Yes I have heard of Warp Speed, and fully believe it was the reason the vaccine was developed so quickly.

Are you really so dense that you believe complete rubbish that has been quoted to you?

I mean, the way things are currently going, it appears they will in fact be stopped in Ukraine.

Oh, you meant *voluntarily* stop? Nevermind then.

Carbon dioxide is a red herring here, completely insignificant compared to the other environmental costs of burning coal, let alone all the other costs of manufacturing solar panels in a country with no effective environmental regulations at all. Just China's terrible mining practices, for example, do more environmental harm in a single year, than all the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels in the entire history of China, possibly in the entire history of the world. And then you have what they're doing to their water and air.

Are solar panels made in China still a net win for the environment? I don't know, honestly. But I do know, if you're only looking at the CO2, you aren't even a little bit serious about enviornmental impact, you're just mindlessly virtue signaling your partisan politics.

Eh. In practice, what you really need to know here is that this disease isn't realistically ever going to be an epidemic in the modern developed world, *even* if it develops a strain that is 100% resistant to all antibiotics (which thus far hasn't quite happened). The conditions for massive spreading just aren't there. It was a large problem in the medieval world, but conditions were very different then. The plague doesn't normally spread from person-to-person directly, in the manner of something like an influenza or a coronavirus. I'm not saying that can't ever happen at all, but it's far too unusual to ever result in any kind of epidemic. To have a bubonic plague epidemic, you have to have a completely out-of-control population of intermediate carriers (principally, rodents) living in close proximity to the human population, and a lot of biting insects (principally, fleas) that routinely prey on both. We're talking full-on Monty-Python-and-the-Holy-Grail levels of societal poverty here, people laying down in straw beds because that's what's available, dealing with flea bites by scratching, grain stored in burlap sacks, rats everywhere, mice everywhere, the whole nine yards. If you clean up your society and control the vermin, ipso facto, the plague is mostly contained and hardly spreads at all.

Sure, it's not completely extinct. But it doesn't need to be, because it doesn't spread that readily. You're five thousand times more likely to be killed by a drunk driver, than to be infected by the plague bacterium. (This is assuming you live in America; yes, I looked up the actual numbers.) And most people who do get infected, don't die, because it's treatable these days, because, you know, modern medicine and stuff.

Cholera, similarly, is not an epidemic threat if you have anything resembling modern sewage treatment. So you can cross that one off your panic-immediately-if-there-is-one-case list as well.

The one that would be all kinds of scary if it ever got loose in the human population again, is smallpox. That thing spreads almost as readily as influenza, and most countries haven't vaccinated for it in decades. In America, routine vaccination was stopped more than fifty years ago, so most of the population, has not been vaccinated. We do *have* quite effective vaccines for it, but in the event of an epidemic, I doubt whether we could ramp up production fast enough, to keep up with the terrifying rate at which smallpox spreads. The one notable piece of good news is, it doesn't mutate much, so once any given patient is vaccinated against smallpox, they won't need the vaccine again. Booster shots not required, thank God. If that weren't the case, we'd probably still be losing a double-digit percentage of the human population to it every generation or so.

Eh. I do really question the wisdom of including Cubans in this. Venezuelans, despite the undeniably genuine nature of their need to get out of Venezuela, are a sudden surge, a large numeric increase within the last few years, and that has significantly contributed to the disruption and the problematic nature of the current situation in America. Haitians, as a group (albeit, perhaps not every person individually), have made their own problems at home. Nicaraguans, I don't really know their situation, so I can't really comment on their inclusion. But Cubans have been trickling into America to more or less the same extent for more than half a century; they're victims of international communism that was *not* home grown in Cuba and is ultimately not really their fault at all, individually or collectively; and they are (as a group) pretty consistently good workers, reasonably innovative (not in a high-tech sense necessarily, but I mean in economic terms: they find ways to contribute positively to society); they're overall a net gain for the US economy, have been for decades; and most of them are generally law-abiding. They also have a pretty good naturalization rate, and a reasonable integration rate (meaning, they don't just keep to themselves as a closed-off isolated community; they interact with the rest of society, pretty extensively, albeit mostly within certain geographical areas). Maybe I'm missing something, but I really don't see how involving them in this whole mess is a good idea.

In that price range, there's also a significant amount of vetting, to keep out hoi polloi (and, in locations where there are a lot of celebrities, paparazzi). You're paying partly for exclusivity.

> Is there actually any benefit to the experience

Presumably these are the sorts of exclusive restaurants that cater to the wealthy and celebrities, where you need a reservation in order to get in at all. (Otherwise, they'd have no way to predict who is going to arrive, in order to research them in advance.) The benefit, presumably, would be keeping out hoi polloi and, probably more important, paparazzi.

is a thing.

Sorry I guess I'm going to have to ask a more specific question. Do you have an example of anybody owning a few million $ in bitcoin *exchanging ALL of it* for something that is not Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency or crypto asset. The fact that you can exchange a small amount of bitcoin for the equivalent amount of dollars does not prove anything.

There are examples of people exchanging their entire hold of hundreds of millions in gold or stocks, without the value of those commodities crashing. Would like proof this is the same for bitcoin.

Do you have ANY examples of somebody exchanging more than about 1 bitcoin for anything other than other cryptocurrency?

With a wild twisting of words this author added "meaning the emissions were dumped up-front in China's coal plants" to try to make this sound bad.

ALL "manufacturing emissions" are "dumped up-front". There is not something special about China or using coal. And even with the 2x or more CO2 emissions of coal, a solar power panel replaces all that CO2 emission in just a few months, which is an awful lot better than a lot of other things that people claim are green.

It is going to evaporate, slowly....

And because where income is high, cost of living is high, and the marginal cost of children goes from "investment in the future" to "big hole I sink money into".

Oh, there are also "reaction" channels with an anime character in lieu of an actual human reactor. But again, those are older and probably not what the article is talking about. (I suspect those may have got started because there were people who for one reason or another wanted to create reaction content without showing their face, which is fundamentally unworkable for obvious reasons, but that doesn't always stop people from trying things.)

I think it's talking about the AI-generated science-fiction stories that keep showing up in the sidebar (if you use the default-view mode). If they're talking about the ones I'm thinking of, the titles are typically along the lines of "We thought everything was fine, until the humans came," or some schlock like that. I've never actually *watched* one of the videos, but I don't need to; you can tell they're AI generated from the thumbnail and title. I've hit "Don't Recommend Channel" on at least a couple of dozen of them, but of course the AI slop purveyors just keep creating new channels (in much the same way that low-quality manufacturers keep creating new unpronounceable brand names to flood Amazon search results with hundreds of copies of exactly the same thing).

There are also channels where an AI voice just reads the comment section from a reddit thread, and the video is a loop of recycled junk gaming footage; but those have been around for a lot longer and so are probably not what the article is talking about. Also, until you've seen (at least the first few seconds of) a handful of the videos, it's not obvious from the thumbnail and title alone, just how lame those channels are. The new ones are much more obviously AI-generated.