The NYT writer must have visited one of those brogrammers startup. Either that or he just plain made it up. It really sounds like a description that came straight out of The Hangover.
Honestly, their findings are what I would have assumed in the first place. It makes more sense to me that people would use Zipcar because it's more convenient than buying your own car and paying insurance on it. The social and environmental factors seem to me more like an "oh by the way", rather than primary motivators.
The researchers deserve a lot of derision, here. It's not like people decide to rent a car by the hour to save the whales. The only intangible benefit in my mind when renting a zipcar is the knowledge that I won't have to direct one of Seattle's horrible cabbies around my neighborhood or pay a ridiculous amount of maintenance and insurance for the possibility that I might want to pick up groceries this month.
I didn't even know they had a messageboard. I just found a coat in the trunk of the mini cooper I just rented. I had the strong urge to just throw it away because it was taking up space I was using for groceries.
Instead I left it in the car, in case its old owners came looking for it. I didn't want to get charged for leaving trash though...
Seems like there should be a feature that allows you to alert the previous driver of belongings left in the car without violating that person's privacy by providing contact info.
This is the wrong attitude as well. Civics does not end at the ballot box. The most visible example in the past year is all the online protests against SOPA and PIPA that resulted in both pieces of proposed legislation being shelved. If anything, that should give you hope that we can still effect change if we work hard to do it.
Our Constitution codifies how we will give consent to the system to rule over us and how that system will rule. The Bill of Rights gives us the right to complain about anything that anyone does.
This is a crappy attitude. If anything, you should be motivating MORE people to vote.
Let's take Florida in 2008 as an example. In 2008, the voter turnout among the voting age population was just 58.5% of a voting population of 14.353 million people[1]. In the 2008 election, Obama received 51% of the vote, and McCain received 48%, with Obama beating McCain by roughly 240,000 votes[2]. That amounts to only 1.6% of the voter population. If turnout was higher by just 2%, and Republican voters formed most of that increase, then McCain would've won Florida. Granted, that wouldn't have given McCain the election, but it would've changed the results in Florida.
Of course, increasing voter turnout is something we're always trying to achieve, but the trend in the past decade is of increasing voter turnout each election. Who knows, maybe 200,000 extra votes will make Florida go Republican in 2012 instead of voting Obama again. But telling people not to vote because one vote won't make a difference is not going to help increase turnout.
Reading this, something occurred to me. If we are to champion "neurodiversity", should we not aim to accomplish neurodiversity in each individual, instead of neurodiversity in the population? By that, I mean diversity in neural activity, such that it doesn't reach extremes characterized by autism, depression, bipolar disorder, etc. In that sense, isn't embracing autism, depression, bipolar disorder, etc. actually the antithesis of "neurodiversity"?
Interesting that this op-ed comes out after his executive order giving him control over telecommunication systems during a national emergency made the rounds around the blogosphere.
