How long have you been taking them? I've heard that an almost universal side effect is terrifying night paralysis on occasion. Have you experienced that yet?
Yeah, this is is true. I've been taking for 3 months now --best consistent sleep of my life, but definitely occasionally the most terrifying sleep paralysis I've ever experienced, or even heard of.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but ~1-2 nights of absolute terror per week is totally worth it compared to how it used to be (getting maybe ~1 good night of sleep every couple weeks.)
I did not experience night paralysis while using lemborexant.
I can think of a few reasons I might have avoided it, but who knows for sure. I wasn't on it that long (about a year? not going to look it up), I as a general rule do not remember my dreams unless I'm interrupted, the underlying cause of my total insomnia was pharmalogical, I've always had some level of sleep disorder, I've been on every other sort of sleep aid, I used it with melatonin... who really knows.
Every day, something like 100 cells in your body become cancerous, but your immune system shoots them down before they can cause any harm. This is effectively a general prophylactic for cancer, so it's not unreasonable to think that we could discover a general cure for cancer (and that something immunotherapy is a promising candidate).
Once the cancer starts to freely mutate it becomes much harder to contain. It's not just cleaning up defective cells, it's full on evultionary warfare between your immune system and the cancer.
Do you consider municipal property taxes (which, when the property value has risen since purchase, effectively taxes unrealized capital gains) also to be "obviously toxic"?
Yes. In regions where real estate prices explode many people are forced out of their homes because they cannot pay the increased tax. This specifically hits senior citizens hard. It's not uncommon for a property to increase it's taxes >30% some years in these boom towns. This creates an economic burden on long term residents, that is mostly used to pay for infrastructure that is needed to accommodate newcomers.
It's a pretty common belief. People having to sell/mortgage their family homes in order to pay higher taxes because their neighborhood is being gentrified is a self-feeding process. If they didn't have to pay taxes until they sold, it would seem far more just.
Taxing unrealized capital gains already isn't all that radical -- property tax is effectively a tax on unrealized gains of property value, and essentially every municipality has that tax.
> Taxing unrealized capital gains already isn't all that radical -- property tax is effectively a tax on unrealized gains of property value, and essentially every municipality has that tax.
Property taxes are a use tax (roads, police, fire, schools, etc), apportioned base on property value, it is not a capital gains tax.
Property taxes do not take into account the amount you paid for your house, so they are not a tax on unrealized gains since the gains are not calculated. You could be underwater on your mortgage and you would be taxed just the same.
Nope it is not. Property tax does not take any gains into account - it's tax on full value (with possible exemptions) not gains, you pay the same regardless whether you bought it for $1 or $1M. Except of course in California where they have this weird scheme which led to the fact that my next door neighbor paid less than half of the property tax I did for pretty much identical house (because they bought it in the 80s) - which looks like negative tax on gains.
In addition to what everyone has already said, property taxes paid are also very explicitly deductible from income taxes. They’re more like an indirect transfer from the Federal government to municipalities, and don’t necessarily result in a substantial aggregate increase in tax burdens.
Also, there is a real debate to be had about if housing should be primary considered an investment or a basic need by society. Many argue that the focus on housing as an investment in the US is a primary driver of our housing problems.
I have achieved effectively permanent relief from tinnitus. And not just habituation, adaptation, or acceptance; I no longer hear the ringing (except very quietly if I really plug my ears and really listen for it, but this probably matches the same level of ringing that I heard before I considered myself to have tinnitus)
In the summer of 2016, I first noticed some ringing in one of my ears when I would insert ear plugs at night. I shared my concern with an ENT who then prescribed ciprofloxacin ear drops. I administered it that night to the one ear and awoke a few hours later to profoundly increased ringing. It was bad enough that it triggered pretty severe suicidal ideation. It also greatly exacerbated my difficulty sleeping, which in turn exacerbated the tinnitus, forming a feedback loop. By late 2017, I also started to develop migraines, intermittent brain fog, and malaise. Addressing these symptoms became a higher priority than the tinnitus, although I believed them to likely have a common cause.
After the first year or so, I very gradually began to habituate to the tinnitus. By early 2019, I had largely habituated to it. I could still hear the ringing regularly, but it no longer contributed to low mood or insomnia. My other neurological symptoms had also somewhat abated.
Throughout that time, I had visited many doctors: ENTs, audiologists, general neurologists, cardiologists, a migraine specialist, a sleep specialist, gastroenterologists. None of the doctors were helpful at all. I had a full battery of tests and none revealed anything abnormal.
Around mid 2019, I had mostly given up on doctors being able to help my condition and instead determined that I'd have to figure it out myself.
After years of trying to directly resolve the neurological symptoms, I eventually reasoned that I probably had some sort of more systemic issue of which the tinnitus was merely one symptom. This was initially difficult for me to accept as I was otherwise generally "looked" like I was in good health: I worked out regularly (both cardio and weightlifting), I mostly ate healthily, I didn't drink very much, I didn't do any other recreational drugs, I socialized regularly.
I then set out to try every possible intervention which was generally safe and which could potentially improve my health (not just the tinnitus, but my health holistically). I tried tons of supplements individually. I reduced my dairy intake. I tried low FODMAP. I tried various prescription drugs (CGRPi, beta blockers, blood pressure medication, etc.). I started to do red light therapy regularly. I started to sauna (both dry and infrared) regularly. I did extended water fasts (5-7 days), which provided surprisingly large (albeit temporary) symptomatic relief. I did some gut microbiome protocols. I tried some other protocols for eradicating latent infections. I tried protocols for improving mitochondrial health and protocols for addressing chronic fatigue syndrome. I tried stem cell therapy, both autologous and umbilical cord-derived.
Throughout late 2019 and through 2020, I increasingly started to notice times where I couldn't find my tinnitus, even when I was looking for it. Unfortunately, I couldn't very easily correlate this with any particular intervention. I also was executing multiple interventions simultaneously, so attribution would have probably been impossible anyway.
Since late 2020, my tinnitus has been more absent than it is present. I cannot hear it today, even if I listen for it and try to trigger it. The last time I recall hearing my tinnitus involuntarily was mid 2021.
I wish I could tell you definitively what caused my tinnitus and which intervention(s) worked for me.
My best guess is that I had some sort of gut dysbiosis which resulted in elevated ammonia and hydrogen sulfide levels in my blood. These toxins are known to harm both mitochondria and neurons, which could manifest as tinnitus (and eventually as my other symptoms). This gut dysbiosis likely originated from the time that I got very bad food poisoning twice within two weeks while visiting Southeast Asia; I also had terrible appendicitis in the months following that, ultimately culminating in the removal of my appendix.
Red light therapy improves mitochondrial health (which in turn improve anything which relies on ATP production, which is quite literally everything). It seemed to help me.
Sauna also improves mitochondrial health. Sweat contains more ammonia than does plasma, and so the sweating from sauna likely reduces ammonia levels (and possibly other toxins like hydrogen sulfide, too). This also seemed to help me.
When I fasted, I stopped fueling my gut microbiome, which meant that they stopped producing those toxins. This could explain why I noticed such sudden relief. This also clued me in to this being some sort of diet or digestive issue.
I think the gut microbiome protocols helped, but by the time I had started those, my symptoms were already abating. These also tend to be a bit hit-or-miss, and they can take months to impact symptoms.
But this theory as to the origin of my condition and what specifically resolved it is probably colored as much by my a priori beliefs about what would work as it is informed by my actual experience.
That being said, I do think the general approach of "aggressively try everything (safe) which could potentially improve your health" worked for me and could likely work for many others.
This is one of the most encouraging and helpful posts I've read on treating tinnitus. Thank you. Can I please ask more about your diet? Did you eliminate anything like salt, sugar, caffeine, etc., from your diet?
It's a perfectly coherent question! I'd kindly ask that you try to comply with Hacker News's guidelines about engaging in kind dialogue, and specifically the line "please don't post shallow dismissals".
Here's what I consider to be a simpler question to answer: do you think people have the right to give birth to a child whose existence would be only horrible, endless suffering before eventually succumbing to death?
This isn't just a hypothetical: people tend to agree that a parents who are at high chance of birthing a child with a terrible genetic disease probably shouldn't take that risk (or, at least, should protect against it with some preimplantation genetic testing).
But everyone suffers at least a little bit at some point in their life. If you don't think people have a right to birth children whose lives would be pure suffering, but you do think people have a right to birth children who would suffer at least a little bit in their lives, then how do you justify one but not the other? Is there some threshold amount of misery which you think is okay to inflict on someone without their consent?
There may be some other moral framework or argument which articulately justifies this, and I'm genuinely curious to see if someone has come up with an interesting answer to the question.
It's a legitimate question! Many people wish they had never been born. What right do you have to force such a person into existence without their consent?
This has actually been a known issue for over a century with Winston Churchill even commenting on it.