I’m really curious about the amount of screen time and news/social media consumption of these groups. I assume it’s a couple standard deviations above what’s healthy.
I know a bunch of trans gun owners. They're pretty standard gun geeks, and a few of them do shooting competitions.
I've asked them how they got into shooting sports, and a lot times, they tell me some pretty scary stories of real-life encounters with bigots. Some have also encountered armed right-wing protestors outside of a bar that held a late evening drag event.
So at least among the people I've met out in the real world, it was fairly common to be motivated by specific real-life events. The numbers might be different for gun owners who don't go to the range regularly.
The whole topic reminds me of Deviant Ollam's talk "Lawyer. Passport. Locksmith. Gun." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ihrGNGesfI) He spends a fair amount of time talking about getting his queer and trans friends interested in guns. I suspect this has been the trend for a few years, at least.
He includes a quote that is rather salient: "If you do not have the means of violence, you aren't peaceful; you're harmless."
Why would you explicitly assume something that confirms your bias? Why not just say that you suspect a trend?
Individual anecdote, but I bought a pistol for defense in the US because of the (two way) threats I constantly read and hear in my real life, and I do not consume any social media. No Twitter, no Facebook. I don't read news outside HN, my local paper, and the occasional CS Monitor story. I rarely sit around scrolling TikTok/YouTube/etc on my phone, and when I do, it thankfully just shows me engineering/trades stuff (BigClive type stuff, plumbers, etc). Admittedly, I have visited 4chan occasionally since it was established.
My opinion is: It's fallacious to imply that the hatred and violence of Americans against Americans is negligible, and could only be considered a real problem through the lens of dishonest media. Yes, consuming garbage media will amplify that fear, but the fear is absolutely, obviously based on real, actual attitudes and words in the US.
In my social circle (mostly Asian tech employees in the PNW) there were many first-time gun purchases immediately after the social unrest in 2020. Hysterical social media posts about "the riots are going to come to the suburbs" factored into it. The fears ended up being completely overblown.
Now there are different groups of people who are predicting violence and feeling the need to do something about it. Too early to tell whether the fears are overblown this time around as well.
In any case, I hope all first-time gun owners properly train with them and secure their guns at home. I wouldn't be surprised if the main outcome of both of these clusters of gun buying is not actual defense against the feared threats, but that guns get stolen and used for crimes.
Unlikely (almost all the "rooftop koreans" had national service training in Korea) and unreported (that I could find)
In the end, Chang said not a single person was shot and killed by the Korean shop owners — just warning shots to chase away potential looters and arsonists.
It’s absolutely insightful for adults as well. Especially when paired with the other horsemen of the attention apocalypse “Dopamine Nation”, “Irresistible”, and “The Shallows”.
Returned my treatment of the internet from “the thing” to just another tool.
If anyone wishes to use this study as a catalyst to shift one’s attitude, then I highly recommend dropping the dopaminergic doomloop apps like Reddit/Bluesky/X/tiktok/IG.
Your life will be better for it. Snapchat can stay…for reasons.
It can be both. The further away I get from social media and its singular narratives where it’s always “this ONE thing” form of causeality, the more I realize the mechanisms and causes can be multimodal and compound upon on another.
>I highly suspect you are not an addiction specialist…
Which also means they're not selling addiction help (which profits when addicts remain so), nor is indoctrinated to the professional fads of that racket
Since someone else vocally disagreed, I'll just back this up. If you change your social situation (new job, new friends, etc...) then a lot of other changes seem to be easier, in my experience.
Rage-engagement, something I never needed, and that I knew I needed out of my life, I just didn't know how much of a positive impact it would have to get off it. Sorry Zuck and Spez, but I know you'll be fine without a hatebuck or two.
Vitamin D, red light therapy, insulin attenuating response of a walk, immunological benefit of allergen exposure, cognitive noise reduction and rest response of walks in forests.
While I find your comment enjoyably pithy, in the case of vitamin D, many humans are currently living at latitudes which they are not suited to (skin being too dark to generate enough vitamin D given the insolation), and eating diets which do not provide them with sufficient amounts of it (the carnivore diets of Inuits and similar groups being a good contrast).
Vitamin D supplementation in the UK - now there is a fascinating topic.
With the industrial revolution there was a problem of kids in cities getting rickets. This was due to a lack of vitamin C and that was due to a lack of daylight due to the smog.
The solution was to take the kids out of the city so they could spend time in the countryside.
However, along with the industrial revolution came steam trains, and, with steam trains, it became a lot easier to get fresh food from the farm to the city table.
Milk became an early commodity for this railway trade, in the days before refrigeration. Bottling had to be invented too, along with pasteurisation to get the modern milk product. They fortified it with vitamin D and, in time, made it mandatory in schools for kids to have dinky bottles of milk for their morning break. All kids hated the stuff but it was 'good for them' and good for keeping farmers gainfully employed.
Then the clean air acts came along, with the first street to ban fires in fireplaces being opposite the smoke free coal factory, the factory being anything but smoke free. Deindustrialisation happened too, so there were no cities with smokestack industries at their heart.
With clean air there was no longer any need to fortify the milk with vitamin D, so that stopped. From now on, kids would get their vitamin D doing things such as playing in the school playground.
But then we became seriously car dependent and the age of the free-range child was over. With 'stranger danger' and screens (initially just TV) taking over, we entered a new era of people not getting enough daylight again.
Along the way vitamin D has been downgraded, much like Pluto, from being a 'vitamin' to being a hormone. A lot of people want to point this out and explain the science to you. From hearing how some talk about vitamin D, it sounds like the recommended supplements are all over the place.
Clearly there are millions, if not billions that seem to be living just fine with not much sunlight in their lives and on no vitamin D supplements. Where's the rickets? Good question, but then, in Antarctica, where there are months of darkness to endure, they are on something like 20,000 units a day, and they probably know what they are doing.
Maybe following their example for this winter could be my next 'nutrition experiment'. Sometimes, when there is so much conflicting information, it is best to do an n=1 experiment with one's own body.
> Maybe following their example for this winter could be my next 'nutrition experiment'
Anecdotal and a sample size of 1, but I tried supplementing Vitamin D last year in the winter months. I live in the PNW, which between October and March, the sun is too low to trigger vitamin D synthesis in the skin to see if it had any effect on my energy levels and mood, I suffer from seasonal affective disorder pretty severely.
Taking 5,000 IU daily had no noticeable effect for me. A slight increase in energy levels but not significant enough that I'd be confident in attributing it to supplementation. I was hesitant to supplement more without medical advice and a blood test.
That's not to say Vitamin D isn't important (it is), and the scientists in Antartica definitely know what they're doing, but it's more to say YMMV.
For me, just making an effort to do more physical activity outdoors during the dark months had more of an impact
~5000 IU daily between February and May was barely enough to raise 25(OH) D level in my blood from 9 to 30 ng/ml.
Depending on who you ask, 30 is either the bound between "deficient" and "insufficient", or between "insufficient" and "sufficient". Regardless of who you ask, there's plenty of headroom until "excess".
Yes, it's possible but relatively hard to overdose on vitamin D, and due to a cock-up in some calculations in a study, until recently the recommended supplement amounts were about an order of magnitude too low: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5541280/
The NHS does recommend that everyone in the UK 'consider' vitamin D supplementation during the autumn and winter: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/vitamin-... , because the amount of sunlight available in those months is not enough to maintain a healthy level.
It’s criminal that the US sent Somalian refuges to live in Minnesota. Those are some seriously brown people in the land of no vitamin D. Pretty big population in Seattle as well, which is worse due to cloud cover.
Not just cloud cover. Most areas in the PNW, the sun is so low in the sky between October and March that you can't synthesize vitamin D through the skin at all during those months, even on a bright sunny day.
Even during the summer up here, you really only get a window of roughly 10am to 3pm where enough UV-B rays can penetrate the atmosphere, in July. It's estimated that >80% of the PNW population are deficient (compared with 40% nationwide in the US).
That same podcast I mentioned pointed out that if a white person nude sunbathed in the winter in full sun, you’d get 2nd degree burns long before you made enough vitamin d.
The body stores it though. So how much of a deficit you’re running for how long matters.
It's only criminal if they aren't provided with the education/information they need to live healthy lives (which is possible with the right diet/supplements).
Dark skinned people do not produce enough vitamin D in northern latitudes because of melanin. If you’re black and in Minnesota you probably need supplementation.
Minnesota? Minnesota isn't particularly dark. Minneapolis is apparently on the same latitude as Venice, Italy, and I don't think of Venice as particularly dark or gloomy (to be fair, they probably have better weather).
But yeah. Low vitamin D levels are common even with lily white people in Northern Europe, and at least here in Norway everyone with dark skin knows that they need vitamin D supplements. Traditionally, public health recommendation (for everyone) was to take cod liver oil regularly for every month with an R in it.
I’m painfully aware of that being dark skinned myself. That doesn’t mean that Minnesota is inhospitable though (or that it would be criminal to send me there). It just means that they’d need to know that they need vitamin D supplements and perhaps regular blood screens. Idk if that happens though.
There are towns in Canada that have heated hallways that go between buildings so you can’t get completely snowed in during the winter. Maybe they should build those. Or the underground walkways they have in a couple of the cities.
I'm an Asian who was born and raised in a tropical weather region of my country. I'm now living in the PNW region of the US and it's always miserable from November-April. Vitamin D helps but it's not the same.
Seattle taught me a lot about procrastination. If you look outside and it’s sunny, and you promised yourself you’d go out today, drop whatever you’re doing and put on a jacket. Because by the time you finish it might be cloudy again. Seize the hour. There are no days to seize.
Doors are such an important invention that multiple unrelated animals have evolved modified body parts to serve as doors to burrows¹. Being able to store food is critically important for surviving low-food periods like winter without migrating. "Indoors" lets you store food without insects or other animals getting to it & stealing it. Fire allows for hardening clay, which lets you make a special tiny "indoors" called a "pot" for storing food. Also bricks so "indoors" can be made anywhere. With a roof the rain stays out & you can stay dry & warm, and not freeze at night. A significant portion of why fire is so important is it enables creating various sorts of "indoors".
> "Indoors" lets you store food without insects or other animals getting to it & stealing it.
This isn't true of human doors; insects are very small.
We've had the technology to keep things in wax-sealed clay jars for quite a while, but I'm not aware that this was done with grain, where preventing spoilage would have been most valuable. Granaries are open to the air. (And devote quite a lot of effort to slowing the spoilage of the grain.)
If you wanted food that wouldn't rot, instead of keeping it in an airtight environment, you dried it.
Every different food idem needs to be stored differently. There sometimes more than one option that will work, but you cannot treat everything the same.
If I have to survive the night, overhead protection and thermal insulation is more important than a fire. Source: I've tried using both without the other.
While I’d love to just go for a walk outside, the allergen exposure of the outdoors is too high most of the time. This elements any mental health benefits a walk in a forest might otherwise give.
I’m currently getting allergy shots. This is my 3rd attempt. Throughout my life I’ve gotten shots for about 12 years now. The last guy said they were better than I was kid and basically a cure now. 6 years later, and on the strongest dosage they’d give, getting 3 shots with each appointment… and I was never able to spend time outside without worry of what would follow.
There has been minor improvement in controlled testing, but no noticeable benefit when actually trying to live life. I go outside near nature once each year as a test to see if there was any progress. I can’t tolerate much more than that.
Shots work well for some. They worked decently well when I was a kid, but these days, not so much. I still hope the current ones will work, as I don’t have other options, but I’m beginning to lose hope.
Privileged commenter. Not everyone has access to a cell phone or the internet, so they can't respond to your statement. Not to mention some people have bad dyslexia or eyesight issues. We could play this game forever, and we'd all be dumber for it.
Walking in a forest is something that much of humanity can do, and it's not a particular privilege (in the pejorative modern sense) - even if there are a small number of people that have issues that would prevent this.
Oh yeah, it’s both funny and understandable how we’ve swung from the mania of huel-esque techbro belief of nutrition to the current holistic eating “beef tallow” and no-seed oils movement. I think we realized guzzling slop alone is spiritually empty.
This adds nothing to the conversation but seeing the lively discussion here on hn about lifting, exercise, and studies is quite rewarding. Good to see technical folks passionate about their health and fitness.
This reminds me of watching the original infomercials for P90X and Insanity and thinking that their testimonials seemed to include a disproportionate number of tech geeks... Maybe we're the real prime market for this after all
I bought the 256gb version with the intent on using it as a new and novel medium to rebuild my app building skills from conception to end after half a decade in the enterprise space. I have to say it met my expectations and for whatever gaps in UX and the featureset exist, they seem solvable and that is very exciting. Needless to say, I’m keeping mine. Influencers be damned.
> think there is a requisite IQ/technical need that needs to be met for people to find this gadget useful.
That sounds like a very convenient opinion for someone to have.
> also popular to shit on new apple products
Sure, in online spaces and from people who haven't bought them. Most people after making an expensive purchase will jump through hoops to justify it to themselves even if deep down they know it wasn't a great idea. It's called choice-supportive bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias) and people tend to fall into that trap because otherwise they end up struggling with cognitive dissonance and "buyer's remorse".
I'm sure that some of the people returning the headset accepted that they overpaid for a product that underdelivered and some were those who only bought the device to see what the hype was about or for social media points and planned to return it. Others are keeping it because they're just fine with what it is or because they're still holding out hope it'll prove more useful in the future and that's fine too, but I don't think anyone is returning the product because they're just not intelligent enough to "get it"
in my regular life I always have very sophisticated monitor set ups. most non-technical people don't. they won't benefit from a device that offers more virtual real estate until there are apps that spoon feed them that benefit.
you also need to be diligent enough to get beyond the learning curve phase and into the utility phase. took me a few days. most people I see online aren't highlighting any of the ways I use it when they talk about how they're returning it, or highlighting discomfort, which is normal and goes away with more usage.
I'm just not convinced by the majority of the influencers rationale to return it.
but ultimately if you don't have a real use case you are solving for having it besides watching TV on it, there isn't a compelling reason to keep it, that's what I was trying to highlight. it is brand new and you need to come up with your own way of garnering utility from it.
As an elder millennial, it really doesn’t seem like a last gasp. These academic attempts are perfect for conspicuous signalling at no cost and such signals usually get repeated by my generation and zoomers. What I’m trying to say is that based on the past few years it seems these busybodies are winning.
I agree with this point. If my mortgage depended on writing this kind of content 40 hours a week, believe me, I would crank out so much harm reduction gobledygook that you would have no chance due to volume alone. And now that ChatGPT is around, I have a practically infinite supply of starter content to expand on.
There's a fundamental asymmetry at work here: the DEI bureaucrats have all of the time and incentives in the world to make more of this and ram it through the right channels. This is their paycheck. Supporting this is perceived as virtuous in many circles regardless of validity. And who is pushing back? Not anybody in a position where their opinion would matter. Instead all we get is a WSJ article and a few dozen anonymous posters on web boards. Doesn't bode well.
People are tired of openly racist organizations lecturing everyone else about how racism is such a problem — such as Harvard who has been griping for a decade… and argued they have a right to be racist to Asians in October.
As a Millennial, everyone I know is focused on the economy and over the whole “woke”.
My anecdotal experience suggests this seems to be a Cali phenomenon. In Seattle, even with our insane number homeless, addicts, and the uptick in crime this year, we’ve had only a handful of attacks against our Asian citizens. All of which were dealt with swiftly and harshly.
