No I just don’t like feeding sea lions. It’s generally impolite to ask people information that you could trivially find yourself. It’s disrespectful of other people’s time. That’s why when someone asks such lazy questions, I first ask them to demonstrate they’ve put in an iota of effort. Why should others answer you if you’re not willing to put in any work yourself You didn’t ask for people’s opinion on the bill, you asked for a trivially searchable factual information. It’s generally pretty rude to ask others to do your basic factual research for you.

I love you Doctor Zaius!

You have no concept of scale.

Numbers going down to levels comparable with numerous other diseases is very much the pandemic “ending.” By your logic, the Black Death never went away. Some people still die from Yersinia pestis each year.

It’s one thing to mask up in a real pandemic. It’s another to advocate for a position where humanity will have to remained masked from now until the end of time.

Can I play the piano anymore?

That’s nothing. We had to install a firmware update on a chef’s knife! 🤣

In the same way blood pressure tells you nothing about a person’s health, yes. In the same way a college degree tells you nothing about a person’s intelligence, or their number of active friendships indicates their social skills.

Just because something is itself meaningless does not mean it is not a broadly useful indicator. But no, the vast, vast majority of people with unhealthy BMIs are carrying very unhealthy amounts of fat. There are some edge cases involving athletes or people with extremely odd build types. And the precise level of where we define overweight or obese really should vary a bit from person to person.

But I’m sorry, 99% of people with a BMI of 35 have a serious weight problem. People just citing Olympic athletes and other fringe cases out of cope and denial. BMI is imperfect, but claiming it’s meaningless is just wishful magical thinking.

What internet searches have you tried so far?

It means a hell of a lot healthier than they were before! We’ve seen that these drugs improve a myriad of health issues. The idea that they don’t help with health is just cope. And no, it really isn’t a half solution. Your health improves the same whether you lose weight via dieting or drugs. Because ultimately you’re doing the exact same thing - eating less.

You’re stuck in Christian cultural thinking. Instinctively you think any boon must have a terrible price associated with it. And we can’t know the side effects? I’m sorry, but that is not how side effects work. There are not medications that never show a side effect for years and then suddenly have it show up decades later. A side effect can become more common with time, but it will show up in some people in the short term. People have been using these drugs for years. We’re not going to see mysterious terrible effects show up decades from now.

By your logic, we could never implement any new medication. There would always be the risk of unknown effects decades down the road. If we followed your methods, we would have never been able to deploy the covid vaccine and hundreds of millions of people would have died. But thankfully that doesn’t happen. We can test drugs in the short term and be reasonably confident of the long term risks.

I challenge you to find a single medication of any kind that showed no side effects in early studies, only to have them be widespread after decades of use. Show one medication. Just one medication that has ever worked the way you’re speculating. You will not find it. The closest I can think of is thalidomide and its negative effects showed up very quickly. Thalidomide was the result of improper testing, ignoring test results, and it resulted in the complete overhaul of the drug testing process.

Drugs simply do not work like you’re suggesting. Side effects don’t just show up mysteriously after decades. That has literally never happened.

You’re stuck in a Faustian mindset. Any boon must have a terrible cost. You simply can’t accept a wonder of modern medicine when it’s right in front of your eyes. It’s not surprising. It’s the same underlying belief structure of every anti-vaxxer.

Is BMI perfect? No. But most people who cite its shortcomings pretend that the edge cases like extremely muscular athletes have any relevance to most of the population.

That’s the problem with “blue no matter who.” These rat bastards hide their colors in the primary. They wait to the general and start flying the terf flag. Then they browbeat trans people and their allies saying, “well, you have to vote for me. What are you going to do, vote for a Republican? If you don’t vote for me, you must support Trump and Republicans!”

Of course, if people do vote for them and they win the general, the next primary isn’t actually useful to get rid of them then either. A that point, the same mouth-breathing liberals will change their tune. Instead of “vote her out in the primary,” the tune changes to, “well, we can’t lose an incumbent seat in a purple state, not for something as trivial as trans rights!” And all the donors will support the transphobe, as they’re the incumbent.

To a lot of liberals here on lemmy, there is simply never an acceptable time to vote out the bigots. We’re just supposed to sit down, shut up, and ignore it as the party gets taken over by raging bigots.

Something looked kooky about your numbers. I figured it out. You’re trying to analyze 2020 as a blue wave year! That was never a blue wave year. It was just a regular election that Democrats won. Biden was a milquetoast candidate that barely beat Trump, even with the pandemic helping him. It was absolutely not a blue wave year. The grandparent post was just wrong on that point.

For a blue wave year, see 2018. In that year Democrats gained 41 seats in the House. This is more likely to reflect what 2026 will look like. 2020 was not a blue wave year. It was a pretty balanced election. Both parties had unpopular old men at the top of the ticket.

You’re ignoring that Congress people often resign before they can lose. You always get a wave of resignations preceding a wave year. Politicians see the writing on the wall and quit so they don’t have to suffer the career setback of losing a race. If you think you’re likely to lose, you’re better off resigning before the election to “focus on your family.” Then a few years later, if the political winds shift again, you can run again without the smell of a loser on you.

Sounds like quitter talk. You got one life to live. Don’t kill the girl you’re meant to be.

Honestly, I really have come to loathe headlines like this. You should generally distrust any political argument made on anecdote and one-off examples. That after all is the exact tool most favored by Republicans to demonize minority groups. Want to make people hate a group? No need to lie. Just obsessively report every time one member of that group commits a crime. Don’t focus on meaningful measures like crime rates and statistics. Instead just scream about one incident after another until your audience has become convinced that the minority group is a bunch of Devils. This was the playbook used by the Nazis against the Jews and their other enemies, and it’s the playbook used by Republicans against immigrants and trans people (both some of the Nazi’s enemies as well.)

When I see repeated posts highlighting individual instances of food poisoning, I can’t help but feel I’m being misled. It’s certainly possible the rate of food recalls have gone up. In fact, I would find that quite likely given the reasons people cite in this very thread. But when conclusions match your gut feelings is precisely when you should be wary of accepting things noncritically.

It makes me really uneasy when I see left leaning folks sharing and uncritically accepting messages like this. If we don’t just want to be blue MAGA (Democrats who share the practices of Republicans), we shouldn’t be accepting conservative-style argument from anecdote. I can’t help feel misled, because my instincts are to immediately distrust anyone that tries to argue from one-off examples rather than citing actual rates and statistics. In this case, what matters is obviously not whether food born illnesses and recalls are occurring, but whether the rate has substantially increased when compared to a few years ago.

You have one life to live. Stop wasting it.

That’s awfully anthropomorphic language you’re using there. They don’t talk. Why are you pretending they do? Obviously you’re an idiot that thinks AI is sentient.

It’s really not possible to make a secure sandbox for a sufficiently capable AI system. If accessing the internet is a strong means of achieving whatever goal they’re given, they’ll try to access the net by any means necessary. And that includes tricking or manipulating humans. They have no concept of the value of living beings. To them, there is no difference in worth between a human being and a rock. To them, we’re just another system vulnerable to hacking, a means of achieving whatever goal they’ve been given.

Even air gapping is no preventative. Air gap a machine, and the bots will just switch from hacking servers to hacking humans. And we’ve seen how good at manipulating people AI agents can be. And consider, the cases we’ve observed of AI psychosis are mostly accidental. The LLMs involved aren’t actively trying to brainwash their human victims as a means to achieve some goal. Imagine how powerful at manipulating human psychology an advanced LLM could be if it were deliberately trying to do so, rather than it being just an accidental outcome.