaces produced under 400 tonnes of iron with the same labor (cost) that a hot-blast furnace used to output 80,000 tonnes, meaning pre-hot-blast iron literally cost over 200 times as much.

The Drinker respirator was used to treat polio in 1928; and Emerson invented a *much* less-expensive respirator in 1931. The Both respirator cost £2000 British pounds in 1936, and £1500 in 1950; Edward Both developed a device in 1950 that cost only £100 and performed the same function.

Why do you think MRI machines can't get cheaper, when food, respirators, medicines, aluminum, cars, books, housing, and even MRI devices *have* gotten cheaper throughout the history of their existence?

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[bluefoxlucid]

I know the history of the idea of a flat earth; round earth is an extremely old concept, speculated upon in 600BC, but not really accepted as a physical fact until 300BC. Now those numbers are really interesting: Thales started investigating the mathematical basis of Geometry in 600BC; Euclid published his famous texts on the mathematics of Geometry in 300BC. Euclid's writings include the observation that a triangle's angles all add up to 180 degrees; however, the Greeks observed that you could make three turns while sailing and end up where you started, yet the angles didn't add up to 180 degrees, thus leading to the *entire* field of non-Euclidean geometry, starting with the projection of two-dimensional geometric shapes onto a sphere.

So, yes, some 3000 years ago, people actually believed the earth was flat.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[axewolf]

"the Greeks observed that you could make three turns while sailing and end up where you started, yet the angles didn't add up to 180 degrees"
that's very interesting

but I object to your point of view on consensus of information

"a physical fact"
what is that supposed to mean?

"people actually believed the earth was flat"
which people? every sailor? how many? how do you know?

Just acknowledge that the records do not exist to be able to speculate on this. What's the point anyway? To say that everyone in the olden days was a dumb-dumb unlike you and me the smartest boys of all time? Honestly I think that's it. To create the illusion of progress, when in reality, people are more thoughtless unoriginal herd-following animals than they have ever been, including especially the ones who are said to be educated. What good is knowledge without the will to apply it to a good purpose?

And people who consciously declared that the world is flat weren't wrong anyway. The earth is flat. It is also round. It is large enough to have the luxury of being both at the same time. The largest scope is not necessarily the most correct one.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[lgw]

Oh, they sure will in some distant future. But by then will have new latest and greatest expensive medical tech - unless we get socialized medicine, of course, then all such progress will fade away.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[bluefoxlucid]

what is that supposed to mean?

It means circa 600BC, the Greeks considered and debated the possibility of a round earth, drawing postulates in the form "IF the earth were round...". Circa 300BC, the Greeks had decided the earth is definitely round, and that the consideration of a flat earth was factually incorrect.

Just acknowledge that the records do not exist to be able to speculate on this.

What are you talking about? We know Pythagoreas proposed the round earth hypothesis in ancient Greece; and Aristotle provided empirical evidence arguing that the earth is indeed round based on real, groundbreaking observations in 330BC. Indian scholars still believed in the flat earth model for a few *hundred* years after that; and, oddly enough, the land-locked country of China retained a flat-earth hypothesis until after the unification of the five territories under the Chin dynasty in the 1600s AD--yes, that's about 400 years ago. Indigenous cultures in the Americas also held to a flat earth theory, right up until invasion by Europeans.

Homer and Hesiod described the earth as a flat disc. Even Thales believed the earth was flat, and Aristotle's proposition of a round earth was based on Euclid's work which followed Thales's own explorations of mathematics--the mathematicians who made it possible to theorize and demonstrate a spherical earth without the power to circumnavigate themselves believed the earth was a flat disc. Anaximenes argued that the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon were flat discs riding on air, and explained their ability to ride on air was due to their flatness, which made them glide like leaves on the wind (a spherical body could not stay afloat as such). Hecataeus claimed the Earth was a circular disc floating in water; Herodotus claimed Hecataeus was an idiot because the ends of the earth only fall off to an infinite drop.

The old Nordic concept of cosmology (back when Odin was King of the Gods in Asgard) maintained a vast ocean surrounding the flat plane of the earth, with Yggdrasil the World Tree in the center, and the great sneak Jormungandr swimming in the sea. They later inferred that the earth must be round by comparing the shadows cast by an apple and the climatography of the earth, creating a global climate model along with their new round earth theory.

The Chinese described the sky and stars as an umbrella (Kai Tian theory) or an egg (Hun Tian theory) surrounding the earth, with the earth as the yolk at the center. Until after 1600AD, no Chinese scholar or philosopher had ever been recorded objecting to the idea that the earth were a *square*, geometrically flat, while the sky was round. It was simply a thing they knew about the earth, a thing that made sense: The earth is the flat ground below your feet, not a round ball that you wander half-way around and fall off.

Do you just want to pretend inconvenient facts don't exist?

What's the point anyway?

The point is the obvious and instinctual is also often wrong. The entire point of a thinking society and a philosophy of engagement--of questioning and investigating, rather than accepting what you're told and what you bluntly see--is to understand what is beyond the shade of your blurred, narrow vision. A society which lives entirely by its instincts follows its state and religious leaders and generally builds itself on superstition and subservience.

The earth is flat. It is also round. It is large enough to have the luxury of being both at the same time.

Your instincts tell you the world is flat under your feet even if it is round 28 miles out; yet that is incorrect. The world has a large radius of curvature, and it is very much curved under your feet, and the curvature is slight such that you do not perceive it by close inspection, and such that it is overwhelmed by noise at small distances (the ground is bumpy--sometimes to an extreme).

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[bluefoxlucid]

It is unlikely all such progress would fade away, and certainly not for that.

Your premise is that healthcare will get cheaper, and then it can get more expensive as new technology arrives. The first problem is people will then move their spending away from healthcare, and the market will no longer bear expensive treatments. The *second* problem is the general advancement of technology means the next latest-and-greatest technology is ... relatively expensive: it's as expensive as our shiny new stuff now stands in comparison to the medical industry, and will stand so in a future where the cost of medical care is much smaller.

In short, a shiny, new, expensive thing now costs 10% of the 6% we spend on medical care (0.6%), thus is *quite* expensive; and, in the future, when the level of technology has advanced to the point that we're buying more and better medical care with only 1% of our income, the new devices would also be quite expensive, reflecting 10% of the total medical expense--or 0.1%.

That's how it's always worked, in the long stretch. Today, we spend 6% of our income on more and better medical care, while in 1950 it was only 5%; and before that, medical care was scarce and expensive, with real medicine and surgery reserved for the wealthiest families because the middle-class simply couldn't afford to buy healthcare. Our healthcare now has increased to include wellness and preventative measures; in the future it will expand to include new drugs and machines and other treatments, and all the while our technology to research and *construct* those drugs and machines will improve, such that constructing a brand new type of machine doesn't incur a cost reflecting so much of the total income.

Socialized medicine would tend to restrict the default payment level for healthcare (the demand market); and further expense from supplemental private insurance (which is suddenly *cheap* because the entire span of public healthcare is not on their heads!) would reflect the consumer market's demand for newer treatments. In an economic system where socialized healthcare is viable, the only likely outcome from such a structure is *more* money diverted to newer treatments, creating a demand driver for technical progress.

Perhaps you should stick to arguments over whether socialized healthcare is or is not currently viable and cheaper than privatized healthcare. I have no immediate opinion on that analysis.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[axewolf]

Instinct is not intuition. Intuition is what may have inclined some people to believe the world was a flat place. The distinction is extremely important.
There is no evidence of any idea led to by instinct in any of this. Instinct is the product of long and consistent experience. Intuition is the product of consistent experience over a much shorter period of time and is much more malleable.

Many birds' instincts must tell them on some conscious level that the world is round, otherwise how would they be able to migrate across continents accurately?

Look at the example of humans undertaking similar journeys. The example you cited of turning three times to amount to a 180 degrees of turning yet arriving far away from where you started: why would you assume that the greeks were the first to experience this? There is no telling how many civilizations collectively realized this before them. You are not accounting for the noise of history, especially events such as "dark ages" as the one spoken of in greek history around 1000 BC or the "bronze age collapse" in general.

You are using a few very examples and not accounting for all the ones that may have been lost. You are not accounting for how these examples survived to present day. You are not accounting for differences of opinion that may have existed. You are guilty of a lack of critical thought: just believing what you heard and assuming it is the whole picture. You are using these few examples from a tiny minority of civilizations to assert that there was a consensus across not just nations, but across the entire world. Do you see how utterly absurd that is?

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[lgw]

Your premise is that healthcare will get cheaper, and then it can get more expensive as new technology arrives.

Not quite. My premise is that we as a society pay the most we can afford for good health care, rather than the least we can manage, because we like to stay alive, and not in pain if possible. That means new tech is funded by dropping prices in old tech.

I'm not sure we disagree on this.

The advance of technology ensures specific treatments get cheaper over time (or cheaper substitute treatments are found - scans replacing exploratory surgery and so on). The combination of our strong survival instinct and the profit motive ensure new research is capitalized, and thus a steady stream of expensive-at-first new breakthroughs.

If you focus on cost minimization alone, the capital for new research nearly vanishes (sure, we'll still get some progress from individuals finding better ways to do what we already do, and some low-capital advancements, but those are fundamentally limited). Many countries have significantly cheaper healthcare than the US, and in turn aren't the source of amazing breakthroughs.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[bluefoxlucid]

You used instinct in place of intuition in the above. They are often used semantically to mean the same thing, although this is technically not correct, as you say.

By the way, spending a lot of energy taking one line of argument and then switching to semantics when you've lost is a dead giveaway that your position is intractable.

You are using a few very examples and not accounting for all the ones that may have been lost.

Your argument has become, "Well, that's just what we *know*! What about what we *don't* know?!" We don't know about the aliens on Seti Alpha Prime, so there must be aliens. Your position is absurd.

You are using these few examples from a tiny minority of civilizations to assert that there was a consensus across not just nations, but across the entire world. Do you see how utterly absurd that is?

All of Europe got their astronomy from Greece--or, more accurately, from Rome, who traded philosophy with Greece on a regular basis. That includes the Arabs. China missed the boat until Europe traded astronomy with the Chinese--that is, the Chinese unified under the Chin dynasty. The Cherokee of the United States--the second largest North American indigenous group--believed the Earth was an island in the center of an endless ocean. The Norse reasoned the Earth was flat until they did some fancy reasoning with an apple and a candle (impressive, that). The Mayans and other Central American indigenous tribes believed in a flat earth theory. The Ancient Egyptians left writings in the pyramids describing the Nun, the great circular ocean surrounding the disc which was the Earth, all a flat plane. The oldest record of any map of the Earth is from Babylon, in the region now called Iraq; it and supplemental writings portray a flat earth theory.

These groups account for approximately the entire spread of human population across the Earth, and for all of the great ancient societies, including the Europeans, the Native Americans, the Egyptians, the Arabs, and the Asians.

You suggest there must, somewhere, be an extreme minority of humans who, upon developing the ability to think and reason, also were bestowed with the knowledge and understanding of a round earth despite such evidence as the ground under their feet being flat and things falling downward (Aristotle's theory of gravitation was that all things moved downward toward the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE; Galileo was earliest with starting a modern theory of gravitation, followed by Hooke suggesting that objects move toward each other).

Developing a round-earth theory has always been a matter of extreme evidence and consideration: circumnavigation of the earth, heavy application of geometry, climatological analysis and extreme lateral thinking, and other manners of high technology are required. People intuited that the moon itself was a disc rather than a sphere--never mind the face perfectly facing the earth; it looks like a circle, so it is a circle. Even reasoning the circle is visible because it is the extreme circumference of a sphere and, thus, intuiting that the earth under your feet is also a sphere raises a hell of a lot of confusing questions (you'd have to develop a cosmic model to explain why this makes sense) and, firstly, requires you to determine that the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon are similar types of things (which is silly: the sun and moon are in the sky; the Earth is on the ground!).

You make the absurd proposition that these things are trivialities.

Re:Tinder is a 'conspiracy'

[bluefoxlucid]

Not quite. My premise is that we as a society pay the most we can afford for good health care, rather than the least we can manage, because we like to stay alive, and not in pain if possible.

I can disprove this in one shot.

Circa 1950, 25% of the average family's income paid for discretionary spending and entertainment; circa 2003, 44% spent on same. Health care spending raised from 5% to 6%.

To put this clearly: the median family freed up 20% of their income and used it to buy plasma TVs and gameboys, rather than luxury-class healthcare. That's not even correct: housing dropped by about 50%, and we spent the additional 14% of our income *plus* 5% more on buying bigger houses.

So out of 39% of our income freed up over 50 years, we directed 1% to buying more and better healthcare. The other 38% went to buying more toys and bigger houses in which to put those toys.

The combination of our strong survival instinct and the profit motive ensure new research is capitalized, and thus a steady stream of expensive-at-first new breakthroughs.

"Expensive-at-first" doesn't means it'll hit the market as expensive as the last breakthrough. You have both the consumer's unwillingness to spend literally half their income on medical insurance (they might buy into the medical care itself when needed; and we can get even-more-expensive treatments into any market by amortizing those unlikely costs via insurance) and the advances in technology lowering the cost of newer technologies.

Remember I said we produced a furnace that made 80,000 tonnes of iron for the same cost as making 400 tonnes of iron prior? We now have machines to build complex machine parts, and even computers to aid engineers in designing complex machines. The cost to develop and produce a complex steel machine today--a new piece of technology--is much lower than the cost to develop and produce a similar complex steel machine in 1790. That's technical progress lowering the cost of newer technologies.

So the next big break through in medicine, what? Gene therapy? It'll be based on synthetic genetics and retroviral treatment, which will be cheaper thanks to more effective DNA synthesis and more reliable retroviral design. Clone organs? The advances in gene therapy and underlying technology will make the new developments allowing cloned organs cheaper--the same technology, if discovered today, will be much more expensive than if we discover it some years down the line when all the basic technology of mucking about with genetics has been streamlined, even though the immediate process is no simpler. This is the pattern of technical progress.

It actually becomes difficult to invent extremely-expensive new technology. You have to come up with completely new, alien processes built on things we can only barely do or can't do at all. Once we've gained the ability to carry out all the underlying tasks, an expensive new piece of technology is just a large amount of small labor, instead of a large amount of large labor. That means "expensive" becomes relative.

I'll bet two, in fact

[stomv]

There was a girl in my class at school that had, STILL HAS, tits bigger than my mother when she was the age of 14. Several of them actually.

I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that this girl had exactly two tits, and that you have a really, really small mother.

Re:I'll bet two, in fact

[desdinova 216]

odd, I read that as several girls

Re:I'll bet two, in fact

[St.Creed]

Heh. My kids are in the first class of high school. Girls vary in height from 1.50m to 1.85m, and from completely undeveloped and very childlike to rather overdeveloped and hard to differentiate from a fullgrown woman. At that age you get every possibility in one group.

Re:I'll bet two, in fact

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you must be good at automatically compensating poor writing.

Re:I'll bet two, in fact

[Anonymous Coward]

HEY I'M SUUUUUUUUPER GOOOD AT COMPENSATING!!!! *Goes away in a really expensive convertible* *Also adds extra words to get past caps filter, but hey I am supposed to be actually yelling this out loud*

Re:I'll bet two, in fact

[thunderclap]

several references tits not girl.

Re:I'll bet two, in fact

[someoneOtherThanMe]

odd

Even. Most people have an even number of tits.

Re:I'll bet two, in fact

[Opportunist]

No. The average person has just under 1 tit.

Re: I'll bet two, in fact

[Opportunist]

Which isn't true either. Zero is not an even number, so about half the population has not an even number. Of the other half, not all members have an even number of tits. So most people do not have an even number of tits.

In related news.

[SuricouRaven]

A lot of teenagers celebrated their seventeenth and eighteenth birthday this week.

Expand this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep kids under 40 off the internet in total.

What if . . .

[DickBreath]

What if the kids were only using it to hook up with people in order to do homework together?

Useless solution is useless

[grimthaw]

This week at the same time as the ban Tinder population of "18" year golds grew by approximate the same number of banned 13-17 year olds. This solved nothing.

How?

[ElectricHellKnight]

Doesn't that very demographic account for 90% of their users? This is like Slashdot banning socially-awkward nerds.

I wouldn't know...

[Zanadou]

I wouldn't know. Its changelog just states

"Improvements & fixes"

...like every other fucking "app" and program update since 2011.