Seriously, this was crazy on so many levels. The new twist on "not in my backyard", for one: We don't want highly skilled, well educated, hardworking people in this neighborhood! Gotta keep it safe for the people on welfare who really contribute to the local "community" I guess. I was really hopeful...

Seems the locals were fiercely opposed to Amazon building their HQ2 in NYC because of gentrification due to all the highly skilled, highly paid tech workers who would be attracted to the neighborhood. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/losing-amazon-hq2-sucks-for-new-york.html https://www.c...

Oh yes, that ship sailed years ago. Some fake news really is "fake news", but a lot of the talk was really about censorship of ideas not approved by the powers that be. Maybe it would be more productive for Adam Schiff to put out his own Facebook message that could go viral. Instead of a dry point b...

That's the problem with studies of correlation, as there is always a complex web of associations and results can be unpredictable (e.g. the famous association between Nicolas Cage movies and swimming pool deaths.) There is in fact little difference in tooth decay between countries that do or do not ...

Sophie, Upthread you mentioned how trustworthy the CDC is. Yet in your last post you refer to Fluoride as one of the 'environmental crap'. Unless something has changed, the CDC considers water fluoridation as a boon to public health with little risk at proper levels. So which is it? I didn't say th...

Wow, quite an eye opening article. The "anti-discrimination"-caused chaos in schools is nuts. So wonderful that my property taxes are going to pay for what amounts to city-provided day care. I'm sure this former NYC teacher has better insight than I do, but I couldn't help thinking that the sentence...

I2start: I agree with your questions about vaccine schedules - unfortunately I'm not aware of any studies or supporting lab evidence to show whether there is added risk from bundling vaccines, or administering on a time-compressed schedule. It is something that probably should be studied. Of note th...

Took a quick peek at the Green New Deal. It's mainly a call for Congress to get off their derrieres and stop amusing themselves with Trump-baiting, and start working on infrastructure that really does need attention. Not at all a bad thing. Some of the items on the list are ridiculously naive, like ...

ISo even though I am heavily libertarian in my political philosophy I am not very sympathetic to the anti-vaxxers. I would change my mind if they had some reasonable evidence but at this point I don't think they do. Correct, they don't. Most of it's based on a 1998 paper that was retracted because ...

A very helpful series of posts from a forum member who took the trouble to send repeated letters to the Treasury Secretary to try to figure out what Treasury Direct would do if your account is hacked: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=225415 Unfortunately the answer is that there...

Without meaning to fall into the "golden age" fallacy, I do wonder why risks generally thought statistically quite negligible 50 years ago loom so large today. Are people's immune systems shot from all the environmental crap we're exposed to? Have bugs become more virulent? No. What the H are you a...

Option 1. The worst possible time to drain yourself of cash is when you're buying a home. Talk to your real estate agent about alternatives? There are lots of other ways to manage this situation without having to resort to a mortgage and all the pain that entails. (Btw there is no such thing as "no ...