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.

I know you're just trolling, but unions are associated with the labor movement, or more generally just populism, which during my lifetime has certainly been more associated with left-wing politics, but which has now shifted and moved to the political right in the last 10 years or so. And that's weird because corporations and pro-business groups have generally been right wing, and labor groups tend to align themselves opposite to business interests, but we live in weird times politically. This tends to happen every so often, when the groups that make up the political parties re-align themselves. It's too early to see how this will play out, but I would bet that big business and labor groups don't end up on the same side at the end of it all.

... stuff that matters... wait, why is this on Slashdot? I mean yeah, I eat pizza, but so does like, everyone else pretty much.

While I'm generally a fiscal conservative, you can't *always* balance the budget. The average person thinks that when the government spends more than it takes in, it's just like a household spending more than it has in income, and that's simply not true. When the government spends more, yes it has to borrow, but it's crucial to understand what the money is being spent on. If a homeowner borrows money on a credit card to buy a television, that's bad debt. But if a business borrows a million dollars to buy a new piece of equipment with a 3-year payback, or even a 12-year payback, that might be a good financial decision. In government, if you spend money on infrastructure like a bridge or a railway line, that can definitely be a good investment, and if you spend money on handing out cheques to the poor, that *can* be a good investment (i.e. if you're in the spiral of a demand-side recession) but it can also be a terrible investment (i.e. if demand is outstripping supply and we're at risk of pushing up inflation). So borrowing because you expect a return on your spending in the future can be a good idea for government, just like it can be a good idea for businesses. And then you have to take into account that the government can *always* pay back its debt by simply printing money. You don't want to do this too much, because it's essentially a tax on all assets and spikes inflation, but it's an option that the typical household, or even business, doesn't have.

You are misinformed about how LLMs work if you think that LLM-generated answers on Google are accurate or trustworthy.

She is a sole proprietor with a single laptop, dummy.

My wife is a professional and requires backups of her electronic documents, and health regulations require that if you use a cloud backup that it be stored only in the same country, so rather than use cloud backups we opted for backing up to a local server and swapping drives offsite. Discovered almost immediately that we weren't backing up her actual work files because OneDrive had helpfully turned itself on and stored them in the cloud anyway, and then moved them out of the real My Documents folder and put them in another area of the drive that was impossible to decipher, and you wouldn't normally backup if you were just backing up documents. I absolutely hate OneDrive now.

If you're going to create a robot workforce to create everything you need for you, then you can also create a robot army to take everyone else's stuff.

I have to admit that there have been a couple times when a query punched into Google provided me with an AI answer (typically a one-line... "how do I format this date in a certain format") that was slightly faster than following the next link down to a StackOverflow answer and reading that one, but I really have to wonder if the unbelievable amount of human effort and capital that's been poured into this technology is worth it, when it doesn't really solve a problem that I had. It solves a problem that Google had (keeping me on their site). But it's only a short-term solution, because by cutting off the revenue stream for sites where content is created, then how are they going to get more content to index?

You forgot the most important thing... finding a spouse. Seriously, the two best places to meet people are church and university, so if you're not religious, and you don't go to college, then finding a long term partner in this environment after high school is almost impossible. Online dating is just fundamentally broken, workplace romances are heavily frowned upon, and nobody leaves their houses to do activities in the community anymore.

This is simply not true based on evidence and statistics. A college education is by far the best investment you can make. Sure, there are people who just get a psychology or gender studies degree and then go out into the workforce looking for a job and can't find one, but that's more than offset by people who take engineering or pre-med and go on to make high incomes. And my wife took psychology, but went on to get a Ph.D. and now earns a very respectable income as a licensed psychologist. There are also 2 year college diplomas, like in the trades, that cost very little and pay about double what you can get right out of high school. Don't buy into the misinformation. College is still the pathway to a better life for most people.

Which makes more sense than some government bureaucrat having to make a determination about what constitutes exceptional artistry, doesn't it?

The book "Snakes in Suits" shows that about 3% of senior management is a psychopath, which is about three times the population average of about 1%. So it's not just in government.