Somewhat related, and with the business of disrupted weather patterns, in Canada, there have been a lot of fires, the West coast has been baking.

While here in PA, we're inundated with rain - the ground is saturated, and every new storm brings flooding. I wish we could send about half of that water out west.

And while I don't think we've had any 90+ degree days here, it isn't cooling down much at night. mid 80's during the day, mid 70's at night.And I only recall one day the humidity dropped below 99 percent (went down to 93 percent)

Weather is pretty unstable at the moment, with some pretty anomalous stuff going on.

Because they're painfully out of alignment with the actual public.

There's a balance here, specially with the de-aging treatments we're coming up with.
If you make someone live to 150 somehow, that will be 110 years of de-aging treatment.
And there's no definitive cure for aging, not one that you can afford anyway.
Cancers can be pretty profitable, but they will also kill your patient pretty quickly in most cases.

Oops! Sorry Rei - I posted before removing the last part of your post. Anyone reading should know that my post ends after

"So in the end, studies just do what studies do, which is show interesting avenues for research. That people believe a study is a fact is kind of a people problem, not a study problem."

While I share your skepticism, I'd love to read the exact study, and know that they attempted to force monovariant analysis on a multivariant situation. That would go a long way towards settling this.

But it isn't saying all changes are based on sugar. Maybe it's because they gave children a lot of Marmite on toast. 8^) It's just a study.

It would appear that you are suggesting that there might be a causal link between vaccines, clean air act (or whatever GB has for that) are creating this increase in cancer. Because this is a study taking data from before those occurrences. I'm pretty sure you aren't, but the timelines don't quite sync up with the Sugar thing.

Studies are just that. Looking for interesting data from the historical/medical record. And while interesting, they can show paths forward for research.

And I'm very skeptical, but not dismissive. We've had bad conclusions, even corruption in the "eat this, not that" business. If we use the US food pyramid, we see that years ago, the sugar industry had corrupt researchers point heart disease causation and other illnesses at fat and proteins. They even claimed that salt was bad. The food pyramid was heavily stacked toward grains and carbs. And interestingly, as people followed those guidelines, obesity and certain diseases like diabetes increased along with the increase.

Also interestingly, I noted that as I tried to incorporate the "proper" diet, my weight became very hard to control.

And in my parent's generation, there were only a few obese relatives and others I knew. And the way they ate, the so called healthy diets would predict they'd be dropping like flies. Lots of bacon, beef, butter, cheese, fat, and while they ate bread, the amount paled in comparison to what was considered healthy.

Most all of them lived to ripe old ages. Trim and generally healthy. Some passed away in their mid 80's from smoking related issues.

Point is, they ate more like the new guidelines. And of course, there were other factors. But the fact is, their "unhealthy diet" didn't seem to cause what it was supposed to create according to the smart people.

So in the end, studies just do what studies do, which is show interesting avenues for research. That people believe a study is a fact is kind of a people problem, not a study problem.

It's also worth mentioning that there's also survivorship bias - anyone who died before the study couldn't be enrolled, and there's also no actual linking to any maternal / childhood dietary logs. Also, the ratios of cancer differences they're describing aren't small, they're massive. Are we to attribute a lung cancer difference on the order of smoking vs. nonsmoking households as being to sugar, or due to, you know, smoking (or pollution) trends not accounted for in their cohort?

Trying to head off the required Anecdotes are useless replies on slashdot, amirite? Actually, anecdotes aer the very bedrock of the scientific method, otherwise we'd all just pick completely random things when trying to solve problems. Like trying to go to the moon by researching dinosaurs. Anyhow, the standard slashdot Anecdotes are not evidence, and correlation is not causation memes on slashdot are amusing.

We didn't have a lot of sugar when I was a kid either. Had a strange combo. My Mother was Italian, Father Eastern European. But not much sugar among the meld. Pierogis and Pizza we always said, although it was more like a lot of fresh and home canned veggies, salads, and home made Italian and Hungarian sausage.

Side foray on salt. Father worked at a foundry. At the hot end, they of course had salt tablets. Some clever industrial hygienist employee was hired, and since in the 1970's, salt was !bad! He took all the salt tablet dispensers away. Employees at the hot end were dropping and getting sick. Smarter minds put the dispensers back. When I was playing Ice hockey, when you sweat off 10-15 pounds per game, you need salt badly after a game. If you just drink water, your electrolytes get all messed up.

Back to the sugar. Here in the states, they could run a study on Amish people. I live near Amish country, and wife and I travel to shop there at times. Those folk are addicted to that stuff. Seems like all of the conditions that this study says are mitigated by less sugar should show up conversely in the Amish.

and nowdays I pretty much never put it in my food and shy away from sweet food, and use pretty minimal salt.

With all that said, the study does mention that children exposed to less sugar in early childhood appeared to have longer telemeres and that there is likely the smoking gun on the early childhood / sugar link, as theres a pretty well established link between telemere length and cancer succeptibility in late life. Essentially the telemeres are the caps on the end the genomes, and the longer they are, the better protected the ends of the genome are from copying errors. Its also closely associated with the hayflick limit (essentially how many copies a cell can make before it shits the bed).

It’s about control too. If all eletronic transactions have to go through VISA to be processed, then VISA can control who can buy what and who can sell what. A public, trustworthy eletronic payment system managed by other governments takes that power away from VISA, so naturally VISA will sabotage any attempt by foreign governments to establish something like UPI.

Remember, while some are trying to make this Pass/Fail, the actual thing that UM is doing is Pass/No Credit. There is a difference. One does not fail under teh UM system.

You are correct in that students getting grades all those years, then suddenly Pass/Fail, or Pass/No Credit - that doesn't make a lot of sense.

One of the worst aspects of Pass/Fail is that in a graded system, there are metrics that tell what might need to be worked on. I kinda sucked in maths beyond Algebra. But I would have passed, so in a Pass/Fail grading system, my grade as a struggling student would be exactly the same as a student that excelled.

Under a graded system with a measurement metric, it was seen that I needed tutoring.

In an ironic twist, while tutoring helped some, my real breakthrough was the old school slide rule. I managed to get into the last class offered in that venerable instrument. Something about the mechanical aspect clicked, and now I do some pretty complicated stuff in my head. I call it the mathemechanical process.

So yes - grades versus Pass/Fail can be a much superior system, pointing out areas that need work, rather than overtly telling some poorly performing student that they are the equivalent of the best student in the class.

Note - I still keep a slide rule handy for really complicated stuff in the house and shop. The battery life on those things is great! ;^)

For a first job, it is in the mix. They hire based on a few criteria. The candidate's ability The candidate's attitude. The candidate's work record. The candidate's maturity. The candidate's ability to work with others.

The candidate's maturity. Which beings me back to my core thesis. The concept of not allowing a student to fail - the Pass/no credit that if we read TFA (this is not pass/fail, this is only pass, or you don't get the points, all of this because the student's are apparently having a universal mental health crisis.

Who do you want to hire - a candidate's who understands that there is some adversity, and can handle it, to a candidate who is still suffering some mental health crisis?

If I might interject some truth in here. As people increasingly turn to prescription drugs and look at having mental issues as kind of a flex, demanding to feel a sort of euphoria because they suffer from "mental health" crises, a world in which antidepressants are no longer enough, but a world where actual antipsychotics are mainstreamed, they actually eliminate themselves from certain careers that require good judgement.

I know, because I've worked in those positions. There are "tells" like antipsychotic drug use, even neck or facial tattoos that tells us that a person might make bad decisions, or already has.

A pity we didn't let them grow up as an alternative. Let them fail, then pick themselves up while still young.

I dunno. The stressed kids are going to be stressed out regardless of the games we play to ease their stressed.

And the concept of making things easy and stress free, one of the core principles of instilling self esteem without accomplishment, simply does not work. All this entire concept does is delay the stress a while, not eliminate it.

The idea of generations attempting in vain to become mentally mature adults in their 30's is pretty frightening.

That's a good point. Yes, it could be Anthropic simply making sure that they can't be blamed if someone doesn't disclose AI usage. Now they can say: "We did everything we could to make sure AI usage is visible".

Though I doubt it'll hold up in court unless the watermark is obvious. Because, again, the law requires disclosure. I don't think a hard-to-detect watermark would satisfy that demand.

Yaknow, given population growth, and most of the world wanting a first world lifestyle, Nature won't need to enlist people to hunter gatherer lifestyle. Might be more like a compulsory draft.

I thought ad hominem attacks were beneath you - I was wrong. And you made up some stuff. Frankly, Not one thing I said was from statistics. I was replying most very specifically to your statement

"I see engineers in our USA offices proudly working 60+ hour weeks. Congrats you earn over $200k, do you have any spare time to spend it?

Yes, I have plenty of time to spend my money. Have you asked the American's you work with if they are not able to enjoy the fruits of their labor and money? Or is it perhaps just something you "know"

Sorry thegarbz, you are simply wrong. No need for me to accuse you of not comprehending what you wrote. You are simply wrong.

It is quite popular to paint a picture of the American who has to work so many hours that they can't use the money they earn.

Even at the job I retired from, I earned more vacation than Europeans do. I had unlimited sick days.

At my present part time job, I earn as much as I did there. My cohorts are well into the 200 K range, some making more. We take vacations, we have spare time (yeah, I've worked long weeks, no big deal)

Regardless, I think you might have told me that nothing you write is to be taken literally. No problem, I suppose. Another difference - My co-workers and I assume everything we say is literal. There is no time to deal with "Did he mean what he said, or was he being non-literal? Really, not that hard to mean what you say, and say what you mean.

Most people don't even know what an OS is and that it can be replaced.
But i don't doubt it is basically already the year of linux (for those that know what an OS is)

Water is a big one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... There is much prior evidence that we are willing to kill each other for fresh water.

As human population increases, and weather patterns change, some places will become arid, others enjoy increased rainfall. The leads to so called "climate migration" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... although an increasing number of humans eventually creates the same effect even if a person does not believe in the energy retention effects of an atmosphere based upon its gaseous composition.

It is a little ironic that AGW results in increasing rainfall. The problem is the distribution of the rain.

Desalinization works, but cannot provide the amount of water needed to sustain humanity as it exists now. And if using electrical desalinization, produces a lot of toxic leftovers.

Now the other resources. We've spent a lot of time and effort mapping out mineral sources. One example. Will there be enough lithium to provide every person on earth with their own modern lifestyle? Enough petrochemicals? - yes, oil is used for a lot more than just fuel. The increasing population will have to make decisions about resource distribution. This does not end up with lifting everyone up, but pulling the first world down to the third world.

In irony those who are up in arms over the ultra wealthy in one country while living a lifestyle that was unheard of 200 years ago for anyone, might consider that as population increases and with limited resources, we will probably have a wealthy class with amenities, and 99 percent living right on the edge.

Could I be wrong? Sure. A lot of people believe that since Malthus was wrong a few times, that the Malthusian concept that humanity is limited by resource availability will always be wrong. But that is an equation that ends up with a big fat infinity in it. How many equations do you believe that end up there?