A recent visit to my local county head office is enough to tell me the government is drastically over staffed, with rare exception. In researching some real estate issues, after doing everything I could via the internet and being bounced around on the phone with zero success, I had to take a trip down to the county office--a modest size county, far from the biggest in my state. I witnessed dozens of workers idling away doing nothing productive, even visibly playing on their phones while directing visitors from one office to the next, and even from one building to the next, giving conflicting instructions and taking no accountability to the obvious dysfunction.

Given stories I've heard from friends and family who worked in the government, I can extrapolate the average federal government department is vastly less accountable and infinitely more wasteful. Undoubtedly many thousands of times over, just due to being that much less visible.

If that tracking device includes an electric shock collar which activates every time you lift your hand to your mouth once you exceed 1500 calories... It very well could.

You are correct. I do not believe that will happen. If it does, then it may run afoul of the constitution, and then you can point at this post and say "told ya so", and I will buy you a cookie--even if it turns out that in doing so it saves the government a tremendous amount of money.

Ok, so the *government* can't pay the president except for his salary. I still do not see a prohibition against the president running a private enterprise.

Liberals / leftists really aren't the ones who want open borders; at least even if those interests do coincide with other interests, their option really does not matter much:
It has long been and continues to be big corporate interests, and billionaire / globalist class who actually own those corporations who want and benefit from open borders more so than anyone else.
Nobody remembers that in the 80s and 90s, and even into the early 2000s it was the democrats beating the anti-immigration drums, as it was the labor unions who correctly surmised that illegal immigration artificially suppresses wages, and the democrats often go where the labor unions lead them. During those times the democrats blamed the Koch brothers and the rest of their sort who had influence in the Republican Party for keeping the borders open.
The reality is they both were responsible, just for different reasons.
Now that the demographic shift caused by those policies is hitting stride (2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from those times are becoming voters), and they align overwhelmingly with the democrat party, that party now wants unlimited immigration. It just so happens they are now on the side of the oligarchs on this one issue; they want to suppress wages across the board and bringing in more laborers does just that.
And people are SHOCKED the labor unions and laborers in general (even Latinos whose families came in in the 60s and prior) are moving away from the democrat party, and cozying up to the republican party. I am not. It is entirely predictable.

The amusing thing to me is that you're blaming Trump for this, and who you really need to be blaming is Obama and Biden, and basically all of the previous administrations of our time.
Trump is a symptom of a disease, not a cause of it.

The particularly funny thing is, that most CNN content could itself be replaced by a somewhat simple shell script, and nobody would notice.

Kind of the same story for my HS science / maths teacher. We were all shooting the breeze one day after a test, talking about our futures and pay and stuff; and one of the other kids mentioned that he'd in no way want to be a teacher as they were chronically underpaid. Teach perked up and joined the conversation, as a 20 year veteran he was making 70k and had a solid two months a year off, a good pension and benefits. He was not in a place as expensive as SF.
Now he did say the first few years of his career were lean, but the key was continuing education and getting various certifications and the corresponding pay bumps which came along with it. He took several vacations a year, had a boat and an RV and a nice house and just finished sending his last kid to college. He told us himself that the idea teachers were poorly paid was a myth and explained he wouldn't have done anything different for a career. Kind of changed our minds about things. This was in 1999.

It's not that you're interested in the ad.
It's that you're statistically interested in the media. Suppose there's a spot in a video which a lot of people re-watch. That's where they're going to shove the most annoying stupid ad possible, and some people will probably click it out of anger and frustration. Winning!

It's a 1920s gangster culture meme. When the mob boss said to 86 someone it meant to take them 8 miles out of town and put them 6 feet under, handy that it also rhymes with nix which was also used in the same context. At some point the military started to use it in their lingo in the general sense of to get rid of something, restaurants and bars started to use it to mean to eject a patron or refuse service.

And that's exactly the point: to exfiltrate as much personal information from the victims brain as possible and use it for advertising and other nefarious purposes.

I simply paraphrased what the GP said. If you have an issue with their idea, it should be addressed to them--I do not claim or endorse it.
FWIW, I think it's rather silly, even though it does describe the current situation rather accurately: through Medicare and Medicaid the US taxpayer, through being unable to negotiate fair market prices has long been exploited by private corporate interests--and that's before one considers that this industry also benefits from large governmental subsidies at every stage of R from university grants on up.
I do not think it's fair to compare what they might be selling drugs in Africa or Romania to what a U.S. citizen pays. As you've said, that might be closer to what the market will bear in those locations--but it may be worth examining what other developed countries are paying, and if we are paying significantly more, it would be prudent to ask ourselves why.
Surely it wouldn't have anything to do with the pharmaceutical industry being a major contributor to political campaigns, or single-handedly keeping major news outlets afloat through advertising contracts.

GP also took issue with what Tesla charges in China as compared to what they charge in the USA, all while ignoring that Tesla China has a gigafactory and benefits from the economies of scale and cheaper labor which is present in that market. It would be silly to expect that a Tesla in China would be anything than drastically less expensive than one built in USA, as that's the very argument all other corpos use for producing everything there.

So what you're saying is you acknowledge the American people are directly subsidizing the rest of the worlds medicine needs through paying an average of 3X or more for the same product, and that this is happening via a money conduit established by unaccountable big pharmaceutical companies (with all of their well known philanthropical tendencies), and that this process should continue?

Huh?

Being a tenured professor does not preclude one from being wrong or being a deeply flawed individual with an agenda. I know a tenured professor who claims/d to be the reincarnation of Socrates to their students, by way of example.
When you have ONE professor who makes an extraordinary claim based on spurious evidence, it should be a signal to as skeptical as their claims are extraordinary.
Not that I know enough about this particular person to comment beyond that, but it does appear they have a history of selling the story differently depending on their audience, which is a sign of duplicity.

Yeah, but I imagine the vast majority of these scooters are two-stroke or 4 stroke with zero emissions considerations, or are so poorly maintained that even if they were clean burning when new, have long since stopped being clean. OP's modern 1500cc scoot-scoot may consume more fuel but undoubtedly produces a tiny fraction of smog-contributing emissions compared to most scooters on the road in India.