Your numbers make sense if 100% of the weight lost came from fat. In practice, it's hard to get results nearly that good from caloric restriction.

What you have expressed is a truth claim. If someone believes that claim without having specific evidence, that is a perfect example of "faith" as it is used pejoratively.

People will still be able to make their own homeopathic solutions. All of the required equipment is generally available in most home kitchens.

When companies sell homeopathic dilutions, the labelling is generally written to make the consumer believe that the contents differ from water when they do not. At that point, these sellers are defrauding others.

Do you seriously believe that's what libertarians want or are you knowingly attacking a position that no person actually holds?

Thanks for the testable forecast. Got a timeframe?

"Since traffic laws don't stop these morons, does this mean we should not have traffic laws?" Of course not. But your point is a good one to raise whenever you come across anyone suggesting the repeal of laws against homicide, assault or reckless endangerment. My guess is you know very well that opposition to gun laws is not the same as opposition to laws that people might use guns while violating.

This is true but misleading. The average caloric intake in Vietnam is 2770 per day. The average caloric intake in the US is 3770 per day. Source. Based on the formula you give, I would expect Vietnamese immigrants to America to gain more than 400 kilos in a decade, supposing their weight were stable while they were living in Vietnam.

The reason this doesn't happen is because "calories used" is not a choice variable. It's the difference of calories consumed and calories stored. Calories stored is a function of activity level and hormones present in the body which are in turn determined by multiple factors including both the amount and the types of food a person consumes. If both sides of of the calorie balance were really choice variables, people with Hashimoto's or even acromegaly could regulate their changes in size just by managing their food intake.

It's trivially true that changes in weight are related to calorie balance, but this is as useful as the observation that changes in the number of people in a building are related to the numbers of people entering and leaving. Neither explanation tells you why anything is happening.

The problem isn't "them." The problem is the powers associated with the positions that you want to throw them out of.

If society decides that whoever is wearing a pointy hat gets to lock people in cages without trial, then there will always be bad people eager to put on a pointy hat. If the current wearers of the pointy hats are separated from their hats,someone else will pop up to don those hats. Furtunately, most Americans do not believe pointy hats should come with the authority to lock people in cages without trial. Nor do most Americans believe that pointy hat wearers are essential to keeping us safe from terrorists.

I wish I knew how to make people think about government positions with the same clarity that they think about pointy hats

I keep hearing about all this deregulation that has happened. We can disagree about whether or not it's good but can you give an example of a specific industry or activity that is less regulated now (meaning less pages of regulations in law or less people working for regulatory agencies) than five or ten or fifteen years ago?

If an individual gets that court order, they have other options, to include forgetting passphrases or preemptive countermeasures. If you think you are a likely target of bad people or bad governments or whatever, you can encrypt your secrets with a symmetrical cipher. Then you store your 50 random character passphrase in a text file and have a program that continuously monitors connections and wipes that text file if your computer becomes disconnected from your home router for more than some number of minutes. (This would also be a reasonable thing to do if you feared burglars. Possibly an effective defense against an obstruction charge.) That's the best I can come up with just now and I'm not especially motivated or even knowledgable on this stuff. I'm sure more creative people can think of additional options.

If Google gets that court order, you can expect them to just comply. That's a pretty meaningful difference as far as I can tell.

The free market neither solves problems nor takes care of anything. Only people solve problems or take care of things. A free market is just a special case in which you are allowed to hire any people you please to solve your problems. Some people favor an alternative to the free market in which you can only hire parties that have received preapproval from political bodies, as is the case with the ISP business.

It might be a good compromise for the government to let people hire any party they like, but publish a list of parties that would qualify for preapproval if preapproval were required. Then people could hire whomever they please, or limit their selections to only parties that have received government endorsement. People could even try both approaches and see which way works better.