Finally, a safe and financially savvy way to diversify my portfolio. I'm currently at about a 70/30 POG - Beanie Baby mix, but I feel like I'm tilted too heavily toward large caps.

(Ha! Large caps! You see what I did there?)

Finally, hope for the most vulnerable among us, the children!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In response to concerns both about possible export of American technologies to China as a result of IBM's involvement, and claims by climate scientists that emissions in China contribute significantly to global warming, think tank The Heritage Foundation released the following report:

"Heh, heh - His name is 'Dong'. Heh."

Has nobody at Mercedes considered the collateral damage their "innovation" will cause? Do they not realize what this will do to the truck stop blowjob market?

Will somebody *please* think of the Lizards?

p.s.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP7sSk3rwm0

...agree with the decision or disagree. But what's the deal with every legal matter, ever, requiring the involved parties to make public statements that sound like they're on the junior high debate team?

"The decision was welcomed by Uber's general manger as a 'victory for common sense, technology, innovation - and above all, London.'" No - the end of WWII was a victory for London. This is just one more thing Londoners can spend their money on.

"Aereo CEO and founder Chet Kanojia said, 'We are disappointed in the outcome, but our work is not done. We will continue to fight for our consumers and fight to create innovative technologies that have a meaningful and positive impact on our world." No, you're basically a cable company. A meaningful impact would be finding a cure for Alzheimer's.

Are canned statements like this actually effective in convincing the public that your pet project is inextricably linked to the survival of humanity itself? 'Cause to me, they just make you sound like a disingenuous prick.

Even better: this cliche soundbite garbage seems to be the only language spoken by our elected representatives, as well. Why not hire an orchestra to play ominous music in the background, while you're at it? It saddens me to see supposed leaders and captains of industry acting like pre-teens. It speaks poorly of us as a race.

Way to pick a tangential item to shoot down. Yes, you win - you can put together a meal that's only half a day's calories. If you're carrying around that pdf you linked on your phone... or you know - if the government forces them to put it on the damn menu.

I think you've just proved my point.

It's cheaper than most other options for eating out, or ordering in, or buying processed and easily cookable meals, if you don't have the time or energy to buy and cook a healthy meal every night, nor the money to buy one. How many people do you know that live off of a bag of apples, and rice, and maybe chicken? I make six figures, and I still barely ever eat fish, because it's so damn expensive. A lot of healthy food is expensive, and eating just the staples requires a fair amount of willpower, when you can just order Domino's.

Obviously, obese people who have money and choose to eat garbage are buying it for other reasons. Feel free to pick one from my post above.

Oh, and btw - I live in NYC, and personally, I think the soda ban was an inept attempt at being helpful. A massive education campaign would be better. But that costs money. And making the calorie info on packaged food more visible, like with chain restaurants, could only really be done at the national level.

And that would require some sort of giant entity with the power to spend billions of dollars, or enact legislation for the whole country. Too bad.

>> If a patron wanted, there was nothing stopping them from buying, say, 3 x 16fl oz drinks and gulp that all up. Alternatively, there was nothing stopping them from getting one 16fl oz drink and going for refills.
>> This was entirely on businesses, disallowing them to sell anything over 16fl oz.

This. Are people enraged and screaming "Tyranny!" about smoking bans and requiring cigarette packages to bear warnings? Largely, no. Why? Because aside from a lot of us either disliking second-hand smoke, or being a smoker and being unable to quit, the general consensus is that Big Tobacco was pretty evil - peddling a harmful and addictive product, and Big Government was the only one who could stop them.

See the analogy here? The (mostly large) corporations that provide our food have been pumping more and more high fructose corn syrup & fat into their products, and making them bigger and bigger. o.k., so you argue that they're just giving the people what they want. But that shit is *addictive* - just ask your local fatass sysadmin who lives on Monster and Doritos. Or go somewhere poor and count the obese people. Those people have a lot less "choice" - because Coke and McDonald's is *cheap*, in addition to being delicious.

In NYC (I think it's local), all chain restaurants are required to put calorie counts right next to the food on signs/menus, just like the cigarette companies. I fucking love McDonalds, but I stopped eating there. I'm a supposedly educated, well-off person with a relatively higher amount of "freedom" than some citizens. And I didn't know that almost everything on their menu was a *full day's* allotment of calories, until the Gubmint made them advertise it. (Since then, they've tacked on more lower-cal items, which is good.)

The reality is, advertising, doctoring of products to be addictive, and good ole' disingenuousness ("serving size: 8oz, servings per package: 2" on a can of Monster. What - do I put the other half in the fridge for later?), etc. is used to peddle crap to us all.

o.k., this is the basic nature of selling, you say. (Except for that goofy "make a better product" idea that some nuts espouse.) It's been that way forever. Fine. But when fully *one third* of us are obese, including tons of kids, and when the entities that are selling the stuff are so large that we couldn't possibly take them on, even together, then it's time for the one giant entity that exists to look out for us to level the fucking playing field. Who's going to argue that HFCS and ubiquitous advertising is somehow not manipulative? The gov't is just doing it's (relatively tiny) bit to help us choose to not be manipulated, just like with cigarettes & liquor.

I see the slippery slope - really. I used to be a card-carrying conservative. I'm still registered Republican, for crissake (though I've voted third party in every election since G.W.) But *everything* is a goddamn slippery slope - and a lot steeper in many cases. Why not take the energy you're wasting going full Enraged Libertarian on fucking soda issues, and point it at eternally renewable copyright legislation, or anti-pot laws - or, you know, the police state - by calling your congressthingies.

TL/DR: The gov't has a mandate to provide for the General Welfare. Obesity is an epidemic problem in this country. Making people think about their choices is *helping*, not fascism. Even at the cost of corps making slightly less money. Even if it's more expensive for the country, not less (see other posts for numbers.) And you can still drink 70oz. of Mountain Dew if you want, fatass.

...at least not on my goddamn telephone. I don't know how to "thumb type" at all, and oddly, when I'm sitting on the subway and I look around to see all the people furiously hammering away on their phones, I'm not one of them.

I use Swype (which is irritating in its own way, due to flaky prediction), and it's just usable enough that I can reply to an important email/text, or look something up on the net/maps. If it's not important, it waits until I'm sitting in front of a monitor - or better still, slips off the agenda entirely.

By all means, improve predictive text / speech recognition / HCI whatever. But why in the hell would I waste my time acquiring a skill that's only useful for burying one's head in (further) neurotic withdrawal from physical reality? It's like learning Esperanto so more people can read your Facebook page.

If I don't leave the lights on when I go to bed, how will I see my way to the refrigerator at 3:00 am?

I call bullshit!

Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more but their future posts are of lower quality and are perceived by the community as such.

By reading Bennett Haselton stories?

BAM! Nailed it!

On a less snarky note: I've tried a number of times over the years to google up the study that I'm pretty sure corresponds to the following assertion, and failed. (Sources welcome.)

Anyway, the (possibly imagined) study claimed that the best way to motivate people was to reward them *randomly*. In the same way that people in Vegas think they've just about figured out the system, random rewards *keep people trying*. Whereas constant positive/negative feedback becomes "the new normal", and ceases to motivate after a while. You can see this in celebrities and rich people, when they believe that their position in life is justified, and bitch about not having more success/fame/etc. And also in the chronically unlucky/downtrodden, when they accept their "fate" and eventually stop trying to move up.

Mesa facility, you say? I think it's clear they plan to use the synthetic sapphires to open a dimensional rift to an alien plane of existence, and destroy us all.