Chopping Block, Ep. 6 ---- Cars, Video Games, and Our Overinflated Egos.

Today, on the Chopping Block.
The result of many years of technology and how our bellies portray the American ego at it's finest.

I will start with video games.
Alright people, HALO, Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil and Call of Duty.
Great games?
Sure.
Overplayed?
Yup.

Apparently the world has failed to notice the fact that video games are destroying us. They are turning us into unsociable people, with no aspiration to do anything with our lives. Sure, we are trying now, just watch Nickelodeon or Disney or Cartoon network for an hour or so and there will be mainly commercials designed to make children proactive. It's a great effort.
But get this.
Basketball sucks. The only people good at it are black people and Larry Byrd.
Baseball sucks. The only people good at it are mexicans.
Football sucks. It fucking hurts.

Now, explain to me how advocating these sports is going to get our lazy white asses out of our gaming chairs when there's action, adventure, and, typically, big bouncing tits streamed to our TV via XBOX360?
Let's face it, sports are boring and unproductive. Maybe if adventure camp didn't cost a small fortune and maybe if there wasn't a chance to get killed in the Army, we would be a little more active. I have friends who want to do military service, but are afraid of getting killed. I would reference them to a recruiter (some I know by name) or tell them that they can always do some non-front lines stuff, like being a mechanic or something like that. But they never listen to me.

But video games piss me off to no end.
In conjunction with the above statement, it makes us indecisive.
"I'm really good at HALO and CoD (Call of Duty) and I wanna join the Marines and become a sniper and do all the fun stuff."
I'm not one to lie. I say
"Listen dude, there's more to being a sniper than bunny-hopping and putting heads in crosshairs. you have to take into effect the wind, how hot it is outside, what angle you are shooting at, you have to eyeball the distance to your target, and you have to take into effect the rotation of the earth. Oh, and the whole time you are watching him take the last puffs on his cigarette and you know that you are stripping him away from his wife and kids forever. You will also be tucked deep into enemy lines, if you are found there is no rescue, you will be tortured and drained of every piece of vital information you know before they kill you and show your dead body on national TV."
At this point, they look down, reconsider asking me and walk off.

I studied snipers, I always wanted to be one, I did my homework. Everything I said above is true.
But this brings me to my next topic. Online gaming. Sometimes you find a bunch of guys in their 30's relaxing and having fun, and take the game seriously, (My best memory is Red Orchestra online, we would form squads and I was always the sniper. I had a spotter and and I could call in support like in real life. Realism was the name of their game and I loved it.)
But, again, there is a polar opposite.
You definitely know them. The 14 year old that has a stupid screenname and cusses and screams at the top of their lungs when they "die."
Grow
up
you
stupid
fucking
children.
Just because you are 14 and have no life doesn't mean it's a communicable disease. It's not a cold, it won't rub off and magically disappear. So drop the act and quiet in the fuck down. Even though it has it's indulgences. Like when mom calls them in for dinner and goes AFK. Then you all gang up on his character in game and continuously kill him until he comes back. Then they freak out about it and everyone else has a laugh. But really though, these kids need to quiet down and grow up, it's just a game, and if you are trying to have a gamerscore to brag about it's about time you found a different hobby.

Okay, What's left...

CARS!

The american car today is shit. We are now putting 30-day money back guarantees on them. But nowadays, it doesn't matter. Once, upon crashing a Daihatsu the race driver apologized profusely to the Daihatsu rep who attended the race. The rep smiled wanly and said "it's okay, we make a new one every 23 seconds."
Let's pick apart that statement.
1 new car every 23 seconds.
1 new child born every 6 seconds.
Out of those, there will be around 2 boys for every girl born.
That means...
2 boys that are fighting over one girl in every car ever made 16 years from now.

I dunno about you guys, that does not sound like a healthy way to hold up our economy.
and I'm only talking about 1 out of many hundreds of automobile manufacturers. So now everyone else has a car, slowly draining our supply of gasoline. Most of them will eventually die in a fatal....car crash. Our parents didn't raise retards, but there's bound to be a few hundred idiots who drink underage and drive while high. Is that how we balance ourselves out? For our massive (and still growing) population we are killing ourselves to balance out. But for every one kid that dies in a car crash some mother is having twins somewhere. Stupid. It makes my head spin. Let's stop making cars, it would be cheaper to continue manufacturing parts for the ones we have now, including older models. Improve what we have, instead of building a new car every time we want to throw in a GPS system or a semi-automatic transmission. Making new cars is just as individualistic as making your current car your very own. So stop trading in your 08 Malibu for an 09 Malibu and improve on your 08.

Next topic in cars. Fuel efficiency.
I've talked about it before, my car gets 42 miles to the gallon, on average. That's 504 miles on a single tank. Now, hybrids are just now catching up to my car, which, by the way, was fresh off the lot in 1993. It does not run on vegetable oil, or grease, or methane, or hydrogen. It is still a gasoline car. Do you know why, of all things my car is so efficient?
It's light.
It's got an inline 4.
And it's got a manual transmission.
So not only am I running on a hyper-efficient cloud I'm having all the fun in the world doing it from every stop sign and every light.
If I get in a crash, I will probably die, the fenders are made from plastic and the frame is made from bar stock. But that is what it takes. It is not 5-star safety rated, it doesn't have XM radio in it, actually it didn't have a radio at all in it when my (then) uncle Ernie bought it, hell, it doesn't even have power steering. But it's supposed to be driven by a responsible person who has a knack for driving. Like me.
Isn't driving supposed to be responsible? Does that mean our new features are the result of irresponsibility? I will answer for you, yes. Seatbelts were invented because sometime you hit a tree. They were improved because sometimes you can hit a wall. The Driver's saftey commission was made because sometimes a drunk teenager can hit you in his dad's Chevy Tahoe. Our loss in fuel economy is nothing more than us!
We, as a driving society, have become far too dangerous to be a driving society. There are too many "ifs" involved to make it worthwhile.

during this post, 78 Dihatsu's were made, and 300 children were born throughout the world. Thats 14,400 babies in 24 hours, and 3,744 Daihatsu's.
5,256,000 children a year, and 1,000 plus in that year will die in a car accident by the time those kids turn 18. Some of those kids won't fit into a car because they are grossly overweight. Some of those won't even have a car because they are too busy trolling about on their video games. And some are dying in Iraq while their younger siblings are out wrecking their Daihatsu.

Food for thought?