First do a left-right on the link that Aurornis posted [1]. Notice the extra fat in the chin, the elongated ear, the enlarged mouth and nose, the frizzlier hair, the lower shirt cut.
You hate it. You think, intellectually, that this shouldn't work and surely no one would have the gall to so brazenly do this without the fear of being caught and shamed. And then you think, well once the truth is revealed that there will be some introspection and self-reflection on being tricked, and that maybe being tricked here means being tricked elsewhere.
Well someone, in an emotionless room, min-maxed the outcomes and computed that the expected value from such an action was positive.
There is no need to min-max. There is never a large scale introspection after a media correction. Most people will never see the correction and will still believe what they saw first, years later, if not for the rest of their life.
Or they do hear about it, maybe a few days or a week later, but they dismiss it because its old news at the point and not worth thinking about to them.
Truth is, most people are never really thinking most of the time. They're reacting in the moment and maybe forming a rationale for their action after the fact.
FAFO* goes both ways. US is in an interesting spot. We have a 1 one-time reset button: Since we’re the reserve currency we can inflate out debt away at the cost of inflation. If and when we do that the world will pivot away, maybe, to another currency. At that point the great American tailwind will be over and we’ll have to be competitive at the global stage — interesting to see what that means, if anything.
As an analogy, imagine you’ve accumulated enough debt and bought yourself a house, a car, and invested in enough productive unseizable assets (very important), like a farm and whatnot, to sustain yourself. what’s the point in servicing your debt? If the only consequence is no one will lend you again, you already have everything so whatever, right?
I can poke a million flaws in this logic, but I _think_ that’s the megasupersmart move the current administration is gunning for. Hell do I know how it will pan out, but I have a hunch. FAFO I guess.
I think the flaw in your thinking is that you assume the US is self-sufficient. If that was the case there would be a very small trade deficit and given the sherade about tariffs early last year, this is not the case (IMHO).
As an external person which is actually benefitting from Trump's shanenigans (I am paid in CHF, which are worth more and more as they are considered probably the safest currency there is) I think the current US Administration wants to thread the needle by devaluating the currency enough that debt becomes manageable and exports benefit from a weak USD while remaining the reserve currency.
However, I also believe that for this plan to work you shouldn't alienate your closest allies as they will go trade elsewhere, impose tariffs on you, or trade in Yuans just to spite you. So you are left with a weak currency that is not as important anymore and basically unchanged exports.
There is no secondary reserve currency the world can look to. The world is becoming increasingly hostile and unstable, and no one is in this position, or seems fit to serve this position, in the next twenty years. Its also the case that the US still has a goal of maintaining low inflation, and I think its likely we would pursue austerity on benefits before we would intentionally succumb to higher levels of inflation (as we already have).
Or, you grow the pie. Look to history to learn how empires of the past grew their pies.
Any country willing to not be lent to again in future can default on their debts, nothing special there; the actual clever bit is stringing out the ability to accumulate debt at relatively low cost into decades of investment... something they seem to be willing to sacrifice to well and truly own the libs. The sadder reality is that there isn't any megasupersmart strategy, just an ageing buffoon with the foreign policy savvy of a middle schooler who's just heard about the Louisiana purchase and tariffs, and a bunch of grifters hanging on.
The experiment in "is America too big to fail" is probably going to result in a "not quite" answer, but they're really giving it a go.
Spain in the 1500s, the Netherlands in the 1600s and the British empire in the 1800s are good examples of countries considered too big to fail that they eventually crashed and burned and lost their world leader statuses rather fast.
In all three cases over reliance on new debt to fund stuff, disappearance of the middle class, and abusing their dominance (military and/or economic) made them crumble as other countries steered away from dealing with them.
Foreigners don't need to own fixed-interest securities. They can also invest in other US assets, such as the stock market. That's quite a good inflation hedge, so long as the US remains a good place to invest.
Except, apart from tech, there is no good place to invest in the US, especially given the headwinds in the current macro environment. And tech is super overvalued now.
There's a lot of investor capital moving to traditional industries in China, India, Brazil, Korea and Europe, simply because there's better returns to be made with more resilience to American problems.
Remove the top 7 companies in the S&P 500 (which are all extremely overvalued anyways), and you'll find a very unhealthy S&P. Take into account American dollar devaluation and even the most laggardly of these markets (Europe) outperforms the S&P500.
Interesting. I like your body builder example, but I believe it more accurately describes the top seven fluff stocks. Valuation matters and just cause the stock is growing (according to estimates) doesn’t mean it’s worth buying. There are other factors like dividend yield and actually making real physical products that people really want, instead of a circular market dominated by a few players that essentially buy and sell products to each other using debt and rounds of vc capital that is constantly hyped up by media darlings.
But that was my point - in spite of the best efforts of the other companies and the other industries, they are continually failing to raise additional (largely American) capital because everyone is just looking at the buffed 7 and maybe some MAGA-backed companies.
Just to make it even more real: During covid I added a sub-panel and the wire (more like the sausage given the girth) between the sub-panel and main panel was aluminum because of cost. You just need to be a tad careful at the connection points with copper -- nothing a caring literate person can't handle
The incoming drop for a service panel is almost always aluminum (at least the residential stuff I've seen). It's cheaper and lighter than copper while still being ductile enough to work with. Just use the proper antioxidation paste at the connection point.
Did you use antioxidant paste on all of the aluminum terminations? If you didn’t, please pay an electrician to come fix it. If you did apply the paste, you are in the 0.01% of non-idiot non-electrician homeowners and can skip my rant about homeowners doing electrical work in the next paragraph. I sell electrical work and have seen some incredibly poor work done by homeowners.
Do not install aluminum wire if you are a homeowner unless you already know enough to use antioxidant paste and also to use a torque screwdriver or torque wrench for terminations and know where to find the torque values for the wiring devices you are using. If you don’t apply the paste, the surface of the aluminum will oxidize and could catch fire due to increased resistance.
I suggest not even touching copper as a homeowner, but it’s your choice and your house.
I always read relevant sections of NEC, UPC, and firecode whenever I DIY. I find the code books to be very clear and thorough and really don’t understand the culture of fear mongering tradepeople have around code. Almost like the code is some sort of mystic hydra only a tradesperson can comprehend. it’s really not complicated: read it and apply it like a recipe.
That’s kind of how allergies are discovered though. Doctors will tell you to go on a restrictive food diet and tell you to binary search for it if it doesn’t cause anaphylaxis. Based on my experience with allergies if it’s not anaphylaxis then allergies aren’t considered super important to resolve by doctors. Finally the immune system is complicated and your daughter may have an unusual reaction which may not be IGe mediated. In other words it could be a reaction to a foreign protein and not an anti-body histamine spike in which case: yes it’s extremely unpleasant and feels like an allergy, but because it doesn’t lead to anaphylaxis it’s not a medical concern.
I appreciate your world view and politico-science philosophical approach, but Venezuela has natural resources, is close to the USA, and decided to mingle with American competitors.
Venezuela was supported via economic trade with nations not aligned with US objectives in exchange for security guarantees that would supposedly prevent US intervention.
More concretely: Russia was supposedly supporting them through economic activity and arms trades. Russia is overextended in Ukraine which is providing an opening and a cautionary signal to any other state that has Russian support that, in fact, any Russian security guarantees aren’t backed by more than words. See Iran and Syria as well.
This is very transactional and a spheres of influence move. It’s also pressuring Russia to find an Ukraine deal fast. The longer they’re in Ukraine the more their global sphere of influence is being reduced due to their inability to fight multiple military fronts at once.
My thought is, China is seen as needing to be curtailed.
Syria curtailed Russia, as you said, they lost the capacity to support it. Iran was a show of force, and something that could be done. And, Iran was very much supporting Russia -- lots of support, such as Iranian drone tech.
But from the China perspective, China was buying a lot of oil from Iran. That was cut off. And I imagine Venezuela as well, has been selling a lot of sanctioned oil to China too.
China has no domestic oil supply of note, and needs to import a LOT of oil. This could be a message to both Russia and China.
You didn't even mention the whole proxy war that Russia is fighting with France across most of Africa (and Eastern Europe). With both mutually picking apart the other's sphere of influence in the respective regions.
Fair, most folks are completely clueless about this being an ongoing concern for nearly 5 years now.
>These three disorders could really be “CKM syndrome,” which can be treated with drugs like Ozempic
The article is trying so hard not to say that obesity is the cause. I call it the obesity pipeline: You start off young and obese and you don't have diabetes and it's all fine. Stay obese long enough and you get diabetes -> metformin. Stay in a diabetic state long enough and you get heart disease -> statins. These are obesity comorbidities.
There is an alternative possibility: you start out with a metabolic disorder, that will eventually grow into diabetes. Along the way, it will make you obese and cause (directly or indirectly) heart and kidney problems.
Unfortunately, since Ozempic treats diabetes with or without obesity, and it also treats obesity without diabetes, it won't help us figure out if obseisty is a cause or a side effect of diabetes. But there really is little reason to pretend it's clear either way.
History is a pretty strong indication that it’s clear to me.
I find it exceptionally hard to believe populations at scale went from relatively “normal” weights to obese as the majority due to an emerging novel metabolic disorder. All within 1 to 2 generations.
Much simpler explanation is that diets and lifestyles changed leading towards obesity. Whether or not a metabolic disorder happened somewhere in the middle there seems irrelevant to me. It’s very clear to me that obesity causes the issues and not the other way around.
I’m open to thinking differently about it, I just find the evidence uncompelling as someone who was obese the majority of my adult life. Given the unique circumstances of how I grew up and then later experienced life, I’m quite confident obesity is primarily caused by lifestyle. Put simply - put yourself in a situation where obesity becomes easy to achieve and the majority of people will become obese.
Humans being what they are will of course have myriad of outliers to refute the point, but outliers are uninteresting to discuss in this context.
The problem with this line is that there are populations that live very similar lifestyles but have massively different obesity rates. The rate on obesity in Tonga is much larger than the one in the USA, which is itself much larger than France - and yet all three are modern industrialized nations where the vast majority of the population lead mostly sedentary lifestyles.
Even within these places, there are often huge disparities in obesity rate. For example, Colorado has half the rate of obesity as the USA: are people in Colorado leading such hugely different lives from the rest of the nation? And are people in Colorado leading lifestyles more similar to those in California than those in Kentucky?
To me, the much more plausible explanation is that there is some aspect of modern life (most likely some element in our food, but very possibly in our enviroment as well) that is causing metabolic issues that lead to this huge increase in appetite that in turn leads almost inexorably to obesity.
> are people in Colorado leading such hugely different lives from the rest of the nation?
Yes, absolutely. I've spent time in very obese locations in the midwest, and spent time living in Colorado and have relatives there.
The lifestyle differences are exceedingly stark. Drastic even. It's clowned on for the hippie/health conspiracy nutjobs meme for a reason. You immediately realize why people look different.
> And are people in Colorado leading lifestyles more similar to those in California than those in Kentucky?
Yup. Again, this is obvious simply from spending time in both locations. You will find places in CA that are nearly as obese as many places in KY, and find that the lifestyles look quite similar between the two. Louisville lifestyle is quite similar to Bakersfield for example and the obesity rate just so happens to coincide with that observation.
I don't know enough about Tonga vs. France to comment, but I imagine if you spent a few months living within the populations of both and living a typical lifestyle/eating a typical diet you'd likely find immediately obvious differences. In this case, genetics is also a very plausible front-line explanation - where in western countries it simply is not due to similar demographics changing so drastically over a generation or two while removing the immigration confounder.
> To me, the much more plausible explanation is that there is some aspect of modern life
Yeah, it's the diet combined with a relatively fast switch to sedentary lifestyles. Mostly the diet and food environment. Participation in adult casual sporting leagues and other outdoor activities is right behind it. Changes in the average activity levels while at work. Just 12,000 steps a day makes a drastic difference in weight for many people.
Technology plays a major role - screen time went from minutes a day to double-digit hours for the majority of the population. Hard to be active while staring at a screen of any sort.
Like I said - I'm also open to some environmental variable not explained by much simpler facts like the food environment, but I think that's exceedingly less likely than what is smack dab obviously right in front of our faces that for some reason we ignore in pursuit of near-conspiracy level stuff. The obvious thing usually ends up being true, and I see no reason in this case to believe otherwise.
Again though - exceptions abound. Humans are complex creatures. They average out quite well though at population scale.
I'm T2D - I've come to believe obesity is a side effect of diabetes, if I'm not on my medications, I can fast for 2-3 days before my blood sugar comes down, because my liver is constantly pumping out glucose into my system.
There is no doubt that hyper processed foods make this condition more likely, but its not just "you have weak willpower and got fat and sick" - I know a ton of fat people who do not have and will likely will never develop T2D.
I know that by modern standards, 18% is better than average, but it's also still pretty fat for men. Men should strive for a 10-14% range. <10% is associated with hormone (specifically testosterone) deficiency, and >14% is both aesthetically disgusting, and bad for metabolic health.
Try losing more fat, to the 12% level, then check your biomarkers again.
The thing being returned is a slice (a fat pointer) that has pointer, length, capacity. In the code linked you'll see the fat pointer being returned from the function as values. in C you'd get just AX (the pointer, without length and cap)
First do a left-right on the link that Aurornis posted [1]. Notice the extra fat in the chin, the elongated ear, the enlarged mouth and nose, the frizzlier hair, the lower shirt cut.
You hate it. You think, intellectually, that this shouldn't work and surely no one would have the gall to so brazenly do this without the fear of being caught and shamed. And then you think, well once the truth is revealed that there will be some introspection and self-reflection on being tricked, and that maybe being tricked here means being tricked elsewhere.
Well someone, in an emotionless room, min-maxed the outcomes and computed that the expected value from such an action was positive.
And here we are.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-levy-armstrong-crying-...
reply