Oh, I absolutely understand what was going on and why. I have no issues with the care he received, and he has nothing but good things to say about the care he received.

It's just kind of weird that in the flow chart of medical diagnosis, all the arrows end up pointing at Lupus.

THANKS. Now I can't un-see that image...

Of course, whether they made 80,000 of them - or just 8 - is not something they're gonna tell us.

If inflation is not a tax, then where does the value of newly printed or fractionally lent money come from? Money has no intrinsic value, it's a mere token -- if you add more tokens, the value of every existing token is suddenly lowered.

People not spending money is bad... how? This doesn't slow the economy any, nor does it freeze any value -- all it freezes is some _money_. Any money that's temporarily out of circulation increases the value of any actual assets that are in use.

As for borrowing costs, you got that reversed: if there's inflation, borrowing gives you an advantage by having the real cost decrease as time goes. With deflation, you need to actually pay to borrow.

Oh, see, there's your problem right there - you appear to live in a country with a sane government.

I already have the higher taxes from living in Oregon, and the fewer rights due to this federal administration. Can I have fewer $10B storms?

And what about those of us that buy an EV and then drive it emissions-free for 10+ years? Especially those of us that "fuel" the EV with renewable energy from the grid or otherwise?

Seems that goes over the "break even" threshold you criticize, while ICE cars just keep pumping out the carbon as a course of normal operation as long as they are in the fleet.

And maybe if we stop the casual "otherism" from people like you, we can learn that people are just people and we should probably learn to get along rather than be divisive assholes living on the flawed premise of "I got mine because I was lucky enough to be born in a rich country, fuck everyone else."

So you're pro-pollution?

Why is it a bad thing to try to keep plastics out of the environment? What purpose could you possibly have in mocking such efforts?

Idiot.

Yes, because new challenges are never discovered while you are building a thing that's never been built before.

You sound like someone that has never been involved with an engineering effort in your entire life.

So you think that if estimations are not 100% correct when they are made, they should never be revised as new challenges and more context is revealed?

This makes you a myopic idiot.

Yet the world's average inflation goes around 5%, not 1%. Surely, they wouldn't be so incompetent if they meant it?

They don't claim that an inflation of 20% is good, indeed -- but only because with the economy hurting so much even financial institutions can't reliably make money. But, their claim is that any deflation, even of 1% or lower, is worse than a runaway inflation. And that's pure bullshit.

Well... and how, pray tell, the regular folk could make their voices heard? By now 2/3 of those polled who gave a yes/no answer want to Brejoin, yet your three largest parties all swear to keep out.

Scientists live and die by objectivity.

If a scientist does their job properly by assembling un-arguable evidence of their hypothesis / claim, then that becomes an accepted hypothesis / claim.

I don't know what the hell you're talking about - scientists are not "go along to get along" types - they have hypotheses and test them. And if the tests result in data that correlates with the hypothesis, they write papers and publish them in order to get other people looking at the work and either punching holes in it or running their own experiments to replicate the results. That's the point of publishing it.

Here's the thing: that's actually how Lupus is diagnosed, at least in my limited single-data-point experience - my father.

He had a random fluid build-up in his pericardial sac around his heart that was basically squeezing his heart to the point it couldn't function any more. After two weeks in the hospital of diagnostics and so on where the eliminated all kinds of other causes, they defaulted to Lupus and started putting him on steroids, and he's been healthy ever since with absolutely no recurrence.

It will be interesting to see if the causal link between Lupus and Epstein-Barr holds up to further scrutiny - it would be great if we could eliminate the occurrence of autoimmune disease through future vaccination.

Of course we'll need the political loonies to GTFO of the Department of Health and Human Services in order to allow approval of any new vaccines...