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Ok, but then again what do we earn from normalising the talking points of the other side ? You're adding shit to the shit pile, but it brings nothing to the table for "your" side
Not the person you replied to, but vilifying the other side is just adding fuel to the fire. Let's say your country and my country are at war. What has a better chance of achieving peace, 1) me saying that you're an evil dictator who does evil things because you're evil and probably insane, or 2) me saying that even though I disagree with you, things are not black and white and my side did some bad things to you too and looking for some reasonable compromise.
To me 1) only makes sense if I think I can defeat you militarily, which doesn't seem probable here. I guess 1) also makes sense if I don't want peace at all and don't care about how many people die, but I'm sure that's not the case.
I was head-hunted a while back from Wayfair, and I felt that it was too good to be true: 1. high pay for remote work, 2. small teams, and 3. working on interesting tech (I think it was an AI furniture preview, like Amazon has). I ultimately decided against Wayfair because I had the feeling that helping a company sell predominately low-quality Chinese furniture to unassuming Americans would further enlarge the void in my soul, and I would be working far too much. Perhaps for a year or two, it would have been a dream come true, if I didn't want to have a life outside of work...
I have taken a lot of these in the past, and the label "pseudoscientific" is unwarranted. The "writer" cherrypicks and generalizes data to discount it, but if you want to understand the mechanism of, say, Ashwagandha, you probably should spend a few hours reading research and meta-analyses and not spending 10 minutes on Google to decide if it's "good" or "pseudoscience".
Should these companies not be allowed to advertise and distribute products that might help some and might hurt others? Should tech writers write health articles when they don't know what they're talking about?
> Should these companies not be allowed to advertise and distribute products that might help some and might hurt others?
That is correct, yes. Pharmacologically active ingredients are medicine. Encouraging someone to take mental health meds without supervision, especially when made who-knows-where with who-knows-what quality control, because they're unregulated, is incredibly irresponsible.
There's a reason you can't buy Zoloft over the counter. Anything else in that space is either:
1. A placebo, in which case, no, companies should not be advertising it and thus keeping people from seeking qualified help, or
2. The real deal, in which case, no, companies should not be advertising it and selling it for unmonitored home use by people with zero education in the field.
There are a multitude of supplements with clinical evidence to support their efficacy that are neither #1 nor #2. These include caffeine, ginseng, various vitamins, etc. If you go to examine.com, they analyze the strength of the studies and the effect size. Most won't have the effect size of prescription drugs but some are absolutely worth taking, particularly fish oil and vitamins like B and D.
Caffeine and gensing have immediate onsets. You know in a small number of minutes whether you’ve had enough or too much. Vitamins usually have a wide range between enough to be useful and enough to harm you, although you’re crazy to take fat-soluble vitamins for a long period without telling your doctor and getting a blood test.
You generally have to take psych meds for quite a few days before determine their effect. If you take too little, you risk your mental health. Take too much? Have fun riding out Seratonin Syndrome!
Animal studies in the lab suggest Ashwagandha may be effective for treating cancer, diabetes, and somehow, both reducing fatigue and as a sedative, but these effects have not been thoroughly tested on humans.
The article doesn't use the term psuedoscientific at all. That was OP.
Government lies, aka statistics, conveniently ignore the cost of high quality items when doing averages. If you are buying eggs as a health conscious person, you know not to buy $1/dozen eggs any more because industry producers have made them low cost by reducing quality, feeding chickens soy and the cheapest excuse for food. The pastured ones are 5-10x the cost and the quality is night and day. US government conveniently views these things as staples, but they are not.
I think this sums it up well. People mostly don't know or care about how hedonic regression is used in CPI (myself included, on knowing). I don't think the process is easy to understand nor transparent (although I may be wrong here).
But BLS denies this assessment (and it's not 100% related to the article posted, but closely related to your comment I think):
> When the cost of food rises, does the CPI assume that consumers switch to less desired foods, such as substituting hamburger for steak?
> No. ...
> Is the use of "hedonic quality adjustment" in the CPI simply a way of lowering the inflation rate?
> No. ...
Obviously, they provide their own explanations, but I'm not going to paste the whole thing. This is definitely something I'd like to understand better though. Especially every time I complain about how Chewy Chips Ahoy or some other product I enjoyed in my childhood is absolute garbage now, and I don't buy the explanation that I simply had bad taste as a kid.
They also host this Quality Adjustment page to say which types of products do or don't have such adjustments: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/home.htm. So maybe this is transparency. I think it would take me 2+ hours on a weekend to really research this to understand it myself.
The BLS also produces an inflation research series called R-CPI-U-RS that does not make substitutions, and it's really not very different from the formal CPI series. [1]
Note that all of the data and methodology that goes into this is public and if there were any real, actually problematic substitutions, you'd know about it. The substitutions are good, actually, as they reflect changes in tastes. For instance, lobster and caviar used to be food for poor people. Should they be part of the CPI despite the fact they're rich people food now? Definitely not, that would massively overstate inflation.
> Especially every time I complain about how Chewy Chips Ahoy or some other product I enjoyed in my childhood is absolute garbage now, and I don't buy the explanation that I simply had bad taste as a kid.
Honestly, I buy that completely. We've known our tastes change as we get older. I used to hate tomatoes, now I love them. [2]
> Honestly, I buy that completely. We've known our tastes change as we get older. I used to hate tomatoes, now I love them.
I used to hate eggs, and now I love them, and I am aware of that change in my taste. The concept that tastes change is not new to me. I also used to love Oreos, and I still do. They do not taste significantly different. Chocolate chip cookies, in general, still taste good to me, especially slightly under-baked ones (which the "Chewy" Chips Ahoy resembled in texture when I enjoyed them as a kid).
The fact that, in current day, I would despise this one type of chocolate chip cookie that I used to like--and also while still enjoying other cookies and chocolate chip cookies, and fully understanding that tastes change--seems to be an absurd scenario compared to the distinct possibility that something changed in the way they make the cookies. Also, considering Kraft (which owned Nabisco which owned Chips Ahoy) split up in 2012, I'd be more surprised if they didn't decide to make changes to some of their recipes.
However, I do remember at one point trying baijiu (白酒), and it ruined the taste of sodas and diet sodas to me for several months. It was an abrupt but temporary change. No idea how that works, but the taste (really the smell) became unbearably similar to baijiu. Kind of want to try baijiu again now that I think about it.
But you will be happy once you're sufficiently medicated via the patented delivery mechanism of antidepressant pharmaceuticals in industrial agriculture... :)
That's emotionlessness...not happiness. Can't wait for the next lecture from "the adults in the room" on the the virtues of colonialism & why the current war on a way of life is necessary for Democracy. Meanwhile I'm wondering how the military or the jet setting managerial class is never held responsible for its CO2 emissions...or how CO2 doomsday cult members do not seem to notice that their international CO2 summits do nothing to affect the atmospheric CO2 levels.
I'm tired of this dream of idiocracy...wake me up already
The US Department of Veterans Affairs is spending a lot more than that to switch from their in-house healthcare system to Cerner. It is not going well.
How dare they breathe the air and spread their highly transmissible virus, like has happened for eons! Then again, why would you choose to breathe in their sickness? Were you not wearing 3 masks and keeping 3 meters distance? Did they make you come to work? Call the tribunal, we must get to the bottom of this, as soon as we've uncovered what causes rectal itch from the office chairs!
Make that 199,999,999 paid subscribers, as I am leaving Spotify, and completely ditching the eternal subscription models. Who's with me? Can we get a post now about setting up Lidarr and making your own Plexamp server for family and friends?
Not comparable to Spotify, because you effectively need to illegally download the entire known music library to self host? It would definitely be the better experience, Plexamp is great, but it's not even really comparable to streaming services like Spotify, whom you effectively are leasing rights to songs through.
Sorry - staying with streaming. I've discovered and been able to legitimately listen to so many great smaller artists with these services that I never would have otherwise.
