Fair point, so I'll re-phrase my question: "why did we bury our heads in the sand and refuse to hold both corporations and ourselves accountable".

We were still always going to end up with AGW - but we could have been working on mitigation and reduction strategies for at least five decades which we mostly lost, partly to our own heads-in-the-sand behaviour and largely to corporate sand-bagging.

BTW, I still think "durr it's mostly them corporations fault!" We could have had comfortable, happy, modern existences without a lot of the environmentally costly - and unhealthy - excesses which we were seduced and coerced into in the name of obscene profit and corporate hegemony.

Briefs are the first article of clothing I put on in the morning. Fortunately, my briefs aren't full of shit. Too bad the same can't be said of Meta's briefs - or of Meta itself, for that matter...

Why have we continued to feed all the "random companies" that got us into this mess in the first place? For example, the oil companies knew in the 50's that we would end up where we are now, and created models in the 60's that were still usably accurate into the twenty-teens. They gaslit the world - appropriate pun intended - and they continue to do so. But we still keep buying from them and they are still incredibly rich.

The weaknesses of corporatism are never examined too seriously by the people whose beyond-comfortable lifestyles that corporatism enables.

But, you eventually will. Trust me, you will. Time catches up to all.

Best option is to write them down and put them in a bank vault, or similarly secure location. And include the bank identity in your will, which you entrust to a respected legal firm. Make sure that the bank knows what to do with the contents of the safe deposit box if they go belly-up.

I'd say that Windows has largely evolved into a service, not a product. It seems the end game is for Windows to be mere terminal software which won't allow your computer to do much of anything if it's not connected to MS servers. Everything old is new again...

Microsoft keeps providing less and less satisfaction to its users. Soon it will provide nothing that pleases them, so I think its CEO should be renamed Satya el Nada. That's only a one-letter difference in total, but it's so much more fittingly descriptive.

Don't forget that refresher on prefrontal lobotomy via the nostril. Oh, wait - I guess someone with the handle "SnotMelon" wouldn't miss that old gem... ;-0

Of course you're right - what was I thinking? But at least when we were kids, the barrier between the plebeians and the ruling class was thinner and more permeable. Also, middle-class education was a lot closer in quality and content to upper class education, the primary difference being in degree and type of indoctrination.

Whispered in a Catholic church, perhaps? ;-)

To American oligarchs the kids' ability to do math is undesirable, because that ability would give them a) an appreciation of how badly they're being screwed over and b) the beginning of the means to do something about it.

IMO anyone who thinks that the dumbing down of society and the sabotaging of education aren't part of a plan, simply hasn't been paying attention. Or they've already fallen for the propaganda coming from the would-be architects of neo-feudalism...

I'm not suspicious. I recommend reading books by Robert Lustig, Gary Taubes, and Chris van Tulleken. Note that I'm not advocating just accepting everything they say - some of it is controversial for good reasons, and some of it is probably just wrong. But for me there's more than enough logic and sense in them to result in some pretty compelling suggestions for causal mechanisms.

Not really - especially the "high caloric" content. The bomb calorimeter - with its suggestion that all calories are equivalent - has caused untold harm because it's overly simplistic to the point of being fundamentally wrong. For example, I can consume a stupidly high number of calories per day from fat; but if I get enough-but-not-too-much protein and a very limited amount of carbs, I will lose weight and be in good health. Many people on such diets have actually reversed arteriosclerosis; the calcium portion of the arterial plaques always remains, but the pus-filled blood-clot sacs shrink and disappear, and the likelihood of heart attack and stroke is drastically reduced.

I totally get where you're coming from, and I support your skepticism. But if this is something you care about, I recommend a dive - both wide and deep - into the available evidence and theories. I think you'll be surprised at the complexity.

For example, let's look at your last question. One of the things that ultra-processing destroys is an almost-mechanical property that changes both the rate of absorption and the total amount absorbed. For obvious reasons, this alone can make the difference between being good for us and being bad. Apples are good - apple sauce - sweetened or not - is NOT so good.

Also, you may see things like carageenan, lecithin, carob bean gum, guar gum, and a multitude of other emulsifiers and smootheners. Many of these are entirely natural and exist in small quantities in fresh foods. But when they're separated from their sources and added in large quantities to things like chocolate milk - to give them that smooth texture - they also start to emulsify the mucus lining in the gut. This disrupts the gut microbiome, and can also allow things into the bloodstream which a healthy microbiome normally guards against. That 'stuff' that doesn't belong in the bloodstream can have nasty effects, perhaps the least harmful of them being increased inflammation.

To be sure, there's a lot of nuance here. But there's increasing evidence for the contention that 'ultra-processed' - vague though it may seem at first glance - is in fact a pretty good yardstick for the healthiness, or lack thereof, of the food we eat. I think ultra-processed food is a real, serious, society-wide health threat. But please, don't take my word for it. Do some digging, and if you feel that I'm wrong, get back to me and we can discuss it some more.

PS Even the 'saturated fats' thing has a lot of subtlety. Olive oil is such a fat, but consumption of fairly large amounts of it is part of the Mediterranean diet, which doctors recommend for good reason. There's even some suggestion that beef tallow is a healthy fat. But trans-fats, or other similarly modified fats, seem to promote inflammation and contribute to arteriosclerosis. And don't get me started on the whole cholesterol subject. Some of it is good and even necessary, some of it bad, and the goodness and badness may be conditional on a bunch of factors. There's probably enough nuance there for at least one good doctoral thesis.

You had me until 'pasta'. It's almost always a highly-refined carb which will spike insulin release in a manner not that much less drastic than that associated with sugar. Even whole-grain pasta is bad in that way, because the grain is ground so fine that the fibre content does almost nothing to mediate carb absorption in the gut.

It's also important to specify WHOLE fruits and veggies - not juiced or mashed. Even the act of finely chopping these foods - especially the fruits - results in a VERY different insulin response profile. Mashing them - as in making applesauce - makes them almost equivalent to ultra-processed foods, nutritionally speaking.

Umm... because it's all they can afford? Because it's all they have access to in the 'food deserts' which they live in and don't have the means to venture out of? Because they're addicted to it? Because they don't know better? Because advertising - aka brainwashing - actually works?

Take your pick - any or all of the above, plus probably more that I didn't think of.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that there's some programming equivalent to a dead-man switch that disables vehicles - and perhaps other electronic devices - if they haven't successfully 'phoned home' within a programmed time.

After all, if you're going to the trouble of designing and installing remote-kill capabilities - for all kinds of possible motives - it would be very short-sighted to NOT disable the equipment if it fails to contact the mothership within a specified period. The tricky part is making it look like a mundane failure rather than a 'Trojan horseless', so to speak...

It isn't even desirable - never mind necessary - to worry about China's reputation when we have "unreliable numbers" much closer to home.