tbirrell

> more cost effective and less environmentally destructive methods

There are few options that are both these things. Which is not an argument to not fund R&D to reach that point, simply that as of right now, precious few things have both these properties. And once you add in the requirement to be able to sustain the power grid, I'm not sure you have any options.

That said, arguing that Big Oil has a strangle hold on politics, while not wrong, is misleading. This simple fact of the matter is that it is the least of many evils right now. Its like salt. Very useful for meat preservation, and the best they had for millennia, though not up to par with modern preservatives. Some day we will have something that is a legitimate contender, and at that point we can go after Big Oil for its influence. But until we have a legitimate contender, taking out Big Oil will only cause problems.

Eh, its not really that bad. The variable latency needs to be much more extreme to be noticeable. 250ms is about the threshold where I start to feel hampered. So going from 34ms->78ms->150ms->56ms->14ms really isn't an issue. If I was seeing 100-200ms jumps, I think that would have a much bigger feedback effect, similar to to hearing your own voice on delay. Especially if it changes on a `space` rather than every character. Just long enough for you to get used to, and anticipate, the delay. Then a wild change.

No it isn't. It tells us that more than half of searches are 0-click. It may not be _exact_ but it is meaningful.

Medium keeps track by setting a cookie. If you have a ad-blocker that blocks cookies, or use incognito, or clear the cookie by hand, then medium won't know the difference.

This. Expanding words and phrases out of their acronyms, abbreviations, or shorted versions lends an air of genuineness and intention to what you are saying.

Well sure, when talking about experience. But not wealth. A millionaire living in my city is objectively wealthy regardless of age. I'm not "wealthy" by any means. Despite that, my income is top 1% for my age-group. However the median income for my peers is also barely above minimum wage, so thats not a terribly helpful metric. Knowing I'm in the top 11% regardless of age is far more helpful in understanding how I fit into my local community.

I feel like age shouldn't factor in, only location. Granted expenses will be different based on age, but they don't seem to be using expenses to determine "rich-ness" at all.

This is not an example of Appeal to Authority because Ben Franklin is an accepted authority. If all parties agree on the reliability of an authority in the given context it becomes a valid inductive argument. Otherwise every Citation or Source or Bibliography would be a "logical fallacy". An Appeal to Authority would be if the quote was attributed to someone like James Polk. Sure he was president, but he has no authority on this sort of subject.

More importantly, I don't believe we could prevent another 9/11 even with government mandated backdoors.

Benjamin Franklin is a Founding Father and has been generally accepted as an authority for more than 200 years, especially on the subject of freedoms and rights. He was a renown political theorist, politician, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat in his own day, not to mention the fact his reputation has stood the test of time.

William Barr is none of these thing.

The truck would have to get 50-60 miles to the gallon to even begin to be competitive with a VPN.