This is different than the glps, directly targeting subcutaneous fat.
Link to an earlier paper on the treatment:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9384315/
"At a dose of 2.0 mg/cm2, CBL-514 safely and significantly reduced abdominal fat volume by 24.96%, making it a promising new treatment for routine, nonsurgical abdominal fat reduction in dermatologic clinics."
I always feel like these frameworks rely on a semantic sleight of hand that sounds plausible on the surface, but when you drill down a bit they render words like 'simulation' 'reality' or 'truth' as either unintelligible or trite, depending on how you define them.
They're defined relative to the axioms. In this case he is using the standard arithmetic & set theoretic constructions to define the terms & functions he's talking about. It's logically sound, whether it makes physical sense or not is another matter.
"Dating from between 5,800 and 5,300 BC, they lie nine meters underwater and were built at a time when sea levels were much lower than today.
Researchers believe they may have been fish traps built on the foreshore, or walls to protect against rising seas.
The study says the structures reflect "technical skills and social organization sufficient to extract, move and erect blocks weighing several tonnes, similar in mass to many Breton megaliths", large stone arrangements used as monuments or for ceremonial purposes.
This technical know-how would predate the first megalithic constructions by several centuries."
Trust has been plummeting for a while now. It seems likely AI video will exacerbate the problem, but I don't see it as a driver nearly as much as the increasing cultural divide in the west.
It has always been the case that you can trust an event occurred, but the story being fed around it was the point of failure with regard to trust. AI video just pushes that initial point of failure forward a step.
We've refined and relabeled the art of naming the demon that possess a person based on the characteristics of their symptoms. Then put a scientific sheen on the proscribed exorcisms and potions, without understanding the underlying issue. Modern day shamanism.
That is a bit hyperbolic (we clearly have real knowledge of the underlying neurological mechanisms), but closer to the truth than most people like to acknowledge.
Misguided: there's now a focus on causality and precise identification based on symptoms and negative impact caused that wasn't present in the days of exorcisms and shamanism. Those eras were primarily characterized by people in positions of (often corrupt or unqualified) authority declaring diagnoses for others, largely without the consent of the diagnosed. Now, the default mode of mental health treatment is now focused on identifying symptoms according to specific rubrics, and diagnosing (or not) based on the presence of those rather than the agenda, religious feelings, or whims of people in positions of authority.
Partly right: what I described above is the default or desired diagnostic approach. We have a long way to go before it's actually performed for everyone. Coercive diagnoses are not uncommon even under modern medical/diagnostic practices: parents seek out spectrum or ADHD diagnoses for kids who aren't suffering, just not meeting parental expectations; psychotic people are handled by modern mental health systems with extremely low autonomy, etc.
Conversations here are also often confused: diagnoses for many mental health conditions are qualitative and measured not only by symptoms but by harms. The DSM and friends aren't like the diagnostic instruments for cancer or heart disease: physiological indicators are much rarer in mental health, so mental health diagnoses combine enumerations of behavioral symptoms and negative impacts caused to one's life. That implies a subtlety that's hard to come by among non-medical-professionals: you don't "have" ADHD (or OCD, Autism, etc.) in the same way you "have" an ulcer; you have those conditions if you present with a certain subset of the symptoms for the diagnosis, many of which are behavioral. Whether a particular treatment is merited has to do with both symptoms and the harms posed by those symptoms to your quality of life. So saying "I have ADHD" is a less meaningful statement than "I have some symptoms of ADHD and they seriously damage my quality of life, therefore I seek treatment".
Add to that our limited (but growing, and better than it was in past decades) understanding of pharmaceutical treatments for mental health disorders--many of the drugs we use to treat, say, depression or ADHD behave with all the subtlety of driving a bulldozer through a convenience store because you wanted to get a gallon of milk--and you have a complex area discussed using outdated binary pathological terminology. That's a recipe for suspicion and confusion.
In short, it is, as you say, hyperbolic to characterize modern mental health treatment as shamanism. But lingering corrupt medical practice and the complexity of the field for laypeople make it hard to see how, specifically, things are improving in this area.
IT is beyond our control because we have setup a system where the people who are paying don't want to control things.
My boss wants insurance to be expensive - if I could afford it I would be more willing to quit (retire early).
Finding cheaper services isn't in my interest - I'm not paying any bills anyway.
Insurance companies like the complexity because it means I can't understand the system and so I have to use them.
Doctors don't really care as they just have administrators play the game for them. Once in a while they look at the game and say something, but really this is just they don't understand how the game is played (they shouldn't - they are doctors, they should be looking at medical issues not administrative ones).
Doctors have also spent a lot of time lobbying to make becoming a doctor harder so that the fewer doctors will be able to command better salaries. It sounds like they are attempting to reverse that and open up more spots for residencies but I imagine that there is a lot of momentum to overcome.
There's an old mechanics saying "if X was covered by insurance it'd cost what Y does" where X is some routine thing (tires/brakes/etc) and Y is autobody or glass services typically covered by insurance.
This proverb seems to also apply to health insurance and the things they do/don't cover.
Putting routine stuff under the purview of insurance is stupid regardless of context. There are other cheaper, faster, simpler and more transparent ways of doing that.
Other countries are making efforts to keep things in check though https://www.npr.org/2025/01/04/nx-s1-5246231/potential-fraud.... The US for some reason can’t even address blatant fraud. One example is the stuff insurers do with Medicare Advantage. There is fraud and Congress knows about it but besides some hearings nothing is happening.
And having lived 10 years in Canada and 10 years in the US and used both their healthcare systems quite a bit, I have seen both sides. Let me just say I moved to the US for healthcare 10 years ago and we do not regret it one bit. The US is easy to point and laugh at, but that just comes from ignorance.
If things keep going in the direction they are, there might not be a LineageOS at some point, and developing a useful alternative before that (Linux based) would be great.
so we fork and continue to work on lineageOS. why start from scratch? (i mean, it's nice to have alternatives, but there is no reason not to continue developing an android fork.
Working on LineageOS doesn't help you if you can't even install it. Fewer and fewer phones come with unlockable bootloaders these days. The grip is tightening.
Yes, but if you are building your own phone hardware to run Linux on it, there is a huge advantage in that Linux flavor being an AOSP fork, since it is already mature.
right, but if you can't install a custom android, you can't install anything linux based or anything else for that matter. so that's a different issue entirely.
Link to an earlier paper on the treatment: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9384315/ "At a dose of 2.0 mg/cm2, CBL-514 safely and significantly reduced abdominal fat volume by 24.96%, making it a promising new treatment for routine, nonsurgical abdominal fat reduction in dermatologic clinics."
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