I can see the next ad:

A creepy dude holds up a blurry smartphone photo that was obviously taken from a long distance and says, "Hey, Los Angeles. I can't find my 'girlfriend'. I haven't seen her in a few hours, and she isn't taking my calls. I don't know what name she is going by now, but if you see her, please call me at 555-555-5555. I'm really worried about her."

Alternative version: He isn't creepy, but instead is wearing a vest with lots of pouches and is carrying a camera with a long lens. He holds up a headshot of a famous celebrity.

Alternative version: He is holding a lollipop and is holding up a photo of a young girl or boy.

There are really d**n good reasons to not put that level of widespread access to cameras in the hands of the general public, so if they're seriously thinking about doing this, they had better have really, really, *really* good vetting for requests, starting with multiple people who know the requestor personally having to attest to the validity of the request, coupled with a public records search for restraining orders, etc.

4.47 million people turn 16 every year in the U.S., so that's 372,000 per month.

Subtract the 4.2 million who retired in 2025, and if you ignore immigration, the U.S. would need to add only 270,000 jobs per year, or about 22,000 jobs per month.

1.3 million people came to the U.S. in 2025. That's an additional 108,000 per month.

So in total, that's only 130,000 per month by my math. Your numbers seem high to me — perhaps based on immigration numbers in prior administrations, when people weren't scared to come here?

Insurance is hard, because every state has different insurance companies with different plans and prices, and different age groups have different prices. Unless I can find a website that has compiled averages for multiple years, there's just no good way to get these numbers. And the ACA didn't exist before 2014, which makes it even more impractical, and the comparisons even less useful (because the market changed so much).

So I'll do 2015 to 2025 instead.

Silver plan for 25-year-old in California: $255 to 280 / 377.46 to 414.47 / 470 to 606 (higher than predicted)

Way higher, but I'm not going to try to do the math for the same reason as above. Fortunately, someone else already did.

Home phone prices are pretty much impossible to make sense of. Bills have skyrocketed over the last couple of decades, but that's because almost everybody dropped service and moved to VoIP, so now the phone companies have fewer people paying for the same amount of maintenance. Around here, a usable home phone service from the phone company is probably $65 per month.

Meanwhile, I'm paying somewhere around ten for VoIP because at some point I decided that paying $50+ for something that I barely use was ridiculous. VoIP prices haven't moved up much in the decade or so that I've been using it, so way less than inflation. And a lot of people get bundled voice service from their cable company or ISP now. And a lot of people no longer even get home phone service.

Internet service has grown atless than 2% most years.

Average cell phone price (JD Power): $71 / $128 / $141 (faster)

But that's not the whole picture. The average grew faster than inflation, but a lot of folks have added extra lines for smart watches. And in 2010, only about a third of people owned smartphones. Today, it's 98%. So nearly everyone has plans with data now, while the basic phone plans from 2010 did not provide data. And a lot of folks do more of their Internet use on phones, which means the amount of data that the average person uses is much, much higher, which drives up the cost of providing the service.

I suspect if you looked at an equivalent plan in both years, it probably grew at or below 4% annually. Or at least mine did. Even factoring in adding my Apple Watch, it barely grew faster than 4%, because I had a smartphone plan in 2010. If I still had only the cell phone, it would have been *way* less than 4% annually.

This is hopelessly regional. Some people use way more power than they did in 2010 because of higher heating and cooling consumption. Some use less for the same reason. And I can't find numbers for 2025 that are national. The best I can find is the projected numbers from late 2024 based on expected price increases. But if we believe those numbers:

That said, annual average for the U.S. based on projected numbers for 2025 from late 2024: $1419 / 2,554 / 1,902 (way less than expected)

$2.83 / $5.09 / $3.10 (way less than expected)

Food in general has been on the high side of inflation, I think, but still isn't usually all that much above the average.

cost of media (netflix was enough, not it's not and it went up in price too)

Netflix: $9.99 / $17.98 / $17.99 (exactly the same as inflation to within a reasonable margin of error)

The decision to use multiple providers is yours. You could dump one and switch to another every month if you want to save money.

That's not generally considered part of inflation. It's also extremely regional, and highly variable depending on how much you earn, how much you donate, etc. And computing an average cost for sales tax, property tax, federal and state income tax, Medicare and Social Security tax, tariffs, and all the other taxes that we pay directly or indirectly would be very nearly impossible even if I were the president of the United States and had access to raw IRS and import duty data.

But remember that you can influence this with your vote.

That is unrelated to inflation. But I'll try anyway. Data for 2025 isn't out yet, so I'll use 2024.

Median U.S. household income: $49,445 / $85,622 / $83,730 (only slightly less than expected)

I'm not fully up on the research, but my understanding is that the cancerous behavior is believed to be caused by viral DNA ending up in cells. And yeah, that's a plausible explanation, up to a point.

But in a healthy individual, viruses wreck the DNA of cells all the time, and the cells just kill themselves and/or are killed by the immune system. When those cells turn into cancer, it means something went very, very wrong. So the way I see it, there are two possibilities:

If the failure of cell death is being purely caused by some quirk of HPV itself, then yeah, vaccinating would reduce the rate of cancer proportional to the reduction in infection.

If, on the other hand, there is a pre-existing immune issue or genetic issue in those particular people that makes those cells fail to apoptose after infection, then there's a possibility that if HPV didn't turn those cell clusters into cancer, some other DNA virus would instead, e.g. an adenovirus or herpes virus, and that the correlation with HPV is high only because of a higher rate of HPV getting their first for whatever biological or sociological reason. In that case, the reduction in cancer could be much less than expected, or you could just end up with a different kind of cancer, possibly at a different time.

Like I said, I'm reasonably certain that it's a good idea, given the data, but I'll be a lot more certain in about ten to fifteen years.

Not in meaningful numbers. There are standards for what constitutes a primary cause of death and a contributing cause of death in the U.S. No one would list COVID as a primary cause of death for a gunshot wound.

That's a load of crap. It was well documented that high levels of contagiousness began about one day prior to onset of symptoms. There were asymptomatic carriers in large numbers — specifically, everyone who got COVID was, at one point in time, an asymptomatic carrier.

I knew MULTIPLE previously healthy people who died from COVID. They got sick with COVID, they got worse, they went the hospital, they were put on a ventilator and they fucking died. Don't give me that horseshit about it being a fucking cold. You can take that steaming pile of anti-vaxx nutter bullshit and shove it so far up your ass that it hits your fucking tonsils.

Excuse my language, but I've had it up to here with people who do incredible mental gymnastics to convince themselves that objective reality doesn't exist. Colds don't kill otherwise healthy people. COVID did. Frequently. And your outrageously statistically bullshit claims defile the memories of everyone who died from this disease.

Average? Yeah, probably.

Description: 2010 / projected 2025 at 4% per year / actual 2025):

• New house: 221,900 / 399,621 / 498,000 (higher)
• Median rent: 1,083 / 1950 / 1703 (lower)
• New car: 24,296 / 43,755 / 50,326 (higher)
• Base iPhone model: 599 / 1078 / 799 (lower)
• Gallon of milk: 3.25 / 5.85 / 4.42 (lower)

So a few things that people buy infrequently went up way faster than inflation, while things that you buy far more often tended to go up way more slowly than inflation.

Not necessarily. Many of those 85k jobs were likely replacing people who left, and thus presumably would not have counted in the 181,000 figure.

More than that:

• The interaction with their third parties may not be secure.
• To the extent that this even temporarily gives Discord any access to your identity, nothing prevents them from retaining it accidentally or intentionally in logs.
• Nothing prevents the third party verifiers from retaining it accidentally or intentionally in logs.
• Nothing prevents abusive governments from later mandating that, because Discord has the technical ability to know who the user is, they required to retain that information for future subpoena compliance, and are prohibited from disclosing that fact.

That last one is a big gotcha. Right now, Discord can honestly say that they have no way to know who these people are. As soon as they take one step down that slippery slope so that they know who the user is temporarily, they can be compelled to know who the user is permanently, and to share that information with any government who demands it under a subpoena. And at that point, the relative anonymity provided by Discord breaks down catastrophically.

In other words, no matter how you do identity verification, if it occurs at the communications platform level, you're taking a huge wrecking ball to user privacy.

There is only one way to do this correctly, and that is for the browser to manage identity verification in a manner that ensures both that it is not possible for the platform to know who is certifying the user's age and that it is not possible for the certifying agency to know what site is requesting the user's age. Anything short of that is all but guaranteed to be a privacy-destroying nightmare. And the source code for that browser must be published (open source) so that security researchers can examine it for vulnerabilities and design flaws.

Further, the browser must provide local per-user caching, and must use a central server to aggregate and retransmit requests with significant timing randomization to confound attempts by malicious conspiracy between the verifier and the site to uncover the identity of users of the site.

For an example of what a proper system must guarantee, imagine that the government of Iran decides to operate a honeypot dissident chat room site and executes anyone who visits it. Design your system to ensure that they cannot determine the identity of site visitors despite fully controlling both sites.

That is the proper level of paranoia when it comes to security and privacy.

HPV is kind of the long tail in terms of vaccine usefulness, IMO. The theory is that because HPV is detected in some cancers, preventing HPV will reduce the risk of those cancers. But the reality is that the vaccine hasn't been around long enough for the first women who got it to be in the sweet spot for getting cervical cancer, so all the data is based on a 90% reduction in the rate of rare early cervical cancer cases. That could only be a 1% reduction in total cases, for all we know. Or it could just be a delay in cases.

So I can at least maybe understand folks who say that it isn't a necessary vaccine. Any benefits would come decades later, and the full statistical extent of the benefits is still unknown.

And at some point, every virus can cause cancer. Yet vaccinating against every virus has the potential to make your immune system misbehave and miss novel viruses, which could be bad. So the farther out in that tail you get, the less sense it makes to vaccinate.

That said, the tail is fat enough at that point to probably be worth vaccinating, IMO.

The case fatality rate of COVID worldwide was about 1%. For your numbers to be correct, about half the world's population would have to be over 60. The median age worldwide is, in fact, half that.

The actual survival rate was only 99.7% in people under 29 (15x the fatality rate you claim for people under 60).

From there, it just gets more depressing:

• 99.5% in people 30 to 39 (25x your claimed numbers)
• 98.9% in people 40 to 49 (55x)
• 97% in people 50 to 59 (150x)
• 90.5% in people 60 to 69 (4.75x)
• 87.2% in people 70 to 79 (11.4x)
• 70.4% in people 80 and older (14.8x)

Source: JAMDA

Your numbers are lies, and you should be ashamed of yourself for repeating them.

Evidence of funding for the ballroom.

The millions of people worldwide named Jesús would disagree, I think?

It means more people are less employed. If you could get 80% of your wages (with full benefits) to work four days per week, would you? A lot of us would, without a moment's hesitation. And even if only one in five people did it (and thus added about 5% to the number of people employed), that would still be enough to completely wipe out tech unemployment.

Teacher salaries are poverty wages. Always have been.

$70k is literally slightly higher than the starting salary for a new public school teacher in NYC per student. It would literally be as cheap, assuming adequate supply of educators, to hire a private teacher for your child. And if you have more than one child, it would be massively cheaper.

The U.S. average tuition for private schools is just $13,000. Even in a high-cost-of-living area like NYC, IMO, $70k per student cannot possibly be justifiable unless a large portion of that money is being used to subsidize a high percentage of scholarship kids or something.

So unless either A. 50% of the students are on scholarship or B. this is an unsustainably small school that averages barely over one student per subject per grade, there's just no way that those sorts of numbers make sense, and if I were a parent of one of the students, I'd be pressuring the IRS to demand that an auditor look over their books to explain where all that money is going.

Julius Caesar and Marcus Junius Brutus sat alone in their private sleeper. They had just gotten back from a forum in the lounge car when the train came to an unexpected stop. That's when Brutus unsheathed his sword.

Et tu, Brute!?! Caesar shouted as...