The part that makes no sense for me is men ending with smaller rates of dementia, given they had much less estrogen to begin with. Men have less incidence of dementia. Men also have much lager incidence of baldness. Did somebody already study if baldness and dementia are inversely correlated? I don't know, perhaps sunlight exposure in the scalp have neuroprotective effects?

Given the prevalence of baldness, and the downside of the condition for sexual attractiveness of its bearers, I suspect we will still discover some strong unexpected upside to explain why this trait was selected for regardless.

It's because of this Big Tech is busy undermining the basis of democracy, isolating people in bubbles, poisoning political discourse with slop and pimping would be autocrats. They want to strip political power from common citizens, turning toward sefdom.

For context, by 1975 Brazil was still aproximately halfway under the brutal military dictatorship that started in 1964, through a military coup supported by Operation Brother Sam[1], and ended only in the late 80s. The movie "The Secret Agent", Oscar nominated in the 2026 ceremony, unfolds in 1977, roughly the same timeframe. It would be a very interesting topic for historical research to comb national files from that period to see if the military surveiled or acted against the named researchers, in some form, for those first attempts to conect to the proto-internet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Brother_Sam

Unions were the institutions that actually helped employees. It's a shame they had their reputations smeared and many were busted, leaving workers out in the cold. The worst run union probably does more for employees than the best HR department.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_effect

I don't think USSR poverty rates surpassed those of Tsarist Russia that preceded them. To their credit, I think ideologic competition between capitalist and communist blocks was part of what allowed improvement of life conditions of workers in capitalist countries, after WWII. Fear of revolutions avoided one-percenters taking all productivity gains in the period. They had to share some to keep guillotines away. As soon as things went south in the USSR, from the 70s onwards, and capitalism took over the whole world, lacking any sort of viable extant competition, we reverted back to the old norm, the workers were denied their share of the productivity gains since then, and here are us now. A regime premised on free competition was undermined by lack of competition to itself.

[1] https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

Pointing complicity with a regime that killed over 260 journalists[1] has a very strong focus and serves well free speech.

[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-04-24/israel-h...

[1] https://m.koreaherald.com/article/10522978