Why are you assuming abuse by parents is solely being targeted at the opposing team’s players? Parents may just as well be shouting at their own kid for what they see as “sub-optimal” play, and at their kid’s teammates for what they see as “getting in their kid’s way.”
I'm not sure why you think I was assuming that. Or why either of those wouldn't be a valid reason their actions shouldn't result in punishment the most direct way possible to the parent. A loss for their own team. That's not a good outcome for someone who treats their kid as a lottery ticket no matter who they were harassing. Although I do understand the response in a sibling post that it still gives the asshat parent some degree of control over policy and outcome. It seems like you may have mistaken some of what I said as implying something about the recipient of the abuse. Nothing I said had anything to do with the recipient of abuse. Just the parent and the team they want to win for vicarious satisfaction.
> Make it illegal to transfer ownership of copyrighted work too, only the spouse or one single inheritor who isnt a company can have the rights transferred, after both die, the work enters public domain.
By your phrasing, it sounds like you still intend the possibility of companies owning copyrights; but how does that happen (other than copyrights already owned by companies grandfathered in)?
Copyright always starts off in the hands of individual human beings; it only ends up in the hands of companies when those human beings transfer ownership to a company. That ownership transfer can be automatic as a term of a contract, e.g. as part of a work-for-hire agreement. But no contract can cause the copyright to come into existence already held by the company instead of the individual. So if you abolish ownership transfer, you effectively make work-for-hire IP assignment invalid. What replaces it?
And, if "nothing"... then how do people pool the IP rights of their own small contributions to a large-scale work, into an IP pool that can be legally defended by a coherent legal entity, so that the large-scale work itself can have market value (i.e. so that sales of polished commercial bootlegs don't drive sales of the "authentic" work to zero)?
Keep in mind that, no matter how much we might want "mass distributed" media to have more-reasonable IP terms, the ability to sue for infringement is still critical to the existence of some forms of media. Especially "location-based" media, with no equivalent licensed broadcast right: movies still in theatre; concerts; live performances of plays and musicals; etc. If there's no legal team that can sue a movie theatre that shows an unlicensed copy of a given movie, then no movie theatre will ever bother with licensing movies again; "box office" goes to zero (from the movie company's perspective); and the incentive to create movies in the first place declines massively.
(You can see what this alternate world looks like from the few cases where movies screwed up the steps required to assert copyright, back before copyright was automatic. Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a good example: theatres — even upstanding large-chain theatres! — did indeed leap at the opportunity to show the movie unlicensed, and so Romero et al made effectively zero revenue off the work.)
I'm not saying this is an impossible problem. There are ways to accomplish this besides the way it's done now. (For example, individual-contributor IP could be retained by the original owners, but cross-licensed between individuals through a collaboration structure to form a coherent defensible IP pool, in exactly the same way that IP for e.g. video codecs is cross-licensed between corporations to form a coherent defensible IP pool today.) I'm just pointing out that the problem does need to be solved.
When I was young, in Europe, there was some ointment made of cod liver oil and zinc oxide, which was extremely effective for the quick healing of non-infected wounds or burns.
For some reason nowadays, that ointment does not exist any more. There still are a lot of ointments containing zinc oxide, but they have different recipes, with more dubious fatty ingredients (I suppose that cod liver oil is more expensive than the fatty substances used now, which is the likely reason for its substitution), and they are less effective than the old one, but they can still accelerate healing in various skin injuries.
Nope; the lockscreen camera is actually an entirely different app, or not-quite-app thing. (Note what happens when you open the camera roll in the lockscreen camera.)
> You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite).
I would point out that many whole foods are generally shelf-stable (over at least weeks, if not months) without requiring the introduction of chemical stabilizers that don't otherwise "belong."
Chemical stabilizers are generally needed for shelf stability in ultra-processed foods, because of one of the other defining characteristics of ultra-processed foods: their matrix has been disrupted (or constructed anew) such that the food is now highly labile (biochemical term: "labile organic matter"), i.e. very easy to break down into nutrients. Which applies not only to you breaking such foods down in your gut, but also to bacteria and fungi breaking these foods down on the shelf.
And as it so happens, because these foods are labile, any such nutrients that do come from breaking down the food, come very quickly. Labile carbohydrates are high-glycemic-index insulin-spiking carbohydrates. Labile fats are atherosclerosis-inducing fats. Etc.
Your body evolved to process (metabolize, remove from circulation, etc.) metabolic inputs in an environment where most available foods were the opposite of labile (a.k.a. recalcitrant organic matter). So most meals would give a slow/gentle level of metabolic throughput; with rare spikes of higher throughput from the rare natural labile food, and then plenty of low-throughput time to recover from such events. Your body didn't evolve to be able to deal with getting high-throughput metabolic input spikes from every meal.
And this is why the the presence of chemical stabilizers in a food is actually a very helpful criterion in the definition of "ultra-processed food"! The necessity of stabilization tells you that the food is likely labile (as otherwise, why would they have needed to stabilize it?) — and therefore is unhealthy to be consumed on a continuous basis. (Unless it's milk and you're a baby.)
But note that the stabilizer isn't itself the problem. Bread is ultra-processed even without a stabilizer, because bread is a labile food with weak matrix integrity. The bread you bake at home is ultra-processed; you're the one who ultra-processed it!
The "rules" for UPFs don't assert home-baked bread as a UPF, but that's because the point of the UPF designation is to label commercial foods, and more specifically, to draw a hard-line boundary based on objectively-measurable characteristics that industry players can't argue with or lie about. And lability / matrix integrity, while quantifiable, isn't something with a clear objective way to reduce it to a single number†; so any definition of UPF based on lability would result in endless arguments/pushback from industry players insisting the FDA is "calculating it wrong."
But in your own personal life, the definition of "ultra-processed" you should be carrying around in your head and evaluating foods by, should be one that includes lability.
† (Instead, lability is a high-dimensional measurement of how efficiently any single digestive enzyme, and/or any specific combination of enzymes, and/or any enzyme paired with a cofactor [e.g. a bile salt], will break apart the given food's matrix to release bio-accessible nutrients.)
> The necessity of stabilization tells you that the food is likely labile (as otherwise, why would they have needed to stabilize it?) — and therefore is unhealthy to be consumed on a continuous basis. (Unless it's milk and you're a baby.)
You're completely lost me here. You're asserting that because food goes bad, it shouldn't be consumed on a regular basis. That just doesn't track, even a little bit.
Maybe your assertion hinges on the definition of "continuous basis"? I don't know what that means, but, taking it face value, it sounds like nothing should be consumed on a continuous basis other than air.
> The bread you bake at home is ultra-processed; you're the one who ultra-processed it!
This doesn't track either. The common Nova classification for ultra processing leans heavily on the kinds of processes that happen in factories. It's the flour itself that makes bread ultra-processed, since the flour is ultra-processed. When I realized that the four-ingredient bread I make at home for my family is considered ultra-processed, I started paying a lot less attention to the entire discussion.
> The common Nova classification for ultra processing leans heavily on the kinds of processes that happen in factories. [...] I started paying a lot less attention to the entire discussion.
Yes, and that's my point: the Nova UPF label is silly, but you shouldn't let a bad definition get in the way of a good conceptual tool.
"Ultra-processed as any lay person would intuitively understand the concept from the name and a series of examples", and "Ultra-Processed Food as defined by the Nova classification", are two distinct — but not conflicting — concepts. Even if you don't care about the UPF label as Nova defines it, you should still care about whether or not things are "lower-case-u ultra-processed." The Nova definition might be silly, but the concept itself isn't.
If you prefer, I could use a different term, like "highly-processed" or "hyper-processed" here, to distinguish what I'm talking about from the Nova label. But personally, I think it makes sense to actually continue to use the term "ultra-processed", and to just think of Nova as defining the term in a way that overlaps with a useful definition, but which both includes and excludes things that a more-useful and intuitive definition of the term wouldn't. After all, all of Nova's other definitions on the same "spectrum" (unprocessed/minimally-processed, processed ingredients, and processed foods) are perfectly good and useful ones. It makes sense to take that series-of-terms and then extrapolate what moving further in the same direction would take you. And where it lands you is a place that is close to, but not equivalent to, Nova's definition of UPF. Which is the place I'm calling "lower-case-u ultra-processed."
I think it's worth thinking this way, rather than ignoring the Nova classifications altogether, because 1. you still get useful information from knowing that a food is in one of the other Nova categories; and 2. a food being a Nova-labelled UPF still tells you something; and that something may, in combination with what else you know about the food, be enough to tell you that the food is in fact a "lower-case-u ultra-processed" food.
> You're asserting that because food goes bad, it shouldn't be consumed on a regular basis. That just doesn't track, even a little bit.
Because food goes bad quickly, yes. (Or more narrowly, "goes bad quickly for the kind of food it is." But I do think it generalizes across foods, if you're careful about how you compare your apples to your oranges. ;)
Also, it's not a direct correlation. Lability (or its inverse, recalcitrance) is the denominator; but nutrient "load" is the numerator. A thing can be highly nutritively bio-accessible and be fine, if it's not nutrient-dense in the first place. Cucumber is liable but nutrient-sparse, so its high bio-accessibility does nothing to you.
But given two foods with the same density of a given nutrient, the easier your gut and/or bacteria breaks them down (and/or the more they've already been broken down), the more you should avoid them / more rarely you should consume them.
This is the generalization of the logic of "eat oranges, not orange juice", but taken past the trivial point of "because orange juice contains far more oranges than you'd normally eat" to the more interesting point of "even if you drank only the amount of orange juice that was in one orange, it'd still be worse for you than eating one orange, because no amount of chewing is going to break the orange down as thoroughly as a blender or juicer will, and so no orange will ever be digested and absorbed as quickly as orange juice will."
I would note that while many foods go bad (and this can give you a weak intuition about lability), ultra-processed foods would go bad really quickly if not for the chemical stabilizers in them, because all the processing has made them more labile than any whole food has ever naturally been. The ultra-processed versions of these foods would, if not for their stabilizers, go bad far more quickly than the "regular amount of processed" equivalents would.
If you could make Wonderbread with all the same steps the factories do, but just skip the part where they mix in stabilizers, the resulting product would never even make it from the factory to store shelves before going bad; let alone have a useful shelf lifetime. And my point is that knowing that can tell you something very important about the structure of Wonderbread, and about what it will do inside your gut.
I understand your individual points and I appreciate the response. Unfortunately, I don't find your arguments compelling because you've shifted your statements as you've explained more, and the absolutes you opened with are becoming a lot softer as you're adding more factors and citing additional variables and nuance.
I think it all boils down to "if microbes can eat it super easily then you should avoid it because it's too easy to digest." There's probably something valid there, as I, for example, made my kids oatmeal pancakes yesterday because I wanted something that burned a little slower than the typical flour pancakes.
I wore a glucose monitor for a few months and tested my blood sugar response to different foods. The worst spike I ever got was American Chinese food: rice+sugary sauce. Brown rice vs white rice makes no difference.
Ice cream didn’t make much of a spike - all that fat. Waffle with maple syrup and peanut butter is completely different profile than waffle without peanut butter.
Most important thing for my blood sugar was portion size. Eat a lot, get a big spike.
Frustrating to me that people argue so much about “processed” vs “unprocessed” food. The real issue I believe is portion sizes.
A boiled or fried egg is processed, but not ultra-processed. (The ovalbumin matrix in egg is denatured but not destroyed by just heating it up. Just like the protein matrix in a steak is denatured-but-not-destroyed by just heating it up.) It's still a whole food, per se.
But scrambled eggs, or an omelette, are closer to being ultra-processed; simply because you've mechanically emulsified the egg together, and in the process, have broken down that matrix. (Same reason that ground beef is ultra-processed.)
At that point, very small further additions can push what you might still think of as "just cooked eggs" into being ultra-processed. For example, just adding a sufficient amount of salt while cooking scrambled eggs could produce an ultra-processed result, since the disrupted matrix allows the salt to get in and break down cells and tissues, and then cooking those lysed cells and chemically-denatured tissues results in higher resulting lability / bio-accessibility of nutrients than cooking would have on its own.
But also, on a separate point: raw egg, like milk, is already one of those rare naturally-labile foods. (That's why developing embryos can make use of the nutrients therein. It's also why salmonella loves raw eggs.) Raw egg is not necessarily especially easily digested by humans (none of our gut enzymes are particularly good at taking apart a non-denatured ovalbumin matrix), but many species have evolved into obligate ovivory for a reason.
The Nova classification is generally how people interpret this stuff. Generally speaking ultra processing isn't something you do in your own kitchen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
> Generally speaking ultra processing isn't something you do in your own kitchen
I don't think that's a useful distinction. Many people make pasta noodles or sausage in their own kitchens, for example, and both of those are ultra-processed by every definition.
Also, IMHO, it's a mistake to think of UPFs as only finished food products you get from the grocery store or from restaurants. Many ingredients people use in what they would very much insist is "home cooking", are themselves UPFs, and so cause the resulting "home-cooked" food to be a UPF.
The FDA's recent categorization of sandwiches as generally being UPFs, for example, is due in part to people using UPF breads like Wonderbread for sandwiches; and in part due to people using reconstituted/preserved deli meats in sandwiches; but it's also due to even people who think they're being healthy, smearing a UPF "sandwich spread" onto their sandwich bread at the end. (A grilled cheese grilled in butter is a highly-processed food. A grilled cheese grilled in mayo is a UPF, because shelf-stable grocery-store mayo is a UPF.)
Alternately, if you want to go on the same journey Keary (the person you mention) went on to form an opinion on what constitutes good vs. bad UX design in music/notation/DAW software, they've also put out a whole series of videos taking the piss out of the UX of most of the software in the field:
Reminds me of the poorly coached American football team I saw that gave up 150 yards in penalties and got “offsides” so many times I thought it was the other kind of football.
> I want to read about dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms
If you're okay with these characters and kingdoms existing in vaguely-medieval China (with magically-empowered monks and Taoist-Buddhist symbolism) rather than vaguely-medieval Europe (with magically-empowered knights and Christian symbolism), then I think you'd be very happy to learn about the genre of xianxia (lit. "immortal heroes"). Unlike the Western high fantasy, xianxia fiction is at a peak of popularity right now, with tons of new stories getting published each month.
As you might guess by the name, at first this was only a literary movement in China; but these days there are tons of English-language xianxia stories as well. And they're not necessarily being written in Chinese and then translated, as you might guess; there are some Western authors writing in this genre too.
---
That being said: while you can find some xianxia stories in published physical form in stores, as a "new media" genre being written mostly by younger digital-native people, most xianxia stories are first being published digitally online as serial fiction.
Among websites where these serials are published, https://wuxiaworld.com is popular for authors writing in Chinese (I believe the site offers professional translation services to authors), while https://royalroad.com is popular for authors writing in English.
Also, as a "new media" genre, these stories are "not well understood" by traditional publishers (i.e. they don't know how to market them), so these stories tend to need to achieve a very high level of popularity before the traditional publishers are willing to engage with them. So even when these authors do produce novelizations of their originally-serial stories, they often end up finding no physical publisher willing to pick them up, and instead end up self-publishing only for digital distribution through Kindle/iBooks/etc.
I like wuxia films quite a bit so I bet I would like this too. I don't own an e-reader or anything but I'll see what I can find. Thank you for the kind recommendation
My partner has had idiopathic hypersomnia (sleeps 12 hours most days, as much as 18 hours some days) for a few years now, and so far nothing we’ve tried has worked without awful side effects (e.g. constant heart palpitations and panic attacks.)
I had been looking into orexin agonists (along with other things like H3 autoreceptor antagonists) back when they were just a concept. It’s good to see them finally reaching commercialization. Although they’re not approved by our own (Canadian) regulatory body quite yet.
Now that they’re approved in the US, though, I’m looking very much forward to seeing how these drugs perform in off-label-ish treatment of the various other sleep disorders that I’m sure clinicians will now begin throwing them at.
Have they tried GHB? I know it's used in narcolepsy patients with great success. If you "microdose" it, it's also one of the best drugs on the planet. Slippery slope, though.
I am calm. GHB has wreaked havoc in The Netherlands, it is something tweakers consume. Recommending microdosing GHB in my eyes is like recommending microdosing heroin.
> GHB is difficult to dose. The difference between a dose with pleasant effects and the dose at which someone becomes overwhelmed by sleep and becomes unconscious is very small. People quickly take too much GHB. The combination with alcohol enhances the effects of GHB. This means that people can become unconscious even with a small dose of GHB.
To jump in with a nitpick, I would point out that a "microdose", by definition, would be far below "a dose with pleasant effects", and so wouldn't be too hard to dose at all†.
The reason GHB has a narrow tolerance window (which, note, is not exactly the same thing as a therapeutic index, as the upper bound here isn't where the drug becomes toxic; it's just where the drug stops being recreationally "fun" and becomes a potent sleep drug instead) is because you actually require a decently high amount of the drug to get the recreational effect; and then only a little more of it will put you to sleep. But a "microdose" would imply that you're not going anywhere near the dose that gives you the recreational effect in the first place.
The term "microdose" is usually employed in conversations like this to specifically mean "a dose of a normally-conceptualized-as-recreational drug, too small to experience recreational effects" — although it can technically also mean "a dose of a prescription medicine too small to see the regular clinical effect."
People talk about microdoses of e.g. LSD, MDMA, or ketamine, as potential treatments for various mood disorders. In none of these cases is there an expectation that you'd "feel" the drug. It's a microdose, not a dose.
(And a fun tangent, back on the clinical end of things: sometimes microdoses of drugs can have paradoxical or unique effects, due to the particular ligand having higher binding affinity for a postsynaptic autoreceptor than for regular presynaptic receptors, such that microdoses of the ligand will only agonize the autoreceptors, with no accompanying agonism of the regular receptors. Activating the autoreceptor without activating the regular receptors can potentially do all sorts of wacky things — you're essentially giving the receptor's coupled ion channel a "negative stimulus", which for most gated ion channels isn't something they're they know what to do with; it's an "undefined behavior" kind of state. But some of these "undefined behavior" states are very useful! Low-dose naltrexone [LDN] therapy, for example: it has none of the subjective anti-euphoric effects of regular naltrexone therapy; but nor does it have pro-euphoric effects. Instead, it has anti-inflammatory effects, specifically on the tissues of the brain itself [astrocytes + microglia] that express opioid autoreceptors. LDN therapy is thus being investigated as a treatment for ME/CFS.)
---
† Presuming that what you have is actually pure GHB. Microdosing GHB's cousin GBL would be a different story, since it is extremely potent, with its active dose (and tolerance window) being measured in micrograms. Don't try to microdose GBL, kids. Not even if you know what solvents dissolve GBL and what serial dilution is.
GHB’s sodium salt (sodium oxybate, Xyrem/etc) is a legal prescription drug in several countries, used for treating narcolepsy, alcoholism, and also as an anaesthetic.
I don’t see what’s the problem with someone taking any drug legally prescribed to them by their doctor. Lots of prescription drugs are potentially addictive, but that’s a risk to be weighed against the potential benefits.
Controlled medicinal use of sodium oxybate under the supervision of a medical professional differs greatly from microdosing/self-medicating cleaning agents turned into GHB by yourself or your local dealer
Yes, I agree that taking drugs manufactured by unregulated black market operators is dangerous and not to be recommended.
But "microdosing" per se isn't the issue.
I once stumbled upon a psychiatry case report about a man with a psychotic illness, who found out by experimentation that taking significantly less of his antipsychotics than prescribed, along with up-titration when he began to notice the prodromal signs of relapse, helped him avoid relapse while also avoiding most of the unpleasant side effects. He did this on his own, only later confided in his psychiatrist he was doing it. Some psychiatrists would have reacted rather negatively, but his (being somewhat influenced by R. D. Laing & friends) actually thought it was smart, and wrote it up.
Everything is addictive to the right/wrong person. GHB is no more addictive than alcohol [IMO] , just much more dangerous at high doses. Although safer at low doses.
Alcohol is extremely addictive so I don't understand the point you're trying to make. You shouldn't microdose alcohol either. Millions of people are addicted to alcohol and many more (ab)use it in the form of a bad habit.
reply