223 karma · joined September 29, 2018
(As it's better to read from the original source that the writer of the above piece used to write their piece, he said, not being sure if he were being snarky or honest)
May your good health continue!
(And regardless - you usually aren't hungry during an extended water fast either - you do get physiological "pings" during your normal meal times. However, I would assume that if you're depriving yourself of water the body naturally overrides everything with signals for thirst)
> Russian physicians have successfully treated many illnesses and diseases outside
> the standardized support of allopathic medicines, as well as more common
> ailments including, but not limited to, mental disorders, bronchial asthma,
> rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, obesity and diabetes.
I guess the Gulag does cure everything...
(though to be fair, the part of the diseases mentioned that are due to metabolic disease - read: obesity - can be treated early in their course by just losing weight - diabetes and hypertension due to obesity will go away once you drop the weight. Just, you know, drink water if you're fasting. Or join the Darwin Awards, whatever).
All this is to say that while there might be one "source insult" that creates most of what we cluster as Autism, it is extremely unlikely. There are probably multiple different insults that create multiple conditions that we crudely cluster under the same Autistic umbrella. It is useless to try and define what is the "true" Autism - we need to understand the underlying mechanism first - maybe then we can give whatever we do understand better its own name.
As to why we are quick to label, I'll just say that in my country, as a child psychiatrist put it to me - before the mid-90s parents were angry with him when he made the autistic diagnosis, a trend that was then abruptly reversed and parents started to demand he label their neurodivergent kids autistic, even if he didn't find the diagnosis to be accurate. What changed? The country started to give disability benefits to parents with autistic children.
tl;dr - Once a cheap alternative is on the market, us frugal folks can't imagine paying for what was once the default and only option, distorting our understanding of what constitutes good quality
* He says buying a new sofa of the same quality today would cost upwards of $5000, and he paid more than $3000 for it in 1999. He paid $1000 now to reupholster.
* Using US inflation data which is easier to access, $3000 in '99 is around $5600 today - so practically unchanged.
* What's changed? Since the emergence of cheap badly-built furniture, it now _feels_ profligate to spend $5000 on a sofa, when in 1999 it was (hypothetically) the only option.
* Instead people feel better buying a (say) $800 IKEA sofa every 5 years, which over 25 years is the $4000 nominal he has spent on his own sofa. It _feels_ much less painful to give IKEA $800 now than to give your local artisan sofa maker $5000. Who profits from that? You moreso than the local artisan.
* It's true that the middle has been hollowed out - I can't find a well-made $1500 sofa, but on the plus side the less affluent have access to cheap sofas, and the affluent but frugal whinge and buy a new sofa every few years.
I'm squarely in the frugal bracket, if not affluent...
Breathing soot every day and caking your lungs with it over time raises your risk of cancer.
If our body was not built to handle homeopathic doses of toxins, we'd all be dead.
There was a swift ban on Thalidomide and the FDA went to the extreme of removing fertile women from all trials for the next 60 years, leading to 2nd order effects like Ambien car crashes.
Taking it as a unified theory doesn't work, just as any -ism taken alone to explain the whole damn thing doesn't work and is often counterproductive. For example - and I would be grateful if someone with knowledge of Girard would explain it - how does one bridge the Underwear Gnomes reasoning of say #12 in the blog:
Step 1 - We point out how we all act out of mimicry
Step 2 - ???
Step 3 - We "escape the endless cycles of reciprocal violence by rising above our desire for vengeance and working instead to delegitimize the urge to punish and scapegoat."
Once a company is traded publicly, the market, over a long time horizon [1], usually gives a good value estimate to the company. In the short-run you have to contend with the different ways to juke the price, such as share buybacks just before the CEO is to get a bonus etc. Heck, even in Boeing's case, the market corrected for the stock price (especially if you consider inflation) once planes started falling out of the sky, and the company started to change. Now only doors are falling out of the sky! It's still a price we shouldn't be willing to pay for a market correction - and that's where efficient regulation comes into play, itself a very fraught tool to get right. All in all, we suck at forecasting, understanding, and learning from outlier events. Maybe it's an inherent problem.
[1] with the usual caveat that the market can remain irrational longer than the plane can remain airborne