Complexity. the "vertical" transport system only goes to given floors in a given building. The roads go everywhere. I can drive from NYC to Los Angeles... and anywhere in between.

But I only need to go between points A and B, and don't much care about hypothetical point C (since I can always rent transport there, if needs be).

In order to transition an economy or government to true socialism,

Finland has been social democrat since the World War II. It's only in the recent years American-style capitalism has become fashionable. I'm sure it's a pure coincidence that our economy switched to an apparently permanent tailspin at the same time.

Gaze upon our debt-free university-level education and despair. Or grow balls and demand it from your own government. Either way, I'm gainfully employed and paying taxes because and only because my government gave me an education offer I could had refused, but didn't see any rational reason to.

How is this blow against Uber?
Uber is illegal in Finland as taxis here need a license to operate and they have service obligation.

Why would anyone use a taxi to get around Helsinki? It's the one city even I just leave my car parked at the outskirt (Mellunmäki metro station 24h free parking with enough space to make sure some is always available - take note everyone, that's what it takes to get people to abandon cars) and switch to mass transit.

Nuclear power requires uninterrupted police powers for tens of thousands of years to control nuclear waste.

Anything that stays active for ten thousand years is either not dangerous or fuel. The exact same power that damages your tissues will just as happily turn a steam turbine for you.

Lots of things kill birds, and actually wind turbines are pretty low on the scale. Even nuclear plants kill more by some estimates:

Yes, obviously it takes a retarded bird to be hit by an easily visible object moving at a perfectly regular path. That doesn't stop people from protesting wind power on behalf of birds, though. And the thing is, they aren't necessarily wrong: while it takes spectacular bad luck for a bird to die from an encounter with a windmill, it also takes a ridiculous amounts of windmills to replace a single nuclear plant.

Of course, there's always the possibility of not having a single large turbine, but a tower full of small turbines. That would not only make them bird-safe, but also allow them to run right up to and including hurricane winds, unlike a single large one (due to stress to bearings because windspeed varies across the area).

Thanks California. Human impact of using coal fired plants? Nope, think of the children has been replaced by "think of the birds".

It's not California. It's everywhere. Anything whatsoever has some impact, thus enviromental groups oppose it. Even damn wind turbines have been opposed on the grounds that they might chop up birds.

None of which means we shouldn't think about how this effect could be mitigated or prevented (maybe use optic fibers rather than open space to transport and concentrate light? Put a glass roof on the whole thing?) but no matter what, there's going to be some negative ones.

The soviet government was unable to keep the lie going. The USA government does not have that problem: They are funded by biased taxation and trade agreements, a monopoly on many forms of intellectual property, a monopoly on 'world police' duties, and sale of most of the international currency. When all that fails, they simply invent 1/3rd of their federal revenue from thin air.

The US government is hardly synonymous with capitalism. Whether that's a good or bad thing I won't get into, but it's entirely possible that US might survive the fall of capitalism and recover. However, should this not be the case, it doesn't matter how much money it can print for itself. Money only has value within a functioning economic system; all the money in the world can't buy anything is no one is selling.

All the people provide is disposable labour and babies for future labour markets.

And they're starting to admit that, too. Once you consciously admit that the promises offered by some Power that Be are lies, it no longer has any power to compel your loyalty. It might try coercion, but as the Soviet coup demonstrated, that's a desperate gambit that has low chances of working, even if the people who make up the army still stay under its spell.

In short, capitalism is going to fall for failing the same test it judges people by: can you deliver? And it could had avoided its fate by showing mercy for those who can't. There is irony in that. But the stupid thing is that it already got a stay of execution back when communism first arose by becoming lighter and softer with unemployment benefits and keynesian stimulus economics, and is really only dying due to abandoning those - and could still repent a second time, it's just bloody unlikely to.

or, more practically, make sure your phone password turns on immediately after the phone is put to sleep, rather than there being a 5 min delay.

What would that accomplish, other than getting your phone "dropped"? Or maybe you just get tased until you voluntarily give the password. Or maybe you just get shot for assaulting the officers. That seems to happen a lot in the US.

Let's be honest here: does anyone really believe their rights will be respected by the law enforcement?

Please show me the gun that's being used.

This delusional refusal to acknowledge that anything but outright violence could ever be coercive is the acid that's quickly dissolving whatever credibility capitalism still has left and exposing the grinning skull of feudalism beneath the mask of prosperity. I wonder what economic system will replace it, once people finally get tired of having structural flaws treated as unchangeable laws of nature or blamed on their victim's personal weaknesses?

The current climate is just like that which preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union: the prevailing myths are so much out of sync with reality people are running out of willing suspension of disbelief and losing their faith. No one believes anymore that hard work will be repaid with anything but layoffs, or that business success comes with a superior product rather than gaming the system, or that the rules are the same for everyone. The system has already lost its beating heart of credible mythology that can organize behaviour, it's just a matter of time before the necrosis of anarchy spreads everywhere.

Did I miss the part where the human race had a miraculous breakthrough in fusion technology?

Does it matter? Fusion is still nuclear power, so even if we had a working reactor right now we couldn't use it.

Actually feminism is about equality for men and women.

Okay. So naturally feminists are working hard to set up those shelters for men who suffer from domestic abuse which you confirmed are currently missing?

The thing is, you can claim you are about equality, and even believe so from the bottom of your heart, but if you only ever adress inequalities that go one way, you aren't. You're a lobbyist promoting special interests, perhaps fair-mindledly, but a lobbyist still.

The problem is that when women do it, it's considered 'empowering.' When men do it, it's considered sexist bigotry.

Having a double standard for members of your own group vs. members of other groups is also natural human behaviour. Neither women nor feminists are any less hypocritical or power-hungry than humans in general. Every movement, no matter it's initial purpose, eventually degenerates into benefiting the people within at the expense of the people without, and at that point should be considered as having exhausted any moral high ground it might ever had had, and abandoned in favour of something new and still shiny.

In theory you could just let the emails sit there until you are back at work, but in practice sadly it is often expected that you check your email inbox every now and then.

Just make it so the work email account is unreadable from outside the office network, and any emails going to your personal account means an hour of automatic overtime pay. Then let the beancounters discuss whether the message really was so important it couldn't wait with the sender.

My world should not stop because you chose to get off.

Then you'd better make arrangements to have a backup contact, now wouldn't you? Just like you'd do with any other mission-critical system.

Troll is a person posting an inflammatory message with the deliberate intent of exciting readers into a controversial response. This is the exact definition.

The problem is, that makes trolls indispensable for meaningful discussion, since they draw the implicit assumptions and attitudes out into the open for all to see. Ghandhi, Martin Luther King and Jesus were all epic trolls by this definition. And the authorities of the day wanted to ban them all, which rises some questions about where, exactly speaking, does this apparent concern for the sensibilities of forum readers originate?