eudamoniac

I experienced dramatic and obvious hair loss in my late twenties after starting creatine supplementation. I'm talking hundreds of hairs coming out every shower. It stopped when I stopped creatine. No I didn't make any other changes in diet or lifestyle at the time. I hadn't even heard of the link before that. This is actually one of those things that made me start doubting "the science" in general because it's supposedly not true, but, it obviously is true for my head beyond a reasonable doubt.

Well you're arguing that dictatorship must be perfect ("applying such values forever fairly without abusing") to be better than democracy. It doesn't need to be infallibly perfect, it just needs to be better than democracy, which is also not perfect.

I have trouble understanding the problem with a benevolent dictatorship, yes. Obviously in real life there are all kinds of problems that arise due to human nature. In an abstract sense, a benevolent philosopher king is better than democracy.

I don't think I read about this, it just seems obvious that if a truly great intelligent leader leads a country it's better than the stupid masses voting about things.

I'm not a rationalist and I don't know who these people are. As far as I can tell they're a bunch of online weirdos who don't matter. But as for that statement, "humanity will be far far better off if they're subjected to the values of effective altruists," that depends on the values in question, which haven't been explained in this thread. But there is definitely a set of values that exists that humanity would be better off subjected to than pure democracy. This is different from supporting an undefined alignment dictatorship in the abstract.

Everyone implicitly believes the above when they believe the concept of a "backwards society" can even exist, or when they think their own society would be better if their lost candidate had power. In both cases you think that there exist a set of values that are better to live under than what the democratic process resulted in.

I think actually most people believe this about their own values. I could find you infinite posts online that say "humanity would be better off if the other political party was gone [and my political party had sole power]"

I don't know who the Rationalists are, but if I imagine them as some kind of misguided Vulcan logicians, I cannot understand what argument you and others are trying to make here. Do you have any concrete examples of a rationalist believing nonsense dogmatically?

My F100 corporation has answered this problem by removing code review entirely. Thankfully it's not Boeing or anything important. Yes I am looking desperately for a new job.

Here's the thing. I've been an AI denier and skeptic since the beginning. I've softened. This is my reality on the ground:

I am tech lead on a front end project that is typescript with react and everything else as bog standard as possible. In the last year the backend devs have been pressured to be full stack, so have been submitting AI PRs to my repo with Claude. The PRs mostly 'work', but invariably have major problems that wouldn't make it through a code review in the before times.

Front end JS on a CRUD app is the literal best scenario for AI. Professional senior devs are using it, and it can kind of work, but still not really.

I've given it the old college try myself recently, and it is at the same time astonishing and disappointing. Yeah it can do a lot, but there's always something wrong with it. The 'something' is not always a bug; it can be a design issue, performance issue, unused code, duplicate code, etc, thus many people don't notice the problems. But I think for those of us who prided themselves on quality, the stuff doesn't work well enough to use. For those who leaned more towards speed, they're overawed. I am concerned for my career, yes.

I know this is rationally a good thing to do, but I can't help but be sad imagining this bowling equipment company being run out of business because someone wanted to do their jobs but for free. It's kind of absurd from their pov. Like imagine you own a cafe you've worked hard to grow into a successful business, and then next door some guy opens a cafe with infinite free coffee just because he is a generous guy.

I don't understand. Are you objecting to "cheaper purchases" or "no downside"?

Yes the prices go up to subsidize the merchant fees. But they don't go up as much as I save in CC rewards, because my rewards are subsidized by people not using the card or using it poorly. I have 5% and 10% cards in certain categories and a 3% in all; abolishment of cards would never drop prices by that much.

As far as downside goes I've been paying with cc exclusively for a decade and I've never paid a cent of interest, so I'm not sure what it would be.

I'm not certain what falling behind culturally means, but it has been my heavily-validated experience that the culture of man women actually date and have sex with is an unabashedly masculine type. The further from engaging in feminine culture and thought patterns, the better for the man. But I am getting the feeling that is not what you meant.

Fwiw I am 5'8" with an average face and I've had sex with over 40 women, none from clubs or bars, and am married. So I am doing something right. And it's been my wide experience that you really want to be a traditionally masculine guy. I have no social media and I engage in no modern cultural trends, music, media etc. Whatever mainstream culture is trying to do to men, drift away from that at top speed.

And yes I am right wing, and no the leftist women in Seattle did not actually care. They just say they care to signal something. So that aspect of cultural drift is also not really a problem.

If a bank has determined the venture is probably doomed and won't loan the money, why should the parent support this doomed venture? People have idiotic business ideas constantly, way more frequently than they have good ones. On average denying such a loan is correct.

The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched, and all of Europe being bombed, leading to cheap land, increased demand for labor, and a powerful dollar. We just have to nuke Europe and cull a bit of our own people too and we'll be in the golden age again. Or we have to get used to it.

Idk the numbers on this but I much more often hear "It's hard to see my parents living so lavishly while they're struggling." Apparently boomers are not big on saving for retirement or living within their means.

Is this like the famous "my dog will only eat fresh roasted chicken" you hear from certain kinds of owners? Because I'm pretty sure when a kid is hungry enough they will eat a banana.

Source: grew up poor, there was no food waste, none

Have you ever owned a building? It's kind of a huge pain in the ass to maintain. A huger pain in the ass to improve it. I wouldn't do it for free.

There's a very basic financial instrument called a credit card and if you just exercise a modicum of control and a hint of reasoning, you get to have cheaper purchases for your entire life with no downside.

Leftists think this is terrible, because when you voluntarily sign up for this instrument and then behave really stupidly, repeatedly over a long period with no reasoning or reflection, it's bad! We can't allow it! I can't say I agree with this worldview.

But... Bob is a child. Why do we need to put training wheels and kneepads on every aspect of our world? Are we trying to completely decouple decision making from outcomes? Let the stupid people be stupid and let the smart people thrive, I say. If there is no such thing as a bad decision, nor is there a good one, thereby there is hardly any life left to live. Let people pilot their own lives.

No online community can maintain quality unless there are systems in place to prevent mentally ill internet addicts from gaining power over it. This should have a name. We can can call it Eudaimoniac's Law.

Anything that gives power on a basis of seniority, activity, volunteering, is guaranteed to suck very soon. There are just way too many mentally ill authoritarians permanently online for normal people to stave them off with naive good faith.

Well I sure did. Not sure why you are writing this as a "gotcha". Buying puts is not some insane play. I gained about 85%.

Resource constraints are irrelevant. I didn't posit a claim for why EU is incapable; I certainly didn't mention "superior human being"s. If EU had had resources, EU would have put out more CO2. You blame USA as though it was a decision unique to them, but they just happened to be in place to do it. No country in that position would have behaved differently.

So, you can get over your cities' "character" or be hot, whichever you prefer. Sorry bud. (Not that Paris's character is intact these days, anyway.)

US: tomato concentrate, distilled vinegar, HFCS, corn syrup, salt, spice, onion powder, natural flavoring

UK: Tomatoes, spirit vinegar, sugar, salt, spice and herb extracts, spice

About the same total sugar per 100g. Of course Heinz also sells "no sugar added" and "Simply Tomato Ketchup with No Artificial Sweeteners" versions in the US. Complaining about food being loaded with sugar/salt as a national issue is pretty dumb, because you can just buy the healthier stuff if you want that. What it amounts to is "US mainline premade foods are not to my tastes." That's fine, but... have you seen an American grocery store? There are infinite options all along the health spectrum. It's not hard to eat cleanly, it's just slightly less automatic.

And no, it is not cheaper to eat healthy in EU either. The cheapest US food is generally cheaper than the cheapest EU food because the quality is worse. If you buy the EU-quality-equivalent foods they are EU-price-equivalent as well. Compare across price brackets, not across the worst possible legal quality of item.

Ok great. I will stop deserving to be in business, my employees will all lose their jobs and then likely their homes, and this is considered A Good Thing. And no, they won't just go get a higher paying job because if their labor was worth that they'd have done that already.

I'd pick the worst version of suburbia over the best downtown city in the world. I've lived in many of each. Suburbs came into existence for a reason! People like them! I've never been closer to ending it all than when I lived in a Seattle highrise surrounded by bodegas and "things to do".

The only reason US has more total output than EU, if that's true, is because EU was and is incapable of scaling industry, innovating, creating value, etc, which is why in 2026 they still see a basic AC unit as unaffordable luxury and why we are posting on this American website about American companies all the time.

It is not that astounding that the cheapest possible product legally available is not good quality. You are free to pay what UK pays for meat (a lot) and get great product.

I'm not sure what bakeries you're visiting but that's not my experience; there's nothing cheaper than flour and yeast and baking soda. If the bakery bakes things in store, rather than getting shipped in, it's pretty likely to be made with those. Of course if you want to buy the sandwich bread that lasts 4 weeks on the shelf then it's not going to be 2 ingredients.

The rest is just global inflation. EU doesn't have cheaper cocoa or wood pulp imports. Every problem begins with inflation. COVID QE fucked it all up.

Goomba fallacy

I'm not the original poster, but your notion that starting a business is for financially independent "made men" was just dumb and out of touch. There's a reason immigrants are frequently restauranteers and laundromat owners, and it's not because they came over with millions.

If you expect to switch right over from tech and make 200k, you will be sorely disappointed. If you expect to be destitute you may be quite surprised.

Also the failure rate for restaurants is on par with the failure rate for other service providing businesses. The fact that the number includes so many uneducated, inexperienced, frankly average or below average intelligence people who open restaurants should indicate to you that it's not really that impossible of an endeavor.

Status quo fallacy

"'American' distaste" is not the demographic I would have inserted there when describing the problems in parks...

Starting a business, but that requires financial independence, right?

What are you even talking about. How many of your local restaurants, coffee shops, laundromats, roofing companies, landscape consultants, shoe repair shops etc do you think are owned by anyone with financial independence?