This. The taxi companies are all focused on the fact Uber and Lyft are working without regulations as if that was the reason for their success. Yes, having lower prices most certainly makes them more attractive, but that's not all of it. Getting a taxi is a terrible experience. If you're lucky, you can hail one, but if you need to call one up... Enjoy waiting for any amount of time between 30 seconds and an hour, the taxi never reaching you, you having no idea where they are, the taxi arriving as a tiny Yaris when you specifically asked for a large car because you have luggage, etc.

One of the big deals about Uber for me is that their app and infrastructure makes the taxi companies look like pathetic dinosaurs. Calling a lift is easy, you can track their position in real time, if something goes wrong or if they're not responsive you can deal with that, you can pay through the app... It's just a much better user experience. Taxi companies probably never even heard of the term, and they're looking extremely stupid for it.

We don't have to understand human physiology to be able to create an artificial intelligence. You're conflating two things. Our first AI is unlikely to resemble anything we know, much less a human-like intelligence.

Yes, and a lot of students don't, be it because of shame from having to ask a question, pride in solving it themselves, or whatever else. If this new method of teaching provides better results, why not use it? Because you didn't have it and made it just fine, ergo everyone should just get on with it?

If this were the correct logic, then Europe would be a warzone with daily shootings, since guns are mostly non-existent in a lot of countries. How weird then that the place with the most shootings happens to be the country that fetishizes gun ownership.

Are you actually serious? How about starving the shitty movies and music out of the market by not giving them a fucking audience? You're part of the problem, not the solution.

Yeah, it's always worth keeping in mind that the universe wasn't designed to be elegant... It wasn't designed at all. It just is.

I'm actually often surprised at how elegant physics can be in spite of this.

That's shortsighted. Science can't do much if you don't use it to guide policy, which, drum rolls, is politics. You can't divorce the two without severely hampering science's ability to improve our daily lives and without making politics an even bigger shithole than it already is.

Hell, politics would be an awful lot better if politicians were driven by scientific results instead of baseless ideologies.

CurrentC is fighting against another thing though: the existing plastic credit cards. Scanning a QR code is far more awkward than just pulling out the bloody card from your wallet and waving it above the RFID sensor.

I think most Europeans think they have cold winters, but they don't really know what "winter" means. Hint: if your entire country gets paralyzed by less than 30cm of snow, you don't get bad winters. If you rarely dip below zero Celsius during daytime, you don't get bad winters.

It always amuses me to see French exchange students arrive here. The ones with a modicum of sense will have talked with people here so they'd get good winter gear ASAP, but a few think that they're used to the cold. Then they get their first -25C in January.

Whoosh.

We're talking about children here, not post-docs. We should all hope that children get a slightly better understanding of the core sciences, it'd be a significant help in dismantling once and for all a lot of the bullshit that gets thrown around (hello intelligent design!). This in no way means that they should all be applying for a physics undergrad degree, but they should certainly have enough of an education in the subject prior to university to be able to make an informed choice as to whether they want to go there or not.

A third world country like the far more left-leaning Germany or Canada, you mean?

I think that should be the first thing to investigate: is the diversity of resumes diferent from the makeup of the community? As a student in comp sci, I can tell you that thus far I've seen an overwhelming majority of white males. Women are rare, blacks are rare, hispanics are rare, even asians are rare. I don't claim this to be representative, but I think we should start at the source instead of blaming a company for it. If the job seekers of that particular ethnicity/gender just aren't there, what are they going to do?

Are you this thick as not to realize that WE, humans, would win? Do you not see that pollution is harmful to all species, us included? Sure, right now most of climate change doesn't affect you. It probably won't affect you in the next decades either. Heck, you might even die before it does anything serious to you personally.

But if nothing is done, millions will be affected. How many will die is hard to say. What is sure is that selfish and mind-numbingly blind people like you are harming our world's future. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not leave as legacy a contaminated wasteland.

The reason that the UN focuses on the US and Europe is that we are the developed nations. We are the West. We should be leading by example, otherwise why the fuck would the newcomers on the scene bother? They've not had the chance to enjoy careless pollution for decades like the US has, and you want to tell them that the US can keep fucking things over because it's not the biggest polluter? Seriously?

If the US were doing their part, it'd put more pressure on the rest of the world. It'd make them able to help other countries build clean infrastructure. Instead, they act as the black sheep, the dissenting opinion which developing countries can point at to justify them not doing anything. And despite all of this, China is in fact doing things. Pollution has become a serious issue and they're working towards solving it with billions of dollars a year. In twenty years, if all else remains equal, I expect China to be significantly more advanced in green tech than the US. Perfect? No. But no one's asking for perfection, just willingness to put the world's fate before your own petty politics.