Once you understand that you quit carbs, eat fatty meat, drink water (ideally spring water), and most of the time the pounds come off. They lied about red meat and animal fat being bad for us. But you can't keep the Sickcare Industrial Complex at 20% of GDP if people eat correctly.

Bonus points for finding local farms raising livestock on pasture and patronizing them. Their animals are healthier and they're building soil without herbicides, pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. Best way to put Monsanto etc out of business.

Yes, there are some people who seem to handle plant-based diets well. If you're a fatty you're not one of them.

So many jobs are unproductive/anti-productive and don't need to exist. With the massive tech-driven productivity gains it should be easier to support a family on a single income, or to retire early. Fun read and the free Kindle sample is generous.
https://www.amazon.com/Starving-Monkeys-Fight-Back-Smarter-ebook/dp/B0032JSL1Q/

gets "corrected" by midwit meatbags one too many times.

In Another Step Farther Out the late Jerry Pournelle talks about this. Like many such grand plans it depends on a heavy lift vehicle to get materials into orbit. Pournelle assumed that only governments could fund the expense and they'd grown bored of such things.

Hello Starship.

I think that we'd still be better off getting serious about nuclear power but once Starship is debugged it could be done.

I hope they throw some money towards developing LFTRs. If you have a couple of hours this Thorium Remix 2016 documentary is AMAZING.

Thorium Remix 2016
Even if you don't bother with making cleaner burning synthetic fuels like they mention because LFTRs give you cheap power to do all kinds of fun things, just replacing natgas power plants with LFTRs would free up fuel for natgas powered vehicles. Actually, we have enough natgas to do that now but... Thorium!

Park a drone airship (hydrogen, not helium) ~22km up with solar panels on its topside for power and you'd have a really nice comms platform. Mesh network the fleet. Maybe higher up. Maybe you'd call it a satellite but it's not what you'd think of at first glance. The rigid hull of an airship would be a nice evolution from the balloons they've been experimenting with.

Civilians are already building their own drones. See DIY Drones, etc.

Personally I'd like to see a drone airship that can hold a stable position around 70,000 feet (~21km) to use as a WiFi relay, which would fix the problem of getting a clear line-of-sight for point-to-point long-range wireless but good. I doubt it can be done reliably though. But if it could, and you built a fleet of them linked with Open Mesh, you could build a global drone communications network for fairly cheap. Call it Skynet... oh.

Nicely put. I think you'd like the book Surviving Off Off-grid: Decolonizing the Industrial Mind.

I'd go back a few years further to LBJ removing silver from American coinage, a key event in the ongoing destruction of the dollar. The 1965 minimum wage paid in 1965 90% silver dollar coins would be worth around $30/hour in today's fiat money. FDR confiscating gold and devaluing the dollar was bad but not catastrophic. Woodrow Wilson's creation of the Federal Reserve enabled the later mischief. The rot had set in when Nixon officially took us off the gold standard and engaged in assorted other economic stupidity. Of all these events, LBJ's economic manipulation to cover the expense of his welfare/warfare state was the worst in my opinion.

Throw in the dividend double-tax that discourages dividend payments that help keep public companies honest (accountants can fake many things but not cash payments), the massive leverage generated by Wall Street banks (derivatives, options, CDOs, etc) that enables all sorts of heads-we-win/tails-you-lose mischief, the federal government encouraging real estate asset bubbles (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, mortgage interest deduction, CRA, etc), and you come to realize that this hasn't been a capitalist nation in a very long time.

Austrian school economists have been warning the world of the dangers of the Keynesian economics practiced by "mainstream" economists for generations now. It looks like we're heading for the "crack-up boom" they predicted, with the Obama Administration accelerating the end-game dramatically. What's fascinating is that Marx understood the danger of undermining currencies as well.

Anyhow, if you want to steal wealth from the average family there's no surer way than printing lots of new currency, which dilutes the value of existing currency, and handing that new currency to your buddies on Wall Street (Goldman Sachs/etc) and politically connected corporate socialists. Talk of manipulating the income tax is laughable misdirection in comparison to this.

"card carrying communist!!"

Given that a suspicious looking brown guy whose political mentor in Chicago was a communist domestic terrorist has been elected President, I think you're safe Haque.

(Let the battle between "+1 Funny" and "-1 Troll" commence!)

See this nih.gov article:
Acetaminophen (paracetamol) use, measles-mumps-rubella vaccination, and autistic disorder: the results of a parent survey

The theory is that after they started giving children Tylenol with their vaccinations instead of aspirin due to the Reye's Syndrome scare in the 1980's, that caused the autism rate to spike. Tylenol impairs the liver's ability to purge the additives in vaccines (not just the minuscule amount of mercury but some aluminum-based ones designed to boost immune response so that they can use less vaccine), increasing the risk of side effects. The child will probably run a mild fever if you don't use a med such as aspirin or Tylenol. I'm not clear on whether the fever reducer is simply for the child's comfort or if it's medically necessary.

It's a THEORY. It looks promising. But if we simply shout down people who make logical observations and use "correlation is not causation" as an excuse for not thinking we won't get anywhere. An observation can still be correct even if the reasoning is wrong. Meanwhile, using ibuprofen or naproxen with vaccines, if any fever reducer at all (aspirin allergy is nontrivial), and spreading out vaccinations over time to the maximum recommended extent seems prudent. It does appear likely that immune system dysfunction is key to understanding autism. That's likely why changing diet sometimes helps: most of your immune system is in your gut. Antibiotic overuse could be a factor. Which particular set of problems is affecting a given autistic individual will vary but the immune system appears to be the common theme.

Nice! That's going to the top of my toy list. Kindles, even my Kindle DX, make very poor web browsers. Only for last-resort use IMHO. The Adam looks ideal for general web reading.

Some people can stare at regular LCD screens all day without trouble. Maybe even most people. I'm not one of them.

I can read off my Kindle's e-ink screen with considerably less eye strain than reading off a backlit LCD. Backlights are hard on your eyes.

Some tips: sit ~3 feet away from your monitor, turn the backlight down as low as you can without it becoming counterproductive (wanting to lean forward to view the dim screen is bad), look away every once in a while so your eyes aren't fixed on the same close distance for long periods. For more serious problems you may need vision therapy like I did. I thought I had ADD until I figured that out. Oh, that's why I had so much trouble with reading and why my vision got blurry after marathon gaming sessions...

I bought an individual catastrophic health insurance plan from Assurant Health via my local State Farm agent. $5K deductible, the maximum they offer. I didn't bother with the HSA part. I pay under $1500/year. The really good part is that any work done in a hospital is covered in full, which I've made use of a few times so far. Everything else, I pay cash and see whoever I want. For oddball stuff like vision therapy (if you think you have ADD, look up Convergence Insufficiency and get tested) it's great to not have to explain to some bureaucrat what it is and get them to pretend to pay for my health care.

It's scary how conditioned people have become to having a third party (pretend to) pay for their health care. Most of the time when I try to convince people that they'd be better off under a catastrophic/HSA plan they just can't grok it.

The refundable tax credit plan that McCain proposed would have paired perfectly with catastrophic/HSA plans. Unfortunately our President spent $40M on attack ads against that proposal, telling people that it'd tax their health insurance... which was true, if you had a really expensive "Cadillac" plan that cost more than the tax credit was worth, "Cadillac" plans which Obama is now proposing to tax...

Whole Foods Market provides this type of insurance to their workers:
The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

Unfortunately the socialists reacted badly to his audacity to state facts that run counter to the Democratic Party line so he got into a bit of trouble.