I guess it depends on how you define past... It was like that last year, it's always been that way.

Repeating the same statements with the support of purchased news organizations and paid shills and astroturfers does not make a country more free.

Restricting speech is bad. Restricting a company's ability to purchase media like Fox, Sinclair, and Clear Channel is good. The consolidation of media in the US is making propaganda very effective and good government harder.

I read the book and saw the movie. I thought the movie was fine. Not as good as the book but better than many book to movie transitions. I suspect that as with most novel to screen transitions the balance between making it interesting to those who had read it while not totally losing those who had not read it was tilted toward the reader and that could put people off. I watched it with my daughter and we enjoyed it.

I didn't find that the racial composition of the cast made a major difference to the story. Some stuff was cut, some was changed, some was added but that is necessary with adaptations.

I'm not sure that the actress is the person with the best perspective. She played a role, she did not write or direct. The book certainly had a religious and political point of view and I think the author was OK with the adaptation.

IIRC oil and coal formed because there were no bacteria to break down some plant and animal life. Now the bacteria exist so I don't think we will get new oil or coal deposits.

How many household incomes in 1978 vs 2017? 55% or so of women worked in 1978, 80+% in 2017. So less big macs even with an additional quarter earner.

The government auctions off spectrum because it belongs to all citizens and they try to have it used properly and to have someone pay the citizens for the use. A vicious circle of people who don't want to govern and people who don't want government has corrupted the process in the US somewhat, but that's how it works in most western democracies.

A free market should be free from the powerful not free from regulation. Government is supposed to be by the people for the people. In the US both have abdicated.

Intelligence is variable. Lots of people are understandably unhappy that university degrees are used to signal intelligence and that things like farming are not. Many tasks and ways of life require at least as much intelligence, dedication, and application as university degrees. Some of the people who live such lives resent being told that they should abandon what they do and send their kids to college. Intelligence is not limited to what people do in school.

Overall it is much easier to be popular using primary school name calling, no matter who is in the audience, than to actually come up with a good plan, poplularize it, and implement it. Intelligence doesn't really come into it. It is also much easier to do whatever makes you money, stick to it, and claim to be honest than to actually be honest in politics. Shamelessness helps too, as admitting to mistakes is the only American political error ("I would not have done anything differently knowing what I know now" - George W. Bush).

The basis of American politics is making sure that no one who is rich stops being rich. The secondary basis is increasing the gap between the stratifications of wealth. The third is shrinking the top tiers. That is limiting economic mobility and having smaller numbers of people being extremely wealthy, very wealthy, and wealthy, with more people being more and more interchangeably middle class, working poor, and poor. It's very much a class system and it's aiming for historical times with a historical distribution, i.e. a few aristocrats and lots of peasants.

Note, I'm doing fine, not top 1%, but at least top 20%. When you criticize wealth and you're called a hypocrite and when you're poor you're told that you're jealous. You're just told that by the bought media who want to please the very rich instead of reporting anything real.

The volume of crap is different. Where you used to have a few news sources that were widely distributed and heavily vetted (more people to vet less news) you now have piles of sources and many, notably Fox, only care about who is paying and who they can manipulate and not about the information. The volume of propaganda and distortion vastly outweighs the truth, and people can easily find other people who agree with them and avoid listening to other viewpoints.

I had a friend tell me NASA didn't believe in global warming. I did a google search with him and there were dozens of entries, most looking sort of like official sources and containing nothing factual. The NASA entry was midway down the first page and, obviously, said that global warming is real and stop misquoting us. The truth is obvious if you are looking for it, but if you are looking to win an argument and prove that educated people and liberals are all idiots it's pretty easy to ignore the correct options and go with the many, many other ones. My friend is not an idiot, he's bright and capable, but he dropped out of school early and he's hostile to mainstream "book learning" so he gets manipulated by a lot of these sites that play to his biases.

Problem is a lot of the manipulation is harmful. Not just global warming, but all the crap about taxes. Check the new budget, poor people get "double the tax deductions" so twice zero. Rich people get real money. Once the deficit balloons who do you thing is going to pay it back? The guys who pay off the politicians and the news sources or the guys who got twice zero?

The whole "small government" thing is sort of insidious as well. All those think tank slogans, but the middle class is pretty much a government creation via taxes. Everyone thinks that they are special and they got where they are because of how good they are, but the goal in the US is Putin's Russia, a kleptocratic dictatorship. In Russia there is not much of a middle class, mostly people working for other countries, not many taxes. Just rich friends of the leader, vairous connections, and lots and lots of people who don't have much.

Funny about "the good old days." I suppose they were from 1952-1978 with some exclusions, and the relatively high taxes are a figment of our collective imaginations. Or maybe the real goal is to go back to the middle ages when leaders really had control?

Money is traceable. The Russians did not use much, probably just incidentals like memberships and web site hosting. The Russians piggy backed on the propaganda networks in place to send their message. Trump did the same. Both hooked into the huge bought media circus that tells media consumers to do what the people paying for the news want them to do: buy guns, lower taxes on rich people, cut services, pay for your own medicare like rich people do and congressmen don't, subsidize big rich companies, money is speech... By comparison Trump and Russian hackers don't seem so bad...

Funny, right to work states tend to be poor. Not sure making all states right to work would be good for anyone, really. Putting in a negotiation structure so that companies and unions can negotiate in good faith to get something everyone can be happy with instead of trying to crush the other side would be a good move. The constitutions the US imposed on Germany and Japan do a good job, and they are way more adapted to the 20th century than the 18th century one the US uses for itself.

Housing prices and bonuses for the 1%. How to produce more without improving your situation in life.

Gut bacteria make a huge difference and they adapt to your diet. There are companies working on transplants, so far it's pretty much consuming excrement... It's the only treatment for some diseases, notably some antibiotic resistant ones. Gut bacteria will change what you consume depending on what they consume and they can change how full you feel based on what they give off (gases...).

Antibiotics kill a lot of gut bacteria so they probably have an impact on weight gain and weight loss. They almost certainly reduce the variety of intestinal flora and that is probably a bad thing.

Recent studies show eating fat does not make you fat. The fat gets broken down and used. Eating sugar makes you fat, it gets stored quickly. Drinking soft drinks (even zero cal zero sugar) makes you fat, don't know why, studies are consistent.

Fruits, vegetables, and exercise are all good.

Walking briskly is good exercise. Walking slowly isn't.

If you want to lose weight: weigh yourself often, cut sugar, exercise. Not necessarily fun, but not bad if you can cook and find sports you enjoy, and/or learn to enjoy walking fairly fast and far.

For drivers? I never apply MS driver patches. Dell or manufacturer. Try using MS video card drivers, and good luck to you.

Iphone updates, android updates through the carrier, that is to say not at all.

Google really has to lean on or bypass the carriers.

I think you are overestimating the cable bill and underestimating the rent of most people. 4 months of my cable bill would not pay my monthly mortgage and I have an oddly extensive and expensive cable package and a relatively small mortgage.

In most elections Hillary would be someone to avoid. In this case she is the only one actually running, that is the only one who wants the job. Trump is using his free media coverage to continue in the race while siphoning campaign donations into his pockets. The Donald is, as is his trademark, only in the race for what he can steal. If he becomes president he can steal an awful lot. The VP will run the country while Trump loots; he has already made it clear that the VP will handle everything while he "makes America great again," presumably by helping Americans get closer to Jesus via poverty.

And yes, Hillary will be as bad as her husband and probably worse than Obama or Bush I, but she won't steal as much as Trump would or as much as Bush II/Cheney did. I'm not American so I can't vote in any case and my country has elected some kleptomaniacs as well (I'm Canadian, but I think Trump would outsteal Mulrooney, literally stealing massive surpluses into massive deficits). Good luck...