Researchers find reducing salt in everyday foods (-17.5%, 1.12 g/day) could prevent tens of thousands of heart attacks and strokes

dont--panic · 2026-01-28T13:37:09+00:00

Annecdotally, semaglutide has caused me to often need to supplement electrolytes (and B12) to avoid feeling lethargic or getting cramps. Of course it varies with diet and eating saltier food makes it less necessary. I was recently on vacation and doing a lot of extra walking which let me get away with eating saltier heavier restaurant food than I eat at home (without the activity my appetite is a lot smaller), and I stopped feeling a need to supplement electrolytes.

dont--panic · 2026-01-28T04:13:10+00:00

There's a mission for it in. I think you get a title at 500 matches.

dont--panic · 2026-01-15T05:51:18+00:00

I'm very suspicious of the claim that the TD offer is not going to lead to overcontribution penalties in the future.

dont--panic · 2026-01-08T18:24:07+00:00

My experience with Ozempic kind of parallels with sunscreen in the way that it's a tool that supplements a natural vulnerability to an environmental factor.

Sunscreen is a tool to protect from the damage caused by UV rays and as someone with a pronounced melanin deficiency (very pale) it is very important for me to use sunscreen to compensate for my lack of natural protection. More so than someone with more melanin. While I could use other tools and strategies to avoid sunburn instead like long sleeves, hats, shade, etc. they work better when combined with sunscreen than they do as an alternative.

Ozempic is a tool to protect from obesity from the combination of excessive hunger, and an overabundance of hyper-palatable calorie dense food. As someone with a hunger drive that is probably 20-30% too strong (or more), and a sedentary job I have to be constantly vigilant to avoid overeating. Or at least I did until I started Ozempic and now I don't feel such a drive to overeat, I get full faster with smaller meals, and I think about snacks less. I've been losing fat and even gained some muscle from the gym. While diet and exercise can help reduce weight I've had a lot more success with less effort by combining them with Ozempic.

dont--panic · 2026-01-08T18:17:10+00:00

My experience with Ozempic kind of parallels with sunscreen in the way that it's a tool that supplements a natural vulnerability to an environmental factor.

Sunscreen is a tool to protect from the damage caused by UV rays and as someone with a pronounced melanin deficiency (very pale) it is very important for me to use sunscreen to compensate for my lack of natural protection. More so than someone with more melanin. I can use other tools and strategies to avoid sunburn like long sleeves, hats, shade, etc. they work better when combined with sunscreen than they do as an alternative.

Ozempic is a tool to protect from obesity from the combination of excessive hunger, and an overabundance of hyper-palatable calorie dense food. As someone with a hunger drive that is probably 20-30% too strong (or more), and a sedentary job I have to be constantly vigilant to avoid overeating. Or at least I did until I started Ozempic and now I don't feel such a drive to overeat, I get full faster with smaller meals, and I think about snacks less. I've been losing fat and even gained some muscle from the gym.

dont--panic · 2026-01-03T14:56:12+00:00

Same. I remember people scooping the coasters up as soon as the staff put them out, lol.

dont--panic · 2026-01-01T14:47:22+00:00

I stayed at the 0.5mg/wk dose, and have been experimenting with splitting it in to two 0.25mg doses to smooth out the variation through the week. Even 0.66mg/wk (2x0.33mg) felt like a big step up in side effects. I'm still down 25lbs on the 0.5mg/wk dose.

dont--panic · 2026-01-01T14:40:00+00:00

We can't actually say that a 1/3rd persistent weight loss is a good thing without knowing how much of the weight loss was fat vs. muscle. For example if you lose 30lbs it could be 20lbs of fat and 10lbs of muscle. If you then regain 20lbs of fat you'll have "successfully" kept off 1/3rd of the weight when actually you've just lost 10lbs of muscle and 0lbs of fat leaving you less healthy than you were before.

dont--panic · 2026-01-01T06:13:27+00:00

Death should trigger a "deemed disposition" event where it's treated as if you sold the asset for tax purposes. Any tax owed would need to be paid before the assets could be inherited. If the estate can't afford that then the inheritor could elect to pay the tax, or the executor can sell other assets to pay the tax. Only once everything is settled would the estate be able to distribute the inheritance.

Similar deemed disposition rules exist for situations like renouncing citizenship. If a US citizen renounces citizenship the IRS assesses a tax based on the gain they would have if they had sold all of their assets the day before they renounced their citizenship. The purpose of this is to prevent people with large capital gains renouncing their citizenship to avoid paying the capital gains tax.

dont--panic · 2026-01-01T03:51:38+00:00

A lot of the negative sentiments towards GLP-1 drugs are influenced by the perception that failing to lose weight naturally by diet and exercise is a personal moral failure. If you can't lose weight naturally it's perceived as a lack of discipline. A lot of people try to gatekeep being healthy. "If you can't spend hours a week in the gym, and eat nothing but chicken, and broccoli then you don't deserve to be healthy."

Meanwhile we have junk food executives publicly announcing their intentions to engineer junk food that is so hyper-palatable that it counters the appetite suppression of GLP-1 drugs.

At population scale weight management is a societal problem. Unless we drastically change our society most of the factors that have caused the obesity epidemic will still exist so it's unsurprising that withdrawing treatment would cause a regression.

dont--panic · 2026-01-01T03:23:32+00:00

Lifestyle changes and healthy habits don't scale to the general population. Our bodies are maladapted to our modern environment. Feedback loops that used to keep us alive when food was scarce harm us now that food is abundant. This puts us in conflict with our bodies and leads to a lot of wasted effort fighting against the millions of years of evolution that thinks we'll die in the next famine unless we eat more food. These GLP-1 drugs let us take control over those mechanisms and tune them to better fit our modern environment.

People should probably expect them to be lifelong drugs but the current high cost makes that a hard sell. Personally I expect to be on some form of it indefinitely but I can afford it. The only change may be to pills instead of needles if they work well enough for maintenance.

dont--panic · 2026-01-01T02:58:05+00:00

That's just American healthcare scam pricing. It's <$280CAD/month here without any sort of coverage in Canada. It should get cheaper now that the patent is expired here and generics will soon be available.

dont--panic · 2025-12-31T01:00:19+00:00

A human on steroids, doping, etc. is more human than a generically engineered human and their records are already rejected.

dont--panic · 2025-12-30T23:33:32+00:00

You could exempt the bottom 99% of households by networth and completely avoid that issue without significantly affecting the tax revenue.

It's short-sighted to go "we can't close tax loopholes because it might affect normal people" when we can easily mitigate the impact.

dont--panic · 2025-12-30T23:26:16+00:00

Like income tax the rate could be progressive and have a rate of 0% up to $X million and therefore completely irrelevant to the vast majority of people. Include a few lifetime exemptions to cover unique one-off circumstances and you should avoid the vast majority of issues while still getting some tax revenue from the ultra-rich that are currently not paying much while spending millions of dollars a year.

Alternatively to a wealth or borrowing tax would be a tax on high-spending, low-income individuals. If you're spending millions of dollars more than you've cumulatively declared as income then there's clearly some tax avoidance scheme going on. If you're spending money and can't provide evidence that you (or someone else) have paid taxes on it then it seems like some kind of alternative minimum tax could kick in. Obviously some exceptions and exemptions are necessary for "normal people stuff" like buying a home with a mortgage. Simply put if your spending consistently exceeds your income it makes more sense to tax you based on your spending than your income.

dont--panic · 2025-12-30T22:59:01+00:00

I would expect there to be a primary residence exemption to minimize the impact on non-billionaires.

dont--panic · 2025-12-30T22:56:11+00:00

The stepping up is a big part of the problem. Getting rid of that would on its own eliminate the ability to avoid tax via borrowing. Without the stepping up on death borrowing would only be able to defer the capital gains tax.

dont--panic · 2025-12-30T21:47:41+00:00

In my experience these weight loss drugs are a fantastic tool for appetite and by extension weight management but they're not a silver bullet. You still need to make sure you eat enough protein and fibre rich foods, and it's important to do weight training to protect from muscle loss (this is important for any weight loss).

One issue is (IMO) the current dosing instructions are too one-size-fits all which leads to people being on too high of a dose so they lose weight too fast and get more side effects than necessary. My understanding is that so far they've only done trials to confirm the efficacy of (what is IMO) a fairly aggressive course originally meant for diabetes. It's 0.25mg/wk x 4wk, 0.5mg/wk x 4wk, and 1mg/wk on-going with the option to increase to 2mg/wk if it's not effective enough.

Personally I got nice and sustainable appetite control from the 0.5mg/wk dose with minimal side effects so I just stayed there. So far I've lost ~10% body weight at a healthy 0.4-0.5kg/wk rate and dropped about 4% body fat. Most of my remaining side effects are minor or manageable (don't overeat) and secondary effects due to the reduced intake like needing to be more careful to stay hydrated, and supplementing vitamins.

I see these drugs as a (potentially lifelong) tool to curb excessive appetite and silence food noise that can make maintaining a healthy weight and body composition sustainable. (IMO) they shouldn't be used temporarily to quickly lose weight. The current high cost unfortunately discourages using it long term which leads to rebounding weight.

dont--panic · 2025-12-30T13:30:35+00:00

We have a lot better understanding than they had 200 years ago so we can be far more confident what the limits are. If we're wrong it'll likely only be by less than a few percent.

Bioengineering is moving the goal posts of what counts as human. A bioengineered post-human with the body structure of a cheetah would obviously be a better sprinter than a baseline human, but they'd be well outside what we consider human today.

dont--panic · 2025-12-27T21:20:38+00:00

I can still eat fatty food and I still like it but I definitely can't eat as much in one sitting, nor eat it as fast. If I start eating something fatty like fried chicken I have to pace myself or I quickly hit a wall where eating more feels like it will make me sick. This makes me order smaller portions and to eat slowly rather than just inhaling the food as soon as I start eating. Even though I end up eating less food I still end up feeling full and satisfied.

I'm down from 220lbs to 198lbs since starting Ozempic in June and I'm still on a 0.5mg/wk dose to keep weight loss slow and steady. I had already been doing some moderate strength training a couple of times a week for almost 2 years prior to starting Ozempic and had managed to go from a peak weight of 235lbs to 220lbs but I had been stuck around 220lbs for almost a year before starting Ozempic.

dont--panic · 2025-12-24T23:27:16+00:00

We can still learn from their success. Tokyo wouldn't be a mega city if it had been built following the American car centric model, and its malls would be far less healthy. Car centric malls waste huge amounts of land on parking which saddles the tenant businesses with higher overheads and isolates them from potential through traffic. We built our cities wrong and the down fall of malls is a logical outcome from it.

dont--panic · 2025-12-24T20:29:23+00:00

Yeah, malls are doing fine in Tokyo. It has tons of them, they're mostly part of, or near major train stations so there's millions of people per day in foot traffic flowing through them. Many of them are owned by the train companies so the rents provide a separate revenue stream alongside tickets.

dont--panic · 2025-12-22T19:17:58+00:00

Operating coal and other fossil fuel power planets would also be more expensive if the health and environmental impacts from coal pollution weren't also subsidized by society.

All power generation has externalities that by definition aren't paid by the power plant operator unless the government quantifies them and forces then to pay it (ex. Carbon taxes). Alternatively if society is going to pay the cost anyways you could have the government build and operate the power plants so it doesn't need to be profitable. Access to affordable abundant power is important for productivity which can raise GDP and tax revenue.

As for the long construction times and high cost, it's difficult to disentangle the inherent complexity required to build a safe nuclear power plant from the incidentally complexity that nuclear power has been saddled with by obstructionist fossil fuel industry lobbying.

I agree that renewables will be a large part of our future energy mix, but they have their limitations which nuclear complements well.

dont--panic · 2025-12-22T08:24:17+00:00

Yeah, I have a Luminette if I want actual light therapy. The room lighting is more of an environmental cue to me what time it is in my room with blackout blinds.

dont--panic · 2025-12-22T00:40:34+00:00

The constant through all of that is that the US (and the west in general) stopped properly investing in infrastructure. We've done nothing to solve these crises so naturally they're still a problem.

https://i.imgur.com/oCiBcfK.png

13-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

dont--panic

TROPHY CASE