So back in 1993 when the largest soda was say, 20 floz (I can't remember the exact numbers), did you go and buy two of them? Of course not! That would have seemed weird. But now, nobody bats an eye and someone getting a 40 floz soda, especially when it's the default size for a value meal. The fact is, serving sizes are normative. I don't think it's a coincidence that they correlate strongly with the rise on obesity in the US.

Here's a quick anecdote: my care is a '96 model. The cup holders can't fit any size bigger than a small from most fast food restaurants these days. Imagine the psychological impact of having all cup holders be this size. It would tend to stop and make you think, "Man, I'm drinking a *lot* of soda!".

why is it the govts responsibility to protect stupid people from their own stupid actions?

Because the government has a vested interest in keeping the population (at least somewhat) healthy. Try being an economic or military superpower when a significant percentage of your population are obese and suffering from diseases like type 2 diabetes. You won't get very far.

Seems like we're trying to circumvent natural selection.....let these people take themselves out of the gene pool....and maybe we'll have fewer stupid people in a couple of generations?

How on earth would they take themselves out of the gene pool? As long as they survive long enough to reproduce, they are still in the gene pool and they will have "won" the evolutionary contest. Eating junk food and drinking tons of soda will not kill you before you are old enough to reproduce, but it will make you unhealthy, unhappy and a burden on the heath care system.

I've honestly started to wonder, with all the problems we're seeing in modern kids, autism on the rise...so many of them with food allergies (I never heard of anyone almost dying from PB&J sandwiches at school when I grew up, and we ALL ate them)...etc.

People fail to understand that in biology, "fitness" has a very specific meaning, namely that you are fit enough (with respect to your environment) to survive long enough to reproduce. As long has you meet those criteria, you are, evolutionarily speaking, "fit". Thus the requirements for being "fit" in human society have essentially remained unchanged since you were a kid, barring perhaps a few vaccines.

As for the alleged rise in autism and food allergies, I think that's simply a case of parents have a greater awareness of these phenomena now. In earlier generations, children with allergies might simply be seen as not liking certain foods and children with autism would just be considered a bit "odd".

Saying that we shouldn't encourage people to eat healthier foods because they will "take themselves out of the gene pool" is almost as bad as saying that we should ban eye glasses. <sarcasm>After all, the people with poor vision will tend to get into fewer accidents! And if we're lucky, these accidents will kill them in childhood! Why, in a few generations we might cure all eye diseases! </sarcasm>

It seems like in a lot of national security matters, citizens would not have access to the same information that members of Congress would due to some or all of it being classified. However, this lack of access would not stop some citizens from forming a strong opinion. A perfect example of this is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There were people who were vehemently for and against it, but neither group had access to the same information that the members of Congress had. How would you weigh popular support against your own assessment of information that you *knew* your constituents did not have access to?

Actually, it looks like I'm wrong on this. MOSES is the one instructing the army officers to kill all the boys and non-virginal women and keep the virgins for themselves.

Unique? Have you read Numbers Chapter 31, in which Moses, the most important prophet in Judaism and the author of the Torah (at least according by tradition), is instructed by God to take vengeance on a rival tribe and:

...kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

(verses 17-18) That's some pretty viciously evil stuff. People tend to have a blindspot when it comes to religions with which they are more familiar. They think of friends and family members who practice that faith and disregard the fact that centuries ago, people had vastly different ideas about what was and wasn't morally acceptable.

For the record, I had three CS professors in college that used Macs and at least two of them had been Apple enthusiasts for 20 odd years. It always baffles me when people act like Mac users are "too stupid" to use Windows (as if that's some kind of great intellectual task?) or "don't know about other options".

But that's exactly my point! We didn't even cover that much in my grade school and middle school science classes. It would have been just as easy for me in eighth grade to think "Well, it's right next to Chlorine, so it's probably similar to the one it's next to." And even if I had answered it correctly, it simply would have been dumb luck.

I'm not sure what experience everyone else had, but until my freshman year of high school, pretty much every science class I took was a complete joke. All of the assignments were essentially basic reading comprehension exercises that involved absolutely no use of any kind of critical thinking or experimentation. TFA said they were asking questions about the periodic table on the test. I can personally attest that the periodic tables in my grade school and middle school were nothing but decorations. We never used them or talked about them. All of the real effort was put into English and Math, because those were the two areas that the state (Arizona in this case) routinely tested us on. Science was virtually ignored.

It's things like this that make me hate the entire crooked system. The federal gov't wants more people to go to college, so they tell the financial institutions "Hey, lend these people all the money you want, we'll make sure they pay it back even if they declare bankruptcy." Meanwhile, the state gov't, elected on a platform of lowering taxes while providing all the same services (the essential contradiction of basically all elected governments), decides to slash education spending. The universities scramble to cut costs but immediate stop when they figure out that the banks are perfectly happy to lend $100,000 to 18 year-olds with no credit history and instead jack up their tuition. At the end of this wretched cycle, you've completely transferred all of the burden to people who took out loans because they couldn't pay for college in the first place and all the kids with rich parents can't seem to figure out what all the fuss is about. Even the kids who get scholarships are screwed because they generally don't scale to handle increasing tuition rates. My freshman year of college, my scholarship paid for an entire year's worth of tuition. By the end of my senior year, it covered less than one semester.

That's a fair point, but I could still see this being very practical if it's the type of thing you could do at home. I really like the idea of not having to worry about whether or not my car has enough "juice" (be it gasoline or electricity) because it gets fully charged every night.

Citation needed. The correct per capita GDP figures are:
Norway: $53,300
Sweden: $40,600
Denmark: $40,200
Finland: $38,300

How the *hell* did the parent comment get modded "+5 Informative"?!?! It mentions some *very* specific and *very* dramatic figured with absolutely no attribution. At least give it a cursory google for fuck's sake!

Many credit unions support shared branching which lets allows you to cash checks, make deposits, etc at other credit union in the same network. I've lived in a city that has no branches of my actual credit union for 5 years now and honestly it doesn't bother me that much (although I will probably get a new account at one of the local credit unions soon).

I realize he put it in a rather asinine way, but I too was shocked to hear that they called firewire obsolete. The line between pro and amateur continues to blur as technology gets cheaper and easier to use. Sweetwater Music has three pages of firewire audio interfaces, for example.

I realize this isn't quite what you're looking for, but bandcamp offers music in in basically any format imaginable, including FLAC. It's mostly smaller artists, but there are a few big names (like Amanda Palmer, for example).

It's still an option, but most pretty much every employer offers you the option of having the money directly deposited. I myself haven't received an actual paper check in years. Still, many lower wage workers still receive paper checks and take them to those god awful check cashing places *shudder*