The phone number thing has nothing to do with tracking, it's about account recovery. IMO, they should offer an option to skip it that makes you promise repeatedly that if you ever forget your password, or if your account is ever taken over, that you'll give up and make a new account instead of demanding some other way to prove your identity and recover your account. "I promise to take responsibility for maintaining access to this account and will never ask Google to reset my forgotten/stolen password".

Probably people would still pester them for a way to get their account back, though.

Why female?

Lithium aspartate, for example

The least-harm principle. There's essentially universal agreement that low (dietary-range) levels of lithium are not harmful, while the research as a whole is strongly suggestive of a benefit (but has not yet met the standards of, for example. an EPA regulatory standard for lithium in drinking water). Lithium, at the doses necessary, costs basically nothing, takes seconds to take, and is orders of magnitude away from the levels where potential toxicity symptoms can arise. To me, that's an easy call. Also, Alzheimer's runs in my family, so there's an extra factor weighing on the scale.

No issues with aspartate. It dissociates fully upon dissolution. L-aspartate is a building block to proteins. D-aspartate is also naturally found and used in the body.

Why hasn't that already happened, then? It's not like the market force in question are new.

Top 10 US states by manufacturing jobs:

1. California (D)
2. Texas (R)
3. Ohio (R)
4. Illinois (D)
5. Michigan (split)
6. Pennsylvania (split)
7. New York (D)
8. Indiana (R)
9. Wisconsin (split)
10. North Carolina (split)

The R / D / split designations above describe the current state government, "split" meaning that control is divided between the parties. So of the top 10, three are Republican-controlled, three are Democrat-controlled and four are divided (though the Michigan split is a very recent phenomenon; Michigan has been quite blue for a long time).

The pattern that I see is that the blue states generate most of the new ideas and products and manufacturing naturally springs up around them, then over time manufacturing of now-established products gets moved to red states for the reasons you pointed out. This is an ongoing process that keeps the manufacturing output relatively balanced over time -- but keeps the blue states richer and maintains their dominant position in US GDP.

Also, it's worth noting that the federal minimum wage is irrelevant these days; market prices have risen above it. Even in low-income states unskilled jobs pay more than the federal minimum wage. (To me, this isn't an argument that the minimum wage needs to be raised, it's an argument that it should be abolished and that we should trust the labor market to set wages.)

Do you also not know how percentages work?

No. I do not like having all manner of restrictions and inconveniences imposed on my legal enjoyment of the product, in an attempt to stop piracy (it doesn't). As I paying customer I expect, as I should, the same unencumbered experience that users of pirated copies enjoy. And I certainly do not want to be forced to lock down my own hardware or compromise it with some rootkit (like the infamous one from Sony) in order to enjoy content.

Like so many others, you mistake the motive of people who pirate content. For some, saving money is part of it. But in a lot of cases it is a matter of convenience. Look at what AllOfMP3 did to music: people were happy to pay just to get their music in the format they wanted, at the bitrate they wanted, with easy downloads. And now that music is easily available on legit sites and through streaming, few people still bother with piracy. In the EU, music piracy dropped by 75% in just 7 years. Simply because the experience with legit sources is now better than pirated content.

As Valve's Jason Holtman said: "Pirates are just underserved customers". It was not greed that drove Game of Thrones to become the most pirated TV show in history, it was simply the fact that HBO was not widely available outside the USA when season 1 aired. People were begging HBO to somehow make the show available to them. And here in the Netherlands, this used to be the rule: if something was not available legally and under reasonable terms, pirating it was condoned. That is a rule that serves the public's interest, as copyright was intended to. Publication (making the works available) was and should be a condition for receiving that temporary monopoly.

As for the movie industry: they were expected to release their works into the public domain, after enjoying a monopoly of reasonable duration. They haven't done that. Instead they have lobbied to increase the duration of copyright time and time again, and lobbied to have these terms foisted upon the rest of the world by treaty (that's why that Dutch rule on piracy got nixed). So they broke the deal, and I do not feel bad about not holding up my end of it. Fuck em.

Being flagged as a dangerous criminal by facial recognition might well count as reasonable suspicion. It depends on the accuracy of the software, measures to mitigate false positives (such as showing the officers a photo of the wanted person so they can do another check), and how to deal with false stops after the fact.

All of the salts you listed fully dissociate in water.

Nothing weird about sodium fluoride, fluorosilicic acid, or sodium fluorosilicate. Sodium fluoride is a simple salt, dissociates immediately upon dissolution to Na+ and F-. Fluorosilicic acid and sodium fluorisilicate result in a fluorosilicate ion (SiF-2) which rapidly hydrolyzes to Si(OH)4 + 6F- + 4H+. Si(OH)4 (orthosilicic acid) is the form of soluble silicon which plants and diatoms consume and is perfectly normal in water in the tiny amounts from fluoridation (like 6 micromolar concentration). Ocean surface water near Antarctica for example is up to ~80 micromolar concentration. And it goes without saying that minuscule amounts of sodium in water are also perfectly normal. The addition of the fluoride ion is the only actually meaningful impact.

Dial "996" for more information.

Really annoying that lithium orotate became the standard way to deliver lithium, given that orotic acid is toxic and mutagenic :P

TL/DR, it affects the enzymes that regulate these processes.

Lithium is naturally present in the diet, but it varies by orders of magnitude depending on where you get your water and where your food was grown / grazed, with most people today on the lower end of the intake. Mineral spring waters in particular tend to be much richer in lithium than river / lake water, and also the fact that municipal water supplies' range limitations on the quantities of common minerals (sodium, potassium, calcium, etc) will also tend to reduce lithium, could be argued that, on average, the average person in the past might have consumed more. But it still would be quite varied on a regional basis.

Note that drinking lithiated water used to be a popular health trend. Indeed, 7-Up was originally called 7up Lithiated Lemon Soda (though the claim of being lithiated was actually a lie in their case, and they ultimately had to remove it!).