I'm curious, if anyone here is taking it for weight loss, what are the side effects you experience, and do you think it's worth it?

> ...to fool people with a low IQ such as yourself.

What is the point of this childish comment? Aside from it being an ad-hominem attack and therefore irrelevant to whether or not my argument is correct, it just reeks of being something a snotty 17-year old kid would say while sitting in his mom's basement, and you've been around here long enough that I know you're not 17.

If you want a seat at the big boy table, you need to talk like a grown-up. Until that happens, you're not worthy of my time.

I agree that increasing immigration is more about supporting large companies, who lobby for it in order to increase the low wage labor pool. However, there's also been significant research which indicates that immigration is usually a net benefit for the democrat party, and a negative for the republican party, and this fact is often cited by political strategists, so the parties do believe this idea.

That argument falls apart when you consider that the US has the highest (or next to highest) consumer spending per capita of any country on Earth. Even more per capita than Switzerland and Luxembourg. I think you underestimate what life is like in most other countries. Almost everyone who moves abroad from the US returns in a few years with their eyes opened.

I think if you read more carefully, he's not talking about why people migrate, but rather why countries allow migration into their country.

I'm not American, and I'm sure the Chinese think it's a race, but to me it looks like a race that the US already won over 50 years ago. Are the Chinese really justified in feeling like they "won" if they get there before Artemis lands?

I agree it's a great deal for the US as a country, but the average high school graduate is unhappy because they can't afford a house, even when the government can somehow afford 13 (!) supercarriers and stealth bombers that look like spaceships, etc. And oddly the educated masses are unhappy too because... I dunno... I don't really know what a kid whose mommy and daddy paid for their super-expensive education to become one of the elite really has to complain about, and yet those trust fund kids are the ones who protest the most. I mean seriously, the ground state of being human is to be unsatisfied, even when your state of being is way better than the the vast majority of people who ever existed. It's possible that humans just can't be happy.

It's not stupid to the average American voter who cares more about their own immediate welfare than what's going on in the larger world. The world order is just reverting to the way it was prior to WWII. Instead of super-powers you have large regional hegemons that control and dominate their own neighborhoods and clash with the larger powers at the fringes. Globalization, multi-lateralism (the UN), and trade were all products of the post-WWII order that came out of the Bretton Woods agreements, and later the IMF and World Bank. But this cost money for the US to bankroll all these systems, and the fact is that the voters in the US are increasingly disillusioned with this system and they voted in a guy who's going to break it all up (starting with NATO, apparently). History is full of stuff like this happening over, and over, and over again. Be thankful you got to live in a little bit of the golden age where it was a little less "stupid" for a while.

I appreciate that you enjoyed growing up in a city. That's great. But the fact is that when you pack people into cities, they empirically have fewer kids.

> This entire culture of having only boys and aborting girls if they don't have a boy, is why their population is declining.

This is a reason, but it's not the main reason. China industrialized extremely fast, which means moving people to the city. When people move to the city they have far fewer kids. Also, most people live in apartments in China, not houses with back yards, which further decreases the willingness to have kids. Who wants to raise a kid in a concrete jungle? China *does* have a lot of space, so if they focused on creating nice places to live with back yards, I suspect they'd make a dent in the birthrate. But the good old "give women more money and time off" has been tried and by itself barely moves the needle.

Well, we've been making software engineers more productive for decades by making much faster CPUs and higher level languages, and lots of pre-defined libraries. If making people more efficient just meant you could do the same amount of work with less people, then we would have fired all but 3 software engineers decades ago, but in reality the demand for software engineers has generally trended much higher over that timespan. The reason for this is Jevon's Paradox... when you make some resource more efficient, then usage of that resource will increase, not decrease (assuming elastic demand). So if AI really makes developers more efficient, then we should be seeing an explosion of demand for software developers. The reason we're not isn't because everyone is replacing software engineers with AI, but because AI isn't living up to the hype, and the overall demand for developers is down because most were employed by silicon valley, and that place ran on very very cheap capital, and the cheap capital has dried up. This was an inevitable result of demographic trends, and many people predicted it. Silicon valley didn't know what to do about it because the share prices were based on absurd growth rates funded by cheap capital. They jumped on AI as an excuse... don't sell your shares: we're not down-sizing; we're just going to continue growing by using AI! As I said, it's bull.

This is counter to all evidence. Assuming any kind of elastic demand for Salesforce Engineers (i.e. is there something productive you could do with them if only your input cost per unit of work was lower) then increasing their productivity should increase demand for them, and you should hire more. That's just Jevon's Paradox. What's really going on is that the CEO doesn't want to admit that the demand has dropped and they're not growing, so they're not hiring. Saying that you're using AI to grow instead allows you to pretend the over-inflated stock price that's based on the assumption of future growth is still valid.

Yes, loose leaf tea would probably be best, but I forgot to mention that I'm lazy.

I'm someone who is concerned about plastic pollution, and particularly concerned about ingesting it. I don't microwave my food in plastic dishes, and I use stainless steel insulated mugs, and I went out of my way to find teabags made without plastic. But the research results in this area were definitely exaggerated by the media. Here's an example:

One of the studies that looked at microplastics in the brain was conducted by taking brain tissue and using a chemical process to dissolve organic tissue, but then the researchers didn't really analyze the composition of what was left. They just assumed that all the remaining material was probably plastic. That's how you got the famous claim that there's *up to* a teaspoon full of plastic in your brain, which is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence, in my opinion. In reality the method they used doesn't provably dissolve all brain tissue, so there's probably elements left over, and that's most of what was measured. But that didn't stop the media from grabbing the headline and running with it.

So the proposal is to cap credit card interest rates at 10% for one year. That basically rewards people who knowingly (they're adults) took on debt with an agreement to pay it back at around 20% interest. You're lessening the consequence of their actions. And all that's going to happen is you're going to encourage more of the same behavior because you're going to temporarily reduce the cost of borrowing. And then a year later you're going to jack the price back up to 20%. I think this plan has bad long term consequences.