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Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

We don’t need to cure death. Just hair loss and old skin, it will create $50T market cap in new companies.

I’m actually more interested in hair removal. There should be better methods than what we have now.

If I’m going bald, then I’d love to shortcut the process.

Shaving is awful no matter where it is on your body. It takes time, it’s irritating and you never look fresh for more than a day.

Just grow a scraggly and comb it down. Venture capitalists wear t-shirts that show their nipples on stage, so what’s the shame in a long scraggly.

There's nothing shameful about nipples anyway.

Isn't this solved with laser hair removal?

Sort of. It's often not perfect, and often not permanent.

Laser hair removal only works if there's contrast between the skin and the hair. So if you have white or blonde hair and white skin, it doesn't work; or if you have brown skin and brown hair, it also doesn't work.

For cases where laser hair removal won't work, there's electrolysis, which involves inserting an acupuncture needle in each and every hair follicle, but it's expensive, slow, and can be pretty painful.

But, hair can be dyed?

When you have laser hair removal, the laser flash pumps a ton of energy into the hair follicle which essentially roasts the shit out of the hair follicle so it dies, usually it will re-product hair at some point but very thin, wispy white hair if any at all.

You need to shave your hair for laser hair removal since you don't want a long melting chunk of hair on your body that will cause serious burns. Hair dye will not color the root base of the hair meaning that heat energy will not travel down to the base as well and probably just destroy the pigment dye instead of the hair itself.

Laser is painful too even when it does work :(

Laser tech is definitely improving on that front! I've done laser hair removal off and on for a while, and the clinic I go to recently got a new laser to replace their old unit that kept breaking down (hence some of those "off" periods)... and this new model is legitimately almost painless. The old one zapped me pretty bad in certain areas, so it's not like I'm immune to laser pain, but in those same areas I never felt more than a tiny snap/pinch from the new one.

The technician also mentioned that this new model works on a wider array of skin tones--if I remember correctly, I think she said that it works all the way up to a Fitzpatrick 6, as long as the hair itself has melanin (still no way to target white/light hairs).

mostly, but not always, and it's harder if there is less contrast between hair color and skin color.

I've moved to designer stubble. You can leave it 2 or 3 days and the lawnmower like stubble trimmers are quite quick.

The hair one is a fascinating one to me... We have some many examples of people like Bezos, Jobs, Ballmer, Brin, Slim... I mean, if the ultra rich have not figured it out, I don't think there much hope for anyone else really... haha of they can pull a Musk, but that's not the point, the point is to reverse balding...

> can pull a Musk, but that's not the point, the point is to reverse balding

How much such hairline can cost, $10?

nah, but I mean, the guy went trough the same instant pipeline as Steven Seagal where he was definitely all thin in Above the Law and a film later his hairline had won the battle. Come on!

It's not what you meant but toupees have gotten really good, the only problem is you can't be a public figure and have pattern baldness one day and a full head of hair the next. There's actually something called "the toupee fallacy" which means assuming an entire category of something is bad based on only noticing bad examples.

I Think You Should Leave had a sketch that's a fake ad for bald men who have been wearing toupees and want to stop but don't want to show up to work one day bald, making everyone think you've been lying to them. So the service is they send you a new toupee every week, each one balder than the last over the span of 52 weeks, so you can look like you're progressively going bald.

I'm not usually into cringe humor, but IMHO "I Think You Should Leave" is its own category. Episodes like Hat and Hot Dog Car ... I almost hurt myself laughing.

In the same sketch there's also an option for a man in a gorilla suit to come to your workplace and rip out your "hair" in one go.

Trump, the most vain of them all, has tried pretty much every way for the last 40 years. It's likely mostly glue at this point.

How about just reversing grey hair. I’m surprised no one figured that out yet.

Is market value the only important thing?

That's the world we've built. It's not a world for humans.

In a market-driven economy, yes sadly.

Not everything is about the economy. Even when you have a market-driven economy I'd say most things that people value aren't even represented by the economy.

Yes, which is the biggest issue of our time. Fixing climate change runs afoul of what the markets want, so it isn't done and the problem gets worse.

No, we need to cure death. I have no problems having old skin and being bald if I can live for 1000 years.

Isn't this covered in multiple sci-fi genres? There's no real way to distinguish immortality from what amounts to a pre-planned death around some kind of life extension procedure. As a social group, we're more likely to select something that is effectively "continuation of thought patterns" than we are to actually extend consciousness

I think brain and eyes within a vat are completely within the realm of possibility in the very near future if not already. That would definitely register to me as extending consciousness with no preplanned death.

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