Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious word) was characterized as intermediate but I think it's much more obscure and less obvious than that; Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia was used as a word (I got that wrong as well) - any type of 'phobia' word is really the sort of thing a fourth grader opens up a page in the dictionary and points out, not a word that is used... ever; metamorphosis and kinetic were labeled expert, which I don't agree with (what elementary schooler doesn't learn about the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly? what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?).

Most words were reasonably well defined in a way that most people would understand or recognize. A few words had poor definitions: lethargy ("the state of being lethargic" - obvious); complacent ("smug satisfaction with oneself" - I disagree that complacency is intrinsically smug); magnanimous ("generous toward a rival" - I disagree that a rival must be involved); gauche ("socially awkward" - this is sort of close but the given definition completely misses the idea of being tactless).

They call it scientific and give a hand-wavey formula, but they don't explain how words are stratified in the first place. If stratified sampling is a formally recognized method of doing this, it would be nice to have a link to a real reference. I think I know a lot of words, but I am skeptical of the estimate this app provided (north of 75k).

The quote is talking about manufacturing labor. This is the guy on the assembly line who lowers the press, makes his thousandth widget for a day, and then lifts it up. Rinse and repeat.

29.8%: Retailer's margin

15.1%: Publisher's margin

14.8%: VAT

That's... 92.8%.

Developer's royalty: 4.6%

"Yikes" -me, just now

There are so many unique dialects hyperlocal to New Orleans, it's amazing.

>>the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently.

requires citations. People lump sugar substitutes together as one class of drugs, but they very much are not. Some are sugar alcohols, some are glycosides, others are different molecules. Different molecules have different mechanisms of action and paths of metabolism.

Much like one might take a "blood pressure" medication, it is a large umbrella consisting of chemically distinct ACE-inhibitors, ARBs, thiazide diuretics, loop diuretics, calcium channel blockers (dihydropyridine and non-dihydropyridine distinctly), and more. These drugs generally do have class effects, but the class effects from an ACE inhibitor (bradykinin cough, angioedema, etc) are quite different from diuretics (hyponatremia, frequent urination, etc). One person's 'blood pressure medicine' is not the same as the next.

I agree that the prevalence of sugar substitutes in the western diet demands scrutiny, and I am concerned about their effects, however any current research lumping them all together without strict attention to pharmacological mechanisms supported by translational research is worse than useless - it is misleading.

In the sense of what we 'know' about modern medicine, we 'know' almost nothing about sugar substitutes. The body of evidence is vanishingly thin. I want more research into this topic, but right now, it's just not there.

... and now you've switched the attack vector to a hostile LLM.

I think, though, that the underlying assumption is that the old virus hangs out, forever waiting for the moment to strike.

Cells senesce and die and get replaced, and the immune system is always active in the background. If the virus particles are released, the immune system is going after it and cleaning up. As essentially no new virus is being created, this is the body's opportunity to clear the virus at a slower, manageable pace where it doesn't have to contend with a rapid, expanding infection.

It feels like one of those ideas that's technically true in all the right ways, but misses one crucial piece that would make the whole thing accurate.

I'm sorry, but you are an order of magnitude out of touch with the average American consumer. Average savings balance under the age of 64 is below $73k.[1] Median savings is below $9k. Most people will, outside of their retirement savings, never have access to an account that has over $100,000 in it.

Never.

Not one day in their life.

Median household income is $80k/yr.[2] Personal savings rate is under 5%.[3] As is noted in the title of the article, there are two Americas.

[1] https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-savings-... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28... [3] https://www.bea.gov/data/income-saving/personal-saving-rate

You could have 10,000 employees, however 4,000 of them are physicians/providers, 3,000 of whom work less than full time for that entity. So you are looking at 10,000 employees, but some number between 7,000 and 9,999 FTEEs. These are very different, and very relevant, numbers when looking at healthcare organizations.

In this case, this is a government official speaking to the press (i.e. in an official capacity). If they were to say "this was sabotage," that is a definite declaration that the government believes - again, officially and on the record - that an outside party has deliberately done material damage to their country. Given the general situation, it is not a huge leap to come to the interpretation that "this was an attack against our country, and possibly an act of war."

No government official would want to be within miles (or kilometers) of that sort of statement unless they have pretty much already internally decided from the top-down to escalate the situation. Almost no single government agent has the authority to escalate the situation in that manner. So what we end up with is "appears to be." This overtly says 'all available evidence points to this being the case, however something else cannot be ruled out.' (As a sibling comment suggests, it can also act as a type of propaganda). So it is not an official government declaration that another nation has damaged them, but they have reasons (probably both apparent and not) to believe what they are saying publicly.

Perhaps this is a 'whoosh' moment for me, but it seems that by simply housing the art in the Museum of /Bad/ Art, you are certainly saying something quite negative about the art and the artist.

What does 'recent' mean, since you have already acknowledged that temporal recency is irrelevant? When am I traveling? What's accurate to my current appearance? What if I started a cancer treatment that renders me unable to grow a beard?

Your flippant reply ignores reality, and these aren't even edge cases.

You need only look to healthcare in the USA. Many, many professionals (some of which you never interact with) handing off patient cases to each other in a very carefully choreographed dance designed to meet legal and regulatory requirements; quality, safety, and care standards; financial responsibilities; and each individual's own personal standards for the quality of care they believe they provide.

In healthcare, we often view risks using the Swiss Cheese Model [1]. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but the system of checks and balances catches most of them before they reach the patient. Prescriber ordered the wrong dose of medicine in the inpatient setting? Pharmacy intercepts and starts making calls or sending messages to verify. Pharmacy approves the order because "that's what they ordered?" Nursing lays hands and eyes to every medicine administered and can 'stop the line' if they deem appropriate. Not to mention the technical safeguards and guardrails (e.g., clinical decision support systems) that are also supporting everyone involved.

But still, failures happen, and they can be catastrophic.

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

The patients in the COVID group, _when they got COVID_ had already begun losing significant amounts of weight. The NYT article is 100% incorrect on this matter. See:

>>The change in weight between randomization and reported COVID-19 in patients who died of COVID-19 according to treatment was −6.4 kg in the semaglutide group vs −0.9 kg in the placebo (P < 0.001) group and −8.4 kg vs −1.25 kg (P < 0.001), respectively, in patients who did not die.

They go on to say that there is a correlation between obesity and adverse COVID outcomes:

>>There was an associated increased risk of respiratory decompensation and mortality in patients with COVID-19 and obesity16,17 and plausible biologic hypotheses associating obesity with adverse COVID outcomes, including impaired respiratory status, lower cardiometabolic reserve, or immune hyperreactivity or dysregulation.18

And they double down on the fact that the patients absolutely had weight loss at time of COVID.

>>Accordingly, it is plausible that the decreased risk of infectious deaths is caused by weight loss, which was 5 kg greater in patients assigned to semaglutide compared to placebo by 1 year, the average time to COVID-19 diagnosis after randomization.

I will leave you with the note that nowhere in the journal article do they make any claims whatsoever about semaglutide's effect on COVID outcomes. They exclusively discuss outcomes as related to metabolic health. Semaglutide is a means to an end. The means is weight loss. The end is better health.

What is this belief founded upon?

Disposable syringes and detachable needles have been around for over 50 years. We had 6mm needles in the 80s.

Evolution of Insulin Delivery Devices https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261311/

There is no presumed clinically relevant mechanism for GLP-1s to be protective specifically against COVID death. It is simply protective against all death, of which COVID is a type. Healthier people are less likely to die, statistically. The same benefit can be (and is being) said about GLP-1s and heart attacks, heart failure, stroke, kidney failure, etc.