MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think eventually that these kinds of drugs will be shown to have extremely negative consequences for anyone who’s not extremely morbidly obese (or at least in bad enough shape that the side effects are less serious than the obesity). Of particular concern is the number of people who are using this product for aesthetic reasons rather than as medically necessary treatment. Women have used this stuff to fit in their wedding dresses as an example.
Long term, given that this substance acts like a hormone, I think that homeostasis will eventually strike leading to the body becoming less sensitive to semiglutide and therefore the person cannot feel full. And there have been some reports of things like stomach and intestinal issues, so I’m not sure about that either.
There have been lots of these pills in the past starting with fenfen in the 1990s. Most of them overhyped or have serious side effects (fenfen worked, but since it was basically an amphetamine, it caused a lot of heart problems and was withdrawn). The thing I keep coming back to is that people are so desperate for something like a skinny pill to be true that the public and doctors pounce on it without thinking about the long term effects. So that’s why I’m shorting it. I’m expecting wrongful death or serious injury lawsuits to kill it in all but the most serious cases and thus limit the profit from it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Yes, because the government has been allowing them to get away with it. And in our fictional universe of Fascist America, those same people and their acquaintances are being beaten and thrown in jail for the first rock thrown, and thus relegated to menial labor jobs once finally released a decade later. This is what happens to rock throwers in actual police states. What middle class or upper class person is going to stick a gun in the face of an actual policeman if it means that for him and his family, their future is thrown away? What person in that situation would allow their kids to hang around the kind of people who are throwing rocks if letting it happen means the rest of the family loses their position and lives in poverty? If it meant that your other kids can no longer dream of going to college and getting a decent job afterwards?
Maybe the lower classes with little to lose would try it. But the control the modern world has is such that it’s less a fear of getting shot and more a fear of the social and economic consequences to follow of stepping out of line. They fear HR more than anything.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean the fact that so many (in fact I’d argue most) urban cores have become anarchic places where the law doesn’t matter is a general argument against liberal democracy. One of the hallmarks of a good system is that life where the system has control is better than places where it doesn’t have control. When the places nearest our form of government are places that people are paying as much as they can afford to either protect themselves from or escape, the system sucks. And on that score I’d urge anyone who suggests that modern liberal democracy is the absolute best system of government to walk through the urban core of your nearest city unarmed and alone. It’s genuinely scary in many places where crime and criminal gangs are common and not pissing off the gangs is more important to survival than obeying the law.
Now if you’d go to the “bad old days” of whichever autocratic government you choose, chances are you could walk down the street at least in daylight, didn’t worry so much about crime because that government would not tolerate the kind of store-looting in broad daylight that happens today, or mugging or rape or home robbery. Try any of that in China or North Korea, you’re going to be caught and imprisoned rather quickly.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean it’s been generations in Europe. Like everything else context matters. American healthcare is not anything like European healthcare— ours is a private, for-profit system designed to cut the costs of healthcare and to ensure profits for hospitals and insurance companies. In a taxpayer funded system like NIH, I’d agree that the slippery isn’t that steep, it’s probably a little steep depending on who’s caring for the patient, how difficult that care is, and the ability of the family to either provide it or pay someone to do so. In America, everything is mediated through health insurance, and as for-profit companies, those companies have every incentive to not cover treating elderly patients who might not live long anyway. Treating cancer is expensive: hospital stays, chemotherapy, pain management, in home care between visits, blood work. Giving an elderly cancer patient an overdose of morphine is cheap. Few extended families in the US can afford to pay out of pocket for cancer treatment, it’s simply too expensive, so if the insurance company refuses to cover it because the cancer treatment is expensive, there aren’t any options, either the extended family spends themselves into poverty to pay for granny’s chemotherapy, or they let her get her OD of morphine and convince themselves that she — and they — chose “death with dignity.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
But doesn’t that require that the population be willing to actually fire back? That might be easier with guns, but modern suburban Americans are not the same stock as Muslims in MENA. Insurgency works if you have a population willing to fight. Arabs in the Middle East sure, they’re raised to fight, to wish for tge deaths of their enemies. White suburban Americans are not made of that stuff. They’ve been tamed from birth, raised to be nice, to prize comfort and safety and peaceful living. I just find it hilarious that people expect suburban professionals who meekly obey every dictate from corporate America and schedule their two week vacations during which they do work emails are suddenly going to rebel and shoot government workers. It’s not going to happen because most of us would be under the bed afraid of the cops.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
See I think we largely agree that absolute principles do not work in the world of actual humans simply because at bottom, everyone is going to be working in their own favor and cooperate only to the point that doing so advances their interests, and the trick is to get pro-civilizational behaviors is to make benefits from society dependent on being beneficial to that society. But of course this is difficult, and probably more so with the hyper-individualism that the west suffers from that says you can do whatever with no regard for others and quite often very few social or legal consequences.
I don’t know how to get there, but I’d love for America to have social cohesion like in Asia and a Scandinavian economic system.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Maybe it’s because I live in rural Midwest but I just don’t get that worried about the guy with a pistol in a holster on his side. I’ve never once seen anyone pull a gun like that in public. Those guys are generally the responsible ones, the guy prone to shooting at people is not going to open carry because he wants to surprise people with the gun. Open carry doesn’t lend itself to sudden shooting or crime because as you mentioned everyone notices the gun.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Politics is always compromise between the need to get things done and the need to uphold principles. Quite often because those principles lead to paradoxes and contradictory answers depending upon the questions at hand. The principle of free speech is not infinite, you can’t talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport, you can’t urge the commission of crimes, you can’t, rather famously, yell fire in a crowded theater (unless of course there actually is a fire), and you can’t lie about a product you are selling. Why? Other very important public goods: public safety, prevention of fraud, etc. need to be protected and cannot be if free speech is absolute.
And on it goes. Policing is a necessary evil, and using force is a necessary part of policing because criminals tend not to respond to polite requests to please stop robbing, raping, murdering, or selling drugs. That doesn’t mean you don’t have rules against overreaching, but one man’s police brutality is another man’s stopping those criminals terrorizing his neighbors.
And balancing this stuff, all these balances between two things that are goods in themselves, or at the very least avoiding some form of known bads, gets complicated very quickly. I’ll be blunt in saying that most people are unqualified for this kind of stuff because they don’t understand the issues involved. Most political conversations are vibes based bleating not even willing to engage in the entire argument, quite often undertaken by people who don’t bother to find out how things work. I put myself there, I have no idea where the highway should go, where the lines of public decency vs degenerate behavior should be drawn, how exactly to police a community without unnecessary brutality or excess permissiveness. And as such I think that politics would go much better if more people tuned out and dropped out and let people who know deal with the problems without me telling them that their solutions are not aesthetically appealing to me.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I find that for most things having a reasonable for normal people and easy to use system is better. I can plug my height and weight into an online calculator and get my BMI. And unless you’re dealing with someone outside the 1σ of height or muscle mass BMI is good enough. And people that BMI doesn’t work for will be high level NCAA D1 athletes, pro athletes, or extremely tall people and they and their health providers can understand where BMI is wrong and do something else or correct for it.
For most people, an excessively complex measurement doesn’t work because they won’t use it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think another way to move the needle is to make eating vegan convenient enough that the average person can eat vegan without too much added effort— no need to scour the ingredient list for obscure ingredients that are derived from animals, restaurants having multiple options that are specifically vegan and are not salad or steamed veggies. As it is now, the choice to be vegan specifically comes with a lot of extra cognitive load. You have to constantly look at ingredients, you have to call ahead or visit the website of restaurants to see if they have a vegan option and be grateful if one exists even if you don’t want that, it’s the only place nearby you can go eat with your friends and not have to bring in food.
This is how gluten-free took off. Until a person could actually have bread products, pastas, desserts, and common foods, being gluten-free was only done if you couldn’t process gluten properly and had no choice. No one else chose to make do with only meat veggies and potatoes, never ever having a dessert. Now, there are gluten free pizzas, cakes, cupcakes, muffins, breads, and a fair assortment of processed convenience foods that don’t have gluten. It’s a bit more expensive, but you aren’t feeling deprived by it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think most people who fear IQ as a concept are generally unwilling to live in a world of winners and losers. They don’t want to admit that being born a loser is possible and that no amount of trying hard can overcome it. Women seem especially prone to this because they’ve been socialized to be “nice” and to believe that “if everyone had access to the stuff the rich have, they’d all succeed.” IQ is a monkey wrench in that concept of the world. A hard limit.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think with 4 and 5 it’s much more likely that they have various companies do that for them, and have arrangements to let them ask to see it. There’s a lot of ways that this could be happening, and since your isp/phone company/social media isn’t literally the government, it’s not really illegal. The arrangement would be something like what happens with pictures. Apple can search your photos (or at least tge ones on their cloud) for child porn. They are also obligated to report any such images they find. But I absolutely believe that if I said something that the government really really doesn’t like that it would be reported to the government fairly quickly. And it’s mostly down to liability laws — if I have a social media account where I talk about doing something illegal and I actually do it, my victims can absolutely go after those media outlets for knowing that I said that and not warning people to stop me.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think it’s fair to question the official report, you just need to be clear about what it is you doubt and what evidence points to the conclusion.. If I think the ME is wrong about the hanging, I better be coming with statistics and medical evidence and so on.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think politics is the place where principles go to die most certainly, and tbh, it’s a big reason why I just am reaching the point where I don’t even want to be involved in any of it. Let me grill or read books or watch sports or hike or fish and let someone else decide what we’re going to do about the problems.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
In retrospect, it would be shocking if AI therapy didn't take off. Probably the biggest barrier to getting therapy is cost and availability. Chatbots are available 24/7, essentially free, and will never judge you. The rate of mental illness is rising particularly among young people so the demand is there. But it's not just that, the idea of therapy is ingrained into today's culture. There's a sense that everyone should get therapy, who among us is truly mentally healthy, etc. I could easily see it becoming as ubiquitous as online dating is today.
I think the huge issue here is that without an underlying pathology, mental health treatments might do more harm than good. The therapeutic process is designed to help people get over a specific set of problems, say pathological depression (by which I mean depression that doesn’t come from a negative life experience or generally poor living conditions). If you take someone who’s depressed because they’re legitimately grieving the loss of a loved one, or because the just got a cancer diagnosis or something similar that makes feeling sad and empty the normal human response to such a thing. And if you don’t allow yourself to just be sad when life sucks, you don’t grieve what was, or the dreams you have or whatever, I think that’s a bit dangerous long term. It’s likely good for you to be sad when granny dies, it means you cared deeply about a human being — one you carried a close, loving relationship with — and you need to work through that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
If the goal is just discrimination, why single out Israel specifically? It’s an odd flex considering that there are other trade partners that would qualify under anti discrimination rules (India, Japan, Korea, Latin America, etc.) but they don’t get the same protections. If I passed a law in North Dakota that said “no money goes to Asian countries,” it’s perfectly fine. If I do the same with South Asia, again, fine. It’s only when North Dakota says “we aren’t buying from Israel,” that anything happens.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean if you create a super stimulus, then people will absolutely choose that over real life. There are beetles in Australia who prefer shagging beer bottles to real females. And that happened without humans doing beetle psychology and A/B testing to create the best, most addictive Waifu-bot possible. Humans designing robot waifus would be working overtime to make their version as stimulating of the male mating system as they can.
Just looking at the NEET phenomenon as an example — people choosing to escape living an actual life in favor of internet, TV, and gaming. Is it normal or natural for a person to choose to live an isolated life indoors over going out with friends, accomplishing things, and moving forward in life? But if you make simulated reality good enough some nonzero portion of the population will choose that, and the better the simulacrum, tge more people get sucked in.
I expect robot waifus to eventually be good enough that all but the most successful men who could get supermodels anyway, and the rest will be at home alone wanking into a robot who’s learned exactly how to get him to spend time with it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean for little girls, I remember reading Beverly Clearly’s Ramona books as a kid, Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High. Those aren’t woke and would probably be interesting to a girl.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
It’s not just social media, but regular media, education and control mechanisms like the ability for you to be fired for saying something online, or convincing others to shun friends and even family who say things that the regime doesn’t like. Americans are saturated in propaganda and unless you’re paying attention you probably don’t even notice it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
If the degree is so watered down anyone can get one, what good is it?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I’m beginning to suspect that screens are a hyper stimulus you can have “relationships”, but they’re only the good parts and you don’t have to work at them, you don’t have to make time for them, you don’t even need to put on pants. Games are much more stimulating than doing the actual thing, they give more rewards and with less effort than real life
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
This 1000 times is why I despise social media. Nobody is getting real conversation on social media because it’s curated to funnel your mind down a path leading to the pre-approved opinion. I mean propaganda is so pervasive in the modern west that I think we’re as bad or worse in terms of propaganda and psychological manipulation than the worst totalitarian regimes of the last century. Stalin put out propaganda, sure, but it wasn’t nearly as pervasive as what we have. He had radio, newspapers, and posters. He couldn’t steer private conversations, he couldn’t delete crime-think from social consciousness. He could chill things by arresting obvious and loud dissenters, but that is much more limited than what social media does via AI and deletion. Our propaganda machine hides and people are lead to believe that they are having neutral conversations.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Reddit is a completely curated experience for the most part, and so it’s never going to be a vanguard for new ideas. It probably stopped being that in the early 2000 before the normies showed up. Now it’s mostly low effort and tryhard shlock that most people have heard some version of before. The memes are not original, in fact they’re basically the same stuff that would have been posted there 20 years ago with names updated. The AITAH and similar talk forums are basically barely realistic fanfic level crap that doesn’t even bring up interesting discussions— and the user is never the asshole because Reddit doesn’t think any relationship is worth working through the slightest problem for. Like if she burned your dinner, you should dump her immediately, if not sooner, and be sure to ruin something she loves on the way out the door.
Avant Garde stuff does not come from places curated to mainstream tastes. TBH I’d look at 8chan or something for that kind of future opinion shaping.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean the gamification scheme works mostly by overstimulation of the part of your brain that gets a ping from being successful. You get a dopamine high from achievement which is how your brain evolved to get unpleasant or difficult tasks done. That doesn’t mean you enjoy the game or got anything valuable from it, it means that the game used sounds and visual displays to trigger the dopamine that comes from accomplishing a task, but in a much more stimulating way. I’d put it this way — if games didn’t have those gamification elements in them, would you still enjoy them? I used to like Skyrim and it was always somewhat a thrill when you saw a hidden door open or quest completed or level up messages appeared. But what if none of that happened? How much fun is it really to solve random puzzles without the reward attached? No loot, no completion, no NPCs blowing sunshine up your ass, just turn the statues around to solve the puzzle with nothing to reward you? Just thwack the bandits for no pats on the head, no loot, no hidden rooms to discover? Is that really fun. Or is the fun getting those little bits of dopamine from the feeling of having done those things?
I’m not going to say it’s impossible that this one is the one, but I think as far as putting money down, I’d wait a year or so to see if the hype is just hype or if it’s real, or if there’s not going to be issues with side effects making the product only “worth the risk” for people who are either going to lose several hundred pounds or die. If the product is only going to be used on the population of people who weigh 300+ lbs, that’s a much smaller customer base than if it can be used by every woman looking to lose ten pounds to fit a swimsuit or wedding dress. If it’s just morbid obesity, it’s life changing for those people, but I don’t think it’s something that’s going to spike the stock price like if you cured a common and deadly disease like cancer
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