This article is everything that’s wrong with internet media distribution. I’m traveling and my data overseas is very restricted in bandwidth. It takes a long time for the text to even load. And the text is among the first things to be loaded. And things are displayed as they are loaded because of course they designed it that way. And so I have to sit there reading a few lines at a time before another image or formatting element is loaded, shifting the entire column of text randomly in one direction or another. The fucking text randomly moves as I am trying to read it. It’s like it was designed to torture people. And the cherry on top is that it’s not even fucking necessary, as HN demonstrates, because a lean webpage could load everything in a fraction of a second. But no, everyone things it’s a good idea to pass around a fucking megabyte of JavaScript just to read filler articles. Good job. Good.
And thanks to the writhing inbred freak that is modern JavaScript, I get to enjoy another form of tech enlightenment which is that every time I scroll slightly upwards the fucking dynamic title bar pops down and blocks the text that I was reading. And then I scroll down and it goes away, ruining the alignment of the text with the top of the screen which I maintain to aid my reading. And like a tenacious torturer the fucking title bar pops up and down and up and down. I am living forever in the insane JavaScript bouncy house praying to god that I can find some way to kill myself to make the pain stop.
No dang, you’re wrong. This is like arresting a man who is walking down a dark alley with cash in his pocket for “robbery baiting,” which is insane. His comment is civil, polite and on topic. Censor people who actually flame. don’t punish people for saying what they think is true. Again, this guy hasn’t made any personal attacks or broken the rules in any way. Cmon.
It's absurd to say that slurring "the general attitude of Chinese people" was civil, polite, and on topic. If you say that, I can only imagine that you're not coming into contact with the very large numbers of people who would find such a comment to be the opposite of civil and polite. That's not our situation, and we have to take care of all HN users. Everyone has the right to come here and not see their country or race or ethnic background (or similar groupings they may belong to) put down in that way.
Perhaps you don't feel like this matters, but I can tell you for a fact that people have been hounded off this site by comments of this nature (e.g. China-related slurs), including extremely ugly personal attacks. I don't want to have anything to do with a site where that happens, and I don't believe that the vast majority of this community would either. None of us wants that community. But we can easily end up with it anyway, if we're not careful, because that's how group dynamics work.
Part of the problem here is that the forum feels like an intimate conversation, and in intimate conversation there is more latitude for talking in a grand and speculative way about this stuff, especially if you have high trust from previous interactions. But when you post to HN what you're actually doing is broadcasting to millions of people. Public broadcasting has to have different standards. Imagine what would result if a million people heard the things that you (or I, or any of us) said to your friends, without any mitigating context.
I just respectfully disagree. So it’s not possible to be civil or polite while pointing out an unfortunate or unpleasant fact? This is obviously ridiculous. It isn’t hounding and it isn’t slurring and it isn’t personal attacks. You have trouble seeing the difference for some reason. All national groups have problems and the only way they get fixed, the only way we’ve made progress, is by refusing to overlook problems for the sake of not stepping on anyone’s toes. Or for the sake of political expediency, Dan.
Unfortunate and unpleasant facts can apply to an entire country and culture. There is no physical law in the universe that prevents this from happening.
In reality, for this specific topic, the canyon is not so wide as you believe and I don't think you have the relevant cultural context to make such a judgement call on how wide it is. It's a century old question... how much freedom of speech and how much censorship and at what cost?
In this case you chose to censor something that could potentially be flame bait (but wasn't) at the cost of preventing any discussion about a very real and general truth about China.
I’m about to be in Rome. If anyone has tips on under-rated things to see and do then I would appreciate hearing about it. I’m already interested in that road you can see from space.
Not sure if it qualifies as under-rated, but there is a night tour of the Roman forums with what's basically a documentary about roman life projected on the ruins, highlighting details and providing context. I found it great (also because it's been produced- and narrated, in the Italian version- by Piero Angela, a beloved science documentarist that has interested in science entire generations of Italians, sort of an Italian David Attenborough). I was there with a friend who's a native English speaker and she enjoyed it a lot as well.
The one referenced by SeanLuke, the via Emilia is some 300km North of Rome. (and I suspect that now what is visible from space is the highway that is practically parallel to it):
You don't need to be "assigned moral guilt" to recognize atrocities from the past, their influence on the present state, and reparations that should be made.
It's kind of an interesting moral question though. Should immigrants have to pay reparations for the crimes of a state that neither they nor their ancestors were a part of?
If we accept that the entity of the United States is responsible for these crimes and owes reparations...is it fair to use fungible tax dollars paid partially by immigrants to pay those reparations?
I don't know. Interesting puzzle to think about though.
Yes, immigrants are part of that "entity of the United States". The reparations are owed by that entity for not complying with a legally binding treaty.
The rule of law means that the entity states that it will comply with everything that is legally binding. As such it is responsible for paying those reparations. The way that entity raises funds is by taxation or borrowing, using itself as the collateral for the debt.
Morals are reasoned, which is not objective but logical, fair enough. Logically, the morality question is answered by deriving the concept of personal responsibility. As an immigrant, you agree to the responsibility inherent to a new citizenship.
Likewise, the Native Americans who controlled the land before the US likely didn't have it gifted to them freely. Tribes were constantly at various stages of war with each other, and some wiped out completely.
Do they owe reparations to each other, too? And what about the ones that are completely gone?
All of the discussion of reparations and making good on centuries-past injustices always leaves out how it all gets swept under the rug if there are no decendents around to make claims.
The ones that are completely gone have no way to make a claim. But if one tribe wants to make a claim to reparations from another they’re free to do so. It’s between them to sort that out and none of my business.
On the other hand I am a citizen of the USG and believe it should be held to its promises.
Promises are a different case, imo. If the deal was made for the land, then past injustices and reparations are irrelevant.
> The ones that are completely gone have no way to make a claim.
I could have been more clear, but I was trying to imply that we should remember that it's the lesser injustices that have claimants. The greater injustices would have none.
In fact, it raises an interesting question. Suppose that early American settlers genuinely just conquered the whole land, provided no reservations, made no special deals, and expected / enforced all remaining Native Americans to submit to the laws of the land. You know, like virtually every other conquering of a territory throughout history.
Would we look on those actions less favorably than the actions that were actually taken? Or would we just write it off morally as "every place was ultimately taken by force by someone at some point" and it be a non-issue, despite it being a much greater injustice?
what about guilt for the quantitative benefits you derive from no other reason but the position of your birth, often at the expense or detriment of others who suffer from the position of theirs?
I understand the point, because one was born with more, one owes it to those born with less. Correct? I think that is an economical system argument than a moral argument. I don't find being born into ANY situation a reason to feel guilt or apologize.
No, not correct. It's less of a debt and more of a duty, and less of an apology than an acknowledgement, and not a guilt but a recognition.
I didn't own slaves, I didn't commit genocide, and neither did my ancestors. But I benefit from slavery that did exist, and my ancestors benefited from a genocide. Do I owe anything to the victim? No, because the victims have been dead for decades if not a century. But a failure to recognize ones obligation or duty to the rest of their community to bring an equity about such that their children or grandchildren don't even consider such questions - that's not nearly at the scale of destruction as our history has wrought but it does continue the cycle. If you want future generations to break from it, it starts by reconciling that your status is derived from the status of those who came before you, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
> But I benefit from slavery that did exist, and my ancestors benefited from a genocide.
I don't think this is the best way to say it, because "I benefit from slavery" sounds kind of abstract at this point. In fact, white people benefited from all kinds of 100% real and explicit racism right up to and beyond Civil Rights.
You don't have to uncover anything hidden because you can just go look up e.g. zoning laws in Berkeley and they will just say in the meeting minutes that they'd invented them to keep out the blacks and Chinese. The reason highways go through US cities instead of around them is because they wanted to knock down the black neighborhoods. They really put a lot of effort into it.
One reason to fix it is that it'll improve life for you too - undoing zoning will make your commute shorter and housing cheaper. But of course, people tend to not care about their absolute quality of life as long as it's better than someone else's.
I’m gonna drop this here because it’s tangential and I think very important.
I have a history of asd, migraine and rashes. As well as getting sick a lot and having weird health problems.
About a year ago I went though one of those once or twice in a lifetime stress events. On the same night as the event, I experienced disturbed sleep. My sleep never went back to normal. Shortly after, I started to experience psychotic symptoms, usually around night. I had happened to read a doctors testimonial earlier about keto and psychosis so I tried it. It fixed both my sleep and my psychotic symptoms. Within one week of starting keto I was completely back to normal. Due to side effects of keto, namely “keto rash,” I was forced to stop. I ended up starting and stopping a lot. The correlation between starting and stoping keto and my symptoms was exact. I have a background in biology and I actively looked for any other correlation. There is zero ambiguity that keto was responsible for my astonishing remissions. I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist With psychotic depression and prescribed anti-psychotics, so the symptoms were real. Obviously I never took the medication. He brushed off my observation about keto.
As time went forward the psychotic symptoms became small enough to just ignore even when off keto, only bothering me occasionally at night. My sleep never went back to normal while off keto.
I started to return to a normal life when a few months later I encountered another health problem. I moved into a new house and because I’m cheap I bought a fixer. The fixer had mold. I stayed inside with a noticeable musty smell. I made sure to air it out and had plans to remediate it eventually. I googled mold health problems and nothing really came up so I assumed it was fine. But I started waking up with strange headaches and shaky hands. Then I started waking up with brain fog and headache. Then finally I started having bouts of ridiculous depression Along with the rest of what I’ve mentioned. I would have a 2 hour bout of those symptoms every other day roughly. The depression was so intense and so painful that it made me want to kill myself immediately. I have never experienced anything like that in my entire life and it was so bad that I think depression is not even the right word for it. The second time it happened I went to the ER. They scanned my brain and did tests and found nothing. My doctor said that nothing was wrong and that I just had depression and recommended antidepressants. But that didn’t explain all the strange symptoms that came with the depression which included extremely dry throat (oddly), weak limbs, and other smaller things. At this point I was emotionally exhausted because I felt very deeply that my brain was horribly broken in some way and there wasn’t a single lead to follow. Based on the circumstances of my life, I decided to throw in the towel. I have never committed to suicide with so little hesitation. I was completely tired of and done with life. No family anyway. But after thinking for a while, I decided I should just travel away from where I live and completely remove myself from any kind of environmental contaminants just on the off chance that it was something in the environment and that removing it would reverse the symptoms. I really didn’t think it would work, but it did. It took about three weeks, although there were still shadows of the symptoms sometimes.
I had already looked into mold and there was nothing reported in mainstream sources. Oddly, some very sus homeopathic websites had articles that described my symptoms exactly. But they were littered with BS pseudo science and didn’t have any treatment options besides eating clay and other nonsense.
I have been interested in ASD ever since I realized I had it. I have a case that is not obvious so I was not formally diagnosed until my mid twenties. So I was googling ASD research and I happened upon this new study that attributes ASD to something called cell danger response. Hypothetically, atp can be used as a signal molecule and cells can get stuck using atp for signaling rather than carrying out business as usual. I wasn’t too sure until I saw that they had done a trial with an old drug that blocks atp receptors on the surface of cells and showed marked improvement in autistic children. Small n but qualitatively meaningful and certainly warranting a larger study. It also lines up with one very peculiar quality of autism which is that it can be temporarily put into remission with TMS in some people, which indicates dormant brain networks rather than destroyed brain networks. Phase 2 trials are about to begin.
Cell danger response is hypothesized to be a branch of the inflammatory system. And in reading about cell danger response I was made aware of another guy who was researching mast cells and micro glia, which are cells that are central to inflammation. This guy mainly studied mast cells. I listened to a podcast that interviewed him, I think it had less than a thousand views. He talked about all these papers he had published about basic mast cell biology. And it blew my mind. I’ll try to summarize all the important points. Mast cells are present in the deep regions of the brain that are responsible for emotions, sleep and other things. Mast cells Distribute inflammatory molecules like histamine, but critically they distribute way more molecules than just histamine. The molecules dispensed by mast cells can do all kinds of things, including dilate or constrict blood vessels. Mast cells are so general that when deactivated, wounds do not heal, as has been demonstrated experimentally. Mast cells can be agitated by many different kinds of chemicals and also stress. But critically, exposure to one specific thing can lower the threshold of the mast cells to be excited by other things. So at the end of the day what you have is a system where inputs can interact and create very complex emergent behaviors. When you combine this with the fact that only a fraction of the population has problems with inflammation, you have something that could have eluded medical science until now.
Then this guy said something that really surprised me. He mentioned that mold can be a big problem with agitating mast cells and that he always recommends his patients to get away from mold if they are having weird problems and that it usually works.
And the pieces start to come together. I have ASD. The only comorbidities of ASD are asthma (which I have a family history of) and skin rashes (I think) which are both problems of inflammation. Psychosis has been shown to be closely linked with inflammation in many cases. Depression has also been linked to inflammation. There is a disease called mast cell activation syndrome where people get rashes and other symptoms, usually triggered later in life by a stressful event. Bingo.
And then it made sense why keto had helped me so much. Keto has been proven to have anti-inflammatory effects in at least one paper that studied one ketone body in particular. And there are also the myriad reports of people’s asthma and RA improving dramatically on keto. And it fits neatly into the broader theory that when the body thinks physical resources are scarce, like during excessive exercise or when running off body fat, it shuts down unnecessary things, including some parts of the inflammation system. Meanwhile, carbs have been shown to promote inflammation.
The only study to properly investigate the link between keto and psychosis is currently underway in Finland and is expected to be finished by December.
The final puzzle piece: after discovering this I had a hunch that my migraines were also caused by inflammation. And i remembered that after taking lsd for the first time, my headaches went away for years. So I googled “lsd inflammation.” lo and behold, all popular psychedelics have been shown to be extremely potent anti-inflamatories. There is one guy in particular who studies this and he has published papers and is currently in the process of commercializing the most potent anti-inflammatory that he has identified which is actually not lsd but an obscure cousin called DOI. Fascinatingly, the dose required to get the anti-inflammatory effect is much smaller than the dose at which the drug makes you trip. And I believe that was the case for all the big names.
So at the end of the day, I stumbled upon a medical revolution that is still in the pipes. And it will be a revolution because inflammation is the cause of many things. Heart disease (yes, really), RA, and many other huge names.
I wrote this marathon post on my phone so please excuse lack of sources and spelling mistakes.
Thanks so much for the positivity. If you google keto rash you’ll understand why I am prevented from being on Keto for long periods of time. The problem with keto rash is that nobody has actually figured out what causes it.
luckily my symptoms don’t make keto necessary. But I do plan on winning back my sleep at some point. And that battle consists of performing some experiments to figure out what causes keto rash. I’ve already informally shown that it can’t happen without the presence of sweat by restarting keto after applying prescription strength antiperspirant to one half of all rash-prone areas. Without exception, the treated half did not develop irritation. It’s not a cure since covering yourself in prescription strength AP would probably be very dangerous and very expensive.
In between now and the time when treatment of inflammation becomes a part of mainstream medical science, I see myself on keto all the time and taking sub-psychoactive doses of shrooms and DOI once a month. I’m excited to see what that combination feels like.
For personal health and wellness, self-experimenting is the way to go. It should be easier to try and see what works for us.
In the end of the day, there's no one-size-fits-all for health and wellbeing, people should have the tools to experiment and find the optimal diet and lifestyle.
The payment scheme of the future will be something where a digital product is created and then kept locked up until it’s unlocked by Kickstarter style fundraising. Each individual person gets something they want (the digital product) in exchange for their money, just like before. But under this model, everything might be open source by default, the product only costs society what it is worth (unlike current digital products like movies and songs) and the convoluted nightmare of drm and each-tv-network-has-their-own-subscription-service can finally die.
