Yeah sure thing buddy, because we're talking about ALL transportation here, not just automobiles. Like I always get off my bike and walk it down hills, because I'm not actually driving the bike with my legs when I go down hills and that's just WRONG.
Oh, please. What's next? You going to accuse me of never using an elevator or escalator, too? We are discussing automobiles.
None of us has lived in a primitive culture, so we can't say, but I say if you're a hunter-gatherer, you're motivated to move around, because otherwise you're going hungry. That's 'necessary exercise', not going to the gym because you have this abstract concept in your head of 'getting fit' or 'being healthier'. Your 'primitive cultures' were REQUIRED to move their bodies if they wanted to survive. WE don't have to if we don't want to -- and MOST PEOPLE don't want to, so they don't do it. That's my point.
Walking and other moderate activity are all that are required to relieve stress and promote creative thinking on top of the physical benefits.
But, see, 'relieving stress' doesn't make you fit or healthy, which is what we're really discussing.
I'm fit and skinny, but I have never seen someone exercising and thought "Gee, they look like they should be embarrassed". If you are cycling/jogging/whatever, you look fine in lycra no matter your level of fitness. You are wearing the proper gear for the activity, which always looks "right".
If you're 'skinny' then you're probably 'skinnyfat', meaning you have no real muscle anywhere, but more bodyfat than you think. You should go get a DXA scan to determine your body composition. Also, you sound weak. Just like the guy who commented above you, you'll get the same injuries and diseases due to your overall lack of fitness as someone who literally abuses their body, because you do little to nothing to maintain it. Also, just because the overall aesthetic of exercise doesn't look dorky/bad/embarassing to you, doesn't mean that MOST PEOPLE don't think it looks dorky/bad/embarassing. MOST PEOPLE are still stuck in their teenage mindset when it comes to what their 'peers' think about them, and they won't break from the pack so far as appearances. If they think someone will think it looks stupid, they won't do it.
Walk five miles a day? Who has time to do that? I have a job and are raising a family, there's too much to do for me to spend several hours walking five miles for no reason! Who would even DO that? Don't you have a car? Can't you take a bus? Do you have some sort of mental issues? That's insane!
That's what MOST PEOPLE would say if you told them to walk five miles a day. MOST PEOPLE you can't even get to walk ONE mile a day. They won't even do it if they need to, they'll call someone for a ride instead because they don't want to do it. You're another outlier, non-typical; you tell people you walk five miles a day, and MOST PEOPLE will look at you like you're nuts, or poor and have to walk, or something other than with 'admiration'. Also 'just walking', while better than nothing, isn't very complete exercise. It doesn't raise your heart rate enough to improve your endurance, it really doesn't burn too many calories, and does nothing to improve your overall strength. As you age you'll still lose muscle mass, you'll lose bone mass, and you'll suffer injuries because of those things. You NEED to go to the gym if you really want to be healthy -- but you WON'T, will you? You say it's 'boring, monotonous, and tedious' and 'fuck that'. So you see: You, too, don't LIKE exercise at all. 'Walking five miles a day' is just you paying lip-service to the whole concept, while really not doing much of anything at all. If you really wanted to be fit and healthy you'd make yourself go to the gym at least twice a week for a couple hours and build/maintain your overall strength, and then RUN, not WALK, to raise your heart rate well above 100bpm, to build endurance. But you won't do it because you really actually don't like exercise at all.
Okay, congratulations. But you're not a typical person. You have internal motivation; you're wired to LIKE it. Most people don't and are avoidant of anything unpleasant. Exercise is unpleasant to them, so they avoid it. Also there's the people (too many of them) that think exercising looks bad/embarassing, so they'll avoid it for that reason, too.
Exercise feels good to YOU, and to ME, and to SOME PEOPLE. For MOST people it does not, and they'll find any other thing they'd rather do than exercise. Otherwise why do we have so many people whose health is suffering because they don't exercise? I get anywhere from 7 to 20 hours a week of exercise because I race bikes. I literally would rather die than go back to being fat, weak, and sickly, but I'm a corner case not typical in the least. Most people think I'm nuts, that's what most people think of exercise. You get however much you get, and I guarantee you there are people who give you shit for doing that, too. Also, we're not rats, or monkeys (despite the close kinship), we're humans, and we react in more complex ways than either one of them does.
For what it's worth, for MOST PEOPLE, if you find some way to make exercise into a fun game, then they're more likely to engage in it. That's why I say training for a sport of some sort is a good pathway to getting and staying motivated. A sense of accomplishment is another good motivator, which is why I gave an offhand example of training for a (half) marathon; it's a common goal people (who are bent that way) have and work towards. I found training for racing bikes to be an excelent way to get into phenomenally good shape, and stay that way (even though I don't do it for that reason), and it works better overall than the totally abstract "to be healthier" reason that I'd used for 10 years prior to that. But the fact of the matter appears to be, despite what you're claiming, that MOST PEOPLE think exercise is dumb, unpleasant, even painful, and a pointless waste of time, even if they'll nod their heads at all the perfectly valid arguments you give them why they should be doing it. If people's doctors can't convince them they should exercise, listing all the bad things that'll happen to them later if they don't, then how do you think anyone else is going to motivate them? If it was so 'fun' and 'rewarding' then why aren't people self-motivating? I've often said that if you could find a way that was 100% effective to motivate people to exercise, you'd be a billionaire. But no such magic motivation method exists because motivation, ultimately, has to come from within the individual, not externally. Thus most people don't, and won't, exercise, or do any 'unnecessary' work -- not unless they have a totally internal reason to motivate themselves. Again: if it were so easy to get people to exercise, especially with all the perfectly valid, scientifically and medically backed reasons why they should, then why are first-world countries full of obese, weak, sickly, diseased people? Because they don't want to, and you can't externally motivate them.
Mod parent up. If you're running it from inside Windows, then you're still running Windows. This is the annexation of Linux that I've been watching happening with Microsoft: one way or another they want to be the only OS that anyone uses, and this is an example of that; I'll say it again: If you're running Linux from within Windows, you're still running Windows and not Linux. It's just a shell at that point. Eschew Windows entirely and install Linux if you want Linux, among other things it'll have 100% less spyware that way.
I'd rather walk everywhere than ever have a so-called 'self-driving car' or even step inside one. If it doesn't have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, a brake pedal, and a way for me to be in total control of it, I don't want it.
No, if the government offered a cash incentive to exercise, people would find a way to cheat the system, not exercise, and get paid anyway. The people who are already motivated to exercise wouldn't change their behavior at all, do the things they already do, and therefore get paid for not changing anything. It would be a gigantic boondoggle.
It's hardwired into our brains: Don't expend energy unnecessarily! Conserve your bodyfat as much as possible, tomorrow or the next day or next week there may be nothing to eat! Famine is coming! You must survive long enough to breed! Doesn't matter that we're not hunter-gatherers anymore and that you can op into your car and drive 5 minutes to the grocery store and get enough food to feed yourself for weeks, or that there's an obesity problem, it's hardwired into our caveman-like brains to conserve energy, move only as much as necessary. Also, the vast majority of people find exercise to be unpleasant, therefore they'll avoid it any way they can, even if they know on an intellectual level that it's good for them, they'll feel better in the long run, live longer, be happier -- doesn't matter, it's unpleasant right now, emotionally they just can't bring themselves to do it, therefore they don't. For what it's worth, while abstract reasons to exercise regularly like "To be healthier", or "Because I want to lose weight" don't work, having a non-abstract reason, like "I want to run a (half) marathon next year", or "I want to participate in such-and-such sport so I'm training for that" seem to work better.
If people like Zuckerberg want to throw money at a problem to show what great humanitarians they are, how about they throw money at cleaning up that huge island of trash in the middle of the ocean, instead of throwing money at something that everyone has been trying to solve for at least a hundred years like cancer, that millions of people are already working on anyway? Or is getting rid of the monument to humans being pigs not enough of a photo-op?
Unenforcable law is unenforcable.. except within their own borders, of course. What do they think they're going to do, have people extradited to their country because they posted an anti-Indonesia meme or comment somewhere? LOL.
Paper books have all kinds of 'staying power', can withstand all kinds of damage and still be readable, and are a 'mature technology' that even the lowliest of nations can manage to produce. I recommend using more of them.;-)
Unless this 'technology' (which, by the way, is not anything new or innovative) is powered by raw sunlight, or Pixie dust, or Unicorn farts, or something else that doesn't require power generation, I seriously doubt that it removes more carbon and pollutants than it, overall, generates, and as such is utterly, completely useless.
Do you have any other blindingly obvious epiphanies you'd like to share with us? Like water being wet, the sky being blue, or grass being green? I never said or even implied that we're corruption-free, only that they're going to be worse, so how about you shut the fuck up and stop wasting everyone's time with your useless drivel?
This. We're in the post-Age-of-Information-age, and are now in the Age of Mass Surveillance. No way in hell they're not tracking every single thing their customers are doing, if for no other reason than to give all that data to FBI/CIA/DHS and who knows who else.
That's all well and good, in theory, but when it comes right down to it, who ultimately has their 'finger on the button', so-to-speak, and can the free world really trust them? Are they incorruptible? Completely unbiased and objective? Also, think about this: Trying to decide anything at all by committee, or getting anything done in a realistic amount of time by a committee. Malfeasance? For the moment, let's say 'no'. Some of the member countries dragging their feet on something they don't like and don't want? More likely than I care to think about. Getting all political about it, using their position on the committee as leverage? Also more likely than I care to think about.
1. The vast majority of humans on this planet (I'd estimate about 99% of them, if not more) really don't think too far into the future about much of anything. Most of them are too occupied with just surviving from day to day, week to week, and have no time to worry about 'a hundred years from now' or 'a few thousand years from now'. Trying to get them to care about something that might or might not happen even 50 to 100 years from now is a real stretch, and chances are even if you can, it'll slip their minds by the following week.
2. The above being said: Getting anyone to do much about something that may or may not happen in hundreds or thousands of years, even if you tell them it'll wipe most life off the face of the planet, is next to impossible. Note that in this case it's not entirely for lack of giving a damn, but it's flat-out not in their realm of influence to do much of anything to stop it anyway. That is almost entirely the province of entire Nations.M
3. #2 being said: Corporations, religions that believe in some coming Apocalypse or other that will take humans off the planet to {somewhere else}, and whoever else has an interest in keeping things the way they are? They'll do whatever they can to hamstring any efforts to 'save the planet' if it means their interests are not served. See #1, above, and expand it to whole corporations.
4. Unless every nation on the planet is unanimously agreed that they have to actively do things to prevent and reverse climate change it's not going to matter who does what. When you have nations comprising about half the humans on the planet throwing up their hands, saying "Hey, we're developing, what do you expect us to do about this?", then what everyone else does isn't going to make enough difference in the long run.
5. Most (intelligent) people will agree that even if human-caused climate change isn't a Real Thing, doing whatever we can to stop polluting the atmosphere is probably a good idea anyway. But in order to do even that much, you have to change the hearts and minds of pretty much everyone on the planet, young and old, rich and poor, individuals, corporations, and entire National governments. If you've got half the planet on board with it, and the other half shrugging their shoulders saying "we don't give a damn, we have our own concerns", then it's not going to make much difference in the long run.
Basically, unless #5 happens, we're more or less screwed, in the long run. All the Jiminy Cricket-like positive thinking won't mean a thing if you can't get everyone, everywhere on board with really changing the way we do many things that we take for granted. Ironically even some of the most well-intentioned people on the planet are actually doing more harm than good right now, by actively trying to limit our choices for energy generation.
The problem is their business model is disingenuous at best. Luring customers in with high bitrates then telling them there's a limit per month how much of that they can use is disingenuous. If they're claiming that their network can't handle people actually using that speed all the time then they're not selling a credible product. It's almost a bait-and-switch scam. What they should be doing is selling a lower bitrate with no cap on monthly usage, or at least offering that at the same price. But they won't do that because then people would know that their network really isn't that great to start with.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The saddest realization of my adult life was when I had the epiphany that the United States I thought I'd grown up in never really ever existed in the first place. It maybe existed for a few years following 1776, but after that it already started getting subverted into something else, once people like the Bush family of traitors, as an example, started twisting it and gaming it into what they wanted it to be, not what the Founding Fathers envisioned. All we have today is the shell of it, and some old pieces of paper, which more and more jackasses in this country want to tear up.
Marijuana is a gateway drug to hardcore drug use and therefore should be outlawed
Remember that old line? Meanwhile the people claiming that were sipping their ethanol-laced beverages or taking a drag off their cigarettes. Modding video games isn't going to create cyber-criminals any more than smoking marijuana led people to become heroin addicts; the tendency to use hard-core drugs existed in the first place. Correlation is not causation. All discouraging kids from experimenting with code is going to do is discourage them from being creative. In fact getting all serious with them about this might actually become the cause of them being criminals, seeing as how contrary and rebellious teenagers, especially teenage boys, can become. Since when did telling someone "don't do such-and-such" actually deter them, anyway?
Uber isn't going to crack this problem no matter what they claim
Quite right. It's all hype. I have little confidence in Uber, especially considering how they run their business; it's run like something organized crime would run, trying to be 'legit'. Actually makes me wonder if Uber is just a front for money laundering, or maybe as a way to hide the transport of contraband? In any case I seriously doubt this is anything more than a way to grab media attention.
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Yeah sure thing buddy, because we're talking about ALL transportation here, not just automobiles. Like I always get off my bike and walk it down hills, because I'm not actually driving the bike with my legs when I go down hills and that's just WRONG.
Oh, please. What's next? You going to accuse me of never using an elevator or escalator, too? We are discussing automobiles.
None of us has lived in a primitive culture, so we can't say, but I say if you're a hunter-gatherer, you're motivated to move around, because otherwise you're going hungry. That's 'necessary exercise', not going to the gym because you have this abstract concept in your head of 'getting fit' or 'being healthier'. Your 'primitive cultures' were REQUIRED to move their bodies if they wanted to survive. WE don't have to if we don't want to -- and MOST PEOPLE don't want to, so they don't do it. That's my point.
Walking and other moderate activity are all that are required to relieve stress and promote creative thinking on top of the physical benefits.
But, see, 'relieving stress' doesn't make you fit or healthy, which is what we're really discussing.
I'm fit and skinny, but I have never seen someone exercising and thought "Gee, they look like they should be embarrassed". If you are cycling/jogging/whatever, you look fine in lycra no matter your level of fitness. You are wearing the proper gear for the activity, which always looks "right".
If you're 'skinny' then you're probably 'skinnyfat', meaning you have no real muscle anywhere, but more bodyfat than you think. You should go get a DXA scan to determine your body composition. Also, you sound weak. Just like the guy who commented above you, you'll get the same injuries and diseases due to your overall lack of fitness as someone who literally abuses their body, because you do little to nothing to maintain it. Also, just because the overall aesthetic of exercise doesn't look dorky/bad/embarassing to you, doesn't mean that MOST PEOPLE don't think it looks dorky/bad/embarassing. MOST PEOPLE are still stuck in their teenage mindset when it comes to what their 'peers' think about them, and they won't break from the pack so far as appearances. If they think someone will think it looks stupid, they won't do it.
Walk five miles a day? Who has time to do that? I have a job and are raising a family, there's too much to do for me to spend several hours walking five miles for no reason! Who would even DO that? Don't you have a car? Can't you take a bus? Do you have some sort of mental issues? That's insane!
That's what MOST PEOPLE would say if you told them to walk five miles a day. MOST PEOPLE you can't even get to walk ONE mile a day. They won't even do it if they need to, they'll call someone for a ride instead because they don't want to do it. You're another outlier, non-typical; you tell people you walk five miles a day, and MOST PEOPLE will look at you like you're nuts, or poor and have to walk, or something other than with 'admiration'. Also 'just walking', while better than nothing, isn't very complete exercise. It doesn't raise your heart rate enough to improve your endurance, it really doesn't burn too many calories, and does nothing to improve your overall strength. As you age you'll still lose muscle mass, you'll lose bone mass, and you'll suffer injuries because of those things. You NEED to go to the gym if you really want to be healthy -- but you WON'T, will you? You say it's 'boring, monotonous, and tedious' and 'fuck that'. So you see: You, too, don't LIKE exercise at all. 'Walking five miles a day' is just you paying lip-service to the whole concept, while really not doing much of anything at all. If you really wanted to be fit and healthy you'd make yourself go to the gym at least twice a week for a couple hours and build/maintain your overall strength, and then RUN, not WALK, to raise your heart rate well above 100bpm, to build endurance. But you won't do it because you really actually don't like exercise at all.
Okay, congratulations. But you're not a typical person. You have internal motivation; you're wired to LIKE it. Most people don't and are avoidant of anything unpleasant. Exercise is unpleasant to them, so they avoid it. Also there's the people (too many of them) that think exercising looks bad/embarassing, so they'll avoid it for that reason, too.
Exercise feels good to YOU, and to ME, and to SOME PEOPLE. For MOST people it does not, and they'll find any other thing they'd rather do than exercise. Otherwise why do we have so many people whose health is suffering because they don't exercise? I get anywhere from 7 to 20 hours a week of exercise because I race bikes. I literally would rather die than go back to being fat, weak, and sickly, but I'm a corner case not typical in the least. Most people think I'm nuts, that's what most people think of exercise. You get however much you get, and I guarantee you there are people who give you shit for doing that, too. Also, we're not rats, or monkeys (despite the close kinship), we're humans, and we react in more complex ways than either one of them does.
For what it's worth, for MOST PEOPLE, if you find some way to make exercise into a fun game, then they're more likely to engage in it. That's why I say training for a sport of some sort is a good pathway to getting and staying motivated. A sense of accomplishment is another good motivator, which is why I gave an offhand example of training for a (half) marathon; it's a common goal people (who are bent that way) have and work towards. I found training for racing bikes to be an excelent way to get into phenomenally good shape, and stay that way (even though I don't do it for that reason), and it works better overall than the totally abstract "to be healthier" reason that I'd used for 10 years prior to that. But the fact of the matter appears to be, despite what you're claiming, that MOST PEOPLE think exercise is dumb, unpleasant, even painful, and a pointless waste of time, even if they'll nod their heads at all the perfectly valid arguments you give them why they should be doing it. If people's doctors can't convince them they should exercise, listing all the bad things that'll happen to them later if they don't, then how do you think anyone else is going to motivate them? If it was so 'fun' and 'rewarding' then why aren't people self-motivating? I've often said that if you could find a way that was 100% effective to motivate people to exercise, you'd be a billionaire. But no such magic motivation method exists because motivation, ultimately, has to come from within the individual, not externally. Thus most people don't, and won't, exercise, or do any 'unnecessary' work -- not unless they have a totally internal reason to motivate themselves. Again: if it were so easy to get people to exercise, especially with all the perfectly valid, scientifically and medically backed reasons why they should, then why are first-world countries full of obese, weak, sickly, diseased people? Because they don't want to, and you can't externally motivate them.
Mod parent up. If you're running it from inside Windows, then you're still running Windows. This is the annexation of Linux that I've been watching happening with Microsoft: one way or another they want to be the only OS that anyone uses, and this is an example of that; I'll say it again: If you're running Linux from within Windows, you're still running Windows and not Linux. It's just a shell at that point. Eschew Windows entirely and install Linux if you want Linux, among other things it'll have 100% less spyware that way.
I'd rather walk everywhere than ever have a so-called 'self-driving car' or even step inside one. If it doesn't have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, a brake pedal, and a way for me to be in total control of it, I don't want it.
No, if the government offered a cash incentive to exercise, people would find a way to cheat the system, not exercise, and get paid anyway. The people who are already motivated to exercise wouldn't change their behavior at all, do the things they already do, and therefore get paid for not changing anything. It would be a gigantic boondoggle.
It's hardwired into our brains: Don't expend energy unnecessarily! Conserve your bodyfat as much as possible, tomorrow or the next day or next week there may be nothing to eat! Famine is coming! You must survive long enough to breed! Doesn't matter that we're not hunter-gatherers anymore and that you can op into your car and drive 5 minutes to the grocery store and get enough food to feed yourself for weeks, or that there's an obesity problem, it's hardwired into our caveman-like brains to conserve energy, move only as much as necessary. Also, the vast majority of people find exercise to be unpleasant, therefore they'll avoid it any way they can, even if they know on an intellectual level that it's good for them, they'll feel better in the long run, live longer, be happier -- doesn't matter, it's unpleasant right now, emotionally they just can't bring themselves to do it, therefore they don't. For what it's worth, while abstract reasons to exercise regularly like "To be healthier", or "Because I want to lose weight" don't work, having a non-abstract reason, like "I want to run a (half) marathon next year", or "I want to participate in such-and-such sport so I'm training for that" seem to work better.
If people like Zuckerberg want to throw money at a problem to show what great humanitarians they are, how about they throw money at cleaning up that huge island of trash in the middle of the ocean, instead of throwing money at something that everyone has been trying to solve for at least a hundred years like cancer, that millions of people are already working on anyway? Or is getting rid of the monument to humans being pigs not enough of a photo-op?
Unenforcable law is unenforcable.. except within their own borders, of course. What do they think they're going to do, have people extradited to their country because they posted an anti-Indonesia meme or comment somewhere? LOL.
Hello newfriend,
This was created especially for you: https://imgflip.com/i/1btarm
Enjoy!
Paper books have all kinds of 'staying power', can withstand all kinds of damage and still be readable, and are a 'mature technology' that even the lowliest of nations can manage to produce. I recommend using more of them. ;-)
I'd rather walk than sit down in some automated deathtrap like that. It's a horror show on wheels. Do not want.
Same principal as opening your refrigerator door to cool your house.
Except, that doing that will actually make your house warmer over time.
Unless this 'technology' (which, by the way, is not anything new or innovative) is powered by raw sunlight, or Pixie dust, or Unicorn farts, or something else that doesn't require power generation, I seriously doubt that it removes more carbon and pollutants than it, overall, generates, and as such is utterly, completely useless.
Do you have any other blindingly obvious epiphanies you'd like to share with us? Like water being wet, the sky being blue, or grass being green? I never said or even implied that we're corruption-free, only that they're going to be worse, so how about you shut the fuck up and stop wasting everyone's time with your useless drivel?
This. We're in the post-Age-of-Information-age, and are now in the Age of Mass Surveillance. No way in hell they're not tracking every single thing their customers are doing, if for no other reason than to give all that data to FBI/CIA/DHS and who knows who else.
That's all well and good, in theory, but when it comes right down to it, who ultimately has their 'finger on the button', so-to-speak, and can the free world really trust them? Are they incorruptible? Completely unbiased and objective? Also, think about this: Trying to decide anything at all by committee, or getting anything done in a realistic amount of time by a committee. Malfeasance? For the moment, let's say 'no'. Some of the member countries dragging their feet on something they don't like and don't want? More likely than I care to think about. Getting all political about it, using their position on the committee as leverage? Also more likely than I care to think about.
1. The vast majority of humans on this planet (I'd estimate about 99% of them, if not more) really don't think too far into the future about much of anything. Most of them are too occupied with just surviving from day to day, week to week, and have no time to worry about 'a hundred years from now' or 'a few thousand years from now'. Trying to get them to care about something that might or might not happen even 50 to 100 years from now is a real stretch, and chances are even if you can, it'll slip their minds by the following week.
2. The above being said: Getting anyone to do much about something that may or may not happen in hundreds or thousands of years, even if you tell them it'll wipe most life off the face of the planet, is next to impossible. Note that in this case it's not entirely for lack of giving a damn, but it's flat-out not in their realm of influence to do much of anything to stop it anyway. That is almost entirely the province of entire Nations.M
3. #2 being said: Corporations, religions that believe in some coming Apocalypse or other that will take humans off the planet to {somewhere else}, and whoever else has an interest in keeping things the way they are? They'll do whatever they can to hamstring any efforts to 'save the planet' if it means their interests are not served. See #1, above, and expand it to whole corporations.
4. Unless every nation on the planet is unanimously agreed that they have to actively do things to prevent and reverse climate change it's not going to matter who does what. When you have nations comprising about half the humans on the planet throwing up their hands, saying "Hey, we're developing, what do you expect us to do about this?", then what everyone else does isn't going to make enough difference in the long run.
5. Most (intelligent) people will agree that even if human-caused climate change isn't a Real Thing, doing whatever we can to stop polluting the atmosphere is probably a good idea anyway. But in order to do even that much, you have to change the hearts and minds of pretty much everyone on the planet, young and old, rich and poor, individuals, corporations, and entire National governments. If you've got half the planet on board with it, and the other half shrugging their shoulders saying "we don't give a damn, we have our own concerns", then it's not going to make much difference in the long run.
Basically, unless #5 happens, we're more or less screwed, in the long run. All the Jiminy Cricket-like positive thinking won't mean a thing if you can't get everyone, everywhere on board with really changing the way we do many things that we take for granted. Ironically even some of the most well-intentioned people on the planet are actually doing more harm than good right now, by actively trying to limit our choices for energy generation.
The problem is their business model is disingenuous at best. Luring customers in with high bitrates then telling them there's a limit per month how much of that they can use is disingenuous. If they're claiming that their network can't handle people actually using that speed all the time then they're not selling a credible product. It's almost a bait-and-switch scam. What they should be doing is selling a lower bitrate with no cap on monthly usage, or at least offering that at the same price. But they won't do that because then people would know that their network really isn't that great to start with.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The saddest realization of my adult life was when I had the epiphany that the United States I thought I'd grown up in never really ever existed in the first place. It maybe existed for a few years following 1776, but after that it already started getting subverted into something else, once people like the Bush family of traitors, as an example, started twisting it and gaming it into what they wanted it to be, not what the Founding Fathers envisioned. All we have today is the shell of it, and some old pieces of paper, which more and more jackasses in this country want to tear up.
Marijuana is a gateway drug to hardcore drug use and therefore should be outlawed
Remember that old line? Meanwhile the people claiming that were sipping their ethanol-laced beverages or taking a drag off their cigarettes. Modding video games isn't going to create cyber-criminals any more than smoking marijuana led people to become heroin addicts; the tendency to use hard-core drugs existed in the first place. Correlation is not causation. All discouraging kids from experimenting with code is going to do is discourage them from being creative. In fact getting all serious with them about this might actually become the cause of them being criminals, seeing as how contrary and rebellious teenagers, especially teenage boys, can become. Since when did telling someone "don't do such-and-such" actually deter them, anyway?
Uber isn't going to crack this problem no matter what they claim
Quite right. It's all hype. I have little confidence in Uber, especially considering how they run their business; it's run like something organized crime would run, trying to be 'legit'. Actually makes me wonder if Uber is just a front for money laundering, or maybe as a way to hide the transport of contraband? In any case I seriously doubt this is anything more than a way to grab media attention.