Eric P

"What *should* be done is obvious enough. Infrastructure programs, student loan relief, single payer (medicare for all), universal pre-k, universal broadband, net neutrality, cap and trade, and hell I'll even say a wealth tax and basic income (universal social security) program out there. Sure, nothing will get done in the next two years. But democrats could at least talk about this stuff and shout from the rooftops why these are all good ideas. Convince enough people that these ideas are good and who knows, they might even win an election or two and get the chance to actually implement them." - Eric P

"It was a good joke *because* Max had no idea who Alfred was. She knew Robin was Batman's sidekick back in the day, but at that point she didn't have any reason to be familiar with the name of Bruce Wayne's (presumably deceased) butler." - Eric P

"You can't really say "like cigarettes and alcohol" because those are two really different things. Cigarette regulation has been one of the greatest success of the last 25 years or so. Taxes keep the price high, suppressing demand. Marketing is strictly limited, which also limits demand. And prohibitions on where you can smoke further limits the appeal and thus suppressed demand further. And yet none of this is so oppressive that a real black market can flourish, except at the margins near state borders with big tax differences. I'm A-Okay adopting this regulatory regime for pot. Alcohol regulation on the other hand is disastrous. It's heavily marketed, prices are insanely low, and the few limits we do place on sales (a prohibition on selling to 20 year olds) yield terrible unintended consequences - teens who get drunk and then do stupid things like drive and not report problems because of a fear of getting caught. There's giant corporations behind both these products but the results..." - Eric P

"Stewart has the same problem basically all interviewers do. If he hardballs too much, he won't get the interviews in the first place. TV is just a crappy medium and these interviews are a crappy format for anything "effective" to come out of them. I don't know why people still pretend otherwise. His interviews are still a million times better than anything that's ever happened on a Sunday talk show though. I still want to know which universe Tim Russert was "no bullshit" and where people get this idea from." - Eric P

"There's no way Philip Banks only pulled down $179k. He lived in a Bel Air mansion and had a live in butler." - Eric P

"How are lasers better than bullets? Lasers still take a ton of energy and that energy dissipates pretty quickly (inverse square law). On the other hand, bullets will travel indefinitely and hit their target with the same energy that they left the muzzle with, since there's no air resistance for the bullet to deal with. In the real world micro-meteorites can be quite devastating and NASA worries a fair bit about them. You can't get them to the speed of light but you could fire them at velocities much faster than a ship can match (as the ship is much more massive)." - Eric P

"Well if I'm in my car my phone is on me. If I'm going to a meeting at work or walking around shopping or wanting to unlock my own front door then my phone is on me. So pretty much everywhere that proximity might matter, I have my phone. And actually when I'm home it's pretty much always in my pocket too, unless it's on the charger. But you'd have to put a watch on a charger too, so that's not even a situation where a watch wins out either. I guess the watch is superior if your preference is for walking around your house naked and thus sans pockets for your phone? But that seems like a pretty marginal use case to me." - Eric P

"I second it being a TV show, that would be the right way to flesh out a Ghostbusters "universe". The premise would be easy to adapt into a monster-of-the-week type show with the potential for more serialized season long narratives. Plus a show would give the breathing room to explore more kinds of stories than just "It's the apocalypse and the Ghostbusters save the day!" that a movie inevitably winds up being. Like what happens when someone tries to copy the technology and open a competing business? What happens when the tech malfunctions? Do they ever manage to win over regulators and skeptics? Though a rebooted all-female Ghostbusters movie is one I'd love to see too." - Eric P

"The media usually favors a neck and neck horse race narrative (even when there isn't one) as opposed to covering a foregone conclusion, so you'd think they'd be excited for a bona fide tighter race." - Eric P

"I agree with you that connecting to the "internet of things" is going to be a big use case going forward, but why do you need a wearable for that? Phones can serve the same purpose, and in many cases are already starting to do that. Something on your wrist doesn't offer any real advantages over something in your pocket or purse as far as proximity detection goes. And seeing byte size notifications on your wrist vs looking at your phone strikes me as a novelty that most people won't find worth hundreds of dollars extra. The only thing I can think of that a wearable can do that a phone cannot is include the sort of passive activity and health monitoring sensors that every wearable to date has included. This is, useful but it's unclear how big the market for that really is. Whether they ever become a mass market phenomenon or remain a mere gadget will depend entirely on what sort of data this and future models will be able to gather, and what kind of applications developers come up with..." - Eric P

"With regards to the Pet Peeves area SPOILERS AHOY: It's not a yo-yo where they came to Earth then left then came back again. The Earth of their myths and the one that they came from was the battered, post nuclear world they landed on at the end of season 3. The one they ended up on at the end (our Earth) was not the same planet, they just called it that because it's a nice place and why not? The implication is that humans must evolve again and again throughout the galaxy (since there were humans on our Earth already when they landed) and the same shit always happens. But it ends on a hopeful note that maybe this time it'll all turn out different because we have cylons baked into our DNA, so maybe we won't treat them like shit when we create them and cause them to rebel and genocide ensues. It's still a tough pill to swallow and there's still a lot of other huge problems with the finale, but it's not quite as bad as what you imply here." - Eric P