The VAST majority of what is wrong with our society (political and obviously economic) can be traced to this. It's the expectation that every economic endeavor must show a return on investment - forever. That every entity must strive to optimize the bottom line every day of its existence. Optimizing for growth above all else crushes and consumes everything.

Increasing local manufacturing will only create more opportunities for people to be indentured to a company that literally hates their existence.

A company is forced to build here in the U.S. and people are supposed to rejoice they now have another option for their lives to simply be tolerated and disposable?

It has democratized what is possible with technology, when that technology was programmable with natural language, i.e., by just asking questions, or asking it to do things, in every day language. It meant people who didn't know how to build software could get software to do their bidding regardless.

Some online Masters degree programs are just scams preying on people's desire to improve their careers. They are successful because so many employer's won't pay or promote to certain positions without advanced degrees. So there is a real demand for degrees like MBAs.

For some degrees, the real value is the additional education you receive because of the increased complexity of the subject. Not everyone goes after these degrees for the same reason. For me, I went to grad school in physics not because I thought it would help my career, but because I wanted to learn more physics. I don't think this is the typical reason for which advanced degrees are sought anymore, but at least in some cases, like mine, master's degrees aren't scams, but a necessary part of deeper education into a specific area.

The problem is the humans. We are not reliable witnesses, even of our own pasts, and unless we are following very strict diets, most of us essentially follow a mostly random walk with our food intake across a narrow range of food groups (even caloric intake can be wildly inconsistent over time). I've met enough people who completely underestimate their consumption of desserts, e.g., that they mentally reduce the occurrence of such events in their personal historical narratives. That alone could put many from both low-carb vegans and low-carb meat eaters into the high-carb category.

Which is the point, the worst failure of this methodology is that there is no evidence that human memory, regarding food consumption, provides an accurate measure over long periods of time. If you cannot establish the trustworthiness of the most basic tool of your methodology, then almost by definition it's meaningless. The error in self reporting could be high enough such that the true classification of 80% of the low carb group is actually high carb. Or the vegan group could be nearly half high-carb, etc.

Without a thorough vetting of the accuracy of the instrumentation used in the research (FFQ in this case), we cannot know the margins of error. But we have apriori reasons for believing the accuracy to be significantly high. Adding more people to the group doesn't increase the accuracy in this case, it only increases the volume of the noise. Is the True Low Carb ratio of each group 10% or 90%? Who knows.

If we can't validate the accuracy of the tools, it makes the results essentially a random choice between the possible conclusions. It means they haven't disproven the null hypothesis.

Which is why I favor some form of sequestration of smaller populations of similar genetic makeup (multiple groups for each type of diet), etc. But that is mostly impractical.

Asking people to quantify their eating habits over the previous several years and expect to have meaningful quantitative results is impossible. I can barely quantify my eating habits over the last few months. There are just far too many variables that cannot be controlled for in such research as to render any conclusion impossible.

We need meaningful nutritional research, desperately, and this just isn't it. It angers me deeply that this passes as science that will get reported on, used as "proof" in justifying recommendations, etc.

The research in general on nutrition and hearth health is still mostly correlation. Definitely someone with a specific disorder could have a more obvious causal link with cholesterol and cardiac events, but I've read a bunch of different papers, many from respected institutions, and the conclusions usually are, IMHO (I studied physics), garbage.