> it's currently difficult to get them prescribed by a legitimate doctor unless your obesity-related health problems are really severe

I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s difficult to get them covered by insurance unless your obesity-related health problems are really severe. In my experience, doctors have no problem prescribing GLP-1 drugs for weight management.

If you aren't significantly overweight a doc won't want to prescribe a GLP-1. Because if you die while on it for any reason, and your family sues, the expert witness will testify that a GLP-1 wasn't standard of care for a patient with your presentation. Then the doc's insurance loses the case (and he pays way more going forward assuming he can practice at all).

This is an argument that the litigiousness of American society incentivizes suboptimal health outcomes from the legitimate health care system because the employees of that system need to legally protect themselves; therefore a person might be better off if they go outside that health care system and buy grey-market Chinese pharmacy peptides labeled not for human use.

Thing is Bay Area folks usually make good money and these are not that expensive out of pocket.

> The threat of a Chinese moon landing

Maybe I’m naive, but what is the threat here?

> If it was canceled outright it would be much harder to react to any Chinese success

I feel like the appropriate reaction would be to congratulate China.

We need more people like you in government

> The entire point of a dating site is to find somebody to leave that site with.

Many people on dating apps are not looking for exclusive or long-term relationships.

> In fact, you'll probably not find a billionaire with kids at any daycare

I grew up with the children of a multi-billionaire. His kids went to the same daycare as I did, and it wasn’t particularly fancy.

Some ultra-wealthy people live fairly normal-looking lives.

Something I heard from someone who worked at the Palo Alto Apple Store two decades ago:

Steve Jobs's kids drew on an eMac with markers or something. He made them make an appoint for the store's Genius Bar and wait in line to have it looked at like everyone else. I don't know anything about how the staff tried to clean it or the outcome.

> if you want to see a rain forest or a thousand year old Buddhist temple or a pyramid, there's not really a substitute in the continental US

Minor nitpick, but there are temperate rain forests in the continental United States. What we don’t have are tropical rain forests.

Because it makes for a more eye-catching headline.

I’m sure there are countless examples to the contrary, but I recently submitted feedback regarding an issue that I was experiencing in Final Cut Pro. Within a week, a member of the Final Cut Pro team contacted me and asked for a copy of my video editing files so they could replicate the issue. I sent them the files, they confirmed the issue, and the issue was fixed in the next release.

I was very pleasantly surprised.

> 2 years ago, a much (much) smaller stunt got me nearly fired at $FAANG, and all I could think was "where has the culture gone?"

Okay, I’ll ask. Details?

> it became clear that the journal's editor was too embarrassed

How sad. Admitting and correcting a mistake may feel difficult, but it makes you credible.

As a reader, I would have much greater trust in a journal that solicited criticism and readily published corrections and retractions when warranted.

Unfortunately, academia is subject to the same sorts of social things that anything else is. I regularly see people still bring up a hoax article sent to a journal in 1996 as a reason to dismiss the entire field that one journal publishes in.

Personally, I would agree with you. That's how these things are supposed to work. In practice, people are still people.

> I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year.

In Hollywood, that line gets crossed at a surprisingly low level. I am friends with Josh Sussman, who played Jacob Ben Israel on Glee. I occasionally visit him in LA, and we can’t go anywhere in public without getting constantly stopped by people wanting photos. It’s exhausting.

I didn't watch it myself, but Glee was a very popular show. Since Josh Susman was a recurring character, it's unsurprising that he'd have a large fanbase (especially in LA).