The point is to avoid contact though. That seems like doing the opposite.

Who says you can't still judge people just because you have a phone? We all do.

Get your family a plan with texting (which is basically just a plan anymore) and send them a group message that says this:

Row row row your boat gently away from me
Merrily merrily merrily merrily please just fucking leave

Also, yes, smartphone convenience is ludicrous. I went car shopping with my mom. Took pictures of every car, took perfectly legible pictures of the window stickers, looked up competing prices on the spot, emailed all the information home for later pondering.

Informational reference, map, audio, video, and picture recorder, weeks worth of music, text, email... and oh yeah, phone, all in your pocket. It is ludicrous. This shit was not even anticipated 25 years ago.

Go car shopping with me sometime. You pay, I choose.

Fuck that.

I'll make it quick. Guaranteed. Hike up to Chicago and I'll take you to the Ferrari store.

http://www.astonmartin.com

Someone near where I work has an Aston Martin DB9. In pictures it doesn't look that spectacular, but going down the street it is a head-turner. Still, OUT RAGEOUS and idiotic. The part of my brain that cleaves to efficiency hates that thing.

The legions of phone zombies everywhere you turn are not worth it.

DBS is better...convertible

I have an issue with people that drive Hummers and massive cars around for efficiency reasons, but I see the appeal in luxury sports cars. Besides, there's really not that many of them, and the improvements in efficiency right now overshadow shitty gas mileage in $100K+ cars.

if you spend $100+ on a car, gas is not an issue

Lol Putin, phone zombies? You're one of those guys? Come on, how cool is it to be able to communicate over thousands of different alleys with anyone, be it a stranger or a friend, at any time any day, regardless of what time it is over there or what the postage stamps cost?

"if you spend $100+ on a car, gas is not an issue"

Yeah it is, petroleum is a non-renewable resource. Consuming capital wastefully is an issue.

says who?

I wonder which ratio is greater - the number of medical authorities that say that vaccines are beneficial and don't cause genetic diseases like autism versus those that say they do or the number of environmental authorities that say fossil fuels are causing climate change and that climate change is devastating our entire planet versus those that say they aren't and that it isn't.

I rather like writing letters.

Anyone with a brain can see that consuming a non-renewable resource at a greater rate exhausts is supply more quickly. If it is all gone before a viable alternative is developed, we're fucked. As such wasting oil is an issue, regardless of where you stand on climate change.

i own one , and i got to tell you...i got no issue

You also got no brain.

i drive a great car

Cars are all a waste of oil.

Putin, get a horse and buggy

Get a car with good mileage and there'll always be other people to complain about. Show off your 8 MPG and you're gonna take shit.

i'm not showing off anything. im just saying i dont have a problem with it

@Putin33

"Cars are all a waste of oil."

I'm inclined to agree. When I lived in New York I went without a car for 12 years, and it was fine. But even in Northern CA it just requires too much planning and bother to go without a car. I commute by train. But the relatively low number of miles I have on my car for errands and such would have been intensely annoying to cover otherwise. (Don't start with ZipCar; you've got to plan way ahead to get ahold of one of those).

In the end I consume some oil to be more efficient with my time on this planet.

Nothing wrong with consumption

To an extent, no, but most of us on this site likely far exceed that extent.

"Nothing wrong with consumption"

Depends on what's being consumed. If what's being consumed needs to be conserved, then there should be efficiency standards.

"To an extent, no, but most of us on this site likely far exceed that extent."

Oh liberal guilt...