IIRC Travolta was a furious that his role was brutally cut to almost nothing after shooting a decent amount of footage, and at least a couple of well known actors were fully out of the final cut.
They were indeed tripping to be in the film, that's one thing I remember clearly, rumours of some actors begging to be in the movie for free.
Phoenicians were a low war civilization. The fact that you had to name a macedonian general to illustrate is telling: the general public barely know phoenician kings or generals despite lasting more than a thousand years through all Mediterraneum, unless we focus on later Carthage which were more belligerant.
As of slaves, of course they had them! It was a normal thing back then.
But the point here is that Phoenicians were traders, not warriors. They built settlements all over the Mediterraneum and then moved goods and culture between them. They were also avid consumers of foreign culture, for example they liked egyptian dead culture so they just copied it.
Meanwhile, taking a couple of beers daily for decades doesn't make anyone raise a brow, you can even find people that says it's good for your heart, according to some doubtful study from the 90's.
In some of those studies you might be referring (e.g. DOI: 10.2174/1874473711306010008) say that MDMA users score worse in memory, but better in depression and anxiety, and equal on cognitive or mood. Of course what makes the headlines is that MDMA is bad for memory, no mention to the positive effects. And of course, the narrative would be that if you take MDMA a couple of times per year, soon you won't even remember your own name.
> Meanwhile, taking a couple of beers daily for decades doesn't make anyone raise a brow
There are a lot of people bought into the idea that ~1 drink a day is beneficial due to the flawed studies like you pointed out.
But most people who keep up with things know better. My primary care doctor gives a reminder that drinking is not healthy despite what some old headlines claimed (even though I rarely drink).
Even the podcasters seem to have caught on, with many emphasizing that no amount of alcohol is beneficial and even 1 drink per night consumed consistently over time has damaging effects.
There is a lot of backlash when podcasters get too close to these subjects. I remember when Huberman touched on the topic of marijuana and Reddit was up in arms. Huberman isn’t great at scientific accuracy (to say the least) but he was directionally correct. Many people didn’t want to hear it, though.
People like to think their drug of choice is the safe one. They cherry pick a few studies that agree and choose to dismiss anything that doesn’t.
Now you will say that we need oxygen and can survive without alcohol. But then again, we do not have a Faustian bargain of choosing to abstain of all the fun things in life and living for 200 years.
The elephant in the room is that no matter how healthy a life style you live, we presently have no way to reverse a rapid decline in quality of life around 85-90 culminating in complete collapse ages 100-110.
You can have a great quality of life until mid 80s by leading a moderately healthy lifestyle provided you do not get cancer.
After that we are a loss on how to prolong our lives.
I would almost welcome if Larry Ellison would prove us wrong in 10-15 years at least there would be theoretical hope. We'll see about Peter Thiel as well, but I will not be alive to see his experiments.
There’s a huge difference between living to a healthy 85 and having major cognitive / physical issues at 65 and symptoms well before then. Yes you’re guaranteed to have significant physical decline by 85, but the baseline isn’t static you can still be more physically capable than an un athletic 30 year old.
it is concerning how many people do not understand the VAST difference in quality of life and physical/mental ability over the age of 50 between someone who takes decent care of themselves and someone who doesn't. So many times I've heard people, in the face of making healthier choices, respond with "why would I want to live longer anyways, I'm going to be old and decrepit!". Very sad perspective.
tw - drugs, addiction, overdose, severe illness, death
tldr - I was this dude until I got to see how things turned out for someone with the same attitude roughly 30 years older than me
I was one of those "Here for a good time, not a long time" people in my twenties. Booze, drugs, parties, shows, "Why would I wanna skip all of this just to go to the gym and pretend to run?" After a few years of partying like that you assume the hangover is the worst thing that'll happen and you'll bounce back after two days. But the universe had a gift for me: my uncle, who was about 35 years older than me, had the same attitude. I watched his addiction progress from "he just likes to have fun" to "sure he drinks too much but underneath it he's a good guy" to a point where his family was making him sleep in the garage. The whole time this was happening he was "Here for a good time, not a long time".
It took him over a year to die, once they determined that the liver and kidney damage was beyond mitigation or repair. I got to take care of him, as I lived with my mom (his sister) and his nuclear family had kicked him out after he pulled a gun on his daughter for coming home pregnant. In that year, he lost motor control, couldn't walk and could barely talk. Once I watched him try to tip his head back to drink from a glass of water and his head just kept going backward until he fell over. Only one of his three kids bothered to visit him. It was the one he pointed a gun at. He forgot her name.
Did you know that organ failure has a distinct smell to it? It's ammonia and engine coolant, saccharine sweet but with just a hint of rot. Our whole house smelled like that for the last few months. Those miasma months were spent helping him to the bathroom and explaining to him that he's at Vicki's house, Vicki is his sister and no he can't take his truck and go to the bar because he doesn't have a truck anymore and his license is revoked. He spent the last week of his life in someone else's bed, howling in pain and terror.
I, otoh, got my shit right. I'm not entirely sober but neither do I party like I used to. The bargain I made with myself is that I can do drinks with friends a maximum of twice a month, and I can't ever do drinks alone. I've been able to stick by that for several years now, even after the overdose death of my brother (who was another one who never saw the sense in anything other than maximum immediate fun). I take two fifteen-twenty minute workout breaks per day, one for weights and one for cardio. I've lost 25% of my body mass, I can bench press my dad and I'm actually having a much better time than when I was having a good time all the time. He was in his fifties when he died. I'm 40 now, and while he had already started his decline at 40 I'm stronger and more capable than ever. And I don't even have to tell myself "no" very often. Usually it's just "That's enough for now".
Maybe one day I'll be old and decrepit, but I won't be middle-aged, decrepit and hated by everyone I know. To me that's such a good deal I can't imagine why anyone would turn it down.
wow what a powerful story - thanks so much for sharing. I'm glad you have been able to turn something horrible into a motivator for yourself. May your story do the same for others so they don't have to rely on dealing with such heartbreaking circumstances. RIP to your uncle.
Can we deep dive into that statement? To me, at a glance, LaLanne's life looks like one that began out of control, then he took control of it and through doing more or less what everyone recommends (high protein, high fiber diet low in sugars and carbs with a bunch of exercise every day) he got exactly what one would expect (a life well past the mean life expectancy and with a relatively high quality of life even into his 90s, even being able to do his normal workout routine before he died). Unless you took him literally when he said "I can never die" that feels like an overwhelming confirmation that diet and exercise are key parts of a long, healthy and happy life.
I personally do not find the idea of endless life in this world appealing at all. I don't even get the desire to live to 100+, nevermind 200. I tend to think that the 'longevity desire' is prompted within oneself when one is not living according to whatever-it-is one thinks one should really do. The rat race is compelling sure, one needs money etc, but that is not the entire purpose of life. Perhaps some seeking/introspection is needed to make life meaningful.
Happy people are generally OK with going anytime, grateful for every moment and experience and only want to have closest ones taken care of. Unhappy ones, especially when its something deep and hard or impossible to tackle, want more and more, like they could somehow fix things in future or cover them up enough to finally arrive at that point they'll never arrive anyway.
Project it to some extremes and its easy to see why sociopathic dictators and billionaires (which most if not all of them are) would love to see significant life prolongation, of course only theirs. One of the biggest threats to near future mankind as it is IMHO, imagine 300 years of rule of pos like puttin' for example.
There is also evidence linking some common pharmaceuticals to long term deficits in memory and cognition.
Diphenhydramine (Benadryl/OTC Sleep Aids) use is associated with an increased risk of dementia [1], while benzodiazepines like Xanax and Ativan are strongly associated with long term cognitive deficits [2]. Taking many drugs is a cost-benefit analysis, and it's important to be informed about the possible consequences before diving in.
> Meanwhile, taking a couple of beers daily for decades doesn't make anyone raise a brow
That totally raises eyebrows I'd say. I like beer as much as the next person, but nobody I know pretends that daily beers would be fine, healthy, or even acceptable. The only person that I know of who likely drinks ~daily self-identifies as an alcoholic.
I avoid alcohol like the plague. I'm spaniard, and I can assure you that there are a lot of people that takes one glass of wine with each meal (something that qualifies you as an alcoholic in medical terms). In the summer, beer is king, and I would say half the population takes at least a bottle (33 cl / 12 fl.oz.) daily, as a substitute for water (luckily, zero-alcohol beer is also on the rise). Wouldn't be unheard that you drink wine or beer at lunch and then go to work until 6pm.
Alcohol consumption is totally normalized here. In fact, the only socially valid reason to not drink at a party or celebration is that you are driving later. That's my experience at least.
True that this surely is very much culture dependent.
I'm also from Europe but a bit higher up, and grew up in a party drinking culture. It wasn't an issue if you were drunk twice a week as long as those were the designated party days, Friday and Saturday, and Sunday was reserved for the unavoidable hangover.
Alcohol with food wasn't too common so drinking alone on other days heavily hinted towards losing control.
>Alcohol consumption is totally normalized here. In fact, the only socially valid reason to not drink at a party or celebration is that you are driving later. That's my experience at least.
It's a bit sad, but it's a reason I pick the car sometimes. To have an excuse for not drinking.
I think this may be generational. I'm GenX and growing up it was no big deal for my parent's generation (yes, the boomers) to have a drink a night. Even among people of my generation now it wouldn't be uncommon. Probably less than before, but I don't think anybody would think twice about a beer or a drink per day would be any big deal.
Our research around the same time came to the conclusion of a sun tracker, with wind protection, would be the best option. The panels were very expensive (a 400'ish W panel that today cost $80 costed around $2,500-$3,000), so aiming for the absolute best performance for the panels was key.
The trackers fail sometimes, but I would say once a year or so. The electronics are not that complicated, and its reliability was higher than the motor itself. I remember calculating with fixed tracking of the sun (because you know were it is at all time) vs photocells that tell the motors were to move and by how much. The trackers win because when the day is cloudy the best performance is to put the panel flat and let it rest there (instead of tracking a sun that isn't there so the motor that day consume more energy that the panels generate), and with enough cloudy days the tracker outperform the fixed tracking by a significant amount.
It's not until recently, with 400W panels under about $500, that tracking no longer makes sense, at least in our latitude.
Or it can be auto-triggered. I remember a history of a Call of Duty game were a number of players were being annoying, cheating and making the game horrible to play. Someone wrote in the chat "Tiananmen Square massacre" and instantly more than half the players were disconnected.
Or maybe if you keep the convo about KJU being fat, you trigger an alarm that schedule a police visit to your house, in a state were they first act and then ask.
In a communist/totalitarian regime, you don't want to give informants any leverage. The fear of it being recorded and used against you is enough. Also, if the regime were to give permission to speak in this manner, it risks normalizing irreverence toward Kim Jong Un, including employees working in espionage.
It's not too difficult to draw connections between Wikileaks, Assange, RT and Russian government. It's known that the GRU funneled info to Wikileaks many times, and at the same time they never published anything that could seriously affect Putin. Examples: the Dirt on opponents were published by UK newspapers. The Fancy Bear papers were published by hacker groups and online news. Pandora Papers by the ICIJ.
The only leak than contains something barely close to Putin and was published on Wikileaks were the Panama Papers, that names three friends of him, not in the government. The lack of any russian officials in those papers speaks volumes.
Best case scenario, they are tools. Worse case, they are assets.
The rubisco enzime is specially ineficient. While most enzimes can usually do thousands of reactions per second, rubisco does up to 10. Organisms compensate making loads of copies, to the point it's the most abundant enzime in nature.
What can a molecule do for such a long time? I mean they move very fast, the distances there is very short, so I kinda assumed that all the molecules do they do almost instantly. But 0.1 sec doesn't seem like an instant event.
>It never makes sense to use tariffs for economic reasons. It just does not work.
This week two USA companies from which I bought some products from Europe sent me an email explaininig how they have to rise their prices due to tariffs, as they need to import from China for now.
Guess who will be faster: these companies finding an alternative supplier in the US that match China quality-price, or I finding an alternative supplier from China? They just admited that they are buying from China anyways.
Is this ironic? Because if this is serious, note that maybe you are the stubborn person here, the one that is wrong, the one that must be nudged to the right direction and join them eventually.
It’s possible parent comment is referring to factually proven issues, such as climate change, that the right has its own set of propagandistic facts for.
I’d say the any group of people has areas of less factitious basis for their beliefs. But, We all should want to employ truthful factual real, non-propagandistic ideas, eh? Is this controversial?
If we don’t have ground truth, real facts, what can we base anything off of? Our policies will fail, our dollars will be wasted, and division will grow.
One danger with "factually proven issues" is cherry-picking facts or otherwise taking them from context. For example, there might be stats on which a president sucked for most of his term, but in the last few months those stats were decent (or vice versa); and then supporters of the president might shout those last few months' stats from the rooftops, and then do polls that show that supporters know but opponents don't know about those last few months' stats, and gleefully report, "Gosh, well, we're trying to reason with our opponents, but unfortunately they're just so ignorant, what can we do..."
Another danger is people playing with definitions. A third is people claiming things to be "facts" based on cherry-picked studies (and possibly some dubious interpretations thereof).
Progress can be made, but I think it requires a sophisticated approach. Paying attention to all the above dimensions, and probably to the motives of the people involved.
I agree with your approach but, as a generally extremely left leaning individual myself, comments solely using "the right" (or any individual group) as the example make it hard to assign to this kind of thought process alone.
Some regular self doubt "what I think are ground truth facts may need to be requisitioned and revalidated and that isn't just true for one specific group to consider" is a core requirement of trying to hold a fact based viewpoint, just as important as any other part of such an approach.
Well no, because the right's argument for why what they're good is good is:
1. We're not doing that.
2. If we are, it's not that bad.
3. If it is that bad, it's not our fault.
4. If it is our fault, just have faith it'll work out.
A lot of their belief system relies on Trump being a liar. Literally, they're hoping for and arguing that it's all a-okay because Trump is a liar so him saying XYZ terrible thing doesn't matter.
The right isn't trying to push anyone in their direction because even they don't believe their direction. They're currently in a suspended state, a type of dissociation.
No, it's definitely this, and I'm confident in saying that because I do, actually, try to have open conversations with these people. And they always back down and undermine _their own beliefs_. It's a strange kind of paradox, in which they support a set of actions but wish to be immune from any obvious consequences of said actions. Despite those consequences being, you know, the draw of said actions.
For context, a lot of people in my family vote right always. Trust me, I have engaged with people on the right and conspiracists, and the common theme is their reliance in a distrust for the people and actions they themselves support. It's an almost supreme lack of conviction, juxtaposed with a religion-like blind faith.
If it's any consolation to you, or anyone, this isn't a new thing. You can see this kind of behavior throughout history in all populist movements that have gone sour. Their supporters stuck in a type of purgatory, where they must ignore what is actually going on while absentmindedly following the messaging. When asked "so what happens now?", they do not know. But they are certain it will be okay.
This is such a wide-sweeping generalisation that it beggars belief. And this "distrust for the people" you speak of, would that characterize your attitude to people who don't vote Democrat? And speaking of Democrats in general, do they show alot of "distrust for the people" too with their simple-minded, largely ignorant stereotypes of Republicans?
Of course it's a generalization, I'm explicitly generalizing.
But, I should note, I'm not speaking on conservatism or the GOP in general. I'm speaking on, specifically, far-right populist messaging, current-day known as MAGA.
This is a different, but related, beast. I'm confident in speaking on it in this way because populism, by it's nature, appeals to the lowest common denominator in order to be successful. We can make a lot of assumptions about populist movements because we know how, and why, populism works. MAGA operates less like a policy set and more like a Cult, like populist movements of the past.
And, to my original point, if I were to explain to you some of the objectively awful things the Trump administration is doing right now, I am very confident you would have no choice but to use the 4-step game plan written above to dismiss it.
When you have subscribed to a religion, you have no choice but to use the powers of divination and faith to argue. The populist movement never had any logical backing to begin with, so you cannot just conjure one out of nowhere.
You dont think there could be any logical reason why 77 million Americans voted for Trump?
You don't think alot of contemporary Democrat beliefs could also be described as a religion that people blindly follow no matter how stupid or extreme?
> You dont think there could be any logical reason why 77 million Americans voted for Trump?
No. Well there is, but not in the way you're thinking.
Far-right populist messaging works because the message is good and designed to cater to as many people as possible.
It plays into people's emotions and sense of identity. It calls upon a sense of national pride and creates an enemy within. It plays into the ego of MAGA cultists, proclaiming them to be the true Americans while those around them are lazy, on handouts, and don't deserve to be here.
> You don't think alot of contemporary Democrat beliefs could also be described as a religion that people blindly follow no matter how stupid or extreme?
Sure, some of it, yeah. There are, after all, populists in the democratic party.
But the democratic party is almost all right-leaning ultra-capitalists. There really are next to no extremists in the democratic party. The only reason you may believe otherwise is because of - you guessed it - far-right populist messaging. MAGA would like for you to believe that the democrats are baby eaters, pedophiles, and communists. Of course, it's just not true. Please see "enemy within" above, sense of national pride, appeal to emotion (harming children) etc etc.
> You say alot of words without much content.
No, I think what's happening is you don't understand what I'm saying or are choosing not to process it, and instead just kind of going "nuh uh!".
"nuh uh!" might have worked before the election. Now that MAGA is destroying the US from the inside out and posting Deportation ASMR while committing crimes against humanity, the "nuh uh" doesn't work. I'm sorry, you have no plausible deniability. You can continue to avoid accountability, but that doesn't change reality happening around you.
Do any other right wingers actually exist on HN? I swear, you guys have the same understanding of right wingers as white suburbantites have of black people.
What you have to understand about the populist far-right is they are, by definition of populism, appealing to the bottom of the barrel. This characterization of how right-wing voters grapple with what their representatives are doing is uncomfortable because we all know it's true.
They were indeed tripping to be in the film, that's one thing I remember clearly, rumours of some actors begging to be in the movie for free.
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