thank you for providing the clarification that I was too lazy to spend 30 seconds googling =)

An interesting read, but the authors' main argument is that, because we ingest lots of nitrates/nitrites in fruits and vegetables and there are health benefits in that context, nitrate additives should be less regulated and even considered as required nutritional intake. They imply that all nitrates consumed are equivalent, but other research does not support it. Much like fructose in fruit has significantly different response than fructose delivered in other ways, nitrate additives are different from naturally-occurring nitrates in fruits and vegetables. Oh, and the authors have financial interest in a company selling nitrate supplements, which was slapped by the FDA for making exaggerated and baseless claims of health benefits based on that paper.

That said, nitrates was probably the wrong example. A high bacon diet will kill you from heart disease before you have to worry about nitrates. Let's use the "cars" example instead. The negative mental health effects of social media are roughly as well established now as the effects of leaded gasoline were when it was banned. We now know that it was even worse than anyone suspected. I don't think "doomscrolling" per se has been isolated as problematic, but it is certainly at least related to intentionally-addictive designs that *are* causatively linked to negative mental health effects.

It needs to be made a national holiday. Just making it Saturday benefits nine-to-fivers over lower-income voters who are more likely to be working Saturdays due to multiple jobs or customer-service oriented jobs.

As for mandatory voting, I fail to see how getting more uneducated voters into voting boxes helps anything. Not uneducated in terms of schooling, but uneducated about what they're actually voting on. Anyone who is only voting because they are forced to is not going to spend the time to learn about the issues; they'll vote for the guy who bought the most billboards.

Doomscrolling is one of the most harmful part of most social media. Just like excessive nitrates are one of the most harmful parts of bacon. Why is reducing or eliminating the bad parts of something while leaving the good parts intact such a bad idea?

The point is that these researchers were lured partly because of Canadian government funding allocated specifically for this purpose. Lots of positions are open to foreign applicants who aren't necessarily recruited. And universities, labs, and private industry will always try to lure in rockstars. But the US federal government has never (to my knowledge) encouraged or financially supported such recruitment. I'm sure the overall numbers involved are a rounding error in the total inter-country hiring. What's significant is that Canada is choosing to invest in its scientific future, while the US is actively discouraging it.

When I look at prospective hires coming out of undergrad (usually interns, because we do real science and just about everyone has a PhD), I have learned over many, many years now that the "education" part of the university doesn't matter. I don't care what classes you took, I don't care about your GPA, I don't care if you started out a community college. By far the biggest factor that determines success for our post-bach hires whether they spent time *doing* rather than *learning*. Working in a research professor's lab, summer internships, whatever. An hour in the lab is worth 100 hours in the classroom. Just like how comp sci grads straight out of uni are often worthless compared to the kid who has some interesting shit they hacked together in their personal github. University is not about classes.

Indeed, there's a reason our space program floundered until we filled it with ex-Nazi scientists.

Damn right, that privilege should rest solely on people with slashdot accounts.

That was obvious when they got behind person who managed to bankrupt a casino.

Except that your vote only counts if you live in a purple county in a purple state (or one of the tiny handful that split electors). Your vote almost always matters in local elections, often in state, and maybe Congress (though politicians on both sides are gerrymandering things to prevent that), but the fraction of eligible voters in the US whose vote can possibly affect the outcome of a presidential election is far lower than 64%. US voters are responsible for Trump, not because of one election, but because so many wholeheartedly embraced us-vs-them identity politics, and continued electing the same trash bags year after year, slowly degrading our republic to the point where fascist takeover is possible and possibly inevitable. I'd rather have people refuse to vote because they recognize their vote doesn't matter than go vote based on nothing but ignorance and wanting to own the other side.

You know how around election time yards and public spaces fill up with posters that say nothing but a candidate's name? No policy, often not even a gimmicky slogan? Sometimes not even what party they're with? That works because people go vote and recognize that name, and that's good enough for them. If people could be bothered to educate themselves about elections we could be in such a better place.

Ah yes, because spending time interacting with software that is designed to make money by providing an enjoyable experience thereby encouraging purchase (i.e., video games) is completely equivalent to spending time engaging with software that is specifically designed to be addictive (i.e., modern social media). Let's ignore the overwhelming body of evidence that have consistently failed to find any link between violent/criminal behavior in video games to increases in those behaviors in real life. Contrast that with rapidly growing evidence that social media use has a direct causative increase in depression and other mental health disorders.

Your comment makes about as much sense as asking "why bother restricting smoking for kids when they still have access to ice cream?"

Consider a completely fantastic scenario in which all private companies are so honest and return illegally-collected tariff funds to their customers. Then the "tariff tax" never happened, right? Except millions of dollars have already vanished into the ether, because

• the government has to pay people to translate incoherent tweets into enforceable language
• the government has to pay people to enforce those new rules
• companies had to pay lawyers to figure out exactly what products are subject to tariff on any given week
• companies had to pay accountants to re-evaluate their capital expenses every time the lawyers see a new relevant tariff
• companies have to pay someone to track which products had tariff-based markups to later give refunds. And in most cases a given product was subject to several different tariffs that affect the total price in different ways
• ACLU or someone has to pay lawyers to sue to stop illegal tariffs
• companies have to pay someone to fill out the paperwork to apply for reimbursement from the government
• the government has to pay people to process applications and issue refunds
• companies have to pay someone to pass those refunds back to the customers

Sure, the wasted money went into people's paychecks, but those people could have been doing something productive instead of laboring in circles just to get back to square zero. If Panic refunded the full 19% tariff value, then they had to eat all of those other costs. Plus things like credit card fees; Visa and Mastercard aren't going to give anyone back the 2% transaction fees on tariff costs, and wouldn't be able to even if they were so inclined.

Everyone is always amazed when I casually bust out the "twist for camera" or "tap for flashlight" features. I wonder if Moto has somehow copyrighted or trademarked it, because otherwise it makes no sense that Google hasn't copied them into base Android by now.

Except that Motorola sells a huge range of phones with costs varying by more than a factor of 5, all with identical Android images and unlocked. The only difference is the hardware specs. The only possible way these phones are subsidized in a way the flagships aren't is if Motorola thinks of the entry-levels as a way to get customers "hooked" on the brand and start paying for the more expensive (and presumably higher-margin) flagships.

Why TF should I need a subscription to run a local-only model?