The amount of assumptions in your post are downright comical. I'm overweight, borderline obese, and in my 40s. And I'm very very aware of how hard it is to lose weight, as I fight the good fight every single damn day. It's taken me the better part of a year to trim off 20 pounds while consigning myself to a diet of mostly salads and a ton of biking. And I can very easily lose a great deal of those gains with a single cheat weekend or literally any vacation. Losing weight is hard because the human body is efficient. You don't have to binge eat to gain weight. Even eating just when your body says "feed me something" is often enough to cause steady gains. That's the point. That is why it's hard to keep weight off. Because the struggle literally never stops. Most people diet a bit, lose some weight, and then want to go back to "life as normal", not knowing that "normal" means "weight gain." True weight loss requires lifestyle changes and an acceptance of a little discomfort, and most people don't want to or can't put up with. How many people do you know that eat a couple of salads as their only caloric intake for the day and bike at least an hour a day? Of the people you know who do that, how many do you know that would be willing to maintain that for life? Don't go spouting bullshit at me when you don't even know the lifestyles these people you're claiming are trying to lose weight are engaging in.

At the end of the day, people want some semblance of comfort. They want to enjoy a donut, or a piece of cake, or a soda. They don't want to feel hungry all the time or constrain themselves to nuts and berries for months on end. They want to eat a prepared meal instead of a pile of leaves. People don't want to permanently alter their diet to something borderline uncomfortable. That is your answer as to why weight loss isn't sustained. It requires people accepting a bit more misery into their lives permanently. I fucking hate salads. I fucking hate biking. I fucking hate not picking up something to eat immediately when I feel hungry. Yet I've been doing it for the better part of a year now. Because I hate dying more.

If eating more salads, drinking less beer, and jogging could fix their weight, most would do that

So you're going to tell me the laws of thermodynamics are BS? Eating less and exercising more absolutely COULD fix their weight. Many (most?) people just don't have the discipline to do so. Like it may actually require you feeling hungry and uncomfortable for a period of time, but you will lose weight, because physics/biology. For instance, if you ate zero calories for a few days, I can assure you, weight will go down, regardless of your "genes". Just because people don't have the willpower and fortitude to accept some short-term discomfort to achieve long-term success, don't try to pretend they're genetically immune to losing weight. It may be harder for them, or more uncomfortable to achieve success, but it's not impossible.

An unsuccessful petition to ban Detroit: Become Human from sale in Australia.

Detroit: Become Human? I played that -- there isn't anything even remotely titillating in that game. What an insane petition

Yes, super hero fatigue is real.

The success of the recent Superman appears to prove you wrong. Tell a good story and people will go to see it. It's not super hero fatigue that's real...it's that the storywriting has suffered, and they're pulling from deeper B and C list superheroes that don't have the same kind of appeal.

I mean, did a million people really search out Velvet Sundown, or did Spotify just inject the songs into a million people's streams? The article doesn't really say, one way or the other.

Likely a combination of both. Initial injection followed by viral search out. I know Spotify has injected AI bands into my "Discover Weekly" stream. I went searching for the artists of new music I enjoyed just to discover they were computer generated

Something like 80% of all causalities in the war right now are coming from drones.

Source? That's a bold claim.

Take your pick -- all sources on google have the number somewhere between 60 and 80%: https://www.google.com/search?...

NPR is pretty legit: https://www.npr.org/2025/06/07... Or NYT? https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

Meanwhile, some reports from the frontlines indicate that while drones are ubiquituous, they aren't the game-changer the tech-industry wants them to be. tl;dr essential bits: a) most drone strikes could have been done by other, cheaper weapons. b) drones are an unreliable weapon due to jamming, dependency on weather and light and many technical failures.

I'm pretty sure that's untrue. Something like 80% of all causalities in the war right now are coming from drones. There are many ways around jamming (band jumping, fiber optics, AI, GPS, piggybacking on cell networks, etc), and those improve every day. And locating and targeting remote drone operators is far harder than targeting a nearby mortar or artillery crew (unsure which "cheaper" weapons you believe exist...drones are dirt cheap)

Tell me then. I was informed from a reasonable Independent that as a Democrat, I tend to "demonize" MAGAs. It does seem easy. So, tell me what you love about the "Big Beautiful Bill"? Honestly, let us talk. I tried before to talk with MAGAs, and in the end it always boils down to a MAGA doing personal, six grader types of attacks.

I wasn't intending to defend the merits of the bill. I personally hate deficit spending. I'm also not a MAGA. I was saying it was a very poor and misleading title. It's a 900 page bill, and climate is a handful of line items on a laundry list of changes: https://www.crfb.org/blogs/bre...

That said, there are some things in it I do like. Like no tax on tips, and alot of senior assistance. But that's neither here nor there. The bill itself overall is poorly designed, as it's yet another example of modern day deficit spending both sides have egregiously acquiesced to making the status quo

House Passes Bill That Slashes Solar, Wind and EV Tax Credits

What a terrible spin-laden uninformative title. That bill includes a ton more provisions than just that. That title makes it seem like it's exclusively a climate bill

Capitalism has failure modes where "Private property" makes "Competition" and "Freedom of choice" irrelevant. Some of these failure modes are called monopoly and cartel.

Monopolies/cartels are not a facet of capitalism. Antitrust is a basic tenet of capitalism. Adam Smith, the inventor of capitalism, was very clear on this. So if monopolies are allowed to happen, it's not a failure of the system, it's a failure of the people implementing it (i.e., what they're doing isn't capitalism, it's something else, probably cronyism)

Fuck you for such a lazy effort. Yes, let's increase transportation costs for people that can't fucking afford transportation to begin with. Go away

Man, if this ain't the truth. It's like when they want to ban natural gas for cooking. Rather than actually make the green thing cheaper and more desirable, just ban the competition and make everyone's lives more expensive and more miserable. Go away indeed. No wonder the green movement is so hated

You're not complaining about pandering, you're complaining about pandering targeted at someone who isn't yourself and who you don't empathize with

This is where you're mistaken. I do empathize with those groups, and even I find the writing cringeworthy. Like the Falcon/Winter Soldier "do better" speech. That kind of thing never happened before, doesn't help the cause, and is all levels of icky.

There are plenty of old series which did their preaching in unsubtle ways, and they sucked

Legitimately curious. Which ones? I'm be surprised if you could produce anything mainstream. In modern day cinema, this kind of shitty messaging has penetrated everything, even blockbusters like Marvel and classics like Disney. I'd be willing to admit wrongness, but I certainly never saw this level of pandering in the mainstream before. And nowhere near the scale it is today (something like ~60-80% of Disney content?)

High interest rates are designed to cause layoffs. That's how they fight inflation

That's not a given. And we haven't seen that in the current labor market. High interest rates suppress business growth by raising the cost of borrowing. This doesn't necessitate layoffs, although it can cause layoffs. In the current economy, we've generally seen reductions in job openings and reduced expansion plans. However, we've seen subdued growth nonetheless, coupled with maximum employment.

Hollywood has been woke and pandering throughout all of its existence. The problem has nothing to do with woke, it's got to do with bad writing and bad acting

Huh? This is a matter of scale and focused intent. For instance, if you don't see a difference in levels of pandering between say the 1989 Little Mermaid and the modern day one, you're being deliberately blind. They literally changed lyrics in the most popular classic songs purely on pandering grounds. The writing is bad as well, but that's because the focus is on the pandering rather than just telling a good story. You have writers going "so how do we shoehorn in a good message about the environment/racism/patriarchy/etc here" instead of going "what would make a good character arc and a satisfying story?"

As a second example, Doctor Who was always woke to some degree, but it's utterly jumped the shark at this point. Again, compare current day Doctor Who to ~20 years ago. If you think the level of wokeness is the same, you're deluding yourself. You have characters literally soapboxing/diatribing to the audience Atlas Shrugged style. That kind of thing never happened back in the day. Writers knew of "show, don't tell". Modern writers are "preach the message through all means possible."

There are only three resolutions to a constitutional crisis. The first is President becomes king. The second is Congress agrees with the president and changes the law. And the third is Congress impeaches the president. The Democrats aren't going to accept #1.

I wish I knew this for sure. I have seen many inklings that would lead me to believe they'd be perfectly content if it was their king. They've already pitched packing the courts, eliminating the filibuster, and rewriting the laws to favor their party (ala electoral college elimination). They've shown a sustained desire to work around Congress rather than with it.

If a popular Democratic president started doing illegal things broadly popular with their base, I'm not certain Congress would hold them to task with an impeachment. Say a president declared a national emergency, saying we can't have another fascist regime take over, so they start taking away everyone's guns, and they ban "misinformation and fake news" (meaning anything that doesn't support their dogma). Then they declare a climate emergency and start going wholesale destruction on the fossil fuel sector -- say they ban coal and natural gas nationwide. Can you legitimately tell me for certain that Democrats would rise up and impeach their leader? Again, I'd like to hope. But in today's day and age, I can't say that for certain.