As have the opioids buprenorphine and Suboxone (buprenorphine/naloxone), which are genuinely useful treatments for addiction and have much lower risks of abuse.
>each of which ended up making a stronger, more dangerous opioid
This is true of some early opioids like heroin, but with e.g. Oxycontin the problem wasn’t a stronger opioid, it's how it ended up being prescribed.
Purdue's marketing led doctors to prescribe it to more people, in higher doses, and for longer. Oxycontin isn't inherently more dangerous than the dose of immediate release oxycodone or morphine that would have an equivalent effect.
Innovation in opioids shouldn't just be written off. They're still the best (and sometimes the only effective) treatment for a huge number of people, and some new opioids like buprenorphine/combos like Suboxone have real advantages.
The lesson from Oxycontin is more about deceptive marketing and prescribing practices.
I mean if there were no safe dose or usage pattern then I would expect a lot of mothers to leave the hospital with both a newborn and a crippling addiction. The epidural is an opiate like fentanyl.
>Taxes paid by your employer aren't taxes you pay.
They have the same effect in that they reduce what employees take home in a given labour market. Employees are effectively paying them in the same way that people who buy alcohol/cigarettes effectively pay more in states with higher taxes on those items (even though the taxes are technically paid by the stores).
If CA eliminated all income taxes and instead had employers remit the same effective rate for all salaried employees, employers would just reduce salaries accordingly.
As another example, France's income tax rates cap out around/below some high tax US states. But France is still a comparatively high tax jurisdiction largely because they also impose massive payroll taxes on employers which effectively reduce employee wages.
> >Taxes paid by your employer aren't taxes you pay.
> They have the same effect in that they reduce what employees take home in a given labour market.
Careful, you're thinking like a Marxist (assigning value based on costs ultimately culminating in labor). Under Capitalism, value is assigned based on the meeting point between what people are willing to pay, and what people are willing to sell it for. Some things, like Pokemon cards, are far more valuable than any costs incurred in their production. Other things, like Aunt Betty's utterly disastrous attempts at baked goods, are worth less than then they cost to produce. Payroll taxes only directly effect the purchaser's willingness to pay. Only if we believe that companies are currently paying 100% of the wages they would be willing to pay if they needed to can we call the payroll tax entirely a tax on the worker.
>the house take on the major platforms is vastly higher than with traditional sports betting
What kind of markets is this referring to?
Polymarket still charges 0 fees. While Kalshi's fees+spread can approach or even exceed traditional sportsbooks on some markets, neither of them have any interest in banning winning players, as they don't take a side on any bet and directly benefit from more betting activity. Kalshi also pays interest on bets, which can add up on longer term positions.
Betfair has operated with a similar model for decades in the UK and elsewhere.
I was referring to platforms like DraftKings, which are extremely sleazy. I think Polymarket and similar low/no fee markets on the other hand are awesome.
There are lots of places where you can bet against other players now. The older betting markets like Betfair are no longer available in the US, but Kalshi, Polymarket, and others now offer the same kind of two-sided marketplace in the US.
There's interesting data on the accuracy of US presidential markets if you're interested in this kind of thing. It's especially remarkable how accurate they were (both at predicting the outcome and how close the results were) many decades before modern political polling came on the scene.
>As a basic if unsophisticated measure of the accuracy of the betting markets, the favorite almost always won, the only exception being in 1916 when betting initially favored the eventual loser (Hughes) but swung to even odds by the time the polls closed. In the 15 elections between 1884 and 1940, the mid-October betting favorite won 11 times (73 percent) and the underdog won only once (when in 1916 Wilson upset Hughes on the West Coast). In the remaining three contests (1884-92), the odds were essentially even throughout and the races very close.
From 2020-2024, the UN recorded ~17,000 deaths among children in all measured countries combined. The share of that that is among older children/teens and in developed countries like the US is vanishingly small.
>It seems that he is spending a lot of his time & effort on maintaining his hair (huge kudos for admitting that!). If his body was functioning like an 18-year old he should not need to do that. If Bryan really set back his true aging clock he probably would not be battling with ongoing hair loss (as he most likely did not battle hair loss 20 years prior), or at least it would stop (which does not seem to be the case).
Androgenetic hair loss (what Johnson has and what the medications he takes are designed to treat) is caused by genetic sensitivity to DHT and DHT levels in the body, not aging. People who don't have the genetic predisposition to AGA or who have very low DHT levels can often make it to 60+ with no visible hair loss. It's not like they're "not aging," they just don't have the combination of genes and DHT levels needed for significant hair loss to occur.
Biological aging is a fuzzy concept that we define relative to various social constructs and other objective markers compared to the general population.
I don't see much issue with its usage in this context.
You could define it as "the degradation of cellular maintenance". Androgenic hair loss is more like a non universal signal of hormonal maturity, like pubic hair growth.
I'm not super well versed but my understanding is that that's right, with your actual DHT levels being the third variable. There are other non-hormonal causes of hair loss, like alopecia areata, but they're much less common.
DHT damages the hair follicles that are sensitive to it, causing them to grow back thinner after each growth and shedding cycle (which is typically a few years). As a result most men don't have visible hair loss until years after puberty kicks in.
It's interesting because there are medicines that can block DHT or reduce it's effectiveness, but they have other negative side-effects. It's almost like if you have this gene and are a healthy man, you should loose your hair - I wonder what the evolutionary mechanism of that is.
None, and in fact it has been proposed that men suffering from AGA, especially if it's early onset, may have something equivalent to polycystic ovarian syndrome in women.
The occurrence of a genetic background in the etiology of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) represents the rational basis to postulate the existence of a male PCOS equivalent. Hormonal and metabolic abnormalities have been described in male relatives of women with PCOS. These males also have a higher prevalence of early onset (<35 years) androgenetic alopecia (AGA).
Hence, this feature has been proposed as a clinical sign of the male PCOS equivalent.
Clinical evidence has shown that men with early onset AGA have hormonal and metabolic abnormalities. Large cohort studies have clearly shown a higher prevalence of type II diabetes mellitus (DM II) and cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) in elderly men with early onset AGA. In addition, prostate cancer, benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) and prostatitis have been described.
These findings support the existence of the male PCOS equivalent, which may represent an endocrine syndrome with a metabolic background, and might predispose to the development of DM II, CVDs, prostate cancer, BPH and prostatitis later in life. Its acknowledgment would be helpful for the prevention of these long-term complications.
The mechanism of baldness is related to the mechanism of growing a beard isn’t it? For me personally I started going bald in my mid-20s, and since then as I lose hair off the top of my head it seems to reappear on my face. So perhaps it’s just a virility/experience signal.
Maybe in the past the fact that someone had survived long enough to go bald or grow a big beard would signal that they had the skill or hardiness to avoid dying young, which might make them more attractive and likely to pass on the gene.
