Business exec A: "We're using cheaper components and they're causing our machines to fail prematurely. Moreover, they can't be easily repaired. Should we go back to the previous component suppliers?"
Business exec B: "That's impossible. We'd be making less profit."
Business exec A: "But our customers will be unhappy."
Business exec B: "Just tell them that it's because we need to meet Energy Star requirements."
Business exec A: "They can't possibly be that stupid."

A bit later...

You:

Assuming the kinds of trips are similar, trips per hour would be worse for Waymo. They drive much less aggressively than your typical taxi driver.

Your argument basically reads like "This is a 2-ton pile of rocks because this pebble I put on it. It wouldn't be 2 tons without the pebble!"

People will wise up once enough unvaxxed kids die from disease.

If they don't, then natural selection will take care of them. You can only realistically be antivax if you're already vaccinated or are living in a society with herd immunity.

500 miles at 70 mph is ~7 hours. Add a bit for traffic and low speed roads. That leaves 14 - 8 = 6 hours to load / unload twice, so each operation has 1.5 hours.

I have no idea how busy the loading docks are in Texas. It seems possible to go over but should not be very common.

That said, if the driver only needs to stay around the source or destination to handle loading and unloading, then that's still a lot of money saved. Instead of spending a whole day driving they could dock a single truck in 5 minutes, spend 10 minutes driving to the next destination, then repeat. Each driver could handle twenty or thirty trucks per day.

Did all those studies come before or after glyphosate use was approved?

That's not going to be the case for a very long time in the US. There's simply too much land and not enough electrical infrastructure. Right now for every EV charging station, you can find 5 gas stations. It'll be decades before the ratio reverses, and many decades before you'll have trouble finding a gas station. It's really out in the middle of nowhere that you'll have trouble in the first place and most people driving out there are going to be using a gasoline car.

Even politically, there's not much chance of the government forcing EV adoption. The California ban is way too far into the future for people to care about. I think the government was hoping by 2035, EVs would be so dominant that the ban wouldn't matter, or maybe they'll just quietly roll it back. If they bring a vote on a proposition for a closer date, it would almost certainly be voted down.

Non-GMO businesses don't stand to gain anything from the government not doing its job. If I were a lettuce grower, I'd want the government to do its inspections correctly and prevent e.g. a salmonella outbreak turning customers away from lettuce.

Meanwhile, if I ran a company that did GMO research, then the government is the difference between making zero money and making hundreds of millions. Paying off a few people to the tune of a few million each would be well worth the cost.

It should be. However, you first have to trust the government organizations responsible for vetting it. I think it's pretty clear at this point that a lot of people have been bought off by various business interests and care more about lining their own pockets rather than public health.

Those 2000 warheads are the ones deployed via ICBMs or SLBMs. I'm not counting the bomber-delivered ones.

The "shorter range" SLBMs have a range of 8000 to 10000 km, enough to reach LA or Miami from the Barents Sea.

Everything you said applies to professional services and IT too. If you want to count the secondary effects, let's say 3x the primary revenue, then it'd be $44 billion vs $2200 billion in professional services or $1900 billion in IT.

You're still missing 2 orders of magnitude before you can claim "We are only the 4th largest economy because of transshipping China's product to the rest of the US."

You're off by 2 orders of magnitude.

Revenue from all shipping in California is $11 billion. Professional and business services make up $550 billion. IT is $475 billion. Real estate $450 billion.

There's about 2000 deployed warheads as of 2022 according to this paper. I'd say losing the top 2000 US cities would make the US a non-factor in geopolitics going forward. Heck, even losing the top 100 would do it.

I would imagine a careful reading of the documentation a face-to-face consult and perhaps even a written contract would be required before sharing HIPAA-controlled information with any 3rd party. And then there should be frequent follow-on audits to ensure the 3rd party doesn't accidentally start sharing.

That's a false equivalence.

While I disagree with anyone encouraging platforms to silence "hate speech", however defined, the actions of the two administrations are very different. There are no material harms to a platform if they continue to allow "hate speech". Indeed, many ignored the encouragement and suffered no ill consequences. Moreover, the platform get to decide what is and isn't "hate speech". I don't even recall any guidelines published by the administration.

With the Trump Administration, they've already decided what they don't like and they are threatening to cause material harm to a specific platform for allowing that speech.