reasonish's comments

Well, lets agree to disagree :) Have a fun life in the human factory farm.

> you will probably live 30 years longer than if you were born 2 centuries ago.

Is what the OP said, and it's false. I will not. The average may be 30 years longer, but that's a fairly meaningless statistic.

The way people live today is extremely unhealthy. Cooped up in cities like factory farms, eating mass produced "food" and becoming morbidly obese.

The best way to improve your quality of life is not to look to science (Unless you're actually ill), it's to look to nature.

Those stats are faulty - the infant mortality rate 2 centuries ago was massive, which dragged the life expectancy down massively. Also, I don't think extending our life past 80 or so is a good idea.

Quality of life is far more important than quantity. Define "overcrowded"... First world countries are more crowded than they were 30 years ago, and (IMHO) the quality of life has gone down.

And as for your "increase food production"... We're force feeding chickens to be morbidly obese, pumping them full of anti-biotics so they don't get ill from living in squalid conditions. We're killing off the bee population with pesticides everywhere. These things are not good, and will only get worse as there are more people to feed.

You're probably going to die from cancer or heart disease.

Even if you just look at environmental factors, we're more likely to die either from the bee population dying due to pesticides, or because of the massive increase in routine use of antibiotics in meat production. Neither of which really get much media attention, maybe because they're both issues caused by science, and people like cheap food.

But at the end of the day we're going to die from overcrowding . The population has doubled in the last 30 years. (Hence why science has to make horrible dangerous food to feed them all).

Whether your fellow man believes in global warming is pretty irrelevant, and whether he believes in evolution is even less relevant to anything that matters. You're certainly not going to die from global warming!

Your comment is the sort of "scientific fundamentalism" I was talking about.

I can see the worry with vaccination, as it directly affects everyone, but does everyone necessarily have to agree on the other two issues?

Is it a real issue if someone is doing really good things for society, being an excellent person, but happens to disagree with you about evolution or climate change?

Science is getting to be its own fundamental religion for many IMHO, who prescribe 'science' as the answer to everything, and treat scientific papers as the bible (They also cherry pick the scientific papers they like, and ignore the ones they don't, just like religious folks do).

Also, the link you cite for climate change is 404, but I would expect the only real bone of contention is whether any change in the climate is caused by humans or not. Are there really people who deny the climate is changing?

I didn't say that. Regulation and vetting is there for a reason. It helps minimise the risks of several things. But it costs money.

Don't be ridiculous. Uber isn't cheaper because of code. It's cheaper because they ignore the laws and regulations. Just like airBnB.

Code has absolutely nothing to do with it.

You do realise there's a good reason it's cheaper don't you.

How many accidents have you been in which required claiming against their insurance (or lack of it). What about unvetted drivers who might rape you?

After airBnB, and Uber, surely the next area ripe for "disruption" / completely ignoring the laws and regulation, is banking. Just offer higher savings rates than any bank, but ignore all that irritating regulation the big banks are subject to!

It's cheaper. Until something horrible happens or goes wrong. It's exactly the same as airBnB. There's a reason these things are properly regulated.

Not to mention the danger of them possibly being sex offenders, rapists, murderers. Who knows!

I'm not the one claiming to be saving the world. A lot of startups do seem to genuinely believe that what they are working on will save humanity (Or they'll sell the crappy website for billions and spend the money solving world hunger or something).

You should watch "Sillicon Valley" if you haven't already. I'm pretty sure they took a lot of it straight from YCombinator. And it's hilarious. "Magic" would fit right in on there, as it's comedy gold.

BS. How does Magic magically know my address or payment details?

In any event, I usually order pizza online, and it takes a couple of clicks. Even on the phone it's less than a minute.

Do you really consider your time so important that you refuse to even spend one minute on the phone talking to another human being to order a pizza?

You know who's specialised in taking pizza orders and delivering them? Pizza delivery companies!

It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world.

How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company (Introducing a middle man) making the world a better place?

It's so well suited to startup founders though - Hey I'm way too busy and important to do menial things, I need a personal assistant on my phone that can do things for me while I'm saving the world by making some crappy website, which will never make any money, but will get bought for billions by some bigger fool because we know people who know people.

Magic sounds like it's right out of "Silicon Valley" (The TV Show).

I'd be surprised if anyone remembers Magic in a years time. Either that or it'll get bought by Amazon for $20bn. Or maybe both...

Choice? In what sense? The JVM is a ridiculously good VM, with tons of languages that compile to it.

Why are we reinventing the wheel?

We have separate events for women in chess tournaments as well. Could it possibly gasp be that womens brains are different to mens? Or is that utterly too horrifying to some to comprehend...

Browser froze choppy horrible (Latest Chrome).

As computers get faster, our ability to program them in less efficient ways increases.

It's a tax on the poor.