Mark draws some parallels between Amazon and some other tech companies that he believes have suffered from the same phenomenon - Apple with Jobs and Cook among them, along with Gates and Balmer, Disney, etc.
But Chinese model releases are treated unfairly all the time when they release new model, as if Tianmen response indicates that we can use the model for coding tasks.
We should understand their situation and don't judge for obvious political issue. Its easy to judge people working hard over there, because they are confirming to the political situation and don't want to kill their company.
These studies have conflict of interest, funding, etc. disclosures.
If it was Lilly and Novo pushing these, they'd either show up in those disclosures or you're suggesting a massive conspiracy to undermine the medical regulatory system to sell more drugs that they already have struggled to meet demand for for extended periods of time.
Why would they kill a golden goose that shows no signs of stopping it's egg laying?
It's not so much a massive conspiracy as it is the known reality of how these companies operate. There is very little risk as oversight and real accountability are basically non-existent
> Cross-sectional studies across a heterogeneous set of conditions suggest that between 29 and 69 % of published clinical trial reports include disclosures of conflicts of interest. Studies measuring undisclosed conflicts of interest suggest that between 43 and 69 % of study reports and other articles fail to include disclosures of conflicts of interest (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4854425/)
Thanks. I'll admit I'm pretty surprised - my understanding is this sort of thing usually is a much bigger deal when it comes to fucking with things that impact FDA decisions, etc., so them publicly flouting it is pretty crazy to me.
I only provided examples in case there was any doubt that failure to disclose ties to the pharmaceutical industry was a known and large scale problem after the suggestion that it was some kind of conspiracy theory. Skepticism in the case of these drug companies is warranted.
As for the variety of the things I've commented on, I can only blame procrastination and the contents of the front page. I got a lot more work done monday afternoon, I promise.
There's no case to be made for calling these drugs snake oil. They're well-proven to have a host of benefits beyond their specified use. Their promotion by the makers of the drug doesn't change that.
I'll note that calling it the gray market really is people uncomfortable with the idea of buying drugs from a drug dealer trying to find a way to make this more palatable.
That's not a judgment thing on my part - I've got a freezer full of Chinese peptides, among other things.
But the raw API on all of this stuff is coming from China in a way that is effectively unregulated and with no recourse if anything goes wrong. Underground Chinese labs get raided and shut down (usually because they're also involved in producing AAS or opioid precursors) often leaving millions of dollars in unfulfilled product. People get peptides with 0 active ingredient. People get peptides contaminated with disinfectant and have adverse reactions. People get mislabeled peptides. People get radically underdosed or overdoses peptides. And when a controversy hits, these labs close up shop one day and come back a week later under a new name. If you get a vial full of something truly harmful to you and you die, your loved ones have zero recourse.
Your local weed dealer has infinitely more accountability than these labs.
Testing isn't a panacea - people do endotoxin, heavy metal, HPLC, etc., but GCMS and similar basically never happens - and without knowing what the potential substances are the automatching to peaks even for GCMS is often inaccurate to the point of uselessness."Purity" reports on HPLC don't measure everything in the vial - just how pure the targeted peak is. It'll catch protein depredations, but it wouldn't tell you if there was a bunch of anthrax in the vial.
For me, the calculus still makes sense. I've got access to things that have worked incredibly well for me that are not yet available in the US, or in some cases, not likely to ever be. But the "gray" market is buying from overseas drug dealers that don't particularly give a fuck about you. They don't want to hurt you - you spend less money if they do - but they also aren't going out of their way to look after you. Most of them only started HPLC tests because the bodybuilding community demanded it, and these guys were selling AAS and HGH to them before they got into the GLP-1s, and then it became the standard.
These aren't parallel import goods getting sold in areas where they aren't supposed to or unauthorized retailers. These are drug dealers that get shut down by the Chinese government on a regular basis. Go look up QSC, SSA, SRY - and those are just some of the biggest names from the past year or so.
I like to call it the "gray" market because the substances themselves are gray, not because of their source. My weed dealer doesn't sell GLPs (yet, but I can see that coming). I haven't seen anyone arrested for having GLPs yet either-- although I have seen plenty of US based vendors have to close up shop due to legal pressure.
I do that believe that risk can be (mostly) mitigated, mainly by sticking with longstanding vendors and by trying to minimize risk with the actual substances (researching proper dosing protocol, batch testing, not assuming dosing, starting out on lower dosing with new kits etc). There is definitely risk associated, that said I'm often dabbling in non-FDA approved substances, so regardless I have zero recourse if something happens.
Are there any testing/safety protocols that you follow?
> I haven't seen anyone arrested for having GLPs yet either-- although I have seen plenty of US based vendors have to close up shop due to legal pressure.
> I do that believe that risk can be (mostly) mitigated, mainly by sticking with longstanding vendors and by trying to minimize risk with the actual substances (researching proper dosing protocol, batch testing, not assuming dosing, starting out on lower dosing with new kits etc)
Bunch of longstanding vendors have had issues. SRY was one of the biggest names for direct-from-China, shipped peptides contaminated by disinfectant, caused severe reactions for some people. Nexaph is one of the biggest names now in the US, has tons of testing, etc., but got a batch a while back from whoever their manu is in China that had some unknown excipient that got played off as a "test formulation," etc.
Batch testing helps, but it requires the original lab to have actually adhered to the batches in a way that others can track, which isn't always the case. Sometimes top colors span multiple batches, tests on the vendor spreadsheet don't necessarily correspond to the batch being sold if you're trusting their testing, etc.
> Are there any testing/safety protocols that you follow?
Not much. I use a 22um PES filter into a cartridge and inject from it for a few weeks and call it a day. I don't even bother with my own testing at jano unless I have reason to believe something is off and need to confirm.
But I never got my LSD or DMT or anything tested before either so my risk tolerance is basically "eh, send it." I just can't in good conscience recommend people follow that same risk tolerance (though I won't begrudge adults the right to make informed decisions to inject basically anything they want into themselves, either.)
You can't mention CICO in this forum, where people have a unique genetic disorder that makes them "extract more calories from the food" or "burn way less" than other people, barring them of any personal responsibility about what they put in their mouth.
I believe that in a vacuum, any human being on the planet can lose weight.
I also believe that we don't live in a vacuum and context matters. The fact that we consistently see people who have a lifetime of being a healthy weight gain significant weight when they move to countries with high obesity rates means that there obviously is something more to this than just "have more willpower bro"
> Regarding the reported transfer of approximately $270,000, I must clarify that these were entirely Noam’s own funds. At the time, Noam had identified inconsistencies in his retirement resources that threatened his economic independence and caused him great distress. Epstein offered technical assistance to resolve this specific situation.
Yeah. What? This paragraph answers nothing and just raises more questions. Epstein just magically walked Noam through making 270k just reappear in his account? This is played off like he accidentally sent a quarter of a million dollars to his checking account instead of his savings account and Epstein told him how to use the bank's website to transfer funds between the two.
It's very easy to believe that Epstein cultivated a massive quantity of relationships with any sort of rich, famous, influential, or powerful person he could. It's very easy to believe that many of them, for much of his existence, had no idea what was really going on. It's very easy to believe that plenty of "normal" (for relative values of normal here) people had no idea how to act when this all came to light and just shut up and avoided it and hoped none of this ever surfaced.
But we also know a whole fucking lot of them did know exactly what was going on and partook in some manner.
And as an everyday person who can realistically make zero impact on any of these people? Fuck if I've got the time to try and sort out which person falls into which group. The courts can figure that out if they actually start doing anything about all of this.
Be careful, that’s not what I said. In response to your statement that “a whole fucking lot of them did know exactly what was going on and partook”, I said only that you don’t have personal knowledge of the facts needed to prove your statement. You don’t know if Epstein provided girls for “a whole fucking lot” of people or just a few. You have no knowledge of how many “partook”. As there have been no convictions of anyone else, none of us do. All we have are allegations. Please confine yourself to statements of fact.
More than a billion dollar global sex trafficking ring. Girls from all over latin america, america itself, france, england, asia. There is more than enough information available to know that this involved more than a hundred people.
That's a whole fucking lot of people to be partaking in a child sex trafficking ring and this idea that somehow we need to know which specific individuals were involved and have convictions for them to make a statement that is plainly true is really weird.
He had a net worth of half a billion, I thought. And there’s no reason to suspect that he used all of it for nefarious activities. A million dollars would have sufficed to fly girls from all over the world. But that’s beside the point.
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