Comment Good news for Tesla (Score 1) 411
Nothing motivates sales of electric vehicles quite like the promise of expensive gasoline. Time to invest in Tesla stock, mark my words.
Nothing motivates sales of electric vehicles quite like the promise of expensive gasoline. Time to invest in Tesla stock, mark my words.
The students who excel at math will go on to become engineers, scientists, statisticians, etc. and the ones who sit in class all day drooling will get a job digging ditches. You want to see the average math scores go up? Let kids who hate math choose between a trade or college bound course schedule for highschool. God forbid parents actually admit their special little flower isn't college material.
I've often wondered why the public education system spends four years hammering this shit into people who have no interest in learning it. Replace it with one class explaining how you do math on an iPad, should the need arise and that's good enough. Sure, there's always the argument that if society goes to hell in a handbasket that there won't be iPads around to do math on, but let's be realistic - in a hypothetical post-apocalyptic zombie ravaged wasteland, basic survival skills will be more useful than being able to solve a quadratic equation in your head. Last I checked, they still don't teach marksmanship, water purification, shelter construction and gardening in public school, so they're clearly not worried about what would happen in a world where every computer suddenly disappeared.
Is the FBI really turning away applicants that, aside from being potheads, meet all the mental and physical requirements? Every pothead I've ever known could barely hold a job, wasn't in the best of shape and didn't think highly of law enforcement. Sure, that's just my anecdotal evidence, but it logically stands to reason that if you're successful and in decent physical condition, you probably prefer real world outdoor stimulus over getting high, sitting on dirty couch, playing Xbox and stuffing your face full of cheesy poofs.
Fuck plot, let's move the camera so much that the audience gets motion sickness!
Every Hollywood blockbuster is going to follow the same basic formula because that's what sells tickets. Rehashing The Hero's Journey isn't exactly new, either.
Disney didn't buy the rights to Star Wars so they could make a 3 hour space opera - they are making a Summer blockbuster to get a return on their investment. You can be sure that means a Hero's Journey based plot and lots of explosions. If you think that looks like shit, no one's forcing you to watch it. No one's taking away the multitude of indie movies where the characters swear at each other for two hours and everyone dies from AIDS at the end.
On the other hand, "shaky camera" needs to die and never come back. JJ Abrams and Michael Bay both should be locked in a room and forced to watch portrait video shot on an iPhone by a hyperactive 6-year-old until they learn the value of proper camera work.
...their rumored sequel to Frozen:
Hey, fans of the movie already blamed the exceptionally cold winter on Elsa.
If only you had bought in early, you could be taking a trip to space on Virgin Galactic, like that flight attendant from Hawaii who was Branson's first public bitcoin customer. Ouch.
This is exactly what will prevent Bitcoin's wide acceptance as a currency. Why would you spend your zero-point-something-something Bitcoin on a coffee at Starbucks today, when two years from now that amount may buy you a car from Tesla?
A little bit of inflation is needed in a currency to encourage it to be spent and exchanged, not hoarded in the hope that tomorrow it will be worth more. The cryptocoin that started as a joke, Dogecoin, gets this. Don't get me wrong, cryptocurrency is here to stay - it just may not be Bitcoin that we'll all ultimately be using.
You claim that hazards faced in one job are false because other jobs are hazardous.
You should note that the job of killer whale trainer is sold as "family friendly fun". Few people are mislead into thinking that for example, coal mining is not dangerous and unpleasant.
I never claimed working as a whale trainer isn't a dangerous profession to be in. If "killer" in the name doesn't hint to the harm they're capable of inflicting on a human, their sheer size should be enough drive the point home. Claiming the animals present an unreasonable risk to the trainers and therefore shouldn't be kept in captivity is not much different than saying we shouldn't have cell phones because servicing the towers presents an unreasonable risk to the technicians. We shouldn't have electricity because mining coal presents an unreasonable risk to miners, we shouldn't have soldiers, we shouldn't have police, etc...
There may be some great points to debate on animals being kept in captivity, but risk to their human handlers is just an occupational hazard that comes with the territory. I only brought it up in the first place because thedodo.com went there and it seems to crop up every time someone writes an anti-Seaworld article.
You probably see the one that is your own country first. By discouraging the whale and dolphin equivalent of the dancing bear that happens in your own backyard. Appeals to the existence of worse problems elsewhere do not change the existence of problem. You don't even dispute the failings of Seaworld and the like, you want us to ignore them.
You sure it's not just a case of "Let's fix the first world problems first, because the bigger problems are so much more... complicated."? Calling for a ban on captive whales is easy. You can even stay at luxurious resort hotels if you want to protest the theme park in person.
Children and families are quite likely to get similar bees in their bonnet if they see documentaries about animals in captivity.
The video I linked to about the sea birds eating plastic and dying has 24,428 views at last check. Justin Bieber's "As long as you love me" music video has 197,193,040 views in roughly the same period of being on YouTube. If there ever was an "artist" I'd compare to a dancing bear, there you go.
You may not like the "dancing bear spectacle", but it gets people into the park and gives SeaWorld the opportunity to pass on their message of conservation. Seeing these animals perform side-by-side with humans has a far more profound impression than being forced to watch some boring educational video at school.
One way is to de-normalise performing animals, so that children might stop seeing large sea animals as our playthings.
It's not as if they're being forced to brew a cappuccino. They swim and jump - no different than the behaviors they demonstrate in the wild. If you've got a better idea how to get people interested in conservation that can attract as many paying guests as SeaWorld that doesn't involve captive whales, go ahead and do it. Calling for the parks to be shut down would only provide victory from an out-of-sight, out-of-mind perspective. Japan will still continue to slaughter whales, commercial fishing will still kill thousands as bycatch, pollution will claim its toll. With the parks gone, one of the loudest voices for these animals will have been silenced.
I'm taking my wife on vacation to a resort. She has always wanted to swim with dolphins, and given the recent hate mongering about captive cetaceans I anticipate it the opportunity will be lost forever in the US within 15 years.
Don't worry! You'll be able to swim with dolphins, sea turtles or drive an Avatar body on Pandora, all thanks to the Oculus Rift! Who cares if the real animals have all gone extinct, they were smelly and couldn't disco dance anyway.
Maybe what we should be doing instead is designating zones of the ocean as inviolable and make sure that we protect the animals and water in those zones as best we can. Then if you want to go to the 'zoo', you take a tour ship out. This is how the safari model works, more or less, and those give a reason for the local people to take care of the area rather than exploit it.
And if everyone trades in their gasoline car for a Tesla model S, we can solve the oil problem!
Oh wait, no, most people don't have that kind of money. It must be great to live in a fantasy world where every family can easily afford to take a whale watching cruse, where you're more likely to get seasick than actually see a whale. Hey, if the next generation of kids grow up to not give a rat's ass about marine animals as a result, oh well, right? You saved a handful of animals from being kept in tanks while the wild populations went belly up. Give yourself a golf clap.
You attempt to refute this by pointing out that other dangerous jobs exist.
We don't eliminate jobs because they carry a higher-than-average risk to the worker. People willingly take jobs fighting wars, climbing cell towers and driving cars at unsafe speeds. Somehow, getting into a tank with a dangerous animal crosses over into the realm of "unreasonable risk"? Give me a break.
Also, just FYI - there's no reason anyone ever needs to die working on a cell phone tower. They could easily design the towers with a mechanism to lower the actual antenna elements. It's just more cost effective to risk human lives than replace/retrofit the towers.
You attempt to refute this by saying that life in the wild is not perfectly safe. Well done. Now explain why being caged in a tiny fraction of typical range space is non-traumatic.
Understand that the situation in the wild, for a significantly larger portion of animals is far more dire than a handful of animals being kept in a tank. Seaworld could kill off and replace their entire captive population each week and they still wouldn't cause as much cetacean death as commercial fishing.
As a car analogy, it's like worrying about your rear-view mirror being loose while your engine is on fire.
Animals are killed in one part of the world, therefore mistreating for entertainment in another part of the world is fine.
Say it with me: "One of these things is not like the other, one of these things is worse."
On one hand, you have animals faced with the very real threat of extinction in the wild due to poaching.
The other, you have a statistically insignificant fraction of the wild population being held in captivity for entertainment, research and education.
Which do you consider more dire and in need of immediate attention?
Let's make it a hospital triage situation: One patient comes in complaining of a headache, the other has a bloody stump where their hand used to be, wrapped in a towel. Which patient do you see first?
Most sensible people realise that Seaworld is not the equivalent of a zoo, it is the equivalent of a circus.
We moved on from dancing bears quite a while ago.
And no true Scotsman would disagree with you! See, I can play this game too.
It's easier to direct hate at a theme park than work towards solving the real issues these animals face in the wild. I mean really, how do you clean up the south Pacific garbage patch? How do you stop commercial fishing from killing 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises annually? How can you convince boaters to stop running over manatees? If only there was a place that people could go that would lure them in under the pretense of family entertainment and then they could sneak in some education about what needs to be done to help animals in the wild...
But they still do a LOT for public education, getting people to understand that maybe burning down rainforest isnt a good idea, that buying from certain companies or certain products leads indirectly to financing poaching or habitat exploitation.
yes those individuals arent in ideal conditions in many cases. but beacuse of the education opportunities provided by their presence, we can swing public opinion to help and make things better for many times larger wild populations. we can get people to get behind preservation and conservation. to demand better fishing practices, to demand better stewardship.
This.
I live in Orlando and it's absolutely heart wrenching to see the rescued manatees. For anyone ignorant to the situation, asshole boaters frequently ignore the "Manatee Zone" signs and run them over in the wild, then Seaworld has to go help them. Some manatees are injured so badly they'll never be able to return to the wild.
It would be great if we didn't need marine theme parks because public opinion was so strongly for environmental preservation that the animals in the wild were well protected, but sadly that is not even close to being the situation. Worse, you have people who misdirect their anger towards the parks, effectively wanting to "shoot the messenger".
No advancing of marine mammal knowledge happens in these theme parks, apart from discovering that each and every time the animals in question have poorer health (physical & mental), and die sooner.
And yes, of course many die in the wild, but by your reasoning we should keep everyone in captivity, as people die in the wild - doesn't that seem rather bizarre logic?
No, you completely misunderstand. There are bigger problems for animals in the wild and if a few have shorter lifespans in captivity because that's what it takes for people to give a shit about the ones in the wild, don't you think it's a worthwhile trade-off?
Of course, you probably believe that educational videos and pictures on Wikipedia can inspire people to care about marine biology just as much as seeing these animals up-close, in real life. Because we all know, the world's problems can easily be solved by an after-school TV special. Then, after the tanks are empty and the parks are out of business, we can save the animals in the wild with a grassroots crowd-funding effort in Bitcoins! That's the ticket!
Here we go again, with the same idiotic line of thinking that brought us "Blackfish". I wonder if these people are trolling or just really this ignorant.
Activist claim: Working with captive cetaceans endangers trainers.
Reality: Cell tower technicians fall to their death all the time (who knew LTE had to be paid for with blood?). Can we at least agree advancing our understanding of marine mammals and inspiring future generations to give a damn might be worth at least as much blood as being able to Tweet about Miley Cyrus twerking? Also, it's probably possible to be accidentally killed in just about any line of work.
Activist claim: Captive cetaceans would have a better life if freed.
Reality: Not even close. Over 300,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises are killed each as a result of by-catch. Also, pollution.
Activist claim: But think of the animals!
Reality: Yes, think of the animals in the wild, you lazy sorry sack of shit. You know, like the ones in Africa being illegally poached. Oh sure, you might have to travel to a place that's a bit rougher of a neighborhood than Orlando or San Diego to protest that and put yourself at risk of being shot, but think of the animals, amiright?
Activist claim: Seaworld is just an evil profit driven empire, hell bent on the exploitation of animals.
Reality: Humanity has already fucked things up pretty bad for animals in the wild (warning: graphic content). We're past the point of taking a "hands off" approach and hoping things just go back to being peachy keen for our fine feathered and flippered friends. Seaworld exists to educate, inspire and inform people that they need to care about these animals today, or the only place we'll see them tomorrow will be in photographs and videos. They also (unlike most of these armchair activists), actually get off their ass and help animals.
The big problem with free-to-play is that all of the games tend to follow the same pattern:
It contains an in-game currency that is difficult or impossible to earn during gameplay, so it must be purchased with real money.
In some skill based games, levels and goals are procedurally generated, so there is no way to actually "win" the game. This includes most 3 lane running games and hunting simulators. (Minion Rush, Subway Surfers, Stampede Run, Deer Hunter Reloaded, etc.)
In other skill based games, the levels may have actually been authored by a human, but later levels are generally designed to become impossible to beat without buying some power-ups. Plants vs Zombies 2 is a good example of this.
In chance based games (gem/candy/jelly match games), you are basically forced into either buying power-ups to win the level, or grinding away by re-playing the same level over and over again until you finally get lucky. Except...
Many of these games have a lives/rounds system that will only let you play a certain number of times before forcing you to choose between waiting or paying to be able to continue playing. (Candy Crush, Jelly Splash, most Zynga games, Angry Birds Go, etc.)
Some particularly evil games will not even allow you to progress to higher levels unless you spam the game on Facebook or, you guessed it, spend money. (Candy Crush, Jelly Splash, etc.)
The absolute worst aspect of free-to-play, though, is how it almost always directly translates to "pay-to-win". The developers rarely limit the amount of power ups you can purchase or how often they can be used, so the end result is that paying removes absolutely all challenge to the game. How is it fun to play a game where the only thing standing between you and "victory" is how wide you're willing to open your wallet?
In the rest of the world a stolen smartphone will get bricked, but carriers are working against that in the US.
The USA has had a stolen phone blacklist for quite some time now. You can check if a phone is blacklisted here. Carriers will also ban a phone from their own network if the owner defaults on their service contract or handset finance agreement.
Phones are still stolen because:
1. Some phones can have their IMEI altered (illegal, but we're talking about criminals in the first place).
2. They can be sold overseas.
3. They can be sold to fools right here in the USA who don't know there's an IMEI blacklist and that they're buying a useless "brick".
4. They have value as parts.
5. Not everything criminal steals needs a logical reason. Some of these low-lives are so trashed on drugs they aren't thinking much beyond "take everything I can grab, sell, buy more drugs."
From Sharp minds come... pointed heads. -- Bryan Sparrowhawk
