wrfrmers

Fully expect the trains/roads/commuter buses to be packed.

Having just started working again after a long run out-of-a-job (and an even longer run outside of the office), I couldn't tell you, either. My job so far only requires a handful of tasks that can't be done remotely (and that, frankly, could be replaced with access to a print center and a courier). Still, I'm required to make a commute that's minimum one hour, and approaches two for the method I can afford. My bosses have also taken offense at my "lateness" (8-8:30 arrival time, instead of 8 on the dot or earlier; sorry, the 6:45 bus hits traffic). Lots of downtime. Few complaints about my actual performance.

This job could be fully remote. I'm actually trying not to puzzle over the reasons it's not, because that would just make me more frustrated. But, gun-to-my-head: it's inertia. People heavily invested - sometimes literally, often overleveraged - in the status quo, and not especially inclined to be open-minded or rational about changing it. You saw that it took a global crisis where employers were suddenly caught on their back foot in order for remote to gain any sort of real foothold (same for rethinking transit policy, etc.). And then they've spent the following years trying to claw everything back. Incumbency is a helluva drug (and the withdrawal is killer).

I feel like unpacking that, "They're smug," sentiment might yield important insights. I don't know why and I don't know what those insights might be yet, but that's my gut feeling. I also feel like there might be some analogy to the phenomenon where people who say, "I only give people respect when I get it from them," actually mean, "I only give people basic dignity when they defer unconditionally to my judgment or will." Then again, maybe expectation is what's at the root of most suffering.

I don't know the mechanics, but my understanding is that such a water fast also permanently alters your digestion and metabolism.

A (logical extreme) example I was thinking of counterig with: if you eat 500,000 calories in 24 hours on the first of the year, and nothing else for the rest of it, you'll achieve a 1,350 calorie/day average, certainly enough to lose a significant amount of weight. And you will! Because your stomach will have ruptured and you'll be dead by the 2nd. Rotting is one way to burn calories. (I mention this to illustrate how focusing solely on the numbers, to the detriment of the actual lived quality of life during the weight management process, misses the forest for the trees.)

It's not that much of a stretch to say that the US is a planned economy, given a sufficient understanding of how those systems operate writ large. Unelected bureaucrats would be a step up, elected officials two, from what we have, which is an unelected, private, distributed "death panel" for any economic decision the average person might want to make. Want to go to school, or start a business, or have housing, or buy enough food for the week? You're not beholden to your family, or your neighbors, or your community, but to some banker or credit bureau executive, and whoever they've delegated their powers to.

As illustrated by Luigi and the response to his actions, "ordinary people" in the US know exactly who to rebel against.

It should be noted that his assassination attempt followed a year where no less than 3 people set themselves on fire in protest of another arm of America's industrial grinder. Which is to say that the most recent act doesn't represent a sudden escalation, but is instead emblematic of a progression from despair to anger. Several billionaires also predicted this progression, warning their peers to ease up on their behavior. They're not listening, and some "ordinary people" seem ready to make them.

Calories in -> calories out is flawed (or, rather, not useful) because metabolism is a feedback loop, not a one-way serial process. The types of foods you eat, how they're prepared, and when you eat them have complex influence for how hungry you feel and how much energy you have to exercise or resist impulses, as well as ramifications for the state of your physiology, per nutrient intake.

CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.

That was one (corrupt) option. Another would have been to draw funds by taxing homeowners, specifically, and limiting payouts by fire risk, capping at a mean replacement cost, not per-house. That that's not what happened is an issue with the implementation, not the base concept.

Lumber is quite a bit lower quality than it used to be, because we're no longer using old-growth timber. Less dense wood burns faster, as does the laminated strand board that long ago replaced plywood (unless you're really fancy) (and toxic fire retardant treatments be damned).

The low cost of lumber is one of many things in America that don't make sense economically, but that persist because of momentum, with each generation receiving an inferior facsimile of what the previous ones knew. See also: car-centric policy (from infrastructure to gas prices) and retirement planning (pensions to IRAs to nothing).

Public insurance. For housing, healthcare, maybe even cars (since the coprorate political complex insists that we HAVE to drive everywhere). At some point, we have to accept that the middlemen are siphoning value, not providing any. Vanguard it and let elected admins set the codes.

In a word, "gentrification."

(Yes, I know, I'm making a point, ye who lives in the United States of "It's not what you know, it's who knows you.")

Modern China is an even more interesting story. Their largest state-backed real estate firm collapsed years ago. The reason why China is in a mild recessions instead of a full-blown depression is because the state took control, triaged what they could, and chose losers in such a way as to prevent the worst-case scenario. A solution similar to what the US eventually dragged itself to after the 29 Crash. In a crisis, socialism works, actually.

>Because many people in the general public, especially leftists and socialists, believe that the 2008 Great Financial Crisis was caused by greedy US banks lending out money to unworthy people who had no ability to pay back loans, and take a profit from each transaction, and sell the toxic debt to other parties.

Most of the people that I've seen taking this position were conservative, free-market capitalists, giving themselves a little "Bad, me!" slap on the wrist. The leftists and socialists are well-read enough to know that the reason loans were backed the way they were is because the regulatory apparatus has been wholly captured by financial players, from regressive legislator campaign funding to the revolving door at regulators, and everything in between. Further, the fallout from 2008 hit most Americans so hard because insitutions leveraged this "in" to warp the shape of the federal and monetary response to the crisis in order to make them whole at everyone else's expense - a course that was not explicitly called for in law (and that some would say, in many cases, violated the duty of responsible parties to uphold the law). The problem remains the banks.