I should have to pay something to watch the latest videos of Micheal Jackson's hair catching fire, it should not be free, because there is a real cost to the planet and future generations when I download videos. My cable billl should reflect bandwidth use, not be the same whether I download a thousand videos or never download any. Bandwidth should be progressively taxed to compensate society for the full cost of excess use. Someone who keeps Pandora on all day streaming music to them should pay more than someone who goes on line once a day to check their email. There should be incentives to turn off the computer and go to sleep, and disincentives for watching porn all night.
Speaking of pornography, how can we justify allowing it at all in the face of this climate catastrophe? If we insist that pornography is just as worthy of our precious energy as all other uses of energy, and has just as much right to contribute to greenhouse gases as political speech or literature or art, then we are truly stupid. There is no first amendment right to destroy the planet. There's no right to build a gigantic printing press that buries Connecticut under a foot of paper, is there?
Electricity is the energy issue and unless you live in an apartment with utilities included in the rent your bill is already based on your usage. I’d rather not find something else to nickel and dime, especially as vital an economic tool as the Internet has become. As for porn, I’ve never been terribly sympathetic to the arguments that it falls under first amendment protections, but as a practical matter regulating that could get messy. I’m not sure I’d go much further than requiring public libraries and schools to block those sites.
Indeed, most of the squandered energy and most of the climate destruction happens right here in my apartment from my TV, my laptop, the fan going in the window, a wifi router, the fridge, a couple CFL’s… And in winter, my heat. But there is no way to tax those things differently, unless we build a tax into the sale of the TV or router. But we should indeed slap a higher tax on all my electricity use, even though it will raise the cost of heat and light as well as television.
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p>I think if we can ban kiddie porn, we can ban all porn. There shouldn’t be any porn sites out there. Even dirty magazines shouldn’t be printed anymore, it’s that crucial that we use our resources better.
It sounds like you’d like nothing better than for us all to become Amish and I’m pretty sure there are already energy taxes. I’d much rather incentivise and increase efficiency (such as cars with better MPG and more use of renewable resources) than feel like we have to give up our quality of life.
After the oil becomes scarce, we’re going to change our lifestyle, like it or not. It’s almost a certainty, as certain as science ever is. And yes, it is my preferred scenario, also, as I think it would increase the quality of life to live in local sustainable communities and not just be mindless minders of technology, amusing ourselves to death.
a fee for this worthless post. There’s nothing worth reading or thinking about in it.
A fee for making a post or comment is a good idea, since it means it has to get stored and disseminated to all the other people.
Good luck finding much support for this proposal in this community.
more than they care about themselves. But I guess this proves that it is just a blog by people who care about themselves.
n/t
so we know it is possible. I realize some would sneak through, there will always be porn, but that’s not the point, as long as we make a good consistent (but not wasteful) effort to reduce it down to almost none, and make sure that everyone understands why.
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p>Why? Because the climate/energy catastrophe is no joke, optimism is foolish, and we just can’t go on like we did before. Banning porn is the most obvious way to send that message, perhaps so obviously that the message is muted, because it’s like, duh! Of course we don’t need porn. To really send the message that the issue is serious, we need to reduce other uses of the internet also, like extraneous baby blogging and posting of cat videos.
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p>btw, if you were making a joke or something it went over my head.
Newsflash – Chinese ability and willingness to filter the internet is hardly a good thing in a free society.
to get rid of porn. Porn is an addiction for many many people, leading to lots of harm of innocent people, and also the industry enslaves runaways and teens and then spits them out on the street. Protecting people from porn is protecting their freedom.
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p>And I cite China just to show that it can be done. China also proves it is possible to force women to have abortions, and force everyone to have only one child. Those two things are not equally bad or good just because it is China that does them, we can approve and emulate one but reject the other. I worry that we are on track to accepting the forced abortions and restricting pregnancy and rejecting the banning of porn, when we should do the opposite.
So far, they haven’t been very successful, since savvy Chinese users are well-versed in using proxy servers, etc. The government’s latest approach is to require filtering software on all new computers. I bet that doesn’t work, either.
Tax dcsurfer a thousand million billion percent for wasting pixels on my wide screen monitor.
Are you willing to give up anything, or pay more for anything?