One foreseeable consequence of this bill is that it reduces the ultimate value of starting and building your own practice, leading to more consolidation among existing large operators. As this is foreseeable, I also imagine that it's an unstated goal.

This is how industrial barons of the early-mid 20th century operated, as an example, with collusion and price fixing type things. Or hospitals and medical facilities today with certificate-of-need laws enforced by the government.

You can complain about what you don't have, or you can work to produce it.

Then again, Americans are sometimes called workaholics, working far more hours. So in some ways this is just a lifestyle choice.

So I think there's truth to what you're saying.

Really, all modern conveniences like grocery stores and plumbing are "unnecessary" in the sense that we survived for 100k years without them.

Think voice control for your device. You speak, and it returns back instructions ( a function and arguments) for your device to be execute.

It is observed that you have junkies shooting up in bathrooms, evidenced by needles strewn on the ground. So the solution from the authorities is to install syringe disposal containers.

https://data.worldhappiness.report/table

It wasn't easy for me to interpret these rankings though, or how they came up with the life evaluation score. More explanation around that would have been helpful. The column headers have hover-descriptions, but they don't really say how the values were calculated.

Anyway - it does seem that Scandinavian countries are well represented at the top. That's not too surprising. Costa Rica at #4 is very unintuitive to me. Viet Nam at #1 for freedom is REALLY surprising to me, having visited there a number of times and having many Vietnamese friends. Likewise, The United States at 104 on freedom seems very weird.

I don't like government surveillance either - but even if you think the destruction is justified in this case, it's starting to become a trend that leads nowhere good. We lose the rule of law, and begin to enter the rule of the sympathetic.

Tiny little slider toward the top - oh man, this is going to take a while. Huge slider - great, quick read. Slider toward the bottom - almost done!

Please stop hiding scrollbars!

This is the big mistake that so many people make: assuming that these folks are behaving irrationally, or somehow focused on something other than what is best for humanity or their own country.

The unfortunate truth is that these people are actually behaving rationally, and doing what they believe is in the best interest of their own country or even society at large. They are doing their best.

And, if you were thinking coolly and clearly, you would likely do the same things in their shoes.

This doesn't at all mean we're doomed - in fact quite the opposite. These are hard things to navigate (nukes, AI, etc) but we're up to the task and will come out the other side much better off.

It needn't be competitive - everybody can succeed more tomorrow than they are today. You win. I win. We win.

Which is sad, because so much amazing stuff is happening on the world right now, and seems to be only accelerating. For everybody.

Already using charged, non-neutral language ("contaminant"), giving away their pre-existing bias and forcing me to disregard the rest of their opinion on the matter. Aluminum is no more "environmental contaminant" than any other extremely common basic element in the Earth's crust, like silicon or iron. Are they also against chlorine?

Clearly they decided to conduct a study to show just how scary aluminum is, and I have no doubt the succeeded.

So - why again does the FDA exist?