Just after surgery in April 2020, my doctors had removed 40 lbs of water weight from me and I weighed 295 lbs.

After almost a year and a half of carefully following the dietician-mandated, doctor-approved diet and with regular exercise, I now weigh 405 lbs. I've discussed this with my doctors and their opinion was to stick to the diet, even if it resulted in weight gain.

Of course, they also recommend a second surgery for bariatric bypass because all their transplant patients gain weight from following the diet.

You have no idea what you're talking about, hope you add my anecdote to your data. Cheers.

Prisoners in the US represent unpaid, slave labor. Where this is the case, it's in the best interests of the people who run the system to keep their slaves working for as long as possible, and they do this by ensuring that offenders are repeat offenders with lengthy sentences. The war on drugs has been especially helpful in this regard.

An appeal to ethics and human dignity, with regards to any element of the American prison system, will not ever work because the people you are making the appeal to are already slave traders who have chosen to dehumanize the people under their care and turn them into property.

Clean out the rampant corruption, burn the prisons to the ground and terminate from employment everyone presently employed in the prison industry. Then maybe we can talk about human dignity and prisoner rights.

Police have been itching for -years- to get everyone into a national database. Soon they'll be able to purchase a database of every Amazon customer's handprint to see if it matches something found near a crime seen. Or even use Amazon's proprietary, secret AI software to discover a match at only 19.99 per print.

Covid's killed 150% of the people in the US that were killed by World War Two.

Would you take a world war depopulation event seriously?

Also, depopulating the first world will have a negligible effect on global warming. Your corporate masters are squarely to blame for that, and they could care less how many of their wage slaves' grandchildren get killed through their accumulation of wealth. After all, it's not like wage slaves are people.

Not that truth will convince an anti-vaxxer. I'd say the drop in O2 to the brain from covid is permanent, but I think the symptom precedes the disease, unfortunately.

If you're paying a mortgage on your property, it's not yours - it's the bank's. They probably have possession of the title, and what they found out during the Great Recession is they could sell a property to someone who can't afford it, skin them for all their worth, repossess the land, rinse and repeat ad nauseam.

The incentive of a bank giving you a land mortgage is to give you a lease you can't pay off, because they make more money that way.

In all likelihood, a mad cow disease outbreak will be traced back to a dirty shipment of hamburger, which was either intentionally or accidentally blended with bad cows. Even if you compromise every shipment coming from a particular supplier, the possible damage is limited to the number of primary victims plus anyone who cannibalizes their corpses.

Just like solid-state hard disk drives, right? Or airplanes, or horseless carriages?

If we weren't taxed for a war, Branson and co would've just made it to space a year early.

You don't think those profits would've wound up in the hands of peasants, do you?

Carbon-based fuels burn to produce carbon dioxide and water. The carbon dioxide they're trying to store is already-burned burnable fuel.

None of that has anything to do with trickle down economics. It has everything to do with the progress of technology; globalization, refrigeration, telecommunications, and automotive advances.

Awfully hard to own a car before they were invented. A Ford Model T, in today's dollars, cost about 16,000 usd new. That's actually cheaper than most new cars today. Cars have been mass-produced for mass consumption for over a hundred years, long before 'trickle-down' economics was ever a policy.

Eating certain foods like ice cream has nothing to do with the masses being wealthy - it's just sugar and milk, except when the manufacturer figures out how to make it cheaper with substitutes. It has everything to do with refrigeration. On the other hand, a 50-dollar steak is -still- out of the reach of the masses. Saffron costs $500 a pound for the cheapest, lowest-quality stuff. If you want the good stuff, it's ten times more.

Regarding going on a cruise - how do you think colonists came to America before the airplane was invented? They bought seats on passenger liners. Many still do.

We are fortunate to live in a time of plenty, when there's a chicken in every pot. But don't dislocate your arm patting yourself on the back, thinking the good times will last forever. The times of plenty will come to an end within our lifetime. And you can thank short-sighted, abusive policies like trickle-down economics for it.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

If we could maintain 2020 levels of co2 emissions we'd be a lot better off climate-wise. Honestly, we just need a good solid plague every september to scare people into staying home and we'd be all set.

Sinophobic would be, "All chinese students and employees are feeding the CCP industrial espionage, because we caught a handful who actually were engaged in espionage."

Saying, "This nation is engaged in acts of war against the United States and our allies, and if they do not stop there will be consequences," is not sinophobic, especially if they are actually engaged in the behaviors they are accused of.

Didn't microsoft already lose one lawsuit (in the EU, because US has no balls) regarding Internet Explorer, where it was ruled that leveraging the OS to force users into IE was an anti-competitive, monopolistic practice?

I guess now that they've rebranded their crappy, monopolistic browser to be edgier, they're due for another round in court.

The main issue is that de-carbonization costs are borne generally by individual businesses; the "climate-fixing" model we're operating by is to generally make polluting more expensive for industries. So those industries bitch and lobby about the expenses they're being forced to bear, like installing scrubbers in their chimneys and not dumping toxic waste directly into rivers and lakes (ocean is still usually fine).

On the other hand, the much, much greater costs of climate change are externalized to the greater population. If there's a famine because crops fail, and people start dropping dead from heat waves and get their cities leveled by historic hurricanes, that doesn't show up on the balance sheet for next quarter.

I really hope the oil oligarchs get sued to cover the losses of these farmers and lose, because losing that kind of lawsuit would revolutionize the climate-fixing model we're operating under. If there's a precedent for "your polluting processes caused my crops to fail" the math starts to be very different.