My son-in-law is from Brazil, came to the US for grad school, has an Ph.D. in ML and a good job in the US. He got his green card via marriage a couple of years ago and was planning on probably getting citizenship in the next year or two. He is very worried about what all this might mean for that plan.
My wife, age 60, has battled her weight her whole life, and my son-in-law is currently taking one of the GLP-1 drugs. When I listen to them discuss all this, the one thing that stands out to me is "The drug quiets the voices in my head about food." If there are sweets in the house, for instance, my wife can possibly resist eating them, but she cannot stop thinking about them. For them, and I think for many people, it's not just a matter of hunger but hunger and learned behaviors. My wife can tell you how those voices were activated by her mother when she was a child. It's really complicated.
If there are sweets in the house, I may eat more than I would like, but I don't really have those voices, and after being married to my wife for 40 years, I can't pretend to even understand what her thoughts are about food. I can get a brownie from the kitchen, eat it and forget about them until I come back into the kitchen again. I suspect you also don't have those voices.
(For reference, I've never been particularly overweight, but twice in my life my weight crept up, and I managed to lose and keep off for years 10-25 pounds through diet changes alone; yes, my weight did eventually creep up, but I think the number of years before that happened would qualify medically as a successful weight loss)
To get back to this discussion, my son-in-law has lost 50 pounds since he started taking the GLP-1 drug, but he has also changed his diet and he exercises regularly. He was trying to do those things with mixed success in terms of weight loss before he started taking the drug, so I would say he would probably stand a higher chance of keeping the weight off if he were to stop the drug, but his doctor talks about him always being on a low maintenance dose.
I agree that that "likely" is not a good look, but this was written by a lawyer to fulfill a legal obligation as part of this settlement, so I'm not surprised.
I used to work for a financial services company that had a strong and well-managed security culture. The company got acquired, and afterwards, we kept getting emails from third parties for various things, all supposedly initiated by execs/groups at the parent company.
We employees of the acquired company discussed the emails in Slack: we were sure that these emails were legitimate, but acting on them would have broken our security policies, so we all decided to all report them as phishing attempts. We understood that we were engaging in malicious compliance, but our actions were also a best practice, so we couldn't technically be criticized for it.
After a while of this, execs at the parent company would send out sometimes exasperated-sounding emails ahead of time, alerting us to the email that we should expect to receive and how they wanted us to respond. Of course, that led to discussions of how we know that that pre-email emails were legitimate. After a while, we all lost interest in this malicious compliance and adopted the much laxer security culture of the acquiring company.
I had to fire the MSP I hired because they needed to install some software on everyone's computer, so they sent a company-wide email, with no clearance from anyone, directing approximately 40 people to open terminal and paste in a string sent in that email. Along with instructions on how to open terminal.
The absolute last thing anyone competent does is train employees to receive communications like that in email and follow them. If they'd asked for 3 minutes at an all hands to prep employees, or announced in slack, or something similar then ok. Or some out-of-band announcement that this was legit.
Very true. This truck appeals to me very much. My wife and I have a 2010 Accord and a 2014 CR-V. We could afford newer and/or fancier cars, but we just don't care about those things.
We're thinking of buying a newer car at some point, but between interest rates and, now, tariffs, we're not in any hurry.
My 30-year-old daughter is still driving the Toyota version, the Matrix, also 2008, that we bought in about 2013. She loves the thing. If she didn't have it, I'm sure I would still be driving it.
I find it hilarious that it's a limited-edition M Theory model. It has a badge glued to the dash that says "1926 of 5000." For a Toyota econobox.
it is not about explicitly voting down a Youtube channel to punish the creator for making exaggerated claims,
that type of action does not scale
what will happen instead is that people will develop an immunity to these types of thumbnails and you will visit less - behaviors are the main driving mechanisms
it will be boring like exaggerated burlesque facial expressions in the early movies
> It seems to me that the whole "trad wife" thing is rage-bait that the press took hold of and blew out of proportion
I don't disagree with you, but there were a couple of crucial steps before that: first, extreme views/lifestyles being amplified on social media that lead people to belief that they are more widespread than they may be, and second, people with related political beliefs latching onto and further amplifying this trend for their own political gain.
You basically made the comment that I was considering. The problem isn't whether some people want to live in specific types of relationships. The problem is how social media amplifies extremism, as you note. It makes a small minority of people doing a specific thing look like an actual trend when it isn't. Throw in monetization--people making money peddling specific beliefs as if they actually believe and live them when in fact they may not--and it's just a recipe for a mess.
I'm with you. I go out of my way to avoid advertising whenever possible, I'm critical of marketing and advertising, and I pride myself on my rationality, thinking that I'm relatively immune to advertising. But yeah, people like you and me are just one speck in a constellation of human emotion and ration.
Disclaimer: I have an iphone, apple watch, ipad, airpods, and personal MacBook. I use a MacBook for work as well. Judge me as you will.
