that's before you even look at medically-related and late age cognitive decline, but unfortunately there are massive socio-economic effects that work against this
More than socio-economic, the chief factor that advances US political candidates is, simply, fame. These days fame is achieved by somehow becoming an outlier: loud extremism, incessant self promotion, and spending truly insane amounts of money. Intelligence of any kind is irrelevant.
Yeah. The right hasn't been able to repeat Trump, other candidates following his playbook have usually failed. And I think it's because they don't have his three-plus decades of lowest common denominator fame and enough money to buy himself out of repeated business failure and corruption. It's a perfect storm.
Well, after reading thru the comments I am clearly not the target audience. It was fun while it lasted. Anyone know how I can delete my account? I need to add it to all the other accounts that I have deleted.
Good luck to you all. I thought this was a tech news site but apparently most people here seem to be actively working in the investigation process.
I don't know WTF has gotten in to everyone but I don't want any part of it anymore.
Like, for real, let me know if there is a way to delete my account.
Usually they don't delete content, but if there's personally identifiable information in your username or any of your post I think it might be possible to have them rewrite it.
Agree fully. While the US never been 100% trustworthy, the election of Donald Trump, the handling of the pandemic, the handling of the 737 Max fiasco and the handling of this years election are very embarrassing and has made the trust hit rock bottom for the nation.
I think I despise marketing. For one marketers and spam calls have basically made me put my phone in airplane mode permantely, only allowing people in my contacts to get thru. I am getting close to the point of getting rid of my cell phone.
If I get unsolicited emails I set up a rule to send them straight to the trash can.
Mostly I am getting tired of every single interaction with a person or technology being used or designed to extract information or money. Don't get me wrong. I am willing to buy things. I just don't want to have to spend X amount of dollars for the rest of my life.
Spam never seems to lead to a legitimate businesses (having to unsubscribe from legitimate newsletters and such is annoying)
And lots of products and services seem to want to extract data and money, but that also feels like it is a result of "product" departments, not the marketing departments.
I do agree with your overall sentiment: It is really annoying to do business with lots of companies out there.
Do you have any links for the cheaper wood from SEA. I am always facinated about how things are cheaper to buy and cheap halfway around the world versus buying locally.
That works out to 2.06% a year. That's not "igniting".
I'm old enough to have seen 14% per year inflation in the 1970s, so 2% doesn't impress me as inflation igniting. More to the point... where's the inflation from QE in 2008? It, um, never really showed up. We continued creeping along at 2% a year, sometimes less. So I'd regard that as experimental refutation of the "Fed printing money, so inflation is going to ignite" thesis.
More precisely, I think the Fed printing money can ignite inflation, if they print more than the economy grows. In 2008, they didn't do that with QE. They created $4 trillion, which almost exactly offset the $4 trillion that vaporized in the crash, and the result was that we avoided another Great Depression without igniting inflation. The Covid crisis... well, it's too early to tell, but they might pull off the same feat.
2% inflation per year since 2000 is evidence of great stability, not of out-of-control Fed money printing.
It's not that much that stock market is up, it's value of dollar quietly sliding.
Stock market auto-adjusts.
Inflation is the hidden tax. Instead of loudly imposing new or higher taxes, government is quietly printing money. Same result for citizens - their buying power is less.
I too did the same! Before my son was born, I was sending him emails with snapshots of him kicking mommy's tummy :) ultrasounds.
I also sent many articles about personality development etc which I started to realize some info is too advanced and wish somehow they could be viewed at the "right" times in his life. Like he doesn't really need to know nor understand neuropsychological advances in research :) So little pondering on how to "feed" him the right info at the right time. Also extremely timely, since its email, if I miss a particularly important day sending it out, I'm late :(.
Nevertheless, if gmail holds out for the next 18yrs, it would be a killer present to have his entire life online w/ pics and at the time memories handed to him. and like other commenter suggested, may need to do a regular "takeout" for him.
Furthermore, in addition to that, I'm also trying to address the needs of our immediate family sharing his day to day fun but don't want to use the currently available privacy fiasco social media.
So I'm also in this dilemma like others howto share w/o going to FB/Twit/Insta and alike. Want something very private but easily available. And like the other commenter, I came to the conclusion of creating my own. So I'm on my way of wireframing, prototyping a PWA based service where everything is private and is fee based. Kinda like the antithesis of all social media as we currently know it. Time seems ripe to address the need for privacy....
Honestly, even if I knew of a bunch of potential markets I'm not sure I would won't you to know. Your motivation isn't that you care about a particular market or problem. It seems your just looking for the most efficient way to 10x your profit. Dispite knowing much about the people/ product/ market you may serve.
I've lost count of the things that I have used in the past that I have stopped using because the product sucks now and is of lower quality or they have blessed me with a subscription model that only cost $5 or $10 a month. Instead of sucking it up and paying for something once I have to die by a thousand cuts and pay for something the rest of my life if I want to use it. Sure it's great for the profits of that company but not for me.
So maybe that's the underserved market. A product that respects privacy and leaves you the heck alone.
Not that I am in favor of parasitic worms or anything but I would be careful to assume that erraticating helminths or any species for that matter would only be beneficial. I don't know where they fall in the food chain. Maybe they are essential for some other species to thrive that we depend on.
There are at least 300 species from multiple phyla that feed on humans. We might also consider those species that feed on our livestock, although such an action would have less ethical urgency.
It isn't impossible that other species might eat them, but given their baroque life cycles it seems quite unlikely that any other species depends on them for survival. But sure, if people decide to start with tests on isolated tropical islands, I won't argue.
Compared with the thousands of species that go extinct every year as a normal part of evolution, much less the tens or hundreds of thousands of species currently being wiped out by human activity, surely wiping out small group of species is not that big a price to pay for ridding humanity of a truly horrible affliction?
We might even one day deem essential some parasitic worm when find it's the only mitigation against another animal regarded as a pest. Actually there are many cases in the natural environment where parasites like this are the vector limiting overpopulation. So eradicating the parasite could lead to resources depletion and extinction of the host species, or make disappear other species they feed on, etc.
I genuinely don't know the answer: is there another word for this concept, where a parasite benefits the species as a whole, but not the individual? That would seem to be a form of symbiosis, not parasitism.
>> there are many cases in the natural environment where parasites like this are the vector limiting overpopulation
Can you provide a couple of examples? I'd be interested in looking into this further to see how that works. Obviously, predators are a different category, and fill an important niche in the ecosystem, but I was unaware that species classically considered "parasites" performed a similarly important role. For example, ticks on moose seem very different from wolves hunting them.
This is the link above which made me overconfident to easily find on the web many examples of such natural regulations. But I could not find a lot... what is more easy to find is mathematical studies showing the effect on populations.
Here is one study considering the potential implications of parasites eradication:
For some particular examples, the red grouse is a bird whose population follows periodic cycles, and the cause is a parasite. Removal of the parasite smoothed out the population variations. You can imagine other species (plants or animals) whose own population cycles would be adapted to the old cycles, and these species would be impacted by the smoothing out of red grouses.
More generally, when a parasitic regulation disappears, the next in line would be resources regulation, that is the species starves when the food is scarce, and thus the population plummets. That could lead to a very different population dynamics (as the red grouse example shows, but there can be situations where the graph is sharpened instead of dampened like here), and because of that one or several species can disappear.
