Cougher

No one has spoken to me about guideline violations. Not one single time. Why would you lie about something like that? As far as my comment goes, it was a joke. Purely in jest.

"There aren’t a fixed number of jobs."

In the case of my mailman, there is. If he retires, another person is hired to take his route. This is the case with many jobs. Clearly I'm not speaking about ALL jobs, just as when I posted the comment about the students who didn't get a job after college that I wasn't talkin about students who got a degree in basket weaving as another posted suggested. I shouldn't have to explain that my comments are not meant to cover ALL situations.

That's part of the function of downsizing. I'm not talking about cases of downsizing.

"The existence of old people is not the cause of unemployment."

Perhaps you meant to post this under someone else's comment, because I didn't claim that the "existence" of old people was "the cause" of unemployment. However, if a 75 year old man retires, it opens up a job for anyone who is younger, be it a 20 year old person or a 55 year old person.

"we may eventually be in a situation"

Which implies that we're not there now. Right now, there are a lot of young people who could use a solid job like a mailman, some of whom have a lot of student debt to pay for careers that are not panning out.

Not only did I live in California, but I lived in the middle of a national forest there. And yes, I spent a great deal of time enjoying it. The question remains, and I'll clarify: how much of a resident's taxes pay to maintain the great outdoors versus all of the other services?

This comparison is absolutely meaningless to me. Does that mean I'm older than the older readers?

For one thing, the post implied that being indoors came with the higher humidity in Texas. But assuming that the poster really did "accept a life spent indoors in air-conditioned spaces" as you reflexively assume, what is this extra high taxation paying for in California that the person wasn't taking advantage of?

"Most back pain, especially lower back pain, is a result of weak glute muscles"

Citation please.

Stop paying attention to the hysteria. It's great for views and clicks. It's terrible for viewers and clickers.

"We have been told that climate change is an ‘existential crisis.’ However, based upon our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations."

https://judithcurry.com/2019/12/14/the-toxic-rhetoric-of-cli...

What's there to research? I'm familiar with football and familiar enough with the idea that new players made "winning" plays in the process of losing the game and ending their season. When you post three times and still have most respondents scratching their heads about your point, maybe it's your communication that's the problem.

Does Apple allow you to make your own ringtone for your own phone yet? Or copy your own songs to your own phone for your own listening?

This response says everything it needed to say in the first sentence without the gratuitous snark of the second.

"What can we say? We know alcohol's a toxin. We'll never believe alcohol can be good for you. This is America, for chrissake! We're willing to die for our true beliefs!" https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-in-society...

That's mighty convincing evidence you have right there.

“Then one day, she was chatting to a cholesterol expert about the potential link in the hallway at her work, when he brushed it off as obviously nonsense. “And I said ‘how do we know that?’,” she says.”

These are our “experts”, brushing off things about which they have no clue.

“How are all these medications affecting our brains? And should there be warnings on packets?”

Yet another warning in a list that makes people's eyes glaze over is not going to do much good. Additionally, people have a difficult time relating to just how bad these effects can really be. People also tend to overestimate their abilities to perceive the effects and endeavor to address them.

“But Golomb’s most unsettling discovery isn’t so much the impact that ordinary drugs can have on who we are – it’s the lack of interest in uncovering it. “There’s much more of an emphasis on things that doctors can easily measure,” she says,”

And what is it about medications that makes people willing to connect these dots? Money and a willingness to not want to know and even to deny what is known. The chemical industry is very good at this and we've known about that for a very long time. There are numerous studies that have found these same associations with various chemical products from artificial food colorings to laundry chemicals and more, with effects that include anxiety, depression, and rage. The ubiquity of chemicals with unknown physiological and psychological is staggering. It's gotten to the point where we can barely socialize without being inundated with the 21st version of passive smoking. People and places can't exist without dousing themselves and their spaces with chemical crap that also includes air "fresheners", candles, essential oils, etc. Road rage, infertility, anxiety, depression . . . all these psychological phenomena that have risen along with the public test lab that is our world. And chemical companies are using the tobacco industry's template of doubt and denial along with decades of honing the craft.

“But in order to minimise any undesirable effects and get the most out of the staggering quantities of medications that we all take each day, Mischkowski reiterates that we need to know more. Because at the moment, he says, how they are affecting the behaviour of individuals – and even entire societies – is largely a mystery.”

It's true. And if it's a problem for medications that are presumably scrutinized, what do we think is the case with the 10s of thousands of chemicals that are basically tested using the “honor system” of industry testing its own products for safety? These chemicals are not tested singly, nevermind in the near limitless combinations in which they exist in our daily lives.

“At this point it’s worth pointing out that no one is arguing that people should stop taking their medication. Despite their subtle effects on the brain, antidepressants have been shown to help prevent suicides, cholesterol-lowering drugs save tens of thousands of lives every year, and paracetamol is on the World Health Organisation’s list of essential drugs because of its ability to relieve pain. But it is important that people are informed about any potential psychological side-effects.”

And every one of these articles will include this boilerplate rationalization that's a lot more complicated – and different – than this.

"You missed the point."

Back at ya, matey.

"Climate change is going to start fires eventually, so let's just ignore what happened and claim that what happened isn't what happened but what's gonna happen happened."

And the least surprising news is that it's yet another concept car that people won't be able to buy.

"Sony didn’t have to go and make a real car to show off some tech it thought might be good for the automotive space. But it did it anyway. . ."

Gosh! Someone buy those guys a beer!

"Making cars at any scale is a grueling business, though . . . So it’s probably a good thing for Sony that it doesn’t plan to make the Vision-S — even if people wind up walking away from CES 2020 wanting a Sony car."

Make that beer a Keystone Light.

"Tesla delivered an impressive number of 112,000 vehicles during the final three months of 2019."

I get that people like this company, but this isn't even as credible as pop stars who've been said to be more popular than The Beatles ever were because of the increased number of people listening to music: GM sold 10 million cars in one year just a few years ago.

The article does not say that health care costs cause poor health. It says that we have poor health in spite of our high health care costs.

Also, you stated that poor health is the cause of high US health care costs and that's not true, either. It's one of the many conctributors.

Also also, healthy people do pay it if they have health insurance and/or pay taxes that contribute to Medicare/Medicaid.

I agree that obesity is a problem though. I also believe that many of these articles about the American healthcare system falsely attribute poorer health to our healthcare system rather than at least partially attributing it to unhealthy lifestyles.

"Along the way, the AI creates an army of what Braun calls “monsters”: Nightmarish faces pocked with inhuman deformities and surreal mutations."

"The company refers to these mutated creations as “monsters.”"

Given that some of these deformities exist in real life, calling them "monsters" really gives an idea of what this dehumanizing-as-a-business does to dehumanize the minds of the creators.

This is a basic example of Google's treatment of its users. They could have offered this to users as an option to help their browsers run more smoothly, while informing the users of the extra CPU drain. Better yet, since what they're monitoring could increase user awareness of what their computers are doing, they could offer to "cc" the reports to the users. This transparency would also put a better face on Google.

But this is not what they did. I don't know what their reasoning was, but I'll perceive it as a callous disregard for the user at best.

And you gotta love the comments section. Within the first five comments, we have Google described as being a nefarious organization created by the US government, the Russians, and the Jews.

Wish harder; it isn't working.

"I drink a gallon of soy milk a week and tofu and tempeh almost daily. Never had a problem with anything, best shape of my life, and highest test levels ever."

^^^ "your situation is anecdotal and thus insignificant for trying to prove some point."

There were other points in my post that were a response to your previous post.

I think you're redefining bro-science.

Everything that you own had been created within the support and context of society. Your food and water, the service that takes your waste away, the vehicle you drive, the vehicles that deliver your food and clothing, the roads, the maintenance of those roads, the products that you're using to post on this site . . . If it's against your will to contribute to these services, you can choose to live free of all of these societal abominations and live in the forest somewhere. But yes, society has a way of preventing freeloading.

And I was saying that you can find one if you look.

Read Chapter 6 of Mein Kampf and realize that America has honed that craft to an art form. http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/meinkampf/v1c6.htm

Review the propaganda of our past wars and understand that this is what they do with every war to get people on board with the insanity of sending their own kids off to die for them. It's not new. Read War Is A Racket by Major General Smedley Butler: https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

Understand that "both sides" agitate for war and/or violent manipulation of foreign countries. If you're upset that Russia interferes with our elections, look in the mirror. We do much worse and have done for decades. Defense contractors figure prominently in the investment portfolios of representatives of both parties.

Keep informed. This is a dependable, convenient place. https://www.antiwar.com

"It’s gotten to the point where my Twitter and Mastodon accounts, side-by-side, look like they were written by different people."

This is a very interesting point. As much as many of us would like to think that we'll just be ourselves wherever we are, we will conform somewhat to the culture of our group to varying degrees. It may be the culture at work or in hobby groups or social media. I suppose we all may have jumping off points as well. I left facebook because my peers evolved into parodies of the grumpy old man, bashing "kids today" and millennials, and toxic political ranting. It certainly didn't seem like home to me.