They're getting bucks for one thing and only one thing--eliminating the cost of long-haul truck drivers or turning them into minimum-wage "truck minders" or something like that.
Why not just reform the legal system so that speed limits are not so prone to abuse and generally make it a rule that unless you are somehow at risk of harming others, that there is no crime? The victimization by police will continue, self-driving cars or no because we give agency to government to invade our lives via the 10,000,000 laws on the books.
My own take on the subtle influence techniques is that if you are aware of them they don't work.
I sat at a car dealership the other day listening to the conversations between sales people and customers and found the subtle forms of influence very interesting. A lot of car salesman tropes, too, of course.
They fucked us on GWT, they fucked us on Angular 1 -> 2. I'm done. I got off of GMail two weeks ago, got Brave browser, am getting my shit out of Docs. I can use someone else's maps. I still may have to have an Android phone because it's a tossup between Apple & Google which one is more fucking stupid.
Being that Windows 10 is such a huge pile of shit, I'd say Microsoft has never learned its lesson and never will. The OSes seem to be "occasional success" with a lot of awful failures.
So if I filed a $0 Federal and state tax return for a couple years during grad school I can relate, then, right? I was living off savings, but still.
Seriously, I grew up lower middle class, probably right on the edge of "poor" but have managed to become quite wealthy now. It is possible, but it takes hard work and sacrifice.
I had to accept the reality that the truly high paying jobs are all obtained via nepotism and inside-track type deals and get over it.
I also had to rein in my desire to be an entrepreneur because no matter what, I could not fail, not even once because there was no "parents' basement" to fall back on.
You have to be smart, tough, disciplined, and good at investing. It's hard to work to pull yourself up and it's impossible to do it if you're stupid unless you win the lottery.
Let's be honest about the plastic in the oceans: It is not first world countries causing most of the problem. Ships do drop their trash in the ocean, that needs to stop, and we're all guilty to some degree, but if you want to stop the worst of the pollution you have to go to the Far East, Latin America, and Africa.
The reason a lot of Wall Street finance types are running to these altcoins is exactly what you say--it's the new penny stocks. There's no regulation and so they are free to manipulate prices however they wish. I'm not sure it's a Ponzi, but it's definitely manipulated by the insiders.
The Iron Curtain is alive and well. We should be helping the Chinese break free of these economic terrorists--how hard would it be to watch your meager savings in Yuan be inflated away so badly each year?
It sounds great, but it's out of reach for 98% of those people. They mostly don't have the aptitude nor the motivation to work and the kind of work they are able to do is pretty menial service or infrastructure type stuff. I have been to these places, seen it up close and quite personally and while some few will escape and better themselves, the majority aren't going in to knowledge work and that's true everywhere in the US, not just Appalachia.
You grew up there but you don't understand the people? I guess we are all optimists.
Crap, I'm in the suburbs of a major midwest city and our ISP options are both shit--Comcast, the bloodsucking devils or Frontier, the mismanaged, bandwidth-overselling vampires. It's very frustrating. I can no longer morally will myself to pay money to Comcast for any reason. I would sooner gouge out my own eyeballs.
I don't see why we need to encourage people to become Facebook zombies. It's pretty vapid entertainment and it represents everything wrong with the Internet today. Now if there was some broader argument for educational purposes then I'm with you. Put another way, if all these people want to do is engage in low culture, there are cheaper ways to accomplish that.