I know it's unconventional, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading that translation. It felt so alive, and other translations have never engaged me in quite the same way.
It was the only version I managed to finish, unless you count "Eaters of the Dead" by Michael Crichton (which is loosely based on it and mashed up with the story of Ahmad ibn Fadlan).
I think it's a good compromise between staying true-ish to the language, and also making it come alive as an epic adventure story.
I actually did this prompt and found that it worked with a single nudge on a followup prompt. My first shot got me a wine glass that was almost full but not quite. I told it I wanted it full to the top - another drop would overflow. The second shot was perfectly full.
Vail averages something like 240" of snow per year, which is 20 feet. Wolf Creek usually gets the most snow in Colorado and averages 430" of snow per year, which is almost 36 feet.
Judging from the comments I've seen, nobody believes this because RFK has completely shot his credibility, and I don't blame them either.
But it turns out there may actually be some emerging evidence to support this. This recent Harvard meta-analysis [1] from just last month looked at 46 different studies and suggested that there may actually be something happening here although it's not conclusive. Correlation but not yet causation.
Nobody should be making policy on this yet, but it's the kind of thing that I would allocate some research dollars to if I hadn't just fired all of the competent researchers.
> Further, a potential causal relationship is consistent with temporal trends—as acetaminophen has become the recommended pain reliever for pregnant mothers, the rates of ADHD and ASD have increased > 20-fold over the past decades
I do not have at all the right background to evaluate this research so treat this opinion for what it's worth, but it seems incautious for the authors to close with this note near the end. People like RFK are looking for an explanation for that 20-fold increase. But the hazard ratios in the studies with positive results seem to be along the lines of 1.05-1.20. They do also note changes in diagnosis criteria before this sentence, but it still seems like if they're going to mention a 20-fold increase, they should be even more explicit that any association with increased Tylenol use could only ever explain a very small part of that.
Ya, an increased risk of 5-20% on an already very low risk.
That means mothers who don't take Tylenol have baseline 3% chance their child will be diagnosed with autism. And mothers who took Tylenol (at the levels of the study) may have a 3.15% to 3.6% chance (assuming causation, which has not been proven).
It seems unlikely we "cracked the code" here.
The best justification for the high increase we're seeing in the data is still just that the data itself has changed in how it's measured and tallied and so on.
I read the study and TBH it's more or less expected that a correlation would exist between increased NDD diagnoses and prescriptions common to pregnant women in regions with increased NDD diagnoses.
Being afforded better care during pregnancy should correlate with better attention (and diagnosis of conditions) to offspring.
If one were cynical one might say this was a good call by Andrea Baccarelli, the Dean of the Faculty, to commission a meta study looking for correlations between common treatments and NDD diagnoses in the current climate of funding going toward whomever can put forward a thread to follow in pursuit of autism.
The irony is that if Tylenol use in pregnancy actually does increase the risk of autism, RFK's destruction of trust in the government's scientific process will probably just push that sort result back. He's a charlatan and totally unscientific regardless.
Luckily for those of us who care, there are private and foreign government organizations who still take healthcare and science seriously. Unfortunately the only sane solution seems to be to ignore the US authorities on this for the time being.
Right, I think this falls under the "broken clock correct twice a day" saying. RFK Jr says a lot of crazy things, but he probably does occasionally say something that makes sense, through no skill of his own.
I mean, he rails against processed food and color/dye additives, some of it being stuff that other countries with reputable FDA-analogues have banned. There could be something to that, even though I can confidently assume his opinions don't come from any sort of scientific rigor.
Some blue states are even (quietly?) jumping on the "MAHA" bandwagon on some issues. Not to categorically say "blue states right, red states wrong", but if your polarized political opponents are putting some of your ideas into practice, maybe not all your ideas are bad, regardless of how unscientifically you may have come by them.
You're forgetting that for half the country that trust was destroyed years ago, and RFK actually being aware of and wanting to investigate evidence like this is restoring it.
That half of the country is not having their trust in science restored. They're forcing their superstitions onto everyone else and calling that science.
That is a retrospective meta study, which leads to lots of speculation, but little actual proof of causation.
>> The researchers noted that while steps should be taken to limit acetaminophen use, the drug is important for treating maternal fever and pain, which can also harm children.
also:
>> Baccarelli noted in the “competing interests” section of the paper that he has served as an expert witness for a plaintiff in a case involving potential links between acetominophen use during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Huh, but digging in a little more does show some stronger studies... hmmmm...
> Nobody should be making policy on this yet, but it's the kind of thing that I would allocate some research dollars to if I hadn't just fired all of the competent researchers.
Yes but that is the whole RFK brand. He and his supporters always try to have their cake and eat it too. Claim something, things go wrong and blame others for misconstruing RFK's comments.
The way this is going - RFK is going to make claims based on this paper and when people get harmed, he and his supporters will claim that people who followed RFK's assertion didn't hear him correctly. He clearly said the policy was based on this paper and people should have done more research and read this paper. See this paper says there is correlation and not causation. So, you cannot blame RFK for this mishap.
Maybe we should. We're talking about pregnant women and autism, along with taking a different painkiller. And if the theory is wrong, it'll only take a few years to find out, presumably.
For people who don't have children: most medical advice regarding pregnant women and infants is overwhelmingly cautious and errs on the side of, "if we don't have enough studies confirming it's 100% safe, it's better to stick to the less questionably safe way." I'm not sure why this would be any different.
The issue here is you need to make a trade. It's not like cutting out alcohol. Now you have to decide, what alternative painkiller will replace it.
There was an initial reason why Tylenol became the standard one, because others were assessed to be riskier in other ways.
I agree with you, people should weight all the known risks from all legitimate studies and data, and base policies around that, and this is no exception.
People are worried though that this won't be the case, and that bias is present from the start in this case, and we might end up making the wrong policy call.
> Judging from the comments I've seen, nobody believes this because RFK has completely shot his credibility, and I don't blame them either.
All you’re stating is that you’ve found an echo chamber - which is true of Hacker News (and Reddit, and BlueSky). It’s also true of TruthSocial. I guess my annoyance is that this is Hacker news not DNC news - and as such, I’d hope for more than one (or even two!) perspectives.
I don’t think RFK has shot his credibility - even if he did withdraw from the DNC on October 9, 2023, less than two years ago. His perspective seems stable 20 years on after he wrote “Deadly Immunity” in 2005.
If you think he lost credibility, it wasn’t recent.
How can anyone find him credible after he pitched a "gold standard" health report (MAHA) that had hallucinated references, misrepresented research and "oaicite" markers that indicated it was AI generated?
I don't find that to be a controversial statement.
FYI, "DNC" or "RNC" doesn't refer to the party in general, it's the national party committee (also overloaded to refer to the convention). RFK Jr has certainly never been a member of the DNC.
I have a Garmin Descent Mk2i which I use for scuba diving, and it's a fabulous all-purpose fitness and adventure watch. I've used to for hundreds of dives, navigation on multiple backpacking trips, cycling, and tons of other stuff. I even wear it daily, and it nicely supports notifications from my phone.
When Garmin originally launched a scuba watch, I was kind of surprised. It's a small market, and there were a lot of established "good enough" players in the space. Everyone already had a dive computer. Who would want an expensive one from Garmin when they could buy an expensive one from Shearwater? But Garmin showed up with a good product, iterated by adding their sonar based SubWave for air integration, and eventually took a lot of marketshare by including fitness and smartwatch features the competitors lacked. Now I see tons of Garmins on dive boats. People love them.
Man, I wanted to get the garmin dive computer so bad. It's got so many awesome features, it's just priced out of my budget. Wound up going with the peregrine from shearwater, which was about half the price, but does way less than the garmin.
Another place they shine is for bikes. Their radar system that integrates with a bike computer is absolutely groundbreaking. It's so fantastic to be able to know when a car is coming up behind you without having to turn your head and possibly lose balance, it's such a great safety feature.
I have one of those as well and it's generally a good device but it has a few weird software defects which make me wonder whether Garmin employees do any real diving? Like in the Multi-Gas activity profile it will automatically prompt you to switch gases based on calculated PO2, but the message covers the entire screen so you can't see your depth! And there's no way to disable those alerts.
I'm just past the second dose on my older border collie, and it has been a good thing for him. But I would hesitate to call it a miracle. He's somewhat more active and flexible, but he still has some trouble climbing steps and stairs.
He also loves the cold, and he's always more active in the winter anyway. I would say he's close to the level he was last winter instead of slightly declined. That's great, but not miraculous.
We'll stick with the regimen and see if he continues to improve. I'll upgrade my judgement if he starts climbing stairs again.
> But this fallacy has been repeatedly exposed. For one, the organisations that are supposed to certify that indeed enough tree-planting has taken place do not have the tools to verify that the declared emissions will definitely be absorbed. Another problem is that many offsetting activities do not actually offset anything.
> A recent investigation into the world’s largest carbon standard found that 94 percent of its rainforest offset credits did not actually contribute to carbon reduction.
When I looked at the offset market in the past, I realized that it was one of the few markets where both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud.
- The buyer is motivated to seek the lowest cost offsets they can find. They're not paying for the cleanup - all they need is the offset document itself, often for legal purposes.
- The seller is more than happy to take the buyer's money and spend it on looking like they're doing something. The rest is free margin.
Neither side remotely cares about the underlying activity behind the offset, and neither side is really penalized if the underlying activity is fraudulent. In fact, both sides are actually better off if the whole thing is fraudulent! I can't think of many other markets where this dynamic exists.
> When I looked at the offset market in the past, I realized that it was one of the few markets where both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud.
> I can't think of many other markets where this dynamic exists.
Recycling market is the same - UK government pays you to recycle plastic, £60 per tonne. You find someone in a 3rd world country that will take it off your hands for £30 per tonne, and pocket the difference. They give you a document saying the plastic was 'recycled' and dump it in the ocean.
Well you can't minimise plastic use if the rest of society doesn't.
I think landfilling is fine, we just need to make sure it does not end up in the environment floating about and causing contamination. And that we are not getting defrauded.
They must be recycling enough of it to recover their £30. They may dump the unrecyclable parts into the ocean, but nobody doubts there are unrecyclable things mixed in with it. It can't be 100% recycled.
To expand on this for anyone who doesn't quite follow, the government pays citizens £60 for recycling, which requires a certificate of proof, a citizen can give their plastic and £30 to a company for a certificate, but the company doesn't actually do the recycling.
The government might as well be part of such fraud too? What do they care, if the plastics is not actually recycled.
But if they cay say to the voters, "Now we're recycling all plastics", then, some more votes, they'll get, in the next elections? (Maybe just a few more votes, if most voters also don't care)
This is true for a lot of corporate training as well, in particular for compliance stuff. It's all bullshit to check a box. Whoever's paying for it wants to spend as little as possible, nobody cares what the content is or whether its actually learned, it's just about transferring liability. It's these silly regulatory constructs that are too detached from reality (like offsets) that give rise to this brand of bullshit
Indeed. I found i can pass 99% of these trainings without reading any materials beforehand. I just check reasonably sounding boxes. That's it. I failed such training only one time among hundreds!
My colleagues pass these in foreign languages for the lulz
My favourite was a training I took once which, if clicked through fast enough, would just skip right past the tests. There was no final check for how well you did, so my "you passed" certificate at the end proudly displayed that I had passed with a 10% score (because I answered the first few questions before realising the bug).
Nice ;)
I certainly hope these things do not store answers forever. Because if they do, in ten years some scary social credit system will punish a lot of people
> both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud.
Many people fully believe that they are making the world a better place, they are not "happy with being deceived" but they are just ignorant. This is like saying that the tobacco industry lies make both happy. That is only true as far as the buyer, the smoker, does not find the true, sometimes in a very hard way.
And your argument also applies to economic scams. If I invest all my money in a fund and think that I am getting a 20% return, I may be happy because I do not know that the bank has lost all my money. So, I am happy until I know the true.
Here, all the fault is in corporations that lie and scam people. The consumers are just trying to be good people. Your assumption that people does not want to know the true seems very profitable for scammers.
> I realized that it was one of the few markets where both the buyer and seller are perfectly happy with fraud.
The tragedy of the commons is near universal on all transactions and our propensity for neglecting fraud regarding the commons is universal. It just so happens that for these transactions the focus is on the commons.
I think the environmental movement went seriously awry by aligning itself with socialist political goals. Socialism is nothing more than a way to monopolize corporate power for tremendous profits. Climate ideals of limiting carbon also diverted attention from real-world pollution concerns - like harm from large-scale mining operations.
Oh man, attacking "socialism" by invoking profits. Saying carbon limiting efforts do not align with concerns about mining. Implying limiting carbon isn't an important goal.
Telling that you invoke those leaders rather than the countries of northern Europe. In any case, I can't tell how your original comment aligned with the discussion about carbon offset credits, or more off-topic, how you think limiting carbon output is somehow not a worthy goal of reducing climate change.
Well, for one, trying to reduce carbon output diverts attention other environmental concerns - like waste management, resource depletion, particulate pollution, recycling, etc. (When is the last time you heard about environmentalists trying to solve those issues?) Second, it gives blanket permission to regulate virtually every aspect of your life. Across the board. Whether it is needed or not. It is also highly presumptions to think that we can effectively control it to the degree it will actually make a significant difference without crashing the economy. And by crashing the economy, I don't just mean the rich sacrificing some of their salary. I mean, people starving or freezing to death.
Many countries permitted leaded gasoline for a long time, and many of the countries that kept it around the longest are also places that grow a lot of chocolate. Lead from car exhaust tends to stick around in the environment for a long time - as part of the soil and the dust in the air.
In South America [1]:
> The first country in South America initiating the phase-out of leaded gasoline was Brazil, moving toward alcohol fuels and unleaded gasoline from AD 1975 on, and achieving a total phase-out in 1991. On the contrary, unleaded gasoline in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru was not introduced before AD 1990–1991, and leaded gasoline was still in use until 1995 (Bolivia), 2004 (Peru), and 2005 (Chile).
In Africa [2]:
> But lead was still common in fuel in Africa and the Middle East. In 2002, UNEP organized a coalition of African governments and oil companies to promote the phaseout of leaded gas, the supposed vehicular benefits of which have been found to apply only to very old cars driven in extreme conditions. Lead was history in sub-Saharan Africa by 2006, and by 2014 was found only in Algeria, Iraq, Yemen, Myanmar, North Korea, and Afghanistan.
And if I were the president, I would ban avgas tomorrow.
The planes can all stay grounded till a replacement is available. The damage caused far outweighs the benefits of using it.
Yes, I know ambulance planes probably use it... Yes I know farmers use it for crop dusting. Yes I know some remote alaskan communities rely on flights for supplies. But spreading lead dust throughout the whole nation is worse than not having those things.
In this context that takes on a very different meaning. I wonder how much lead is directly from crop dusting. Avgas is ~1g/liter of lead and 100LL is 0.5g/liter. A small plane burns ~50 liters per hour.
> Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine.
When inside of a real brick and mortar store, have you walked by one of those displays on the ends of a row that's selling Pepsi products or Doritos? How do you think those things got there? They're called end caps, and stores make a lot of money from brands to put them there because customers are more likely to see them and purchase whatever.
Also, have you noticed that the shelves at stores usually contain the most well known brands at eye level while the cheap stuff or weird stuff is usually down low or up high? That may be store optimization, but more commonly those top brands pay for that eye-level placement.
Amazon didn't invent this. They just came up with the digital equivalent of what stores have been doing for decades.
Yes, of course end caps are doing the same thing, prioritizing the store's needs over the shopper's. They pull the same shit with how they lay out the store, to make you spend more time in it and travel over more of it. Which turns out to mean they're not just prioritizing profit over what's personally best for their shoppers, but also over public health, when there's serious infectious disease on the loose—which is all the time, and especially every Winter, but we got a particularly memorable lesson in the cost of that sort of thing, rather recently.
As serious as infectious disease is, I'm not even sure it's the biggest impact: the venn diagram of endcap products and products likely to contribute to metabolic syndromes is probably pretty close to a circle.
At least the pandemic moved a lot of shopping online and gave a margin of convenience back to customers.
Now I'm wondering whether all this customer-hostile activity on the part of grocery stores actually ends up being net negative for the economy. It may be a negative-sum action they're taking, in purely easy-to-quantify economic terms, without even putting a value on wasting shoppers' time or whatever extra stress or irritation that causes. A few extra flu cases per week per store can cause a lot of harm in lost productivity and medical bills, and then, as you point out, there's the way they push junk food.
I can ignore displays and go to right aisle to choose on products. On Amazon there is no equivalent. If they just ignore my search request I am stuck with trawling through irrelevant results.
Amazon search may have lots of results that I don't care about, but is generally accurate on the first try.
The brick and mortar experience is ostensibly 10x worse than being able to use a search box. Grocery stores and Home improvement stores are the worst - I probably spend 80% of my time there trying find where things are, with the overhead labels generally being useless.
Diver here. I'm looking at these four pictures after the fact, so I already know they're fake. They're good, but they also have some weird flaws. That said, I don't think I would have immediately recognized any of these as wrong on Facebook (maybe the diver photo).
- The nudibranch (slug thing) on the green coral doesn't look like anything I've seen in the Caribbean before, and the coral also looks odd for the region. That said, this is probably the most difficult photo for me to differentiate. I would have accepted this as a cool find of something I haven't seen before.
- The grouper (big fish) photo is actually pretty good, although DALL-E has misplaced its eyes a bit. That said, the lit foreground and dark noisy background are exactly the look I would expect for someone using a basic camera + lights with wonky post-processing.
- The diver photo is a horror show. There's a hose going nowhere on her back. It looks like she's blowing out of a harmonica instead of a regulator. Bubbles are collecting around the top of her mask for some reason. Her fins look like they were badly Photoshopped. Nothing looks right here.
- The lobster photo has a real but subtle flaw: Caribbean lobsters don't have big claws. It also looks like it's under a rock like you would find in cold waters around Massachusetts and Maine instead of the Caribbean.
Interesting stuff though. It will force me to be more skeptical when I look at people's photos in the future.
