Yes and it was also an era in which government was willingly made very large and had broad support for doing so. First was the expansion in response to the Great Depression, then again not a decade later for WWII. The fed as a portion of GDP was at its highest levels in our history (at or near 50% I believe). So the line between American economic liberty and communism was not nearly as sharp as it is today. Also there tends to be a misunderstanding among today’s political right that the current size of government is not the historical high point. In fact it is some 20 points short of that.
I understand what you mean. I look at some comments now as feeling like they are just AI generated. Factual and soft but reserved/flexible opinions etc.
And how do you isolate being skinny because you are regularly active and eat well vs. being skinny because you are sedentary and eat garbage but then chase it down with a drug?
I think it's worth looking at the people taking it. While there is definitely nutritional education that needs to happen in behavior intervention, the key benefit to Ozempic is that people talk about it "turning down the food noise."
Those choices become easier when you have assistance.
I’ll make my usual response: we know that being obese is basically the worst possible thing you can do to yourself, and the longer you are, the worse it is. The side effects are going to be pretty awful just to negate that, much less all the other things they seem to be good for.
>> being obese is basically the worst possible thing you can do to yourself
Lol. I can think of dozens of worse things. Drinking. Cocaine addiction. Meth. Winding up in prison for some reason. Riding a motorcycle without a proper helmet. Getting into a plane flown by Harrison Ford. Even simple unprotected sex can lead to massive medical problems. Ever looked up the average life expectancy of professional athletes, especially the NFL? It isn't great.
Being obese is probably worse for you. NAFLD has long eclipsed alcohol related liver issues.
> Even simple unprotected sex can lead to massive medical problems
Even treated HIV is probably less of a risk to your long term health than obesity, but I'm not a doctor.
> Cocaine addiction. Meth
OK, yes, there are illegal drugs that are going to be worse for you than being fat.
I'll rephrase:
Being obese is basically the worst possible thing you can do to yourself that affects a huge portion of the population of the western world.
Very very few people are riding motorcycles without a helmet, even fewer are getting into planes flown by harrison ford, only a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the population even has the option of being a professional athlete.
I like how the implicit sorting at the end here suggests Harrison Ford is ferrying around more people than there are professional athletes. Busy fella!
Okay, GLP-1 don't solve these but these aren't medical issues. This is just danger
> Even simple unprotected sex can lead to massive medical problems
Mmm... not really. People overblow this. Pretty much all STIs are completely harmless to your health if treated. One shot of penicillin and you're good to go. Your average flu is probably much worse than syphilis or chlamydia. HIV is the "biggest" risk, but HIV doesn't even impact your lifespan anymore.
Actually I recently listened to a fascinating hour long interview with Lotte Bjerre Knudsen (ACQ2 podcast) from which I learned that the original research started in the early 90s. I'm not an authority but I'm pretty well aware of the history. However, I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop if you don't mind.
And I don't care about votes up or down. But I appreciate your theory on how they're playing out!
Is there a law of nature that says a chemical compound has to have a side effects of medical concern for a significant portion of people that ingest it?
One of the most commonly consumed drugs on the planet seems to indicate there is no such thing - caffeine in reasonable quantities is tolerated by the overwhelming majority of human beings and research indicates that even outside of the stimulant effects that humans use it for, it is beneficial. We have significant evidence that caffeine in the 100-400mg per day range decreases risk of heart disease and stroke, and smaller but still compelling evidence that it is protective against diabetes.
Irregular use does seem to cause a small increase in heart rate and blood pressure, but this fades in the overwhelming majority of users as they make the usage more regular.
Too much can cause adverse outcomes, such as anxiety, and in some people timing might be important for maintaining sleep quality, but the vast majority of us would see positive impact from consuming a cup or two of coffee in the morning with little to no concern around side effects.
Absolutely, I'm sure there's all kinds of drugs that are totally safe. And I have no reason to think that this one isn't. But it does seem to follow a classic pattern - people get unhealthy because modern life and technology have removed them, in a period of decades, from the environment, incentives, and activities that have shaped their bodies for millennia. And rather than looking at the simpler solutions - in this case just being more active and eating better - some new technological solution is created to fix the problem that the earlier technologies accidentally created. Then the cycle continues and other non-intended consequences ensue. So that's all I'm saying - it's interesting to watch humanity progress. Hope it works out for everyone and it's a smashing success!
> And rather than looking at the simpler solutions - in this case just being more active and eating better
I think this is the part where the argument falls apart, though. My relationship with food is vastly different now than it was when I was a teenager or in the front half of my 20s. It was easy for me to eat a healthy amount of food and exercise. I never struggled with it. It didn't take any particular amount of willpower to avoid overeating. I even was able to fairly easily bulk and cut because I was focused fairly heavily on lifting weights - the bulking was harder for me than the cutting!
But as I got busier with other aspects of my life, it became easier and easier to just grab some fast food, or swap over to eating almost entirely uber eats during the pandemic. Before I realized it, it was suddenly very hard to eat less. It was still possible - I would lose weight, manage my eating, exercise, etc. - but something would always happen that caused me to lose track and backslide. A huge project at work, a bad breakup, tearing my meniscus while lifting. But all of these attempts took significant effort and willpower from me, something that I had never struggled with before. It wasn't my metabolism slowing down - I was always hungry in a way that I had never faced when I was a slimmer person, and fighting it caused significant impact to my mood, ability to focus, stress levels, etc. Tirzepatide has put my relationship with food and hunger back to being much closer to how it was when I was younger.
There are tons of feedback loops that are well documented that makes it more and more difficult to lose weight once you've put it on and kept it on for a while. It's certainly true that there's no magical situation where people can eat fewer calories than they use and not lose weight, but for a huge amount of people, these GLP-1 medications are a far simpler solution.
> Hope it works out for everyone and it's a smashing success!
You're getting downvoted here but I think there is precedent behind your statement. History is littered with weight loss drugs that had to be pulled because the shoe eventually dropped. Usually that was addiction or death which, admittedly, neither have been shown in the GLP-1's but, given the history of weight loss drugs, it's not unreasonable in my opinion to be cautious.
I'm not a chemist, biologist, or pharmacologist, but wouldn't it be more reasonable to be cautious based on how analogous the method of action is to other drugs, rather than the effect? GLP-1s don't work in the same manner that phen/fen did, for example.
DNP is an extremely effective drug for weight loss, but no one who knows anything about how it works would think that it would be reasonable to compare it to the GLP-1s, and anyone who knows how it works would also plainly see the dangers around its use.
GLP-1 type drugs have been on the market for decades now as well, and while they are not perfectly safe, we've got a good amount of data around the short to medium term side effects.
Property, that is, that didn’t exist prior to the wide use of software or SaaS platforms. Which begs the question, did the rights ever exist to be eroded in the first place?
"Free market" is one of the best examples of a technical term people use with complete confidence despite not knowing what it really means. Furthermore, even if you do know what it means you probably remember it as something you learnt on day 1 of economics class before learning all the reasons they never really exist and what governments try to do about that.
I’ve studied economics for years and I’m still of the opinion that the only government intervention to the market should be breaking monopolies and cartels. I’m waiting for a piece of literature that would convince me otherwise, maybe you could provide one?
I can't, but I'm curious how you think problems like externalities would sort themselves out. Also what about natural monopolies like utilities and infrastructure that can't really be broken up?
I think humans are excellent survivors. I don’t lose sleep over externalities because of that alone. What I mean by that is that once people realise their daily lives are being affected by a negative externality, they start making decisions that alleviate that hardship.
I do recognise though that it’s an unsolved problem, and will lead to some form of regulation as our understanding is lacking.
I think only harmful monopolies should be broken up by force, since they’re a legitimate market force. I’m conceding some ground on that because I’m not prepared to claim that monopolies aren’t always harmless.
Australians (and other outsiders) use that term when talking about aspects of the US because that is the Hollywood picture of how the US functions.
That is the lie that is sold, and people outside have no way to know it’s not true. Even today there are hundreds of millions of Americans who say they live in a free market and that it’s the best thing ever.
> Australians .. use that term when talking about aspects of the US because
Australians have a weird sense of humour - it's clear from here that most aspects of US economics are decidedly not free markets but so many US citizens never shut up about "free markets" and have such a bicameral Capitalist v. Communist view of the world that it makes sense to just deadpan nod along.
Maybe reread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41856242 and ask yourself if the article really thinks the US health system is a proper Adam Smith free market .. or just a "US free market" with extra heavy air quotes.
I’m not sure that the impact on the debtors is even the worse part. The removal of any apparent consequence for the cost of education also seemed to remove an incentive for the university to provide a quality product.
For number 2, how did you come up with the very narrow 15 year window of birth from 1980 to 1995? I was born in 1963 and for the entirety of my upbringing it was a forgone conclusion that the lack of post high school education had a dire and inescapable consequence in future earning and socioeconomic status.
I was born in the mid-70s, and nobody told me "Just go to college, any college, and major in anything." That was never the narrative.
It was "Go to a top-N college, major in one of these very carefully enumerated majors that tend to result in good career trajectory (business, engineering, medicine, and so on), and maintain a very good GPA throughout." The messaging was very clear, from parents, teachers, and guidance counselors: Don't go to film school or a Tier-2 university and major in history, if you want a career.
I'm not sure when the "Go to any school, and do whatever" messaging started but it was not happening in the 90s when I was in high school.
I grew up in the latter half of the 90's and the narrative I remember was that it was a time when even like entry-level secretary jobs started requiring degrees (a phenomenon which may or may not have been exaggerated), and the reasoning was "it doesn't matter what it's a degree in, they just want to see that you have the capability to see something through to the end and not drop out"
was still told this and i graduated college in 2024. it did work out for me, but for the vast majority of ppl in my graduating class, unless they double majored from B School or did a proper STEM degree, they’re unemployed
Because at that time an engineering degree still had some weight because not everyone can get it. This inflation 9f degrees caused the degrees to have way less value only for the next generation
Yes, along with capitalism, free markets, anti-union - once you have enough positive confirmation bias momentum on words already agreed upon as bad, then all you need is a little ad hominem implication nudge and you captured a large number of readers.
On the other side you have socialism, DEI and cisgender. You really don't have to make a point to get that section riled up, just mention the term. (One could literally start a speech to the respective crowds by repeating a single word, e.g. corporations or socialism, taking a dramatic pause, and get a strong response.)
And again, it's safe to toss out policy feedback that obsesses over these terms. (Both the far left and right also have a weird obsession with capitalising random words. I think it seems evocative of Enlightenment-era English?)
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