satellitec4t's comments

Phew

But that's beer being less popular...

A. Please be sarcasm..

B. That's.. not communism.

C. Especially in this case, the safety issue affects everyone else on the road, too. If someone crashes into you while playing with their Apple Play, congrats on enjoying the unregulated free market.

If your kid takes a ride in a friend's dirt cheap car they bought because they're 17 and they get in a wreck, congrats.

If manufacturers can make and sell unsafe cars, they will, and it will drive up the cost of safe cars.

When products as critical as cars unsafe, it costs everyone, even those who don't buy them.

> the rising popularity of atheism

How can not-a-thing have rising popularity...

Then there are people who say, "I'm not religious -- I have a relationship with God"

Atheism is just a-theism, not-theism. If you are not a theist ("i believe in a god or gods"), you are an atheist.

You can be atheist and agnostic - most atheists are.

As a counter example.. Ireland is in the process of removing their laws against blasphemy (there was a referendum late last year. the country is now going through the process of carrying out the removal).

I thought the problem was they are more difficult to fly, less stable.

Hopefully the increase goes to the drivers...

I guess I led with the wrong thing. Mainly pointing out that they are not, in the strictest sense anyway, "directly quoted from Jesus" (and it kinda boggles my mind that he wouldn't have the foresight to write things down clearly to help keep things clear and consistent, which would not even have been unprecedented at the time)

Numerous variants of the Golden rule predate Christianity and there are few if any direct quotes of Jesus that survive. The gospels were written decades later. Oddly Jesus doesn't appear to have written or had someone record his wisdom directly, despite Aristotle setting an example with his 18 books of ethics over 300 years earlier.

Also Jesus: no need to wash your hands if you give to the poor you hypocrites, what goes in the mouth comes out of the body!

1800 years later: humans finally develop the germ theory of disease and can stop dying of easily preventable illnesses

> Another is a worldview that values selflessness, altruism, and honesty. I don't think those things can exist apart from religion

Religion doesn't have a monopoly on those ideals. They are not even solely human ideals. Many mammals display them in certain scenarios.

> (at a cultural level, anyway).

Many of the least religious countries are the best places to live, and the most religious, the worst. I went to Norway (the least religious country in western Europe), and they often don't check tickets on the train or at the entrances of places. When you ask someone why not, because people could lie, you get an answer like.. "because one wouldn't do that" (ie cheat the system). I got so used to it that I would lose my train tickets in my bag because I didn't need them. The only place I needed them was getting off the train at the airport because there was a machine that checked it.

> because as soon as you decide morality is relative then everyone is free to choose the morality that is most convenient for them/their tribe.

Religions do this. There are many sects with different rules. People pick and choose what rules to obey all the time.

Not being religious doesn't make one a moral relativist. Ethics and morality can be reasoned about.

> I think this explains much of our political divide and the "post-Truth" era generally

The post-truth era in the West is clearly a product of the religious right: https://youtu.be/xnhJWusyj4I

How the &$#! do I read this

Someone showed me this strip ~10 years ago when the place I was working briefly instituted a similarly counterproductive incentive policy. I just Googled "Dilbert code me a minivan"

Obligatory Dilbert

https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

One thing I notice is she says the ride app GPS took the driver through local roads instead of the highway.

I had a similar experience with Uber recently.

There is a road that goes pretty much straight from the airport to my house, though it's a busy, slow road. Instead the uber gps had us going all over the place, through many intersections and left turns. It might have saved 1 or 2 minutes, but surely cost way more in gas (and CO2) and was much more likely to result in an accident. I felt bad for the driver, having to drive such a confusing and stressful route.

I'm not sure if it made my route more expensive. The cost is set before we leave, so any route has the same cost. But the drivers are paid more the farther they go, so it costs uber more to pay him, when he could have gone a way that's much shorter and doesn't take any longer.

> Is the remedy worse than the disease?

Depends on where you live. In some places the entire way of life will be destroyed through drought or rising sea levels. In some places your gas may be a bit more expensive.

Whatever is convenient in the moment so that they can continue doing nothing and selling oil or sticking it to those educated elites who don't know nothing about the real world.

They'll just keep moving the goalposts until it's too late to do anything about it (which was like twenty years ago anyway)

Twitter is horrible