It's a net win - just like factory automation reducing the number of factory workers is a net win. Also, Walmart really pisses off hipsters, so it's twice as good

Yeah, I fucking replaced ten people with one robot, and I was the last manufacturing business in town. It's a win-win! Well, if you count me twice. Which I do.

Higher taxes for everyone else comes from voting for bigger government, not from Walmarts.

Oh, Fuck. Off. When Walmart drives out all of the Mom and Pops where any slacker in the 90s could earn 9-12 dollars an hour can't make 7.50 an hour plus benefits because instead of the store being a little lax on inventory, or God Forbid you had to wait an entire week to get that thing you saw in the catalog, we decided to get everything fast and now and made like shit by child laborers in southeast asia. And we got to buy the Waltons a goddamn hawaiian island so they can drink themselves to death in front of a nice view.

Gee, for me, there's a downside in that scenario. But as long as we get more efficient, everything's good for everyone equally, right?

You have to make a lifestyle change. If you eat shit, and you sit there like a pile of shit, you will look like a pile of shit, and you will feel like a pile of shit.

We are mammals, and we aren't supposed to sit inside all day. We need to move around and get some sun, or our biological systems are going to continue to store fat like it's winter. Without Vitamin D and exposure to fresh air instead of the toxic inside environments we work in, including low levels of oxygen due to poor ventilation, we have trouble getting all of our biological systems to run like they are supposed to.

I am in a constant battle with my weight, which I am usually on the losing side of. When I cut out all sugar, including sugar in coffee, and I focus on eating vegetables and non-meat sources of protein, I feel like absolute hell for three days and then I feel amazing until I start eating crap again. This time around I'm going kind of nuts with pressed kale/apple/carrot juices and very little meat. The change is astounding. Within a week all of the weird aches and pains I had, including some of my back pain, began to disappear. (I am down to a BMI of 30 from 36, and still trending down).

I really think the Western diet starves us of basic building blocks for repairing and maintaining our bodies, and as we discover more about our symbiotic relationship with bacteria, I bet they will find out that the ingestion of products (sugar, processed flour, etc) that easily turn into glucose make our symbiotic bacteria go apeshit and stop serving their purpose. It's like stuffing petri dishes into your body and hosting a microbiological world war.

The funny thing is that once I rid my tongue of the expectation of a wall of salt and fat and sugar, healthy foods that seemed bland are suddenly rich with flavors and it's no problem snacking on carrots and raw broccoli with hummus or whatever and staying away from sugar drinks which are now overly sweet. I can get an Americano with a touch of milk and it tastes like chocolate if the beans are good. Roasted whole vegetables (which I am trying to learn how to cook myself) are as satisfying as any fast food meal, but I don't feel like shit an hour later.

Probably the best side affect is that my body now tells me when it's full. Two years ago I could eat an entire pizza without really thinking about it. Now I can have a bowl full of vegetables and feel more satisfied. (Not sure what the science behind that is, exactly, but it works.)

Mass produced foods are designed to addict, and kicking that addiction is just as important as kicking a smoking habit, if not more. Once I hit my target BMI, if I can stay on track, I will introduce a small amount of meat back into my diet, but I'm fairly convinced that processed sugar and processed wheat are literally poison for our mammalian biological systems. Now that it's out of mine, I don't have to think about going outside. Getting up and moving around is no longer a chore. It's actually becoming a joy that I haven't felt since I was a kid and spent every possible moment outside.

Anyway, tl:dr; Pollan seems to be right. Eat lots of veggies, a little bit of dairy, and a tinier bit of meat. Drink water. Go outside. Do not drink sodas or eat fast food, ever. If you put garbage in your body, your body will turn into garbage.

Do you understand the difference between an anecdote and a falsifiable assertion?

Colonel Korn is a hopeless fucking idiot and doesn't understand the difference between falsifiable assertions and anecdotes. It is safe to ignore him on every subject ever.

He's probably a libertarian blowhard who's worldview is so damaged that he thinks plastic bags -- cheap, frivolous, lazy, horrible for the environment -- are somehow representative of an American way of life. Well, stopped clocks are right twice a day too, I guess.

That's why I love my fellow citizens. They're more offended by talking about death and destruction than they are about paying for it.

It was poor and loose imitation of JG Ballard's "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" published way back in 1968 when it was okay to have an opinion.

He's the kind of fuckhead who would be ratting his friends out an invading force the week after they rolled over his town. He's loyal to power, doesn't have any semblance of principles that exist outside of worshiping power, and therefore he's a fucking model American (or German or Frenchman or whomever is running the show).

He probably spends weekends having wet dreams about exposing plots that discredit Old Glory, or any of the principles she has pretended to have over the past 200 years. He sleeps with on hand on a flagpole, stroking it erotically as he tries to imagine a thousand dead bodies and ten thousand eviscerated limbs and container ships full of blood pouring over his naked body to celebrate the March of Freedom -- making a pitstop in weak Arab States before it returns to bring justice to the nigger Filipinos and nigger Mexicanos and Panamanians and Nicaraguans and Hatians, fouling his financial lebensraum and ruining a diverse America predicated on the phallus worship of power and of the gun and all her related orgasms of control and death -- as long as Freedom worships American Freedom unconditionally. Unconditionally, as judicious as God: you are either with Us, or you are against Us and you are doomed to die if you do not obey. But you won't have to wait for hell in the afterlife. This is currently available for overnight delivery, if you call now.

Just before he climaxes, a tear forms in Adrian's eye as he imagines how glorious and good he is, offering the savage Arab a chance to get on their knees and sign up for slavery instead of being killed on the spot. He revels in the moment that God was in the room when his Lord and Savior, George Herbert Walker, decided in his infinite wisdom to kill a few hundred thousand Iraqis and displace two million more in order to improve women's rights by sending tens of thousands of them into prostitution after killing their husbands on the battlefield. In his own way, Adrian has freed the Iraqi people from the tyranny of owning their own resources, and replaced their struggle against corruption of their government with a loss of basic security, infrastructure, and education.

And when he does climax, Adrian thinks about the power he protects. He thinks about raping and murdering a prisoner and then helping cover it up without having to answer to any semblance of a court. He heaves his entire body into rapture as he pictures an innocent man being electrocuted to death by someone from the Agency while Bradley Manning is forced to watch from a prison cell, crying for mercy, as part of his "non-torture" permanent solitary confinement that Adrian bravely initiated because... why?

Because in Adrian's sick fantasy, Bradley Manning is the individual who needs to be cured of dangerous fantasies. But the truth is that Adrian Lamo is a hallow imitation of a human being, and when he passes away there probably won't be a soul left to save. Lamo will worship whoever has the biggest gun, and it will serve him well because parasites make up for their lack of intelligence and abandoned independence with dependence on larger, more powerful entities who will accept fealty from any random piece of shit from the street, including Adrian Lamo.

I hope the amount of incorrect, ranting assumptions you've made about me and what you think I stand for made you feel better.

Perhaps you shouldn't be blamed, but your role in the institution is clear: you help rationalize death and violence for those in pursuit of power. There are lower callings, but not many.

Do you believe that the world and humanity would be better off if the US hadn't existed after, say, WWII? Not just from a geopolitical perspective, but from perspectives of technology, medicine, and similar? Do you believe that someone like, say, China, or an amalgamation of warring mideast states, or perhaps even an old Soviet superstate would be a better global steward than the United States and the West?

The mid-east states started warring after we and our allies divided them up after WWI and purposefully separated tribal groups by state lines, and then started stealing all of their resources. China has not stepped outside of its borders in quite some time, but I understand if you're afraid of the Asiatics. 19th Century ignorance is about where I'd place your philosophical aspirations.

As for Russia, I find that simply ironic. Who was it who was invading Afghanistan to impose secular values on a fundamentalist culture, but couldn't get things done because weapons and arms were being smuggled in through Pakistan? Do I prefer the massacres in the eastern bloc to the death squads in Central America? Do I prefer the assassinations of civil rights leaders with the FBI or the KGB? How is Estonia doing vs Haiti? Latvia vs Ecuador? Poland vs Nicaragua? Was Saddam a great ally in the 1980s when we sponsored a million deaths after Iran threw out our puppet government, or was Mubarak a better investment (until recently, at least)?

Did our investment in China go up or down after they rolled over students in Tiananmen Square? What made us turn on Gaddafi after showering him with diplomatic gifts in 2008?

Do women have more rights in Saudi Arabia or Iran, and if the answer is Iran, why are we allies with Saudi Arabia?

Only a fool can see the American empire as anything than what it is: a run-of-the-mill, self-interested machine of conquest and violence. Not better or worse than any other empire, but like all empires, interested in a single question: do you obey?

If you want to defend that mentality, there's no difference between yourself an any other parasite of any other empire. You wave the stars and stripes because of your coincidental birthplace, not because it represents a value system. You're a self-righteous parasite. There's nothing special about you or about America. Not anymore.

PS: I didn't even touch the slaughter in Southeast Asia. That would have made the argument too easy.

Most of the commenters here will twist this story into how the US is somehow evil, and drone on (pun intended) about how the US and West governments and/or corporations and/or political systems are what's wrong with the world, when in reality, people are suffering and dying under actual tyranny and oppression.

Like in Syria.

You are absolutely right, and absolutely wrong.

In December of 2001, U.S. agents arranged to have a German citizen flown to a Syrian jail called the Palestine Branch, renowned for its use of torture, and later offered to pass written questions to Syrian interrogators to pose to the prisoner, according to a secret German intelligence report shown to TIME on Wednesday. The report is described in the new book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program by British investigative journalist Stephen Grey. The complex arrangement was part of the CIA's sprawling practice of extraordinary renditions, the secret transfer of terror suspects to hidden prisons across the world -- which has involved the aid of numerous foreign governments and the knowledge of key Western European allies, according to the book, which was shown to TIME by the author. After U.S. officials long refused to confirm the CIA's secret detention of terror suspects abroad, President Bush last month admitted that terror suspects had been transferred abroad to secret CIA facilities, but U.S. officials continue to deny that such prisoners have been tortured, saying that foreign governments assured them that they would be treated fairly.

Inside the CIA's Secret Prisons Program, Time Magazine, 2006

And before you backpedal on what happened to Maher Arar:

This week the Supreme Court denied, without comment, the appeal of Maher Arar, a dual citizen of Canada and Syria who was arrested in transit through JFK airport in 2002, then shipped off to Syria and tortured for 10 months. Arar's abuse allegedly included repeated beatings with electrical cables and confinement in a cell the size of a grave. When they realized they had the wrong guy -- the really, totally, and utterly innocent guy -- Arar was released without charges. He was then completely exonerated of any link to terror by the Canadian government, which impaneled a commission to investigate the incident, issued a 1,000-plus-page report on the matter, held its own intelligence forces responsible for their role in the screw-up, then apologized and paid Arar $9.8 million. Whereas the U.S. government -- as Glenn Greenwald observes -- has never apologized, never acknowledged any wrongdoing, never held anyone responsible, and, on President Barack Obama's watch, has only redoubled its efforts to prevent Arar from having even a single day in court.

So, we took an innocent man, illegally shipped him off to Syria (probably in exchange for easing off pressure on the Assad regime), tortured him, and now we're denying him his day in court to hold our government to account. Stop pretending that you, or the American government, has any principled position on matters of human rights. Syrian torture facilities are just dandy when we want to use them. The fact is that we have put more bodies in the ground this decade than the Assad regime has in it's entire family history.

That's why you focus on Assange, instead of dealing with what his organization has revealed. The truth isn't important to you. Protecting American state power is. Oddly enough, the American government keeps telling me that they're free to subpoena everything about me and my life, and that I should have nothing to fear if I have nothing to hide, and now we're saying the same thing. Why is the American government so afraid of the truth?

As a huge world power, they've got lots of little people like you, desperately clinging at the teat of the empire, ready to kill enough brown people to fill up football stadiums labeled "collateral damage" and "terrorism suspects" instead of what most of them probably are: "innocent civilians." They're not statistics, and they're not mistakes, they were human beings with families and hopes and a future, and they were all snuffed out because you and people like you would rather massacre a million people than let oil rich nations govern themselves. You'll send young Americans to die telling them it's for freedom, but really it's for the empire. It's for profit. It's for control over countries that don't want us there.

So fuck your lies, fuck your hypocrisy, fuck your deluded self righteousness, fuck your paranoid fascism, and fuck you. May you reap what you sow.

There are exceptions to every rule, but unfortunately, most people who have an MBA are interested only in making money. They "achieve" this goal through lies called marketing, through bullshit accounting tricks and technically legal loopholing called money management, through exploitation of the earth and it's people called maximizing revenue. If you'd read your literature, you'd know that pursuit of money has never been a noble goal, and it never will be. It's the desire of degenerate subhumans whose greatest gift to the world will be as compost.

As one artist put it, you're a poor man's Donald Trump, and you think that's worthy of praise? I'll trade one million MBAs for one Jonas Salk any day of the week. You may have fooled yourself into thinking that greed and gluttony need a graduate program, but no one else is that delusional.

Why do you think oil is cheaper than orange juice? It's because we demand cheap access, or we invade. Just read about the Pentagon flatly stating they will "not tolerate" Iran's alleged threats to close the Strait of Hormuz. Control over the region is also used as "veto power" in geopolitics.

If you don't think so, ask yourself why we have invaded Iraq a half dozen times in the 20th Century. It poses no threat to our national security, and has no resource other than oil. Why did we overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran and then divide their oil fields between BP and American oil companies. Then ask yourself why we consider Saudi Arabia an ally, even though they're beheading people for witchcraft and treat women like garbage, and make Iran look like a paradise in comparison. It's because they sell us oil and support our iron grip on the region, because it also serves their interests.

If you know of a nation we've invaded more times with more resources than Iraq, just name it and provide your sources.

Germany also has one of the highest ratios (approximately 20%) of renewable energy production precisely because they tax non-renewables and subsidize green energy. Germany is the exception, not the rule.

Huge government subsidies in the form of never-ending wars in the middle east and military technology investment have led to our dependence on fossil fuels... I'm not sure why you're against a similar method of weening ourselves off of them.

Governments last year gave $43 billion to $46 billion of support to renewable energy through tax credits, guaranteed electricity prices known as feed-in tariffs and alternative energy credits, the London-based research group said today in a statement. That compares with the $557 billion that the International Energy Agency last month said was spent to subsidize fossil fuels in 2008.

Source.

You were saying?

If you actually have evidence that someone did all that complex soil and sediment analysis in a specific field in Peru, please provide a link, as I will definitely include that in my museum of the least optimally spent money

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the dumbest motherfucker alive who is somehow capable of using a computer.

If you do not stand by to free man from the clutches of another man, you are by choice, the very type of person you so much despise

The real question would be, do you support China invading the United States if they think we aren't free? You're not even thinking about that, but that's alright. I had no reason to expect any real ideas from you.

There's a decent argument to be made that North Korea would be more like China if we hadn't invaded. That is another example of a decision made by people who thought they knew how to "fix" a political movement that threatened their interests by responding with extreme violence. The Korean war was fairly successful, especially compared to our similar invasions of Southeast Asia, half of Central and South America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Haiti, and the dozen other nations we've destroyed with our ignorance.

Keep cheering on the death and destruction and pretend it's for freedom. You're doing exactly what your owners expect you to do, and they didn't even have to ask for your fealty: you freely gave it to them, no questions asked. All they had to do is say some nice sounding words, and you handed over your pocketbook and your children's future without even thinking about it. Wave the flag. Close your eyes. Remember: you're a real American.