It worked out poorly for America — we got stuck in a long expensive war that we got basically nothing from — but for the average Iraqi? I'd much rather be an Iraqi citizen than an Iranian one, and that wouldn't have been true in the 90s. Saddam was pretty evil — and a bad leader. Iraq's GDP per capita is 6x higher today than it was in 2002, a year before the invasion.
It worked out pretty poorly for the average Iraqi. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed (some estimates put it at around 1 million), and millions of people became refugees.
Citing the relative GDP per capita number is reductive and doesn’t give a good picture of the average person’s life.
The GDP should be banned as a metric for being a life quality proxy, it's insane how so many people still refer to it although proven to neglect so many parts of what counts into LQ. To OP: Go check out Doughnut Economics - the book does a good job clearing up economical fallacies & mismodelling of such things.
This is a pretty wild counter-factual. Reminds me of a report I saw about a hipster cafe existing in Baghdad 2025 as proof of success of the US invasion. What would the alternative have been? How do you factor in the loss of life? I suppose the real answer is asking Iraqis...
Broccoli has 2.8g of protein per 100g. Beef has 26g per 100g, and chicken has 27g. If you're trying to get protein, broccoli isn't going to do much, and I think it's good that the government is being honest about that. A chart that listed broccoli as a major source of protein would be misleading. Broccoli is a good source of many nutrients, and the chart calls it out as such, but it is not an effective source of protein.
If you compare protein per kJ instead, broccoli has 0.021g protein per kJ whereas lean beef mince has 0.028g per kJ. Much more similar. Although of course you would need food that is higher density protein as well so you don't have too much volume to eat.
But that is a kind of silly way to compare. Broccoli isn't very filling _and_ it doesn't have very much protein in it. That doesn't change the fact that it lack protein.
The question is if I'm preparing a meal that I want to be filling, healthy, and energizing, how should I do it. Broccoli isn't a good answer to the protein part of that question.
Normalising by mass is a poor way to assess food's protein content since different foods have greatly different water contents. E.g. beef jerky has much higher protein per 100g than beef largely because it's dried (admittedly, probably also because they use leaner cuts)
Beef has ~3x more protein per gram than legumes. It is much more protein-dense than vegetables or legumes.
Similarly, it's a "complete" protein, whereas most vegetables and legumes are missing necessary amino acids.
The downside of beef isn't the "density" of nutrients: the downside is high saturated fat. Chicken breast, though, is similarly high in protein without the saturated fat downside.
> most vegetables and legumes are missing necessary amino acids
In practice, there's no evidence of amino acid deficiency in vegans/vegetarians except ones that restrict even further (potato diet, fruitarians, etc)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6893534/
Besides the ever-popular soybean being a complete protein, if you have normal variety in your diet, it's just not something you have to worry about.
>In practice, there's no evidence of amino acid deficiency in vegans/vegetarians
That is not what your linked article says. It says there is not evidence of protein deficiency, and the deficiency of amino acids is overstated. Not that there is no deficiency.
And vegan/vegetarian health is really a 2nd order variable here. Vegans and vegetarians could have massive amino acid surpluses and it remains a fact that vegetable proteins lack useful amino acids that meat has. Maybe the vegetarians are eating lots of eggs. Maybe they are taking lots of supplements. Maybe they are actually eating meat despite calling themselves vegans and vegetarians. It doesn't matter. There really is no disputing the fact about the composition of meat/vegetable protein.
> a fact that vegetable proteins lack useful amino acids that meat has.
This isn't a problem since you only need nine essential amino acids and they are present in adequate quantity in various vegetables and shrooms. The others are synthesized by ones body.
Only if those vegetables or shrooms were grown in natural sunlight (no greenhouse plastic/glass involved) and in a soil with abundant minerals, macronutrients, and high brix value.
The fat is an excellent source of energy though and it's very hard to get fat by eating fat because it's essentially hormonally inert. I.e. eating fat doesn't precipitate insulin which is the hormone that enables body fat accumulation.
So the problem with steak isn't the steak itself it's the "steak dinner" where the meat comes with sides such as french fries and drinks such as beer.
> The downside of beef isn't the "density" of nutrients: the downside is high saturated fat.
There are other downsides to beef .. such as the batshit crazy use of ecosystems and resources required to produce it at industrial scale.
Got a (beef) cow roaming in your yard, somehow getting by on whatever grows out of the ground? Enjoy your steak! Generating 6x the calories via a water-intensive cover crop to feed the cow so you can eat it later? Just say no.
This is orthogonal to nutritious eating habits; I don't think the food pyramid should lie about nutrition due to ecological concerns. (I do think the food pyramid should be a little more concerned about saturated fat than it is, though — which is why I called out chicken as an alternative, and elsewhere also mentioned fish.)
Worth noting that like amino acids there are essential fatty acids as well, and most people have poor nutrition there... red meat isn't "only" saturated fat, but a fairly balanced fatty acid profile. You can have too much, but in moderate cuts it isn't too bad.
I usually suggest around 0.5g fat to 1g protein as a minimal, higher if keto/carnivore.
That's true, although fish has a better balance of essential fatty acids than red meat. Although, oddly enough, wagyu has a (much) better fatty acids profile than other types of beef, so you can justify the occasional wallet splurge on health grounds!
The GPT-5 series is a new model, based on the o1/o3 series. It's very much inaccurate to say that it's a routing system and prompt chain built on top of 4o. 4o was not a reasoning model and reasoning prompts are very weak compared to actual RLVR training.
No one knows whether the base model has changed, but 4o was not a base model, and neither is 5.x. Although I would be kind of surprised if the base model hadn't also changed, FWIW: they've significantly advanced their synthetic data generation pipeline (as made obvious via their gpt-oss-120b release, which allegedly was entirely generated from their synthetic data pipelines), which is a little silly if they're not using it to augment pretraining/midtraining for the models they actually make money from. But either way, 5.x isn't just a prompt chain and routing on top of 4o.
Prior to 5.2 you couldn’t expect to get good answers to questions prior to March 2024. It was arguing with me that Bruno Mars did not have two hit songs in the last year. It’s clear that in 2025 OpenAI used the old 4.0 base model and tried to supercharge it using RLVR. That had very mixed results.
Cars are still sold with J1772/CCS ports, there are still CCS chargers being deployed, there are still J1772 home chargers being sold, almost every level 2 charger is J1772, and my NACS EV came with two dongles.
(FWIW, the new Leaf has a NACS port that's only used for level 3 charging, and separate J1772 port for level 1/2 charging.)
If there was a legal mandate for a changeover, it would be a very different story.
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We pretty much need to force NACS: Force all public chargers (level 2 and 3) to be NACS, force all cars sold to be NACS, and make it super-easy for people with older cars to get dongles.
AFAIK every major car manufacturer has announced they're switching to NACS for the American market (or has already switched). I think you're underselling how standard it is. And it's already easy to get dongles for old cars! You can get them on Amazon with two day shipping.
The manufacturers all want you to use their dongle. It's not CYA, either. A lot of the Amazon ones aren't safe.
> I think you're underselling how standard it is.
It's about availability:
There's still way more CCS / J1772 than NACS when I use public chargers, or when I look to purchase home chargers. The dealer that I bought my Ioniq 9 had a CCS charger, and the other dealer that I took it to for service had a CCS charger. When I park it near work, it's a J1772. (I wouldn't have bought the Ionic 9 if it was CCS/J1772.)
Searching Google for "What percentage of EVs for sale in the US are NACS" says:
> Transition Period for New Sales: While nearly all major automakers have committed to the NACS standard, many 2025 model year vehicles are still a mix of CCS ports with available NACS adapters, or new models coming with a native NACS port.
> 2026 Model Year: Virtually all new models from every major automaker are expected to come standard with the NACS port
Searching Google for "What percentage of EV chargers in the US are NACS" says:
> As of late 2025, NACS (Tesla's standard, now SAE J3400) dominates in available ports, especially DC fast charging, due to Tesla's massive Supercharger network (over 57% of ports) and rapid adoption by other automakers, with NACS already representing a significant portion of all installed ports, though CCS1 still sees new deployments, creating a dynamic transition where NACS is the majority in Tesla vehicles and rapidly growing across the infrastructure.
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What distorts the issue is that so many EVs are Teslas, and that so many chargers are Supercharger. Once you exclude Tesla / Supercharger from the comparison, there's still too much CCS/J1772.
The fact that virtually all new models in 2026 will have NACS tells you we don't need to regulate in 2026 that all new cars must be built with NACS. That's what's happening anyway.
Once you exclude Supercharger
Why would you exclude Superchargers from the comparison of American charging networks? Most V3/V4 Superchargers support charging non-Tesla NACS cars (or non-NACS cars with a dongle), and they're much more reliable than the non-Tesla chargers e.g. EVGo. The reason NACS took off is because the Supercharger network is so good, even for non-Tesla cars.
...Curiosity satisfied, I suppose. While I disagree with some of the USAID cuts, I don't think that "not giving charity" is the same thing as "mass murder."
Although, the local hospital records imply that hallucinations can last for days or even months, so uh, probably not a great idea to go looking for them...
According to a voluminous illustrated tome I acquired during my extended stay, Yunnan has at least seven species of native psilocybe. Like nearby areas along the Himalayas, cannabis and opium are endemic and widely utilized in traditional cultures of the area. Heroin processed in Myanmar became a problem in rural Yunnan the early 2000s and present-era government shut it down with a heavy-handed campaign around 15 years ago. These days it's probably trans-shipped more than locally consumed.
My guess would be there is probably some contamination with something ergot-like going on. Long-lasting but maybe hard to detect because such a small amount is needed for effect that it's easy to miss.
Sadly, it's worse. We don't have one experiment that works in mice: we have dozens, if not hundreds. We've cured "Alzheimer's in mice" many times over. The treatments never work in humans, because it's not the same disease. We don't know the root cause of the human disease and so we can't model it accurately in mice.
> We don't know the root cause of the human disease
It's increasingly likely that there is no "root cause" to find in humans, but rather, that Alzheimer's is what happens when there's enough external stressors acting on the brain.
I've seen an analogy of a leaky roof being used: the leaks are things like age, stress, heavy metals, mold, bad sleep, bad diet. Genetics defines the original building materials (resilience) of the roof. You can put buckets under a certain number of leaks but if there are too many your ability to repair gets overwhelmed and the result is diseases like dementia.
I think something similar applies to other diseases of aging like heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, perhaps even cancer.
The downside of this is that's it's hard to imagine a miracle drug being the solution. But the upside is that a combination therapy that identifies the "leaks" and works on reducing or eliminating them will likely be effective against a wide range of age related diseases.
The therapy will likely consist of drugs and supplements in combination with lifestyle changes.
I totally get that people are not mice, however animals studies have been useful for all sorts of diseases. Are they really uniquely bad for Alzheimer's?
To put it simply, mice don't get Alzheimer's. We're not studying mice with Alzheimer's, we're studying mice with an mutation chosen for resembling Alzheimer's. But we don't know whether this model replicates the actual mechanisms of the disease, or if it's superficial.
Thanks for the explanation, this really clears up the concerns here. It's easy to imagine scientists attempting to model in in mice and making real progress, but it's also easy to imagine us misunderstanding the real disease well enough such that what we've modeled in mice does not produce real results.
They're not eliminating a competitor, they're (effectively) acquiring a competitor. Nvidia's GPUs are great for training, and not bad for inference, but the custom chips are better for inference and Nvidia's worried about losing customers. Nvidia will no doubt sell custom Groq-like chips for inference now.
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