The term is also used in medical imaging to refer to an older study you use as a reference. Like, say, women past a certain age are offered a mammography screening every year or two, and here, the "prior" is last year's screening images. Radiologists will have the current (the primary) and several old (the priors) images on screen side by side so they can compare and spot any changes.

The US has always had a strong puritanical streak. Part of it is that when Europeans migrated to America, many of the people who decided to make the trip were various religious sects which were just a bit too extreme and too weird to be accepted at home. And they brought along some strong ideas about what you weren't allowed to do. The prohibition laws were spearheaded by such religious groups, for example.

This all got a boost in the 50's with McCarthyism and the Cold War. America felt it was in a competition to prove its way of life superior, and so it had to become as anti-communist as possible. Whatever they did, we had to do the opposite*. Communists were opposed to religion, so America embraced religion, and became far more religious than it was a few decades earlier. And this, naturally, gave more power to the religious groups who were still around, and who still didn't approve of nudity or books with bad words in them.

Of course there's more to it than that, but America has always been quite prudish and puritanical.

> It was the land of the free around 100-200 years ago,

Slavery has entered the chat.

We don't always do that.

If you have (1 + 2) x 3 for example, then you add before multiplying,.

It's just a convention to make it easier to read and write maths. We've agreed that if nothing else is specified, you multiply first. And if you want something else, you can toss a pair of parentheses around it to override that rule.

> Isn't that the whole point of fat storage, to provide caloric fuel when you don't have access to it through food?

The whole point is to use it as a last resort to not die. Not to just use it up when you could eat normally. And there are a lot of reasons why this is the case.

First, it's what the body and your brain wants, and they make you feel like absolute shit if you don't eat. What you weigh doesn't matter, starving yourself is really really hard, because every cell in your body is screaming at you to not do it.

Secondly, it's unhealthy. Part of that can be alleviated with supplements as you say, but the other part is that your body goes into survival mode when living off your fat reserves. Your body weakens, you health worsens, your immune system goes downhill, you have less energy, and some of these effects persist even after you start eating normally again.

And then there's the problem that such a crash diet, even if you go through with it, may make you lose weight, but it won't keep the weight off. Heck, you just taught your body that "sometimes there will be no food for 6+ months", and to that, the body responds "well, then I'm going to eat literally everything I can get hold of while we do have access to food". The body tries to repair the damage and recover the lost fat reserves. So you end up regaining the weight you lost, but with some additional permanent damage to your health and to your metabolism.

All because you had this idea in your head that literally anything, including month-long starvation, was better than being fat.

Because we decided on it. We use a base-10 system with ten digits (0-9), and we prefix digits to indicate powers of ten (so the rightmost digit is the ones, the next one to the left is tens, then hundreds, then thousands etc)

We can do the same with any base. You may have heard that computers and computer programmers often use binary. That's base 2 (where we use the digits 0 and 1, and the rightmost digit is ones, the next is twos, then fours, then eights and so on).

Hexadecimal is also commonly used with computers. That's base-16. So we use the digits 0-9 plus the letters a-f to mean "ten" through "fifteen". So the rightmost digit is, as always, the ones, then we have the sixteens, then the 256's and so on.

The general system works with any number. We've just decided to settle on 10 for our everyday number needs.

> After research, it was found that eating MSG in normal small quantities has little to no impact on health.

That's understating the findings somewhat. It's not "little health impact at small quantities", it's "the studies that claimed it was harmful were flawed and have been thoroughly debunked, and the only reason people bought into them in the first place was because MSG was associated with Asian cooking and Americans were really super racist at the time"

...by pulling the child back. The wagon is exerting force on the client to keep him from moving forward, and the child is exerting force on the wagon to make it move forward.

The company isn't "your property". You own a very very small share in that company. Decisions about the company are taken by the majority owners, not by you, personally.

And if the company decides that "all shareholders will get a chunk of money, and their shares will cease to exist" then that is what is going to happen.

Because they've found it's the only way to get the media and the public to pay any attention to their message.

You can certainly argue that they're in the wrong to use these methods, but so far it is seemingly the only way to make the world realize that there are people protesting for the climate and against oil, and that is why they do it.

When people protested against oil pipelines, the military was called in. Activists have literally tied themselves to oil rigs and it didn't make an impression. I think, if you can come up with a method that works for drawing attention to the climate crisis, most of these activists would be very grateful to hear from you. Because they've tried a lot of things, and so far, vandalizing art pieces is just about the only thing that gets the world to pay any attention to their message.