Study of falling sperm counts finds 'alarming' levels of chemicals in male urine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fefu33e8O-0

Talk to a doctor sometime about the volume of 30+ year old women who are on some type of daily anxiety medication. My understanding is that it's approaching 50% or higher.

Was that level of anxiety among women common before birth control?

IMO there are a whole lot of questions that come from it.

... but isn't it really hard to distinguish _actual_ rates of homosexuality from visible homosexuality? As public acceptance for LGBT people has increased, more people can feel safe coming out or identifying as gay.

Further, if the pill became widely available around 1970, and if this were an impactful factor, wouldn't you expect to see the corresponding change beginning in at least the mid 80s, as those kids grow up?

I should really go find the studies.

I'm sure there are studies to back it all up that it's super bad to have kids in 30s/40s but damn, a lot of people I know had parent in their 30s and they seem ok?

Edit: Actually I'd almost say that I'm envious by how well these older fathers children turn out. They just seem to be more chill, the kids sleep better, the parents generally have more money to deal with problems, they have more time for the children.

I'd advise any parent who has a first kid and is feeling all kinds of overwhelming or surprising things, to go and first get desensitised a bit, and then do the work...

lmao that hits home, as a kid my crazy mother always told me that I needed to see a psychologist

Now, that's called child abuse, while making them lame with amphetamines is good parenting

Lack of ADHD and hyperactivity being notable problems had more to do with the lack of medical study and treatment rather than the lack of cases. 40 years ago, physical abuse was still the norm and people believed you could punish bad behaviors out of a kid. Going even further back any boy thought to be "deviant" or "troubled" would be sent to mental institutions or bootcamps.

Most troubling is its lack of serious research methods or credentials. Owner and editor Van Zandt is a self-described “armchair media analyst. Van Zandt said in a response (below) that he has worked in a research-related capacity in the healthcare industry.

Media Bias / Fact Check's rankings are based on a scale that Van Zandt developed on his own; the research and reporting are done by volunteers. Use it at your own risk."

I wonder if it's a check doctors are generally doing now.

By contrast, someone who is living a more sedentary life could possibly have more time and less stress, thus possibly be more focused on greater sexual frequency. Their abilities, socio-economic status, or access to women are other factors.

But in a context of falling sperm counts, testosterone levels, endocrine disruptors showing up in urine at high levels, SSRIs (some of these are male-specific but have female counterparts), I worry that just shrugging off low-to-nonexistent libido as just "ah some people are asexual and that's valid" isn't giving a complete picture.

Sex feels really good, relationships are important to most people, most relationships of the sort I'm referring to are going to be with a partner who wants sex. To reiterate, any ego-synchronic asexuals out there, if you're happy I'm happy, but it's also okay to treat a lack of libido as a medical issue and see if it can be alleviated, which is often the case.

This blanket advice is a bit dangerous. Once on a test cruise for longer than a couple months, it's a lifelong commitment. Low testosterone has a LOT of input variables. You need to know your cortisol, your LH, your FSH, your E2 and SHBG, your TSH, and T3/T4 levels as well.

Some men can be fixed with stress reduction methods, some can be fixed with interventions that increase gonadotropins, like clomiphene or HCG. Sometimes you need to inhibit aromatization into estradiol. Sometimes you just need to lift heavy weights.

Check all your hormones, because your HPTA is not a one-variable function. Then decide on a course of action.

Hitting up Big Mike in the locker room for 500mg test cyp because your testosterone is low is a bit premature.

1. Sperm count might not be falling at all.

2. If it is, that might be some sort of natural variation, or an effect rather than a cause (maybe sperm counts fall if you aren't regularly impregnating women, which is to some extent a social choice).

3. Even if there is a natural cause, it might not be chemicals.

4. Even if it is, that might not actually be a problem worth worrying about.

"17 times what is considered safe"

Considered safe by who? Epidemiologists?

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24457405/

Ugh, synthetic towels. They don't absorb anything, just push it around. They burn and/or melt if you try to use them as a substitute oven mitt. They're beyond awful.

Get white cotton ones and bleach them. They actually function as towels, which should be the minimum standard for, you know, a towel. You don't need mold resistant towels.

As for the rest:

The cost problem's the main issue. Take away the cheapest materials, demand goes up for the next-cheapest and pretty soon it's not cheap anymore (yes, they can make more, but only to a point). Our society's totally adapted to clothes so cheap they're not worth repairing, that don't need special care because, even if extra care would make them last longer, they're so cheap it's not worth any time or materials, et c. Given the modern cost of labor in the developed world, a large chunk of the population would be doing a lot more DIY clothing repair than they do now.

If you go extreme with it, you can't even use stuff that comes in glass jars or bottles—the inside of the lid is plastic.

Especially on HN, it's a particularly shrewd assessment where we ought to be critical of every single thing we are told, and told to believe - because we've been burnt before, we've learned our lessons, and we ought to know better. The part of the play is to assume that everyone who is labeled a "conspiracy theorist" automatically believes in far out things like the planet being flat. It's a very good disqualification mechanism, and people buy into it easily. Lets not bring that to HN.

How high or low male aggression is is certainly an interesting discussion, but I think is missing the most important point.

All other things being equal, a man with a higher testosterone level may tend to be more aggressive and less docile than the same man with a lower testosterone level.

If chemicals/plastics are reducing testosterone, the average man today might be less aggressive than he otherwise would have been.

> Furthermore, I think countries that have exceptionally low violence from males (like Scandinavian and (some) European countries) point out what -can be- and that this violence that we see in America and a lot of 3rd worlds countries is more societal and learned than innate.

Do Scandinavian immigrants come to America and start a crime rampage either in the first, second, or third generation? Have any American newspapers made note of the Scandinavian crime problem? If the American experience was the biggest variable in American crime, then the crime rate from American immigrants from Scandinavian countries should be noticeably higher than the crime rate in Scandinavian countries? You need to isolate for the right variable and compare the same kind of apples-to-apples populations to make the determination.

> Aka nature affects it more than nurture.

You can have any opinion you want of course, but I think you meant to say that nurture matters more than nature because you're making the argument that violence is societal and learned.

2) Certainly it's fair to point out that mind-reading isn't a thing and you can't prove why anybody does anything. Thoughts and motives of others are internal to their brain, and while they can be in evidence, they cannot be fully known. This idea that you can mind-read is something that virtually every media entity, whether it's a mainstream corporate outlet or some indie conspiracy theorist, gets wrong. Many news headlines are literal mind-reading headlines that are impossible to verify. Once you start looking for this, you'll see media mind-reading everywhere.

3) I'd like to point out that you arguably committed the same mind-reading error in your post that you're critiquing. By saying that that "the former sells more books", you're stating an assumption that their motives are fiduciary and not driven by a genuine desire for human freedom and quality of life. Your statement may or may not be accurate, but certainly isn't a provable summary of their motives.

4) A lot of the ivory tower crowd likes to scoff at the conspiracy theorists, saying they always get things wrong. That can be debated until the cows come home, but I'd like to point out one small thing. There's no war in my lifetime (other than Ukraine, imagine that) that a large chunk of the corporate media weren't hooting, hollering, and cheerleading for, and I can't think of many conspiracy theorists who ever supported the constant random wars. Just think about that when deciding if contrarian voices are needed or not.

> For example, the data used dated from 2009 to 2010, and exposure to BPA may have decreased since, while exposure to other chemicals may have increased.

> Another uncertainty is whether women of reproductive age have the same levels of chemical exposure as the men in the study.

Even the researchers suggested a wider time frame and a larger comparison group.