Utah added speed limits of 80 mph a few years ago with no increase in accident rate. Going 80 on a rural interstate is not appreciably more dangerous than going 55.
There's a lot of talk about the military, but the military and all DoD related spending isn't even half what these two are combined, and we've got precious little to show for it (and seemingly less year by year, as defense spending remains historically consistently flat, but shrinking slightly (since WWII).
How do you figure? Military spending was less than $300 billion in 2000 and in the proposed 2013 budget is $672 billion. It's shrunk slightly since last year, but certainly not on a downward trend over the last decade. Or three. Or five.
Thank you for explaining your wonderful theory. It explains perfectly why New Orleans and Houston are such centers of progressive thought and inland cities such as Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Dallas are cesspools of ignorance and poverty. It also explains perfectly why inland progressive cities like Minneapolis, Denver, and Austin can't possibly exist.
Your entire post is a barely coherent collection of stereotypes and amateur sociology so asinine a college freshman would be embarrassed to spout it. Anybody that thinks you can't be decadent with a socially conservative viewpoint has obviously missed the existence of the entire state of Texas, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf States, China, pretty much any colonial government ever, etc., etc.
Also, look at a damn map sometime. If you move SF 100 miles inland you get San Jose! Or Sacramento. Hardly conservative bastions.
Your post does nothing but highlight your own ignorance and prejudice. I have no idea how you got modded insightful.
And yes, the wars do affect our deficit, even when the Bush administration was just fudging the numbers. It's not like they weren't spending the money. They just didn't report that amount in the general budget.
But the Obama administration does. That *has* changed.
It's not either or, it's both. The single biggest cause for the increase in our deficit was the drop in tax revenue caused by the recession, which also caused ancillary increases like increased interest, but the other causes were also very large. The wars cost $1.4 trillion!
Obama's tax cuts also cut revenue. The wars cost a lot. These are *all* causes, and increased discretionary spending is just one piece of many.
Yeah, sort of, although you have to remember that the 165 billion number isn't accurate due to the Bush administration keeping the Iraq and Afghanistan wars off the budget. That doesn't take into account a huge amount of money that we were spending.
Most of that change came about because of the recession and the government response to it: decreased tax revenue (greatly exacerbated by the Bush tax cuts), stimulus spending, the tax cuts since Obama came into office, and increased interest payments on the resulting higher debt load. Another large bit came from the wars. Another large bit came from an increase in defense and discretionary spending.
This is true. I live in Utah, one of the most conservative states in the country with the most well-organized religious-political union, and even here you can see the writing on the wall. Abortion, sex ed and ID are still hot topic issues (absolutely nothing like it was in years past, but still contentious) but women's lib and gay rights are something that the younger generation, even arch conservatives, have accepted as right and necessary.
Sometimes I wonder about Aaron Swartz. Given my propensity to being similar in thoughts, I often find it odd he would have simply given up without a plan. I've reached a conclusion that perhaps his suicide was part of the plan. Because he just didn't have the resources to fight the corrupt system, and he figured he would be better suited as a martyr than to go down and serve a thirty year prison sentence.
Although who knows, perhaps mental illness got in the way. One thing is for certain: copyright law killed him.
It's probably both, really. Suicide (at least as it commonly occurs) is often primarily a method of communication. If you've ever known anyone that has committed suicide or tried to, it's almost always that they're trying to tell somebody something. That's one of the many reasons teenagers kill themselves more than any other age group. It's the most effective way for them to communicate to the world how fucking miserable they are and that they need help, because either they don't know how to ask for help or they've tried other ways and nobody has responded.
Of course being depressive doesn't help. Depression causes you to draw away from people and into your own head and cut off communication with the outside world, but that doesn't get rid of your social instincts and innate social desires.
Actually, MSNBC does quite well in the ratings. Not quite as good as Fox News but who does? And although right-wingers like to say it's just as much a Democratic channel as Fox is a Republican channel, that's not true.
They are rarely extreme in their positions and don't tow the same party line that Fox does. They have Joe Scarborough on for 3 hours a day for some reason, even though they are a proclaimed progressive station. I guess he must get pretty good ratings.
As for the taking heads, Maddow is excellent a fair amount of the time, Matthews is OK but absolutely annoying for anyone that isn't a die-hard Democrat and everyone else is pretty mediocre at best. Not quite as asinine as Fox News can be, but still fairly in the realm of people talking out their asses for no discernible reason other than because they have a microphone in their face.
Thanks for the reply. It was very insightful again!
I think you would be very interested to learn that scholarship pretty unanimously considers the Gospel of Matthew to *not* have been written by Matthew himself, and out of the gospels was either the third or fourth latest (although probably 3rd) to be written, with Mark being the earliest and the others drawing on it for inspiration. You can sort of see that in the content, as Mark and Luke are a bit more "storytelling" and historically based, while by the time Matthew and especially John were written the theology and concepts are much more developed.
It was common practice in the time for an author to sort of "assume" the role of a more famous individual when writing, or for a collection of oral traditions to be written down and attributed to a single venerated individual. In the case of the Gospel of Matthew an early church leader, Papias of Hierapolis, decided (for some reason lost to history) that Matthew wrote it even though he almost definitely did not. The Gospels of Mark and Luke could have plausibly been written by their namesakes, but there are indications in the text that they also were collections of different oral traditions. There also seems to probably have been a sort of Christian "ur-text" that, along with the Gospel of Mark, was used to influence the writing of the other three gospels, but that has been lost to history.
I find early Christianity from the beginning to the end of the fourth century endlessly fascinating, particularly the diversity that was present in Christianity and how the Bible became canonized. I don't know if most Christians are aware of just how diverse early Christianity truly was, and the amount of argument, debate, and political in-fighting that led to the establishment of fundamental dogma. A lot of Catholic beliefs from the direct opposition of early church leaders to gnosticism and manicheism, and those religions in many ways were as influential in the formation of Christian dogma as the Christian teachings themselves in the sense that early church leaders were developing their own theologies to disprove those sects. St. Augustine is the one who came up with the idea of original sin and the City of God, among other influential ideas, and he was a Manichean for the first decade and a half of his adult life. And why was Revelation considered canon but not other texts? Because Revelation is kinda nuts...
He's not directing it. He is producing it. JJ Abrams has a production company, Bad Robot Productions, and they are working with Valve.
A lot of the films or TV shows that JJ Abrams is famous for he mostly worked as a producer. Alias and Lost, which are the two shows that made a player in Hollywood, both didn't have a whole lot to do with him after they were started. Same with Fringe and Cloverfield, he mostly was just a producer.
He's copying Spielberg's career, which is a pretty damn intelligent thing to do. Remember how it seemed like *every* movie that came out in the late 80s and early 90s was a Spielberg film? Same thing.
Just wait, in five years Abrams will start making artsy movies about WW2 and racism and you'll be really pissed off.
The ironic thing is that (at least according to rumor) Blizzard actually wanted Warcraft to be a Warhammer game, but GW was so anal about protecting their IP that they refused to license it. So they missed out out on roughly a kajillion dollars of profit and brand exposure and the video games they came out with in the 90s were pretty mediocre.
Jefferson wanted to be wealthy, but how could he have immense wealth if he freed his slaves? It seems that he had to make certain, pragmatic compromises.
He wanted to get laid, but he promised Martha that he would never remarry and he had a hundred women who were legally bound to obey his every order! It seems like a certain, pragmatic compromise was indeed necessary. After all, we can't all follow our own moral creeds all the time. That would be damn inconvenient.
I think the Founding Fathers exemplify American society and government *perfectly* in a way that we often miss when we glorify them and the Constitution. They talked a whole lot about freedom, justice, God and high morality but at their core, the way they truly acted, they were just rich white men that wanted to get their rocks off and not pay their taxes. Some folks in America seem to think that is a new development, but that has always been the American Way.
Thank you for writing out a thoughtful reply. Even though I disagree with much of what you said, it is always interesting to read people who are eloquent and non-judgemental about their beliefs, and I hope you do not take offense at anything that I say because it is asked in curiosity and not malice.
I think the thing that is hard for me to understand as a non-believer, is why Christianity? Because (and I do not in any way intend this to be insulting, but often people take it to be) the decision of what you choose to believe seems rather arbitrary. For example, this passage:
Since I know from valid science that the universe is not a static place, I know then that existence did not come about as portrayed in Genesis. But so what? I think about it and realize, with the first books of the Bible being written about 3,500 years ago, even then the original authors were writing about people (if we take Adam and Eve to be real people - which I actually do not but that is a whole other discussion) who had been dead and gone for 2,500 years. That's a long time before picking up a pen to make notes and not forget anything. Further, these first authors had no understanding of science at the level that we do
Could have just as easily been written about the early Christians. The gospels were not written down until 30-40 years after Jesus' death at the earliest, with the last revision to John happening sometime in the early 2nd century, and almost certainly were written by people with no firsthand knowledge of the events. And they certainly didn't have a modern understanding of science.
Furthermore, all of the religious themes and messianic claims that are present in the New Testament were legends that were common in the region, sometimes going back hundreds of years: claims of virgin birth, divinity, resurrection, and all of the miracles attested to Jesus all have a long history in the folklore of the region.
It's difficult to study the history neutrally and *not* come to a conclusion much like your conclusion vis a vi Mormonism. It's not that they were making unique claims, Jesus's followers were exceptional for the time for one reason: they were more successful at converting Romans.
So what's the difference. Why do you doubt the claims of the Old Testament, but not the New? Why do you doubt the claims of Joseph Smith, but not the Early Christians? How do you just *what* to have faith in and what to dis-believe, because as a non-believer it seems entirely capricious and arbitrary.
More likely (and what it seems is happening) is that music breaks into a sort of regionalism that was missing for the last half of the twentieth century. Places like New York, Austin, Seattle, Toronto, etc. will have thriving music scenes that launch internationally known bands because those are places where you have enough people and money to support a large number of professional musicians. Even then the huge majority of those people aren't going to be making large amounts of money, but they can probably pull down a decent middle class existence if they're at the top of their game.
Any place that doesn't have the population or artistic reputation will still have good musicians, they just won't be pros. Or if they *are* pros they're pulling in a lot of their money teaching, working recording studios, and other related jobs.
For the most part being able to drive around the country in a van and make a career out of it is dead. If you're a pop star or at the top of your genre you can still pull it off. The key is to get headlining gigs at high-paying regional venues and festivals. If you can do that then you can make a good living out of touring, but if you're just playing bars and "regular" music venues you're making scraps.
Also, being a jazz musician usually isn't a terribly lucrative profession unless you are a star, and even then you have to work your ass off performinjg and be good with your money. Led Zeppelin and The Beatles made money on record royalties. Dizzy Gillespie? Not so much. So many great artists died penniless that it's a cliche.
Well, of course a fundamental change in the Internet hasn't happened in the last 20 years. You can't found something that already exists!
Right now I would say that the fields most likely to provoke a "fundamental" change in our technology are biotech/genetic research and nanoscale materials, although neither one has provided an "Aha!" moment that fundamentally changes the way we view society quite yet.
We haven't seen the full effect of many discoveries of the past couple decades because these technologies are still in their formative years. Remember that electronics was a major industry for almost 70 years before the invention of the transistor. The modern Internet didn't exist until the late 80s and early 90s, didn't become commonplace ubiquitous until the early 2000s, and the full social effects of that change have only been felt over the last five years or so. Usenet was created in 1979, ARPANET in 1969, and packet-switched networks were around a decade before that. The Internet is actually a perfect example of iterative development of ideas. It's only in hindsight that it seems like a sudden change.
Energy is another field which could see that happen, although I think we're probably not very close to the breakthroughs that I think will change that industry.
And also, lets be clear about what he did and didn't do. He didn't hack anything, he didn't break into secure vaults or anything even remotely technical. He went phishing, and duped people. This is nothing more complex than showing up at someone's doorstep wearing a hard hat and saying, "I'm with blah blah construction. I'm going to need you to leave the house for a few hours, and can you make sure everything is unlocked for me? Thanks." And people gave him what he asked for... people gave him their credentials to accounts with half naked photos on themselves. At some point, ignorance fails to be adequate justification for the actions of the victims here.
And then used those photos to blackmail them into stripping naked for him over video chat. That's not just being a peeping tom or swiping some nudie pics. Once again, he didn't just trick girls into giving them their passwords and then took a look around. He blackmailed them, forcing them to take their clothes off under coercion. That's a huge distinction.
There's also a difference between an overzealous DA piling on charges, and someone being a massively serial offender. Each of the charges is relatively small, he just committed the same crime hundreds of times.
Did you even read the story? He didn't talk his way into getting them to talk their clothes off using his charm and wit. He didn't "trick" them. He stole their credentials, found incriminating photos of them, then blackmailed them into stripping for him on camera.
If someone had done this in meatspace they would have received the same punishment, and rightly so. This was extortion, plain and simple. And although it's not sexual assault, it occupies a frighteningly close position. I can't believe anybody is actually sticking up for this dickwad.
(Gasoline prices are measured in dollars, and the 0.9 cents doesn't quite have so much meaning... we have all learned to just add one the the last digit in the price haven't we?)
Actually this is still effective. Even though everybody "knows" that something listed at $1.99 is essentially the same price as $2.00, it still effects sales. If your gas station doesn't use fractional cents your sales will most likely drop a tiny bit. Psychology is strange that way.
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Utah added speed limits of 80 mph a few years ago with no increase in accident rate. Going 80 on a rural interstate is not appreciably more dangerous than going 55.
How do you figure? Military spending was less than $300 billion in 2000 and in the proposed 2013 budget is $672 billion. It's shrunk slightly since last year, but certainly not on a downward trend over the last decade. Or three. Or five.
Thank you for explaining your wonderful theory. It explains perfectly why New Orleans and Houston are such centers of progressive thought and inland cities such as Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Dallas are cesspools of ignorance and poverty. It also explains perfectly why inland progressive cities like Minneapolis, Denver, and Austin can't possibly exist.
Your entire post is a barely coherent collection of stereotypes and amateur sociology so asinine a college freshman would be embarrassed to spout it. Anybody that thinks you can't be decadent with a socially conservative viewpoint has obviously missed the existence of the entire state of Texas, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf States, China, pretty much any colonial government ever, etc., etc.
Also, look at a damn map sometime. If you move SF 100 miles inland you get San Jose! Or Sacramento. Hardly conservative bastions.
Your post does nothing but highlight your own ignorance and prejudice. I have no idea how you got modded insightful.
And yes, the wars do affect our deficit, even when the Bush administration was just fudging the numbers. It's not like they weren't spending the money. They just didn't report that amount in the general budget.
But the Obama administration does. That *has* changed.
It's not either or, it's both. The single biggest cause for the increase in our deficit was the drop in tax revenue caused by the recession, which also caused ancillary increases like increased interest, but the other causes were also very large. The wars cost $1.4 trillion!
Obama's tax cuts also cut revenue. The wars cost a lot. These are *all* causes, and increased discretionary spending is just one piece of many.
Yeah, sort of, although you have to remember that the 165 billion number isn't accurate due to the Bush administration keeping the Iraq and Afghanistan wars off the budget. That doesn't take into account a huge amount of money that we were spending.
Most of that change came about because of the recession and the government response to it: decreased tax revenue (greatly exacerbated by the Bush tax cuts), stimulus spending, the tax cuts since Obama came into office, and increased interest payments on the resulting higher debt load. Another large bit came from the wars. Another large bit came from an increase in defense and discretionary spending.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt#Change_in_debt_position_since_2001
Or read Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson, George Plimpton, etc. etc.
Development wouldn't drop like a rock. It would revert to the ag schools, which already do a significant amount of the heavy R&D work anyway.
We managed to grow food without genetic patents from about 12,000 BC to 1980. I think its safe to say we could figure out how to keep it going.
This is true. I live in Utah, one of the most conservative states in the country with the most well-organized religious-political union, and even here you can see the writing on the wall. Abortion, sex ed and ID are still hot topic issues (absolutely nothing like it was in years past, but still contentious) but women's lib and gay rights are something that the younger generation, even arch conservatives, have accepted as right and necessary.
It's probably both, really. Suicide (at least as it commonly occurs) is often primarily a method of communication. If you've ever known anyone that has committed suicide or tried to, it's almost always that they're trying to tell somebody something. That's one of the many reasons teenagers kill themselves more than any other age group. It's the most effective way for them to communicate to the world how fucking miserable they are and that they need help, because either they don't know how to ask for help or they've tried other ways and nobody has responded.
Of course being depressive doesn't help. Depression causes you to draw away from people and into your own head and cut off communication with the outside world, but that doesn't get rid of your social instincts and innate social desires.
My 2 cents, anyway.
No, but Lance Armstrong's credibility as a spokesperson is, which is why they asked him to step down as chairman.
Actually, MSNBC does quite well in the ratings. Not quite as good as Fox News but who does? And although right-wingers like to say it's just as much a Democratic channel as Fox is a Republican channel, that's not true.
They are rarely extreme in their positions and don't tow the same party line that Fox does. They have Joe Scarborough on for 3 hours a day for some reason, even though they are a proclaimed progressive station. I guess he must get pretty good ratings.
As for the taking heads, Maddow is excellent a fair amount of the time, Matthews is OK but absolutely annoying for anyone that isn't a die-hard Democrat and everyone else is pretty mediocre at best. Not quite as asinine as Fox News can be, but still fairly in the realm of people talking out their asses for no discernible reason other than because they have a microphone in their face.
Should be "...Catholic beliefs stem from the direct opposition..." in the last paragraph.
Thanks for the reply. It was very insightful again!
I think you would be very interested to learn that scholarship pretty unanimously considers the Gospel of Matthew to *not* have been written by Matthew himself, and out of the gospels was either the third or fourth latest (although probably 3rd) to be written, with Mark being the earliest and the others drawing on it for inspiration. You can sort of see that in the content, as Mark and Luke are a bit more "storytelling" and historically based, while by the time Matthew and especially John were written the theology and concepts are much more developed.
It was common practice in the time for an author to sort of "assume" the role of a more famous individual when writing, or for a collection of oral traditions to be written down and attributed to a single venerated individual. In the case of the Gospel of Matthew an early church leader, Papias of Hierapolis, decided (for some reason lost to history) that Matthew wrote it even though he almost definitely did not. The Gospels of Mark and Luke could have plausibly been written by their namesakes, but there are indications in the text that they also were collections of different oral traditions. There also seems to probably have been a sort of Christian "ur-text" that, along with the Gospel of Mark, was used to influence the writing of the other three gospels, but that has been lost to history.
I find early Christianity from the beginning to the end of the fourth century endlessly fascinating, particularly the diversity that was present in Christianity and how the Bible became canonized. I don't know if most Christians are aware of just how diverse early Christianity truly was, and the amount of argument, debate, and political in-fighting that led to the establishment of fundamental dogma. A lot of Catholic beliefs from the direct opposition of early church leaders to gnosticism and manicheism, and those religions in many ways were as influential in the formation of Christian dogma as the Christian teachings themselves in the sense that early church leaders were developing their own theologies to disprove those sects. St. Augustine is the one who came up with the idea of original sin and the City of God, among other influential ideas, and he was a Manichean for the first decade and a half of his adult life. And why was Revelation considered canon but not other texts? Because Revelation is kinda nuts...
Right.... because if there was one thing TOS was famous for, it was subtlety and scientific accuracy.
He's not directing it. He is producing it. JJ Abrams has a production company, Bad Robot Productions, and they are working with Valve.
A lot of the films or TV shows that JJ Abrams is famous for he mostly worked as a producer. Alias and Lost, which are the two shows that made a player in Hollywood, both didn't have a whole lot to do with him after they were started. Same with Fringe and Cloverfield, he mostly was just a producer.
He's copying Spielberg's career, which is a pretty damn intelligent thing to do. Remember how it seemed like *every* movie that came out in the late 80s and early 90s was a Spielberg film? Same thing.
Just wait, in five years Abrams will start making artsy movies about WW2 and racism and you'll be really pissed off.
The ironic thing is that (at least according to rumor) Blizzard actually wanted Warcraft to be a Warhammer game, but GW was so anal about protecting their IP that they refused to license it. So they missed out out on roughly a kajillion dollars of profit and brand exposure and the video games they came out with in the 90s were pretty mediocre.
You're right.
Jefferson wanted to be wealthy, but how could he have immense wealth if he freed his slaves? It seems that he had to make certain, pragmatic compromises.
He wanted to get laid, but he promised Martha that he would never remarry and he had a hundred women who were legally bound to obey his every order! It seems like a certain, pragmatic compromise was indeed necessary. After all, we can't all follow our own moral creeds all the time. That would be damn inconvenient.
I think the Founding Fathers exemplify American society and government *perfectly* in a way that we often miss when we glorify them and the Constitution. They talked a whole lot about freedom, justice, God and high morality but at their core, the way they truly acted, they were just rich white men that wanted to get their rocks off and not pay their taxes. Some folks in America seem to think that is a new development, but that has always been the American Way.
I think the thing that is hard for me to understand as a non-believer, is why Christianity? Because (and I do not in any way intend this to be insulting, but often people take it to be) the decision of what you choose to believe seems rather arbitrary. For example, this passage:
Could have just as easily been written about the early Christians. The gospels were not written down until 30-40 years after Jesus' death at the earliest, with the last revision to John happening sometime in the early 2nd century, and almost certainly were written by people with no firsthand knowledge of the events. And they certainly didn't have a modern understanding of science.
Furthermore, all of the religious themes and messianic claims that are present in the New Testament were legends that were common in the region, sometimes going back hundreds of years: claims of virgin birth, divinity, resurrection, and all of the miracles attested to Jesus all have a long history in the folklore of the region.
It's difficult to study the history neutrally and *not* come to a conclusion much like your conclusion vis a vi Mormonism. It's not that they were making unique claims, Jesus's followers were exceptional for the time for one reason: they were more successful at converting Romans.
So what's the difference. Why do you doubt the claims of the Old Testament, but not the New? Why do you doubt the claims of Joseph Smith, but not the Early Christians? How do you just *what* to have faith in and what to dis-believe, because as a non-believer it seems entirely capricious and arbitrary.
More likely (and what it seems is happening) is that music breaks into a sort of regionalism that was missing for the last half of the twentieth century. Places like New York, Austin, Seattle, Toronto, etc. will have thriving music scenes that launch internationally known bands because those are places where you have enough people and money to support a large number of professional musicians. Even then the huge majority of those people aren't going to be making large amounts of money, but they can probably pull down a decent middle class existence if they're at the top of their game.
Any place that doesn't have the population or artistic reputation will still have good musicians, they just won't be pros. Or if they *are* pros they're pulling in a lot of their money teaching, working recording studios, and other related jobs.
For the most part being able to drive around the country in a van and make a career out of it is dead. If you're a pop star or at the top of your genre you can still pull it off. The key is to get headlining gigs at high-paying regional venues and festivals. If you can do that then you can make a good living out of touring, but if you're just playing bars and "regular" music venues you're making scraps.
Also, being a jazz musician usually isn't a terribly lucrative profession unless you are a star, and even then you have to work your ass off performinjg and be good with your money. Led Zeppelin and The Beatles made money on record royalties. Dizzy Gillespie? Not so much. So many great artists died penniless that it's a cliche.
Well, of course a fundamental change in the Internet hasn't happened in the last 20 years. You can't found something that already exists!
Right now I would say that the fields most likely to provoke a "fundamental" change in our technology are biotech/genetic research and nanoscale materials, although neither one has provided an "Aha!" moment that fundamentally changes the way we view society quite yet.
We haven't seen the full effect of many discoveries of the past couple decades because these technologies are still in their formative years. Remember that electronics was a major industry for almost 70 years before the invention of the transistor. The modern Internet didn't exist until the late 80s and early 90s, didn't become commonplace ubiquitous until the early 2000s, and the full social effects of that change have only been felt over the last five years or so. Usenet was created in 1979, ARPANET in 1969, and packet-switched networks were around a decade before that. The Internet is actually a perfect example of iterative development of ideas. It's only in hindsight that it seems like a sudden change.
Energy is another field which could see that happen, although I think we're probably not very close to the breakthroughs that I think will change that industry.
And then used those photos to blackmail them into stripping naked for him over video chat. That's not just being a peeping tom or swiping some nudie pics. Once again, he didn't just trick girls into giving them their passwords and then took a look around. He blackmailed them, forcing them to take their clothes off under coercion. That's a huge distinction.
There's also a difference between an overzealous DA piling on charges, and someone being a massively serial offender. Each of the charges is relatively small, he just committed the same crime hundreds of times.
Did you even read the story? He didn't talk his way into getting them to talk their clothes off using his charm and wit. He didn't "trick" them. He stole their credentials, found incriminating photos of them, then blackmailed them into stripping for him on camera.
If someone had done this in meatspace they would have received the same punishment, and rightly so. This was extortion, plain and simple. And although it's not sexual assault, it occupies a frighteningly close position. I can't believe anybody is actually sticking up for this dickwad.
Actually this is still effective. Even though everybody "knows" that something listed at $1.99 is essentially the same price as $2.00, it still effects sales. If your gas station doesn't use fractional cents your sales will most likely drop a tiny bit. Psychology is strange that way.