betty_staples's comments

> People with cabinets full of dozens of supplement bottles that were chosen based on studies, too. Then they finally decided to try real antidepressant medications and wished they’d done it sooner.

Here's the thing - if you click a button and pay a dollar your supplement will be there at your door in hours.

Getting a SSRI is a whole damn thing

Lot of drugs - mental health, low cholesterol, low blood pressure -- a lot of drugs along the lines of "take them rest of your life" -- ought to be OTC you ask me. Of course medicine would hate that because the red tape of going in, checking a box, and getting a script, is a nice little profit center. Not as much as racket as say spine surgeries, but a bread & butter small time racket. Here's a question, has anyone tried making these OTC and measuring risk & reward, deaths vs lives saved? Or measure healthcare costs? Because I'm willing to venture lots of lives would be helped, families whole, at a much lower cost.

>I have seen more than once our local vet using this technique to treat cats with large wounds -- with great results by the way.

I'm not surprised, a lot of vets I know from Iraq and Afghanistan had used Tilapias for battlefield dressing. Worst case there was a Tilapia MRE people kept around for this purpose. Honestly it's great to see them taking those skills from war and translating them into helping street animals such as cats.

>Amazon right now feels to me like a large landlord seeking rent kicking people for no reason because they didn't like that some person spilled some water.

At Amazon scale they have people firehosing water and complaining about it, people punching holes in the roof causing water leaks, people messing with the pipes causing water leak, it's a lot, so they just wrote "ban water on floor bot" which clears 95% of the scammers and 5% of the innocents who had a small spill. Which sounds innocuous but, again, at scale, 5% of the innocents is a damn lot of people

>I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.

Just to go off of this.. I'm not saying it was aliens.... but it was aliens.

https://www.dictionary.com/culture/memes/ancient-aliens

I will say I am strongly against what social media algorithms do.

But I am fascinated by the black mirror element. They said "hey algorithm what gets likes, what gets views - look into human nature and report back" - "human nature shows polarization does! emotional charged divisive content!" - that's just fascinating. Not learning, philosphophy, growth, education, health, no, the naughty stuff, the bad stuff. That's not to exonerate social media companies, no, such would be the same as exonerating big tobacco for what they do.

relevant lesser known fact - 3G crypto is broken. In such a way that is a bit suspicious - a couple terabyte-sized rainbow table will crack it.

I found a guy with the tables at one point, it's buried deep on the internet -- but this for example -- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6645525

Yes well there are other things you could do with a DNA genotype than tag ethnicity or confirm it's human. Specifically related to a similarity metric between genotypes (which is how we go about arriving at an ethnicity estimate)

For example

if said saint has any known living relatives (and we are certain of that), then this confirms the veracity of the relic.

if said saint has multiple relics of various body parts, we DNA test each one and examine concordance.

of course a DNA test may QC fail, not enough DNA, too low quality, etc. But if it passes then we potentially have dead to rights a confirmation or refutation of the relic. For this reason I expect the church would be quite recalcitrant to have it tested, because there is a possible outcome that the relic is revealed to be a fake