Any [emphasis added] weight loss pill

Nope. There’s one that actually works really well. It’s called 2,4-dinitrophenol. It works by fucking up the way that your body makes/uses ATP; instead of being available for cellular respiration, it gets wasted as heat. It’s like constantly doing cardio; you’re burning tons of calories without doing anything. Users have reported losing up to seven pounds of fat–not water–in a week. The downside is that this heat can lead to hyperthermia if you take too much, and since the half-life is quite long, by the time you start seeing the negative side effects from OD’ing–about a week after you OD–it’s way to late, and your brain cooks. Oh, and you’re gonna sweat like a watermelon at a Baptist barbecue the whole time.

It was thought that it also caused cataracts, but that seems to have been incorrect.

It’s been banned since the 40s, I think, as a diet pill, because people had a tendency to take too much and die. If you know where to look, you can still find it. I wouldn’t recommend it for the overwhelming majority of people though.

Yearly bug and pest deterrent spraying around exteriors of buildings

No, this actually does something.

I live in an all-wood house. (Literally a log cabin.) I’ve had issues with carpenter ants. Spraying permethrin around the house, and on their trails when I see them, has largely eliminated the issue. It’s a pretty concentrated solution, about 10:1, and has to be reapplied every few months (it does wash off, eventually), but it def. does the job.

You can get a less concentrated treatment for clothing if you’re going to be in areas with extremely high levels of mosquitos and ticks.

Any product peddled by a megachurch (see the Baker bucket for a great example)

Some megachurches have sold freeze-dried prepper food. It’s not a grift per se, because it’s perfectly edible freeze dried food, but it’s overpriced for what you’re getting.

I’m D deficient. I took D supplements for a long time; m D levels never significantly increased.

one of those all-in-one $2,000+ fancy machines that mounts on your wall.

Actually about $4000 to start, plus the cost of the weight plates, bars (I prefer Ivanko), Iron Grip dumbbell sets, and so on.

In almost all cases, it’s cheaper to have a gym membership at a decent hardcore gym.

There are a lot of things you simply can’t do with bodyweight alone. And you can’t do it with just a couple kettlebells and adjustable dumbbells either. Having a lot of strength and muscle mass when you’re young is a very strong predictor of health in old age, since past the age of about 40, people just start losing mass and strength; the more you have before that, the better off you are.

Goth.

A lot of it will depend on your output device; cheap headphones will wreck audio quality.

I remember the bad old days when .mp3 files for streaming were often 128kbps (or less!); I could absolutely hear audio artifacts on those, and it got significantly worse with lower bitrates. 320kbps though seems to be both fairly small, and I can’t personally tell the difference between that and any lossless formats.

They don’t give you complete privacy, no. On the other hand, if what you’re concerned about is your workplace seeing that you’re fucking off at work, or a Hollywood studio suing you for pirating a 20 year old television show that isn’t available to buy or stream, well, a VPN is just fine. In regards to piracy, it obfuscates a lot of your internet behavior from your ISP, so they aren’t able to easily track what you’re doing either.

If I was worried about gov’t level threats, Tails, Tor, and public, unsecured WiFi would be the only thing I’d be using.

All food is organic. Every bit of it is made of carbon building blocks.

I prefer the real Africa.

I saw it in theaters too. Two months later, I saw The 13th Floor. Dark City had come out the year before.

I think that all of this was just the zeitgeist of the time.

My god, even among DC movies, that was such a steaming pile of shit. And so what did they do? They made a sequel.

(Hey, I like DC movies. I really enjoyed The Flash, and I liked the Superman v. Batman, with Batfleck. So for me to say Aquaman was a turd in a punchbowl means something.)

Mad Max is amazing for what it is; an apocalyptic film made on a shoestring budget that depicted something that feels prophetic now. You have to look at it and compare it to other films in the 70s; if you look at, for instance, Roger Corman films, it’s Oscar-worthy in comparison. When you put it in the genre of ozploitation films, it’s solid gold.

Let me ask you this - do you believe that people have the right to protect their own lives? Does that right depend on your size and gender?

You might have to live near your customers, but you don’t have to live in exactly the same shitty circumstances. Based on the places they lived, they weren’t doing a lot better than the people around them that were working shitty minimum wage jobs.

I’m not sure that makes sense

The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental civil right in the US, and I believe that access to the means of self-protection is a human right. I think that correcting the underlying issues that lead to gang activity would have more benefits overall than trying to ban a constitutional right.

While gang activity exists in all countries, countries with fewer social problems and lower economic inequality have far less of a problem with gang activity.

Likely killed by indiscriminate Israeli bombing. They don’t know where hostages are being held, so any bomb could be the one that kills hostages, and they clearly don’t care.

I dropped Instagram, and couldn’t be happier to have left that cesspool behind. No […] LinkedIn, […]

Unfortunately not having any presence on LinkedIn makes it quite challenging to find professional-type jobs. :/

I know that people hate hearing it, but the violence–specifically gun violence–is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.

This was likely gang activity. Gang activity is driven by a lot of socioeconomic factors; long-term fixes are things like community reinvestment, properly funded education, reducing income inequality, criminal justice reform, and so on. Even things like reproductive rights and access to birth control and abortion help rather significantly here. If you fix the underlying issues that drive gang activity in the first place, then you eliminate most of the violence problem without also affecting civil rights.

Unfortunately, in the US, one side appears to only have the political will to remove a particular civil right, and the other side wants to obstruct everything and blame it on all “personal responsibility”.

Most of the street-level dealers that I saw in Chicago were not making a lot. I can’t guarantee that they weren’t dipping into their own supply, but they still lived in the same shitty, working-class neighborhood, and they were renting rather than owning. I’m sure someone was making a fair amount of money, but they guys on the corners, or the guys that fetched the drugs for the transaction, they weren’t making bank. AFAIK, they were mostly dealing pot and heroin; probably mostly heroin, based on the baggie sizes.