Your edit makes me wonder if you realize consciously that your rant is completely orthogonal to net neutrality even with your epplanation, and you're just doubling down on deliberate unawareness as a strategy to avoid feeling foolish.

No, not really... have a look through my (quite infrequent) posting history and comments to follow the logic.

The current GOP-controlled administration is implementing a cunning strategy to undermine the safety and freedom of all Americans. These are deliberate actions being taken, with specific goals to suppress what it is calling "fake" news/media, but what most people call facts. The most astonishing thing is that they've twisted and mangled the definition of "freedom" into something that doesn't resemble freedom at all; and yet there are many people who are stupid enough to believe they're actually being helped by these ludicrous decisions.

Viewing the investment as insignificant because the investor has more money is a seriously foolish perspective that ought to be fought against instead of expressed

It is a valid point of view. Although perspective and proportionality are equally valid as well.. Apple invest in anyone else but themselves.

It is a point of view that can only be held by people who feel like their opinions on how Apple should spend its money are valid, which is utterly ridiculous in every way that isn't imaginary.

That was true a decade ago. The tooling has caught up in most languages, so it's trivial to embed your SQL in application code and use it in an environmentally independent matter (eg to invoke in unit tests), provided you take the few minutes initially to set things up correctly instead of the all-too-common "fuck it we're a startup" manner people seem to love.

We all want things, but I sure as shit don't care what giant, rich ad corporations want from my computing equipment. Their needs aren't important to me at all, even though they currently subsidize the garbage fire that is the modern web.

I'd love to remind the author of the original headline (it appears to have been changed) that there's a huge difference between not understanding something now and knowing you'll never understand it.

This is not really a contradiction. Automation will indeed replace humans in millions of jobs, low-paying and otherwise, but until that process reaches a critical tipping point, we still have a country to run.

Nope. Especially since many of us don't have piles of irrational hatred for it.

it's important to note, (western) government decisions already are algorithmic. We simply aren't privy to many of the steps involved, and our ability to influence outcomes is limited by the elitism of representative democracy and the stifling regressive nature of bureaucracy.

Edit: that isn't "regressive" as leftists confusingly redefine it, it's the dictionary definition. Might be important to note in a political comment.

Do you have a belief that politicians somehow do know these things well enough to make decisions across this spectrum on your behalf?

In practice? No, of course not. Representational democracies are all flawed more or less depending on the country. I'm just not convinced direct democracy is the solution.

Take the TPP for example. Is it a good idea? Is it bad? I haven't read it, and even if I did, I probably wouldn't know either way. Even if I could vote on it directly, I'd have to trust someone to explain it to me. And how would I know which explanation to trust? It seems that we're back to square one.

A questionnaire would give policy makers an insight into how you would feel about particular policies. It could be used to test the detail of something like TPP. Give an indication of how you would feel if you had studied the specifics.