Cancer is also free. Doesn't mean I want it.

And yet, have the temerity to be a president who knocks a few bucks off the budget and get accused of "gutting" the military.

It is, however, the world's shittiest socialism. Brits be looking at this and going, why you got two Medi- things?

Or, perhaps it's because their money is impregnated with acid. I'm sorry, I am in the fact free zone, right?

U.S. population accounts for about 4% of the world population, so that's probably not where this prosperity is coming from, by and large.

It doesn't solve the problem of people doing stupid things with batteries, but it definitely makes recycling device materials easier. It would also likely have a positive effect on how long people used their devices.

Given the implicit advocacy of STEM in this reply, the absence of any concrete support for the author's thesis is rather remarkable.

Yeah, I mean, I'm paying for the service and I'm paying for network access. Don't see why I should be forced to watch their ads.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Balls and strikes are the atoms of baseball, not the planets. The comparison should be more along the lines of when the shot clock starts in basketball or exactly where the receiver touched the ground in football. Even then, though, the comparison is imperfect. There is a long history of pitchers and catchers exploiting the psychologies of different umps. Catchers work very hard at "framing" — that is the art of making an outside pitch look like it caught the corner. Greg Maddux was a master of slowly expanding the strike zone over the course of the game. These are fairly small matters, but for people who care, they are sources of considerable entertainment, and it typifies the kind of edge work that differentiates great players from good ones. Should we take that away? Well, if we do it won't really change the game that much, but by definition it will render it a little less human.

What are you gonna do? Shoot 'em if they target you for legal scrutiny?

I can't even begin to imagine this being useful. But I can imagine it producing 32 headaches.

Ok, I guess if you're the Unabomber you've got a point.

This is ridiculous. Privacy is not the opposite of having a Spotify account. You wouldn't give up any more if you bought a CD from a store with a credit card.

IMO, ownership isn't the answer to everything. When I was a kid, I could scrape together the $8 or $9 bucks to buy an album (this was a long time ago, obv.) maybe six times a year. Off to the record store. Hours spent looking at the covers of hundreds of records, hoping to God I could figure out which one was worth my paltry allowance simply by looking at the cover art. Album purchased. Go home, listen to ten songs until the needle wears a hole in the record, or, just as likely, regret that I just bought an album I didn't like very much.

Today, I pay $15 a month (in today's money) for a family Spotify account. Me, my wife, and my two kids probably listen to at least a hundred bucks worth of new albums (in 1984 dollars) each month. I can go back and sample a half dozen albums from an artist I like without having to shell out only to discover that I've wasted my money. I can introduce my kids to entire genres without breaking the bank. My daughter can hear six versions of the piano piece she's studying. That's not mere convenience. It's musical wealth, for cheap.

Insofar as it's an indicator of whether people are careless with their money, sure.