We also have 2022 and 2023 settlements of similar merchants vs. credit card companies lawsuits that haven't resulted in mass chaos.

I suppose they could take my "rejected" card for an additional fee. A great way to ensure I never go there again, but up to them I suppose.

Funny. American restaurants almost univesally expect an additional fee of 15-30% called a bri.. er, "tip" but you'll boycott one over the 2% they might pass on to you to use a reward card?

They just make insane profits because of the volume of product that they move.

Walmart's return on assets is ~7% which is not bad, but is certainly not insane. They'd do a lot better liquidating all their stock and stores and sticking the money in a NASDAQ index fund.

Microsoft's ROA is ~18% and Nvidia ~77%.

Walmart's net profit of $15 billion is a BIG NUMBER but only compared to something like an individual's net income. The median American household's ROA seems to be about 42%, although you could argue that should be a little lower if you properly accounted education as an asset.

Cars occasionally run onto the sidewalk and hurt someone. More often than planes cause injury around airports I expect. Putting sidewalks right beside roads seems like a terrible idea. Why not have at least a buffer zone? Say, a football field (choose your type) of buffer?

Same for airports. Airports do have buffers around them, especially at the ends of runways. Very, very occasionally it isn't enough.

I'm not really sure what your point is. You are correct that racers frequently sail through all sorts of weather without damage. They do sometimes take damage though, the vast majority of which is due to trying to sail through weather as fast as possible.

A cargo ship would presumably sail through storms as fast as it could without risking damage.

My, we are an aggressively stupid dipshit today.

You do seem to be yes. Maybe time to take a break?

Ships scale up pretty predictably. No, they didn't build THE BIGGEST CARGO SHIP EVAH for their prototype. That would be pretty dumb.

This thread is talking about the ship speed. And the speed of a displacement hull is intimately linked to the length. As is the capacity, incidentally.

But half the time, in particular in regattas where you race against time, you end up in 11s and 12s and you go through.

And that's when you're racing. Remove the incentive to go fast and you're even safer.

Length, which is the relevant metric when you're considering the speed of a pure displacement hull.

True, and that system does work pretty well.

Of course, it's not the whole story. Vietnam is far from the only time the US got up to some unilateral shenanigans (i.e. bypassing all that nice world institutions stuff).

The US has a long and copious history of invading other countries, destabilizing governments (democratic and otherwise) and assination plots of everyone up to and including heads of state, and there's no shortage of it after WWII.

The outright annexation did stop post WWII. Well, except for a bunch of Pacific islands, which was done with UN endorsement.

The recommendation was not to expose babies to tree nuts in any form because so-exposed babies seemed to be more likely to develop nut allergies. It turns out that was due to recall bias and the opposite is actually true.

Assuming you are older than 25, you (and I) were probably exposed to peanut butter, along with other common food allergens, on purpose by our parents around four or five months old. As I recall (can't confirm) that was the general recommendation prior to 2000. Around 2000 the EU said five months and the US said 36. Current guidelines are 4-6 months.

I do think there is a bit of a difference between the agenda of a limited term presidency of extremists and the agenda of the Chinese communist party though.

The US has invaded all of its neighbours, most multiple times. Many of those neighbours got annexed and remain so. There was even a whole holy destiny religious thing to justify it. You didn't have to be a neighbour though, the US would invade you no matter where in the world you were.

Are. It's not in the past. Since WWII the US decided all the other powers should give up their colonies and the US and USSR would have "spheres of influence" instead. So not outright annexation, but if you don't do as you're told, more invasions.

It's not "a limited term presidency of extremists." The current bunch are just less subtle. They're also more talk and less invading, so far.

Now?

It didn't explode out of nowhere. Some people have always been allergic to nuts. Pediatricians jumped the gun a bit around 2000 based on poor evidence and started recommending completely avoiding exposing high risk babies to nuts until they were three years old (in the US). This turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to do and produced a generation of kids with much more severe nut allergies. More kids with more severe allergies caused even more restriction on exposure.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...

As I replied to you elsewhere, yes, the per capita rate is imporant, but Americans insist on making absolute comparisons.

The absolute comparison also isn't entirely irrelevant. The article uses electrical generation as a proxy for GDP, a widely used practice and one that probably underestimates China if anything. So total electrical generation indicates the economic power represented by a particular political entity. Monaco and Liechenstein are not superpowers even though their GDP/capita are more than twice the US's and the threat of sanctions from Ireland doesn't carry the same weight as those from the US.

No, they were still terrible. But they were all there was.

Perhaps you've never had or don't remember the experience of carefully checking the polarity and voltage on a wall wart barrel jack and then holding your breath as you plugged it into your expensive gizmo.