> Personally, I've swung over to the laissez-faire side of medicine.
Chesterton’s Fence rears its ugly head again. This is the same thing as vaccine skepticism (those diseases can’t be that bad, I never hear about them killing anyone these days) applied to a different context
Arguing for modern reforms is one thing, but there’s a reason we have the FDA. Statistically, most individuals do not have the medical expertise or the desire or ability to wade through enough clinical data to make these sorts of decisions with any hope of good outcomes, particularly in the face of an entire Internet of people trying to push questionable substances on them.
If only there were a federal administration whose responsibility it was to collect data about food and drugs so we could rely on something more than anecdotes from random strangers on the Internet.
I emphasize it's like the drug disulfiram: Very effective as long as patients take the full dose, but the lack of real-world efficacy stems from the difficulty in adhering to the treatment.
> the lack of real-world efficacy stems from the difficulty in adhering to the treatment
Do you have a source for this "lack of real-world efficacy"?
> This study found that 84.4% non-diabetic patients stop taking GLP-1 drugs within two years
"With a with a median on-treatment weight change of −2.9%" [1]. Of those who discontinued and experienced "weight gain since discontinuation," they were "associated with an increased likelihood of GLP-1 RA reinitiation."
I'm genuinely struggling to see how this source shows real world inefficacy. In my friends, all of them stopped taking GLP-1 drugs within 2 years because all of them lost the weight they wanted to.
Out of curiosity, what sources lead you to believe this?
They absolutely do not, unless you’re getting too many calories.
Individual foods are—with some exceptions—neither bad for you nor good for you. A healthy diet can occasionally include doughnuts, and milkshakes. Your overall diet is what matters.
Most green vegetables you can eat unlimited amount and stay healthy. They are absolutely "good" food. (Please don't reply with something trite like "oh, but what about the pesticide residues?") The same can be said for high fiber (soluable and insoluable) fruits like apples, oranges, and bananas. As long as eaten whole (minus skin for oranges and bananas), it is almost impossible to overeat these and they are absolutely "good" foods.
Sure, they are not mercury-level toxic. However, these recommendations are for people who consume way too much of these dishes, and it's a safe assumption that this is the case for a significant part of the population.
Sure. We’re saying roughly the same thing. For most Americans, hamburgers cause heart disease because we don’t exercise enough or eat enough plants. If you’re backpacking twenty miles a day, sure, eat whatever, you won’t suffer inflammation or obesity from it. (Though you may run nutritional deficiencies. And you’re building bad habits for when your activity necessarily tapers off.)
Hamburgers are not causing heart disease and diabetes for most Americans. Bad diets loaded with too many calories, too many saturated fats, and too many simple carbs are.
Messaging matters. When you tell people hamburgers and bacon and everything they love are bad, they stop listening, give up, or just eat some other junk that wasn’t prohibited. When you tell them some foods are good, they start buying into superfood marketing.
Diet is the only thing that matters. Lots of veggies are extremely useful because they add bulk without adding calories, and along with fresh fruits are great sources of fiber. Cheeseburgers can only come so often because they’re extremely calorie dense and send enormous reward signals to your brain.
Give people the tools they need to thrive, not just “don’t eat these specific bad foods, eat these specific good foods”.
Tourism to Mars and back (this is the easiest interplanetary travel) means years confined in a space rocket just to circle around Mars and get back (it is not possible to land on Mars and get back). Not that appealing…
I know the GP mentioned making humans interplanetary, but I mostly just interpreted this as “more spacefaring”. By tourism I really just meant something along the lines of orbiting hotels.
They’re also reducing the float requirements, which is absolutely insane. As a passive investor with significant assets outside of tax-protected retirement accounts, I am beyond livid. If I have to switch investments to move away from the rules being changed out from under me, it will result in enormous tax consequences.
I don’t tend to let my emotions out this much here, but utterly fuck everything about this administration, and fuck anyone who voted in favor of it.
I think you need to consider who is being taxed. I doubt very much that OP is part of the class of people who really should be paying more tax. Rather, they're concerned about their retirement assets. Is that a good outcome here if it applied to everyone?
This is just one more of an endless list of inexcusable, indefensible, corrupt and incompetent acts this government has performed and/or enabled.
In this specific case I am retired and I have done this based on financial projections assuming the game continues to be played the same. So it hits closer to home for me. But it’s a far bigger problem than just me—this is looting the retirement savings of millions of Americans—and it is far from the only thing about this administration and those who have supported it to make me absolutely livid.
If you’re referring to the manosphere podcasters, pseudoscientists, cranks, and conspiracy theorists that came out in droves to support him, they can get fucked too.
If you’re referring to Biden, who all but guaranteed that Trump would win a second term by having zero sense of urgency or concern, zero drive to push through popular but sweeping changes, zero real vision, falling back to politics-as-usual, and topping it all off with disastrously running for a second term until pulling out at almost the last possible second, then yes, him too, and I will personally never forgive him for stepping in when Bernie had momentum.
For anyone else, it’s hard for me to get as worked up over them. Uninspiring, ineffective, bargain basement levels of corruption is upsetting but not a reason to put fire to everything that has put this country and its residents in a position of economic power, peace and security, and as the diplomatic head of the world. If I could wave a magic wand and strip the right to vote from anyone who thought so and acted upon that belief, I wouldn’t give it a second of hesitation.
I’ve been considering that this might be an outcome of AI-written software and it’s the one aspect of all this that I’m actually unequivocally happy about.
Most software written at companies is shit. It’s whatever garbage someone slapped together and barely got working, and then they had to move onto the next thing. We end up squashing a never ending list of bugs because in a time-limited world, new features come first.
But that only really applies when the cost of good software dwarfs that of barely-functioning software. And when the marginal cost of polishing something is barely longer than it took to write it in the first place? There’s no reason not to take a few passes, get all the bugs out, and polish things up. Right now, AI can (and will) write an absolutely exhaustive set of test cases that handles far more than a human would ever have the motivation to write. And it will get better.
If a company can ship quality software in essentially the same time as it can ship garbage, the incentives will change rapidly. At least I hope so.
If the length of your password reveals enough information about the password to practically aid in discovery, your password sucks and you need to choose a new one.
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