If you're really stuck needing to buy a drink, I've never seen a cooler at a store that didn't sell water bottles right next to the soda pop. I'm not sure what the psychological reason is, but people think they're getting a better deal spending $2 on a coke instead of $2 on water because they're getting sugar and flavor. Nobody needs that extra one or two hundred calories, and if you're thirsty, water is always going to quench the thirst. You're not paying for the contents. You're paying for the bottle, the branding, and the fact that it's refrigerated.

While not quite as energy dense, LiFePO4 (aka LFP) batteries are increasingly common, and they don't pose the same thermal runaway risk that lithium ion batteries have. It's worth looking for this type of battery in devices you're buying from now on.

It's easier to just assume you're right about everything and avoid trying to understand facts and evidence.

"Alpha is a measure of an investment's performance that indicates its ability to generate returns in excess of its benchmark." - from here. So it means your ability to beat the market by picking good stocks.

Companies that pay dividends tend to be bigger well established mature companies that have a large market share and aren't investing much in growth, which means they tend to hold value pretty well in a crash. They also tend to fare a little better in periods of high inflation, and we're going to see higher inflation for the foreseeable future. But you aren't going to average better than a 5% market return, and that requires a million dollars in assets to get that rather small $50,000 per year income.

What you're talking about is called price collusion, and while it does happen, it's also illegal and does get prosecuted (I can think of two examples in recent memory).

AI is just the scapegoat. The real reason is that tech companies used to be flooded with cheap capital, and now capital is significantly more expensive so they're strapped for cash. The old model was to grow at all costs and burn through investment money to gain market share. The new financial reality is that they have to be profitable today. You used to be able to hire a new grad with the understanding that they wouldn't be that useful in the first year or two, but you needed them to support future growth. Now you need people to be productive immediately.

Yes, in the very short term. But you're completely ignoring the competition factor. Someone else will buy an excavator and force the market price of digging lower.

Yes... but when deployed broadly across industries it also supports higher worker efficiency and productivity, which allows higher wages. And it's not like the unemployment rate went up to 30% and stayed there. A couple years ago we had record low unemployment. If all the jobs where gone due to automation, what were all those people doing working? I don't actually believe there's much behind the AI hype. We're poised for a big correction. But automation, in general, has improved worker productivity and driven wage increases. But I admit that the wages have not increased nearly as fast as worker productivity.

That shrinkage has nothing to do with computers and almost everything to do with competition for middle class jobs via globalization. If anything, computers and automation slowed the shrinkage because it helped maintain a higher worker productivity in the US than in developing nations.

People are as smart as people are. Other than significantly reducing malnutrition, nothing we've done in the past thousands of years of recorded history has actually made people significantly smarter. We need to work with what we have. And the idea that the world is going to end is simply not true. There's going to be lots of areas of the world that get poorer, and a few that actually become more habitable. Humanity will continue and keep doing what it's doing. As an individual your ability to change things are very, very limited. But you can change your own circumstance. You can adapt. Those are the people that will survive, and even thrive, in the future. Which is really no different than the past.

The administration has made it very clear that if you want to stay on their good side, all this climate action stuff has to go. And the majority voted for this administration. So this is literally what the majority of Americans want. Kind of. What they mostly want is a good job, reasonable pay, and the ability to afford a house. If you can give them that *and* stop climate change, they'd be on board.

Yes, and it's also a technology that took us from over 90% of people working on farms to about 1% of the population working on farms, not to mention powering fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars. Fossil fuels are also the input stock used to create nitrogen fertilizer, which is what made farm yields large enough to feed our population without running out of land. I agree that we need to phase out most fossil fuel use, but let's not pretend that we wouldn't lose 90% of human life on earth, including women and children, if we just stopped fossil fuel use cold turkey. Too fast is bad, and too slow is bad. There's a golden path we're trying to walk. And it's not like we're making no progress. Global spending on clean energy has quadrupled over the last 10 years. Newer and better battery technologies are being released all the time. All industrialized nations including China (but with the exception of the USA, Russia, and Saudi Arabia) have some form of federal carbon pricing.

Growing up we learned about the food pyramid, and the four food groups, and we learned that fat is very bad for you. It turns out all of that was wrong, at least partly. You can now find so much food information by so-called gurus and most of it is contradictory. Almost every source of information on food and nutrition is untrustworthy. There are just so many variables. I went down a rabbit hole trying to find out what the "most healthy dinner" would be. Like somewhere, someone must have come up with a dinner menu that's the most healthy based on our known understanding of health science. But actually no. The people who are most trustworthy realize they don't know that much and they don't make pronouncements. Everyone telling you what to eat is generally trying to sell you on some new fad diet or product.

A heart specialist told one of my relatives: "pretty much if it tastes good it's bad for you". I believe that's probably true. I do my best but I'm only human.

A fair chuck of the crypto space is "pie in the sky bullshit" with a few rare exceptions where the coin itself has been established as a critical consumable for some other service which delivers real value. But the rest? Memecoins are basically a casino with the added twist of being able to bluff other idiots into doubling down on your bet to your own benefit.

Trump Coin, on the other hand, is not a meme coin. It looks like a meme coin and you're supposed to think of it as a meme coin but it's the first kind: a coin which enables some other service that delivers real value. That value is bribing government officials.

Large purchases of Trump Coin necessarily drive the price of the coin up, allowing Trump or his chosen acolytes to sell their horded coins at a tidy profit. Everyone who holds the coins has a commonly held interest. Everyone who buys them to inflate the price and enrich the holders expects to get something for their trouble and then becomes part of the cabal of holders.

Trump Coin is basically an anti-dollar: it is backed, not by the full faith and credit of the United States but by the political corruption and dominance of the MAGA movement.