can we maybe slow down our use for business reasons? I'd rather have moderate-speed sustainable growth, at slightly higher fuel prices that help drive commercial advances in solar and wind, than find out in fifty years that we've drilled out all the easy-to-get wells and don't have nearly enough commercial investment in other fuel sources to keep up our demand for energy.

Besides, petroleum has some pretty nifty properties besides energy production that I'd really love to keep having easy access to. Like, cheap plastics. Burning it for energy is kinda like using our limited helium reserves for toy balloons.

I don't think there's going to be any kind of peak oil civilization-ending disaster...just that prices will go up. But if they go up a little right now, they won't have to go up by a lot later.

Oh yeah...and from a foreign policy standpoint. We have a ton of oil here in the USA. Energy independence is nice, but it's not critical right now. Wait until Russia closes its borders, the Middle East falls apart and turns off their spigots, and Europe is begging for fuel at any price...can we maybe use our massive national reserves then instead of now? (needing to have the infrastructure in place ahead of time does complicate things I'll admit)

Suuupermaaan.

Just because we might get out of the fire and back into the frying pan, that doesn't make it a good place to be. Careful you don't normalize the many, many other things he's still pretty crazy on.

And that that was one of the main benefits of using it? I was always confused how on earth that was supposed to work. Comforting to see that the answer is apparently "it doesn't".

You're not supposed to put the cup into your grinder.

So this is the "spherical cows" of coffee, then?

Oh, good point. That does seem a little weird, then.

If you social-engineer your way into a bank vault to steal stuff, then of course the bank employees are idiots and massively liable, but it's still your fault too.

In terms of "who's the victim and who benefits", this seems identical to art forgery. Nothing was taken, but value was removed from existing goods. If there is utility in scarcity, then removing scarcity destroys that utility.

If you sell limited-edition prints of a painting, and people buy it because having one out of only a hundred has value to them, then someone making counterfeits is decreasing the value even if they don't directly take from the original creator.

If these game points are considered to have value because they take time, effort or skill to obtain, and then someone finds a way to manufacture more of those points by deception, then clearly it's diminishing the value of the legitimate ones.

It's called football to distinguish it from horseball.

If these points were 'earned' from playing games, then it sounds like they're not much different from winning tickets at a Skee-Ball machine. If the publisher decides to gate content behind them, I don't see how that's even the slightest bit unethical. They create content and then limit access to it.

This seems a lot like printing your own skee-ball reward tickets, using them to "buy" passes to the exclusive backroom pinball arcade, then selling them on Ebay. You obtained a thing through deception, and everyone in the transaction agrees that the thing has value. How isn't that fraud?

On my Android it's about a quarter of a second, which isn't insignificant from a user interface perspective.

(Also, it eats up battery life.)

It's a great legitimate reason, but that doesn't mean it's not a big problem, too. Just because they're not actually bugging it, doesn't mean that it's okay behavior...it makes malicious behavior harder to spot. Engineering would be so much easier if we never had to worry about unintended consequences or inconvenient best practices.