And each time it was clearly the wrong one.

Alien Earth was pretty good. I enjoyed it and thought it was as good of an Alien story as we've gotten since 1996. The reviews were quite strong between Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB.. Like all series, not every minute is perfect, but on balance it was very good IMO. It wasn't for you?...kewl...watch whatever you like. However, you just sound like a raging dick devoting a half sentence to shitting on popular works. If you want to criticize it, put some fucking effort into explaining your opinion so we can discuss like adults, otherwise, fuck off.

Taxes do not depress the economy. They only are an issue when you have a kekistocracy like we do right now so that a massively disproportionate amount of the value of your taxpayer dollars is going to a handful of psychopathic billionaire Epstein Island attendees.

But otherwise no that's not how that works. You still need roads and schools and police and fire departments and you need regulations to make sure that the shit people sell you is safe because it won't be if they don't face consequences for selling you unsafe shit and you need research done that takes decades to pay off that no large corporation is going to pay for.

You also need social systems that prevent people who are unfit for work from becoming desperate and violent.

And finally you're stuck with the government whether you like it or not because if you don't create one and fund it then the billionaires will making you pay for it and then they'll take everything from you which is what they're in the process of doing right now. I mean for fuck sakes just go look into how SpaceX is basically a scam to steal all of our retirement savings...

You are thinking and acting like a 12-year-old and it needs to stop. If you're on this site you're smarter than that. You need to stop indulging yourself.

You would have a point. But they are so you don't. They will rule that the Federal regulations override state making it all legal and then we're just stuck with legalized gambling everywhere because we elected a corrupt asshole multiple times for some god-awful reason and they kept getting supreme Court Justice seats.

This last time we fucked up so bad I don't think there's any coming back from it. I'm happy to be proven wrong but the shit's about to hit the fan in so many ways and there's fuck all we can do about it. It's not like I can wave a magic wand and give everybody in the country a hundred IQ points.

Maybe even 2 years. I mean if you're in the Grand theft Auto then yeah that's fine but everybody who isn't this game is going to choke the life out of the industry. I think it's budget is over 2 billion. I don't even know what the hell you do with that. But whatever the case it means that for at least the next year or so it's going to be basically impossible to get anyone to play anything else in the larger game industry. The same thing happened when Skyrim really took off. There was a period of time where it kind of just choked the life out of the industry but that one was only about three or four months.

You're not correct. Natural sugar is healthy and most artificial sweeteners are neutral, not problematic. Aspartame is LITERALLY the most studied molecule in history (quoting Peter Attia). They've been thinking it caused all sorts of shit since the early 80s. No one can prove it. There are theories abound, but no one could conclusively prove it. Should you drink it?...eh, not really. It's better than cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup, but it's obviously better to drink a glass of water over a diet coke. However, nearly EVERY FUCKING human being on the planet has consumed it...if it caused cancer or some health condition, we would have a lot more information about it. Why? Because cancer response varies by genetics...some are just cursed and more likely to develop a tumor than others. Some can smoke a pack a day until they're 90 and never get cancer, but others get it after a few years of minor second-hand smoke exposure. The same can be assumed for all problematic molecules...that a tiny portion would be unusually sensitive and give leads to the mechanisms by which it harms us.

Your general point is correct to avoid sweets, but sometimes you just can't. It's like everything else you "should" do. You should get 8+h of sleep, drink 3L of water, have consistent bedtimes, get 1h of exercise, etc....however, life sucks and that's not possible for most Americans or really anyone...some nights we go to bed late and rely on coffee the next morning. Some days, I miss workouts and I am way better than most. It is natural, normal, and healthy to want sugary foods...you just need to dose it correctly.

Yes fresh fruit is superior to a cookie, but it's not shelf stable. Really, most sugar in the modern American diet consumed outside of sweets (like salad dressing or sauces) is not to cover up inferior ingredients, but either to make it taste good or as a preservative. No one really has the time to make homemade salad dressing, so we do need processed food and sugar is superior to nitrates....and preservatives are superior to bacterial contamination or the ingredients breaking down into toxic byproducts because you ate it a few weeks after you were supposed to.

Look...if you have the willpower to never consume sweets?...good for you...it probably is slightly positive, but doesn't really matter much. Most people get a LOT more fat off starches than sweets. Most are like me...give me a cookie and I'm done...eating too much sweets makes me nauseous. I can eat bread until I fall asleep...hence why I don't ever eat it. But if you're eating sweets, yeah...artificial sweetener is typically better than real sugar

Remember, 2 of the healthiest foods you can eat require sweeteners to be edible: Greek Yogurt and Whey Protein Powder. It's obviously better to have yogurt with sweetener than sugar, unless you're one of those lucky individuals who is effortlessly skinny no matter what they eat.

My body doesn't produce fructose, but you can't deny our natural desire to eat fresh fruit. What is the relevance to his response? If it's mindless, you did a poor job making the case.

Look...I'm getting old...I've heard this story a dozen times...something unexpected is associated with bad health or good health...and in each case, there was an obvious socioeconomic indicator. If you're consuming sugar free food, you probably have a weight problem or are worried about your health. There was a recent article about ambient noise causing bad health outcomes...yeah...people that live in crowded urban areas are typically poorer and more stressed out than suburbanites and the 1% retreat to secluded estates. The same with air pollution (unless you're talking about lung issues specifically)...I'll wager chronic health issues are occurring more due to the stress and poverty associated with living in polluted areas. People that have their shit together move away from major freeways and railroads once they get the money. 30 years ago, it was fucking wine....because in the USA, the poor don't drink wine as much as the wealthy and educated. My dad, a non-drinker, even started having a half glass every night, hoping to increase his heart health.

Xylitol is a shitty sweetener...it poisons your dog and definitely has GI side effects. I honestly don't know why food producers use it. It can't be that much cheaper than the more established products. I guess because it has a similar volume and texture? However, I would be very surprised if it actually contributed to strokes and heart attacks vs people who were in bad health were taking steps to consume more sugar free products.

Donald Trump famously said: “I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke” on October 14, 2012 (despite the fact he famously drinks a ton now). Similarly...seems like all those people on chemotherapy keep getting cancer!!!! And now the latest version....xylitol consumer have bad health outcomes?!?!

Agreed. Are these people having these health effects because of xylitol?...a substance I extremely dislike as a dog owner (it's very poisonous to them) and that it's an inferior artificial sweetener...or is that they already had health complications and thus are trying to control their sugar intake.

20 years ago, there were constant articles trying to link tooth decay to heart disease because they were associated with each other...hoping they'd discover that the bacteria in your teeth was a noticeable cause of heart disease and thus a potential route for a treatment...and all the research concluded was that people who skip dentists appointments probably don't take the best care of their heart either.

For billionaires. Meanwhile you and I got about 25 bucks a month but thanks to Trump's tax cuts for billionaires and the big beautiful bill for billionaires he has raised the national debt by 25%. Think about that a quarter of the debt is because of trump.

We elected the king of debt to be president because he promised to reduce that and we elected a billionaire rapist pedophile because he promised to protect us.

Honestly at this point if I wasn't being dragged down with the rest of them I would be happy to see these fuckers who voted for Trump get what they deserve. The better half of me knows that stupid people don't deserve to be taken advantage of but fucking Christ there should be limits to stupid. Like some practical limit to how stupid you are.

Not that I'm terribly fond of China what would it be a dictatorship and all but it is annoying how the Epstein class is busy trying to make me angry at them for no particularly good reason. They're all good reasons to be upset with the Chinese government what would the human rights violations and all but now this is bullshit.

Yeah but Federal regulations override state regulations. Supremacy clause which is what they're relying on. They have control of the supreme Court thanks to decades of bribes and so here we are..

Even if you're not stupid enough to gamble because you know you have to lose because of course you do you're going to be negatively affected by this because tens of millions of young men will gamble with money they don't have to lose and that will increase crime and cause a ton of other problems.

This is a classic chesterton's fence where you don't take the fence down without understanding why the fuck it was put up. Gambling is highly addictive so it needs to be carefully regulated. Criminalizing it isn't a good idea either keeping it locked away to one state and then heavily regulating it in that state more or less seem to be working. And we just pissed that all away.

Six of nine judges are completely on the take. Google the phrase luxury motor Coach sometime.

It should be a bigger deal that the Chief Justice of the supreme Court is a corrupt sellout but well here we are. Half the country is quaking in their boots because 34 trans girls might play sports and one of the most powerful men on the planet is openly taking bribes and they shrug their shoulders.

I don't know how a species like that survives the next 50 years let alone the next millennia.

The datacenters don't care as much. We need Nvidia to remember which customers made them what they are now, and sell some damn RTX's at a reasonable damn price. In 2020, they released GPUs altered to suck at crypto mining so that there would be some supply for everyone else. I'd like them to think about that again.

But they don't make memory, and that's the real killer right now. And the datacenters have already bought it all.

I have a suspicion that this is an ill-conceived response to China's Mercantilist approach. At least on the surface, it looks to be working for them, so we should do it to? Right?

Well, no. We got where we are by not doing it that way. Plus, our political system doesn't work with it.

This is not a GOP thing, it's a Trump populist thing. The party is not pleased. There are a lot of members in Congress that are screaming at him every day. I also think it's a mistake. I was fine with it when it was a negotiation tactic for updating some realtionships, but he's gone too far with it. There's one nation we need tariffs against, and it's China. The Canadian tariffs, for example, are just plain dumb as far as I can tell. I don't understand why he's doing that, especially given that he already redid NAFTA.

My best guess there is that he saw how Canada did have a number of tariffs in place and didn't like it. But! They were volume-gated well above the trade we actually do, so they've only ever kicked in once. It's like he missed how those were basically for show so Canadian politicians could say they were protecting their industries without actually doing anything.

Conversely, 100% of US debt is the result of spending too much. Congress can fix that but doesn't seem to have the stones to do it.