I agree with most of what you said, but...

Most of what you mentioned came from right-wing media (regardless of whether it's social, talk show, or news media). Those do NOT count as political ads that will be shut down after the election. I'm only referring to the types of ads that will be shut down. Do you really think someone getting their news from Fox, Rush, or even Facebook will be swayed by a Biden ad? Or the other way around? I know people are stupid, but they will still pay more attention to the news stories (regardless of whether they're true or false) that come out in the next month than to the ads.

One flaw in your argument is that hydrocarbons (e.g. oil) have H, C, and O, so burning hydrocarbons produces BOTH CO2 and H2O vapor. Using your own argument, burning oil would be a "double whammy" compared to burning hydrogen. But your argument has another flaw:

"Water vapor's most significant effect is that it doubles the effect of atmospheric CO2." - You have that backwards.

Example: https://research.noaa.gov/arti....

Quote: "For well over 100 years it has been known that increased emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide will warm the planet. As the lowest layer of the atmosphere, called the troposphere (surface to ~7 miles), is warmed, the air becomes more humid because warmer air holds more water vapor. This “tropospheric water vapor feedback” approximately doubles the initial warming caused by carbon dioxide."

Adding CO2 to the air by itself will:
a) Warm the air, allowing more water vapor to be trapped in the atmosphere.
b) Warm the ocean's surface, increasing its evaporation rate, ensuring that the additional capacity for water vapor will always be filled.
c) Remain in our atmosphere forever until real work is done to remove it.

Adding H2O to the air by itself will:
a) Compete with the other water vapor evaporating from the ocean.
b) Condense far too quickly to cause a noticeable warming effect.

Adding both to the air will basically just do what adding CO2 does all by itself.

"The News Cycle and Advertisements do sway voters."

You made your argument as if those 2 things should be treated as the same thing, but IMO they are different enough to require 2 separate arguments. People seek out the news (making people more receptive to it), and they chat about it with family/friends/neighbors/co-workers. Ads are forced on people, and are unwelcome to almost everyone (making people less receptive to it).

News agencies have (or are supposed to have) rules for making at least some half-assed attempt at vetting sources of information. Political ads are literally any BS that anyone can pull out of their ass if they have enough money to place the ad. Perhaps the lines between the two have been getting more blurred lately, but there is still a difference.

Seriously, at this point who would possibly let an advertisement sway them? It's just a waste of time and money.

IMO there is another import question to ask. Where did he buy that computer/office chair, and just how quickly did it burst into flames? Was that also an Amazon purchase, and is it significantly more flammable than US regulations would allow? I would imagine regulations like that only apply to US manufacturers (and not to sellers like Amazon), so things made in China and shipped by Amazon may not be subject to those.

Well now, don't completely discount good old-fashioned avarice and rationalization. I mean, even if she knew the product and company was certain to fail, she may have seen it as her best shot to get rich quick on someone else's dime. Since rich people don't get their asses nailed to the wall the same way poor people do in this country (ditto for young and attractive women), she probably figured she would get away with minimal damage.

Yes, she may be a complete psychopath/sociopath, but she may not. She may have rationalized it as taking from the obscenely rich (as venture capitalists investing in companies like Theranos tend to be) and giving back to the poor (herself and all the employees she employed). I'm not saying it was anywhere close to right, and I sincerely hope they do nail her ass to the wall for it, but it is possible that she firmly believed she wasn't actually hurting anyone (and she may have actually felt bad if she had believed).

Next time I need to replace mine, I'll just drive to Whole Foods and pick one out of the trees. ;-)

Perhaps the next step for cops/FBI will be to call your ISP to disable your Internet for the window of time they expect to be there.

YMMV. The Ideapad I bought lasted over 7.5 years. During that time, I replaced the battery once and the HDD once (the HDD started to get bad sectors after 4-5 years, which isn't unusual). The laptop was actually still running fine, but after 7.5 years I felt it was time to upgrade it rather than replace the battery again. I had let my 2 kids play games on it quite a bit too, and it was looking pretty beat up. ;-)

OTOH, I've heard that Dell's Precision line is like the Thinkpad line (designed to last longer), but the (much more expensive) Precision I replaced the Ideapad with had a key break off in the first 6 months of much lighter use. It was still under warranty, but Dell knows their laptop keyboard design is crap, so their warranty doesn't honor broken keys. And of course, as soon as the warranty was over, the Precision started over-heating.

Next I replaced the Precision with an XPS 13 (which IMO is like a more expensive Ideapad line), and it was actually shipped to me brand new (ordered directly from dell.com) with a key already broken. Of course Dell tried to repeat the claim that their warranty doesn't honor broken keys, but since I hadn't even turned the damn thing on yet, and I ordered it directly from Dell, obviously I wasn't going to let that fly. After making them fix it, I've been using it for the past year or so, but I really don't like it as far as laptops go.

More recently, my daughter bought herself a new Yoga Ideapad. So far we both like it a lot better than either of the Dells I've had. I hope it lasts as long as my old Ideapad did, but of course it's impossible to be certain without waiting that long.

Perhaps. I suspect it is actually the same covid infection, and not actually a re-infection. One research study indicates that covid symptoms can come and go for 8+ weeks: https://patientresearchcovid19.... Of the people included in the study (people who had symptoms for at least 2 weeks but not severe enough to be hospitalized), 80% still had symptoms after 7 weeks, but only 10% still had symptoms after 8. (Unfortunately the study only lasted 8 weeks.)

And of course, there are several articles pointing out how flawed the test is, and how much worse its reliability gets if you take the test too soon or too early.

Note: I myself am on week 8 with covid symptoms (fortunately mild). Different symptoms come and go, like the fever, which is there some hours of the day and gone other hours of the day. I'm hoping this will be my last week with symptoms, but there is no way to know until they go away and stay gone. One this is for certain, attempting any kind of exercise makes the symptoms noticeably worse for a while.

TFA: "Even though Aedes aegypti is only 1% of its mosquito population"

I'm sure the birds will be fine if 1% of the mosquitos in the keys fail to breed, and the other 99% fill in that void.

And now we're back to the "Be extremely afraid!" comments that both sides make. I wouldn't say your points are invalid. Exaggerated (and exactly how much is definitely debatable), but not invalid. Having said that, things in the US are definitely scarier this year than they were last year.

I'm "for" responsible gun ownership. My dad started teaching me to shoot when I was 4 (properly supervised for that age, of course), and I did very well on the ROTC rifle team. I'm fine with guns, but I am still dead set against assault rifles. I've never heard a single argument in favor of them that I would call reasonable or rational.

I'm also against people who act irresponsibly with guns from being allowed to keep them. For example, morons like the ones I've read about drawing guns during verbal arguments over mask orders need to have their guns taken away. If that's truly what happened, of course (you can't believe a lot of what you read).

Anyway, make an example of asshats that do little but make responsible gun owners look bad, and get rid of assault rifles and high-capacity clips/magazines used to kill people at a rate that really only make them suitable for military use, and you'll find that very few people will mind you having guns. There will always be asshats on both sides of the fence, and there will always be some people complaining very loudly on both sides no matter what happens, but your guns (with the possible exception of assault rifles) will be safe.

I think you should have logged in for that comment. It is a very valid point, but IMHO only if you're honest enough to agree that it happens (a lot) on both sides of the aisle. Each side just have different points to raise fear on to try to rile up their base. For example...

Republicans: They're going to take your assault rifles!

Democrats: One of them is going to kill your children with their assault rifles!

I have to say I'm with the Democrats on this one, though I am not on the Democrats' side on a lot of issues. I think we need to look at what Australia did (with conservatives stepping across the line in favor of reasonable gun control), and why they did it, and how it worked out for them.

Actually, the narrative was "masks may or may not help", which is a very different narrative. Consensus takes time to be reached by the scientific community on things like that because it's unethical to experiment on humans as if they were mice or guinea pigs, so they are limited to observational/statistical studies on how well masks work in places that do require everyone to wear them. It takes time for events to unfold, to gather and verify statistics, to compare them against each other, to consider other factors that may skew the statistics, etc. The more time they have to gather info, the more confident they become one way or the other.

It wouldn't surprise me if Fox News, Breitbart, etc. actually went so far as to say "masks are bad", but anyone who blindly believes what they see/read on those ultra-conservative rags is just as bad as anyone who blindly believes what they see/read on their ultra-liberal counterparts. I see a black pot on one side and a black kettle on the other. Even Trump did a 180 on wearing masks, and while he's clearly both an idiot and a liar, he's not a complete moron.

One thing I can definitely understand 100% about conservative viewpoints is skepticism in scientific studies. Skepticism is the correct response when new studies are touted by the media. The media often twist them into something they're not, and in some cases the studies themselves were seriously flawed in the first place. My all-time favorite news article was one that jokingly claimed "Scientists determine that all foods cause cancer!", and it poked fun at just how flawed those scientific studies on mice were back in the 1980's.

However, continued skepticism in the face of a large growing body of evidence is just being stubborn stupid. *cough* climate change *cough*

> Tell me, do people have the right to riot, commit arson, vandalize property?

No, they don't have that right. The so-called "protesters" causing real damages need to face the full legal/criminal penalties for their actions. Then again, so do the police who started this whole mess. Police should not be held to a lesser standard than the rest of us.

Now, instead of trying to use a tangential argument to force a change of subject because I made some valid points, which is a spineless tactic that people with no integrity (people like my ex-wife, or Donald Trump) use when they worry they might lose an argument, why not try responding directly to the arguments I made? Even if others disagree with your counter-arguments, you would earn some respect from them. Be a man, not a troll.