The west would cut the internet the second shit got real. No question.
Europe is already flirting with it. Look at their draconian internet speech laws. If you think that ISPs would try to stand up to the government you should read about how quickly they bent over after the PATRIOT act.
Or avoid medication for anything but treatment resistant depression.
SSRIs are not well understood. Their side effects are not great. Getting off them is miserable. I had them. I felt dead inside. Mission accomplished. Depression was gone, so was my desire to eat, have sex, or do anything else. I wasn’t depressed, I was a zombie. 8 adjustments and medications later I got off them and realized they’re yet another pill to fix a problem 98% of people can fix other ways if they tried.
I do not understand this intense desire to be medicated. Exercise, go outside, talk to people. Get good sleep. Once the rest of your life is squared away get some meds if necessary. Psychiatrists and psychologist walk the razors edge of quackery every single day. Talk therapy is a program to take tremendous amount of money from people and funnel it into their account. It’s absolutely nuts the average talk therapist bills at over 300 dollars an Hour. There is no reproducibility in mental health. in their “science”. Therefore, there’s no reason to believe their magical pills will fix problems they barely understand at a biological level.
As a final note people in the military do a ton of cardio because running and rucking is hard work you train for. It is certainly not to “stay sane”.
100% I have found the same, SSRI's definitely make things worse and I stay away from them, and regular exercise has offered the biggest consistent/persistent improvement in mood.
Medication is the fastest way to make some positive progress before you completely spiral and majorly fuck up your life.
Would you rather take a pill and keep working while you sort things out or would you try to rebuild everything after you burn it all down? Talk therapy and exercise may be just as effective or more so long term, but may not be effective enough in the short term.
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules? We'd appreciate it. You're welcome here as long as you do that, but we really need commenters to stay respectful, avoid posting in the flamewar style, and (above all) use the site primarily for curiosity, not smiting enemies.
Dunno why you are being downvoted, probably cope. It is well known by now that antidepressants are only marginally effective on average [1-2]. You're right they should probably only be prescribed for quite severe or treatment-resistant depression. Although the treatment-by-severity effect has been somewhat disputed [3-4], it has rough support [5], and makes sense since it is dubious that we should be giving ineffective medication with serious costs and side-effects to people with moderate depression.
My take is pessimsitic estimates of AD effectiveness assume you get one Rx and don't follow up and adjust dose and medication choice. I was lucky when I took ADs to have a good primary care doc who had a psychiatric nurse practitioner working at his office and being a good self-advocate.
The "sequential treatment" or "tailored treatment" approach is at least plausible and what is done in practice, yes, if the prescribing doctor is good, and if this is feasible for the patient.
However, since this takes time, and most depression is temporary, it is hard to know if you really are tailoring the medication to the person in many cases, or it has just been long enough you are seeing regression to the mean (or a placebo response, which is still strong even in treatment-resistant depression https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...).
There aren't really any double-blinded or even just properly placebo-controlled / no-treatment controlled studies to test this, but the closest thing to looking at the sequential approach also doesn't find very impressive results (https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/13/7/e063095.abstract).
I do believe the drugs help some people, and almost certainly take some experimentation / tailoring. The average effects are just very weak.
yeah... i did forget to add meaningful community and spiritual activities to that list but people can have just as strong objections to them as they do to the other things on my list!
Your experience is not the same as other people. No one cares if you don’t understand their own life and choices. Get off your high horse and stop assuming that “those dumb depressed fat people just need to sleep better, eat better, and exercise and obviously it’s just that easy”. If you had success with whatever method, that’s great. We’re thrilled for you. But what works for you is not a universal solution.
We've asked you to stop posting like this to HN. I understand that the topic is sensitive and personal, but being this aggressive in HN comments is not ok and we ban accounts that do it.
You've been a good contributor to HN for a long time and most of your comments aren't like this, but there is also a long history of us asking you to stop posting personal attacks:
I don't want to ban you but it's important to preserve this place for its intended purpose of curious conversation (which depends on thoughtful, respectful comments), so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing this going forward, we'd be grateful.
As a long time Usenetter, I don't care about the first two sentences being abrasive, but the material in quotes is insinuating that the replied-to grandparent at some point contained that verbatim text. I have a hunch that it did not, which is not cool. Particularly because the text is negative, making the false attribution defamatory, which is a different category from insults.
Yes, using quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not is a trope of internet aggression and something we've long asked HN commenters not to do: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., and is one of the reasons why the GP comment was abusive.
I won’t argue against you. It’s clear you would’ve been in complete support of the lobotomy craze. Exercise, diet, sleep, and good company are the most universal cure for the average form of depression. I specifically called out treatment resistant depression as requiring medication. Surely your basic bitch depression caused by being overworked, underfed, and slammed with bills can’t be fixed with anything but a simple pill.
You missed the greater point that medicines are overprescribed and OP all but made a Pfizer ad out of their post. HNers lack contextual reading ability, and life experience. It’s a shame really. The over prescription of drugs is a tremendous problem in the west.
My “high horse” is supported by actual medical science. Unlike the entire field of mental health.
Pfizer ad or not I'll say my AD experience was positive. I got it prescribed by a psychiatric NP in a time when my job situation was about to go to hell but I was planning to tough it out till I got the project done.
I did get the sexual side effects but because men often come too quick it can be a blessing as much as a curse, personally I found it took longer to orgasm and when it did happen it was a much more complex and richer experience with a definite periodization I haven't had before or since.
When I was taking ADs I did have problems I blamed on the ADs that really had to do with the "non-drowsy" antihistamine I was taking crossing my blood brain barrier anyway.
When I did stop ADs I tapered over a month and the physical effects were not bad at all. It was the beginning of a time of personal growth that I can look back on now and think it worked out great but was challenging for the people around me for a while.
The most common argument coming from people like you is X is bad because a lack of evidence, and then you present Y as an absolute truth with zero evidence. This time you've linked two garbage websites, both controlled by special interests. You've also fallen into the common trope of discrediting someone's entire view because of another view (so-called "quackery"). Your opinion is relatively consistent with the reddit/HN zeitgeist. That is to say, you are wrong.
Since you present no actual evidence. I won't either. Instead I'll tell you what is coming out as the truth:
1. Carbohydrates and especially sugars contribute more to various disease processes, including CVD, hyperlipidemia, etc than fat or meat consumption. A trivial google search, which you are clearly capable of doing, would show you that.
2. Eggs are loaded with cholesterol and saturated fat. Egg guidelines have been moved almost as often as salt and sugar. Most doctors will not stop you from eating 2-3 eggs a day because the benefits far outweigh the risks.
3. A balanced diet is better than one that isn't. But if you have no choice meat and fat have the highest level of satiation-to-energy of any kind of food.
4. High levels of exercise in combination with a diet higher in foods that have high levels of nutrition (meat, eggs, butter, and green leafy vegetables) will produce less negative health effects than following the government's health guidelines on either exercise or nutrition.
5. The existence of cultures that subsist entirely on meat and fat invalidates your argument. The eskimos, in particular, have comparable life spans and yet hyperlipidemia is extremely common among them. CVD is not. One factor could be the energy consumption due to exercise and extreme cold. The fact obesity, heart disease, cancer, etc risks all rose with the proliferation of highly processed carbohydrate and the "fat-free" trend is further evidence that something is wrong.
6. It is hard to believe anything the government says on nutrition is valid. Back when people watched the news we heard coffee is bad/coffee is good, salt is bad/salt is good, fat is bad/fat is good, meat is bad/meat is good. You should ask yourself seriously if you're getting your information from valid sources or if you just believe whatever the youtube you watch says.
It is possible to overdo nearly anything. Saturated fat guidelines, along with cholesterol guidelines, are likely too low even for conservative values. That being said, the amount of processed carbohydrate you should eat daily should approach 0 and you should consider it to be more of a snack if you eat it at all.
As for him being a quack, that’s earned through his refusal to follow scientific guidance, and sacking the guidance available. You’re presumably aware of his
views on fluoride and vaccines.
Or allow people to declare bankruptcy and punish the schools and the loan companies. Garnishing wages is also a normal thing to do with debt you can't pay.
Forgiveness means paying them back, which means these companies (and the people who got loans) will have learned nothing.
We have financial tools available to this. The only problem is very, very wealthy donors will suffer immensely.
> Garnishing these wages is a regressive, punitive tax that will further slow an economy very near recession territory.
Probably not. It will certainly impact inflation however. Just like the PPP and trump bux.
> In particular, the Paycheck Protection Program has so far forgiven $757 billion in loans to private businesses
The PPP shouldn't have forgiven anyone either. There's a reason we are in the situation we are in. The financial system is not allowed to fail as intended. Instead we prop it up like weekend at the bernies with infinite money printing and forgiveness.
I struggle with this idea people aren't allowed to FAFO anymore. If we do this, why not pay back every loan. That'll certainly bolster the economy!
You think these are moral failures, or there’s a lesson to be learned. That’s a naive idea. These are governance system failures, and these people should not be punished for a suboptimal system that we put them through. They don’t get a chance to make the decision again, so what would this teach them? “So sorry you live in a poorly functioning country that doesn’t subsidize education and we told everyone they need this credential to have a middle class life haha better luck next life!”
The debt doesn’t matter, it should’ve never been issued, forgiving it won’t create inflation (they’re already not paying the debt), we’re just collectively cruel and low empathy at a nation state governance level for what’s happening. And the country will deserve the outcome.
> What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning
Your entire political statement aside manufacturing was always a good job. I’m not sure if you realize what kind of skilled labor went into manufacturing:
1. Machining
2. Tool and Die
3. Welding
4. Etc
Hell when I was working in construction I was making 20 dollars an hour at 18. That’s good money, and at the time if I would’ve stuck to it I would’ve been able to afford a decent life. My stint as a machinist while backbreaking at times was a good highly rewarding job.
Now, to address your political point. Yes, jobs should pay a living wage. Unfortunately even with such “wage suppression” America is still one of the most expensive countries to live in. We subsidize global food, drugs, etc. I can only agree with your point if we simultaneously become an export economy, and reduce or remove all global subsidy. But the party who supports raising wages also supports near limitless spending on the less fortunate countries. You cannot have both.
"The United States provides over 40% of the world's humanitarian aid, and spends around 1% of its budget on foreign aid, including military aid. Surveys suggest that Americans believe 20% of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, and that 59% of Americans believe the government spends too much on foreign aid"
Your unwillingness to read the primary sources linked in the Wikipedia article because they show how you're flat out wrong indicates that your entire thought process can be disregarded at no cost.
Do you have a primary source showing that "the party who supports raising wages also supports near limitless spending on the less fortunate countries"?
- your suggestion that we become an export economy, here on a forum where many people are working on products that will be purchased by the world but not counted as exports (examples of non-exporters who collect money from around the globe: Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, AWS)
- the idea that the way to prosperity is for Americans to move back into lower-productivity jobs. (Here I ask you to look up the revenue per employee of Costco and JP Morgan and on the other hand good manufacturers like Steelcase and Lockheed Martin and Eaton. What do you think happens if we move the workforce from higher-productivity jobs to lower-productivity jobs?)
- your confusion of an economic point with a political point
Many of the bodily sins in the Bible are really just common sense health advice. Some are period oriented, such as eating pork, which was notoriously hard to make sanitary. Others are to insure a society functions well, like for example not banging your neighbors wife or not causing harm to people.
So, in this light it makes sense to treat it like a sin. And to be fair, it is a sin in modern society as well. We even have “sin taxes” for such vices we determine can be used for tax gain.
I see no real problem with this. I am unaware of any large program that forces you to give yourself up to the Christian God, but most require you to give yourself up to a higher power. This is obviously designed to give you a release from things you can’t control so you can use that mental power to help yourself get better.
honest question, as i simply have no clue about this, is there evidence that they did? given that the koran also forbids pork i doubt that a way to make pork sanitary has been found before then.
Pigs were domesticated (specifically for their meat) for several thousand years already by the time the earliest Jewish dietary restrictions took shape.
There are many theories that try to tie it specifically to the conditions in the Middle East, but none that I'm aware of are particularly convincing.
Pigs –being omnivorous– can acquire parasites that are harmful to humans at a higher rate than herbivorous ungulates.
That was as true 1000 years ago as it is today.
Cooking and salting the meat both greatly reduce incidence.
It is possible that cultures which avoided pork altogether lacked adaptations against the parasites at the genetic level or simply that somebody among them noticed the relationship with illness whilst missing the link with undercooked meat.
Let's say that was possible, why would it be likely, or even the most likely explanation?
How do you square this against, say, the possibility that the early jews wanted to differentiate themselves from the egyptians? I'm not sure about the specifics of the archaeological record but perhaps it was the case that pork was an upper class thing in Egypt due to it being fat and tasty, and slaves and workers were instead fed beef. Then the rule in Leviticus might reflect this and conserve a part of an older identity. In early judaism at least some of the fat from mutton and so on was burnt as a cultic sacrifice, so maybe the idea was to keep tradition from before the exile to the Sinai.
I was indeed going off the premise that there was a scientific reason behind the dietary laws.
Purely cultural reasons are plausible but pork is a staple meat in all cultures where it is allowed. It would be an inordinate sacrifice to make for tradition alone.
If differentiation was the motivation, couldn't they make laws against eating peas or some other inconsequential crop?
In context, pork was only one of many forbidden foods. Certain kinds of locusts being allowed while others not, certain kinds of seafood being allowed while others not.
They have been debunked as being good heuristics for food safety with 21st century knowledge but that doesn't mean they didn't stem from observations of poison, parasites, etc.
You could apply the same reasoning to the Jewish culture of cleanliness in general. It certainly differentiated them from many other contemporaneous cultures, but why would they wash themselves in the first place?
What do you mean by "inordinate"? Reason as a main source of social norms is a much later ideological invention, usually considered a result of the dominance of the roman catholic church and its adoption of aristotelian philosophy.
You're still defending possibility as such, and not arguing for relative likelihood. I find the lack of anchoring in early judaic society suspicious.
If you read the Torah you'll find that it is not a collection of argumentative texts. To the extent that Leviticus makes an argument it stops at two criteria, cloven hoofs and rumination, without further explanation. This is also how more well-known early judaic legal norms were communicated, e.g. the noahide laws and the decalogue are presented as is without further argument.
The context of early judaism was also quite deadly in itself, people died all the time from a variety of opaque reasons. Figuring out that someone died due to some meat-transmitted parasite rather than a disgruntled shedim wasn't very likely.
The Torah is quite unconcerned with things like health or actions that are supposed to result in a long life, insisting instead that these things are decided by G-d. Dying isn't given a very prominent place in this early theology either, it just kind of shrugs it off with a vague idea about Sheol as a container for souls, in case they just don't stick around like some ancestral ghosts or something.
Pork was widely eaten at the time, so the "good heuristics for food safety" thing seems entirely useless to me. People already knew how to prepare pork and did it, and pork isn't particularly insidious, if kept in a warm environment it'll ward off your nose and taste buds in no time. Beef (and mutton) is more likely to trick you into eating it even though it has gone bad, and it also carries a risk of giving you parasitical or bacterial infections.
I am not going to win in an argument about ancient religious texts.
Personally, even rejecting the food poisoning mechanic, it still rings more likely to me that some more superficial heuristic like "pigs and eels revel in the mud thus they are unclean" existed before religious and/or cultural significance("these beasts are unclean and I'm the Rabbi") was attached to it, rather than the wish for differentiation from other peoples appearing first("the enemy drinks water, henceforth we shall only drink beer").
But perhaps you're right and my mind can't wrap around that of those people from three thousand years ago.
Sheep usually have fecal matter in their rear wool, and pigs aren't the only animals that enjoy a bath in mud or muddy water when it's hot.
I suspect the ancient jewish idea of cultic purity had less to do with washed skin and hair, and more to do with behaviour and discipline. It's much harder to ritually slaughter a pig than a sheep or cow, and perhaps this was associated with rumination by the early jews.
Jewish law on this topic is like a thousand years older than the prophet Muhammad, or more, it's not exactly clear when the contents of Leviticus first stabilised.
As for pork as food, it's as old as neolithic societies. Wild boars were a very popular food source, hence why they were eventually domesticated. Now pigs don't produce tasty milk in the same way sheep, goats and cows do, but they produce a lot of meat and offspring without being picky about diet.
Leviticus does not say 'pig meat makes your tummy ill and then you die, so obviously don't eat it', instead it says 'pigs don't chew cud, hence they're impermissible', and frames it as a cultic uncleanliness, similar to contact with menstruating women or somesuch. People don't get parasites and die from a hug with a menstruating woman, but there are still rules in early judaism about it and as far as I know no speculations about it being in any way health related.
If pork wasn't a main meat in Egypt and the Levant in like the bronze age, then it would likely not have been a prominent diet rule in early judaism. G-d has this tendency to make up rules about stuff that people do rather than stuff that they already don't. When it's about things that people don't have to be constrained from doing or encouraged to do that they're already keen on doing, the genre tends to be poetry rather than law.
But the point is it shouldn't be considered a sin, as in a moral failing, when it's a biochemical change in the body causing a disorder, and the solution is abstention and medicine (for example, GLP-1 agonists have been shown to significantly cut down on cravings [0]). It's like saying getting sick is a sin, when there preventative and curative solutions unrelated to believing in a deity or higher power.
It’s foolish to ignore the social component of addiction.
Some of the medicines and treatments showing the most promise are still too expensive for many. AA programs are accessible and can be helpful. You think they treat alcoholism (or alcohol abuse disorder) as a sin? In the meetings there isn’t a whole lot of judging going on. It’s mostly mutual support and compassion.
The reason no one has found a better way is because hypertrophy is because it’s well understood and there’s no “better” solution. mTOR is the primary hormone pathway.thy increase the adaptation ceiling by increasing RBC, reducing protein breakdown, etc. Thereby reducing rest needed, so mTOR is heavily unregulated.
This is one of the view places where “if we could we would” is the correct answer. There is so much money in the space of anabolic cheating, the clandestine scientists would’ve already developed it.
It is entirely too clear absolutely no one on this god forsaken website understands the government. Trump doesn't wage war. This is a DoD action, owned by the DoD, developed by the DoD, for the purpose the DoD cares about. What would the DoD care about?
1. Resources in Venezuela coming under control of Russia and/or China
2. Controlling a completely unstable country to build influence in latin America
3. Styming a port of entry for drugs like Fentanyl that, in reality, are coming from China
4. Preventing China/Russia from dropping mid-range missiles and military installations remotely close to the US
I don't think realistically isolationism implies inaction. Let's suppose that it's the most "honest" cause. That is, attempting to prevent a Cuban Missile Crisis event by putting boots on the ground early. Then this doesn't contradict isolationism. In fact, I'd argue it's probably entirely within the bounds of "America First".
However, your point stands. Venezuela stands to benefit from an invasion because the country is unstable and teetering on collapse. It's essentially being sold to the highest bidder. If Russia/China want to put their boots there they will need to defend it and rebuild it. If the US wants to prevent Russia/China from doing that they will need to defend it and rebuild it. The US has far better global power projection and will likely spend considerable resources to ensure it's success as it's also, in some sense, a survival concern for the CONUS itself. I would think it could look a lot 1953 Iran, with the exception that power projection "down the street" (so to speak) is much easier to maintain than across the ocean.
Moreover if you can get an edge that is even 2-3% over a coin flip all you need is risk management to make money.
Not understanding this is how you go broke. I traded for a number of years and did well. It was not hard to regularly beat the market, especially in futures and options.
Software engineers are desperate to have their work be like machining aircraft parts.
It’s a tool. No one cares about code quality because the person using your code isn’t affected by it. There are better and worse tools. No one cares whether a car is made with SnapOn tools or milled on HAAS machines. Only that it functions.
We know there is no long term merit to this idea just looking back at the last 40 years of coding.
Europe is already flirting with it. Look at their draconian internet speech laws. If you think that ISPs would try to stand up to the government you should read about how quickly they bent over after the PATRIOT act.
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