Regret's quick guide to thinking it through.

[Reginald Ret]

Once again I am confronted with good intentions gone horribly wrong, with short memories and an  inability or unwillingness to think, to follow their ideas to the logical conclusions.
This is quite annoying so here's a quick guide.
When you come up with a way to improve or otherwise change the world there are some things you MUST  think about:
1.What is my goal?
2.What must be done to achieve my goal?
3.Am I willing to accept that price?
4.Who should do it?
5.How should they do it?
6.Who will most likely end up doing it?
7.And how will they do it?
8.Is the difference between 4/5 and 6/7 a problem?

And some things that can help you work through this:
1.What happened the last time someone tried this? (history books are your friend)
2.If making the world a better place is so damn important to you, why aren't you baking a cake for the lonely elderly lady in you neighbourhood?

[Triple Zero]

What if the lonely elderly lady has diabetes?

[Reginald Ret]

What if the lonely elderly lady has diabetes?

Then you need to ask Cramulus for advice, he'll know how to handle that situation.

[Captain Utopia]

2.If making the world a better place is so damn important to you, why aren't you baking a cake for the lonely elderly lady in you neighbourhood?

Do you know how many Get-Out-The-Vote volunteers are simply so pooped come election night that they crash out and fail to vote themselves?  Do you?  I have no fucking clue.  But to me it's not a hypocritical act.

Bake as many cakes as you want - the situation for lonely old ladies in general isn't going to improve until the wider community gives a shit about the situation at least as much as you do.  And I fucking hate that screech of "well why don't you pointlessly sacrifice everything in a futile gesture if you care so so much!?", because the subtext to that is "Shut the fuck up hippie and let me get back to the serious business of ignoring it, because goddamn I'll be pissed if you manage to make me care in the slightest about your issue."

The real reason why these lonely old ladies are suffering their miserable cake-free existence is because of the incrementalist do-gooders who would rather have the cheap thrill of doing something tangible in the real-world rather than proving a point for their cause on some internet forum.

Fucking recyclers.  One by one they smooth out the curve.  We humans are blind to incremental change, we can only respond to crisis.  Design for this.  You know those banks left by a plow after a decent snowfall that piss you off in the winter?  Pfft.  Major cities, only one hundred years ago had roadside trash banks ten feet high because when the piles were only one foot high it wasn't too hard to ignore them.  What happened?  The truth eventually became unavoidable and shit got done.  Sanitation departments sprang into existence overnight.

Have a good cause?  Well fuck doing anything about it yourself.  Just get out onto the street and into the face of anyone who tries to ignore you.  Or better yet, just crack open another Mountain Dew and teach the internet a lesson or two.  Shit will not change until you have an army of cheerleaders demanding change, and then you can take a well deserved break.

tl;dr - don't bother fucking about with lonely old ladies, that's what the internet is for.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Lonely old ladies make the best trolls, IME.

[Captain Utopia]

I tried that once on Omegle, but I quickly ran out of material after I played the CAN YOU TYPE ALL CAPS BECAUSE I'VE LOST MY GLASSES DEARIE card.   

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I tried that once on Omegle, but I quickly ran out of material after I played the CAN YOU TYPE ALL CAPS BECAUSE I'VE LOST MY GLASSES DEARIE card.   

I found some really disturbing logs documenting my oldest kid's Omegle trolling. It's really awful. It starts with 12/F/West Coast, and gets  from there.

She is a terrible person.

[Whatever]

I tried that once on Omegle, but I quickly ran out of material after I played the CAN YOU TYPE ALL CAPS BECAUSE I'VE LOST MY GLASSES DEARIE card.   

I found some really disturbing logs documenting my oldest kid's Omegle trolling. It's really awful. It starts with 12/F/West Coast, and gets  from there.

She is a terrible person.

Yes, my son has done some shameful things there. 

[Slyph]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxoxgb2PSjU

I use this video on Omegle. I got the PERFECT reaction to it once. There was a guy jerking off as soon as his cam started, and he just slows right the hell down while he figures out what the hell... You can tell he's thinking about it... and then thinks "fuck it" and goes back to pounding... I flick Manycam off and the deformed chick disappears and it's just me in a V mask, shaking my head in judgement...