CharonY

As mentioned the effect seems to be small. Most studies I have seen were based on tracking folks who used high levels of SPF (e.g. because of some underlying conditions) and then track their Vitamin levels. There are also handful of controlled trials but usually at lowish SPF (see an example for Australia doi:10.1001/archderm.1995.01690160043006). Obviously, there could also be other effects, but after sufficient such studies you should see an overall lower level among those whop regular use sunscreen, vs the control groups. So far, metastudies have not shown a strong effect. An example is here https://doi.org/10.1111/bjd.17980 However, also as mentioned, the data for very high levels of SPF are still sparse (I think I saw an abstract somewhere suggesting that very high SPF could increase risk of vitamin D deficiency but cannot recall it very clearly).

So after Seila Law, it seems that there are really only two limits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seila_Law_LLC_v._Consumer_Financial_Protection_Bureau From there I suspect that head of the bureau of labour statistics would not fall under these exceptions.

Oh I see what you mean. I was focusing more on the higher positions, but obviously the it would be fairly simple to remove the remaining staff and/or or replace those with hiring authority. But as already mentioned there has been a confluence of decisions, including congress basically giving up their power of the purse as well as rubber-stamping appointees, which makes these details rater superfluous. The fact of the matter is that it turns out that it is rather simple to violate the spirit of the constitution by using the magic power of not caring (and stacking SCOTUS).

While it has gotten worse, in the area of medicine that mindset has existed for quite a while (at least in the Western world). Physicians are expected to "fix" health issues, whereas their role is really support you body to find a workable equilibrium.

So I think this is where the distinction between inferior and principal officers come in. The former can be removed when certain minimal conditions are met. However, Seila Law (not Sailor... I had to look it up) is even more explicit, concluding that the power of removal is unrestricted with only two exceptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seila_Law_LLC_v._Consumer_Financial_Protection_Bureau But essentially this was used to fire the Inspector Generals.

So the way it was explained to me is that if congress passes a law to establish an agency to be put under the president, they would have implicit power to appoint inferior officers. However, this provision does not establish how firing is done and in fact SCOTUS has established in the past that even if they did not hire them, they are able to fire them. It was originally interpreted very broadly until a SCOTUS ruling (Humphreys executor) has limited it. It involved a member of the FTC and it was decided that it was not an arm of the executive and the President cannot fire them. Apparently there was also a later attempt at reconciling the power of removal via a slew of SCOTUS decisions but we ran low on coffee and time, and the summary was that congress would need to protect positions explicitly. And I think power was further diminished recently (I think it was Sailor Law or something, cannot recall).

Interestingly, there is some evidence that while sunblock is protective against skin cancer, it does not seem to affect other processes significantly. I am not entirely sure regarding the whole autoimmune angle, but in terms of easier measurable factors such as Vitamin D the impact of sunscreen seems to be fairly low (except on the very high end). The general recommendation I have seen in that regards is to sue SPF 30 with intensive UVB radiation (regardless of season) and daily SPF15 in temperate climates.

This sounds like a recipe for fatigue as already mentioned. In Switzerland you have got something like 4 votes per year. Having one every week is insanity.

From what I understand the role is mostly outlined in the Appointments Clause (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointments_Clause) where there is a distinction between "Principal Officers of the United states" which includes SCOTUS, public ministers, ambassadors etc., which require senate confirmation, and "inferior officers" which typically are appointed by principal officers. The latter can be appointed within the executive branch and under presidential authority. Also from what I understand, under the duty of faithful execution of the law (which is freaking ironic in this presidency) the President has the authority to remove any officials without congress, except when there is a law stating otherwise. So that makes independence of agencies in the US really shaky.

As TheVat said, the point is not about killing folks, but rather a sort of vision of an optimized gene pool, by letting natural selection (or anything else) do its thing. The idea that it results in a healthier population is a faulty one due to the reason I mentioned before. It is a short-term optimization but limits potential. Our tree of life is full of dead branches of species who were very optimized for their particular situation, but vanished when the situation changed. You can also think of it that way- a "perfect" gene pool formed by natural selection with the highest fitness will have all relevant alleles fixed (i.e. a given locus will be identical through the whole population). If the selective pressure at some point changes so that these specific alleles become detrimental (say, a high susceptible to a new virus) the whole population is going to be affected. In other words, envisioning a form of optimization as outlined in OP necessarily means a reduction of diversity, and hence flexibility in the gene pool and makes the population more vulnerable to new health events.

I have gotten more interested in that field recently and I have chatted with folks who had some more interactions with custom-designed AI for in the medical field and one for biological research. The former performed really well, whereas the latter was abysmal. I have some thoughts on why that is the case, but I the folks I chatted with are more on the user, rather than developer side. I am wondering whether that could be discussed in one of the existing threads or whether it might be something for a dedicated one?

I don't think that this is new per se. It was quite common that folks adopted a poorly understood verbiage that they have seen used in scientific context in order to provide their arguments with some gravitas without doing the actual footwork. Or to put it differently: The phenomenon under scrutiny does not, in a rigorous epistemological sense, constitute a novel emergence. Historically, there exists a demonstrable proclivity among lay interlocutors to appropriate lexemes and syntactic constructions ostensibly derived from scientific discourse. This semiotic transference is frequently executed with minimal hermeneutic engagement, serving primarily to imbue their rhetorical postulates with an illusory veneer of empirical legitimacy, absent any substantive methodological substantiation or evidentiary corroboration.

The way it reads seems to be that if there is a resources something will somehow gain the ability to access it. It seems to be somewhat Lamarckian but an overall misunderstanding how (and on which level) evolution works.

Oh, I have no doubt that this was mostly rhetoric, though it managed to change the way folks thought about the government, which probably was the plan all along. It is just now that the mask is all off.

In short, no. Your argument is based on the faulty assumption that there are "good" genes and that helping folks to survive it will let in a creep of "bad" genes. In this line of (frankly, eugenic) way of thinking there is an optimization to be had, where a good gene pool is actually fairly shallow and full of "good" genes (I will continue to use genes here, though I am really talking about alleles or variants as most folks arguing this are using the term gene, although it is incorrect). The issue here is that nature is highly dynamic and one thing that we have seen empirically, but can also explain theoretically, is that a population with a broad gene pool is more likely survive than a shallow, but optimized one. The classic example in humans is sickle-cell which is very detrimental when homozygous, but in areas with malaria heterozygous carriers have a higher survival rate. This can be extended to all the "bad" genes as you won't know whether there are situations where they are beneficial or become beneficial in certain combinations with certain alleles and/or environmental conditions.

Again, that is a bit backwards. There are many reasons why gene pools change, including random events such as mutations but also just drift. There is on need for "struggle" of any sorts. However, if there are loci under positive selection, then those are likely to enrich more in the population over time (and might eventually become fixed). All this can be associated with observable changes of traits, but there can also genetic changes without morphological changes.

That is not really the way it works. The Nature abhors vacuum quote is really a bit an inverse of the process. When we look at ecosystems, it almost always seems that there are no unoccupied niches (which, btw. is not quite correct, in multidimensional niches theory predicts that certain types of niches which is corroborated by empirical studies (e.g.. Walker and Valentine, Am Nat 1984 https://doi.org/10.1086/284322). The theory is not that suddenly species develop the ability to fill those niches, but rather that due to competition, niches will eventually be filled. The key component here is direct competition, not the similarity in which they acquire their nutrients. Again, this is not how evolution work. A single entity or even a species does not make evolutionary changes. Evolutionary changes are factors resulting in a change of the gene pool (over time). That being said, the largest prey eaten by carnivorous plants includes birds and rats, though mostly opportunistically.

For that matter, I feel that the dismantling of government functions and goals is more associated with post-Reagan conservatives where the idea of small vs big government became the dominant lens to view the world. So much so that some otherwise reasonable folks try to argue about fascism, communism and Nazism in the sense of big vs small government axes.

I think all of that is due to how streamlined, seamless and convenient things have become. The younger generation does not need to think or know about how things work, it just does. It feels a bit like stereotyping but its also seems to me that folks are less curious about why or how things work. They essentially grew up with a magic square slab that keeps them entertained without pause and probably also distracted them from being curious about its inner workings (such as how it accesses the internet). This certainly also extends to other aspects related to the technology. For example, most don't seem to have a clue how data is stored on the phone and in university, a high number of younger students don't really know how to save or organize files. A common thing you hear is that on their phone the file is "just there".

Did you switch to glasses recently? It was the opposite in my case a bit. I used to wear them when I was young but had to switch to glasses because my eyes kept burning which the doctors couldn't really figure out. Somewhat recently the eye doctor suggested to me to try new contacts and to my surprise they worked. They suggested that in the past the contact might have rubbed at the region where the stem cells are which will lead to reaction that is fairly similar to an allergic response over time.

That is even more complicated and also useless.. Stem cells are non-differentiated cells and cannot really do anything. You would need to control their differentiation in such a way that they become islet cells to be able to implant them. That only is very tricky. But even worse, they still would have same mutation as already existing islet cell, so essentially you just did a very complicated thing that your body would do on its own without really gaining a benefit at the end of the day. What that guy needed is just a handful of functioning islet cells, basically a group of cells in the pancreas, that are able to produce hormones such as glucagon and especially in this context, insulin. And since the patient got type I diabetes, their existing cells are unable to fully do that for a range of possible genetic reasons. So if you take cells from the patients, they will have the same underlying issue. And as mentioned before, if you do not know the exact reason, and/or the reason has to be fairly localized (e.g. to specific locus), you cannot hope to reverse the issue with a targeted approach such as CRISPR/CAS.

Add to that the declining ability to pay attention and remember.... what was I talking about?

No, they used CRISPR-CAS12b. There are technical nuances between those two systems but I don't think they are relevant to your question. Using his own cells would be a bit pointless as they lost their function resulting in type I diabetes. If they wanted to use the patient cells, they would first need to harvest cells, which is hugely invasive (the donor in this case is deceased), figure out everything that is wrong (type I can be caused by many mutations and likely include issues that are not yet known) and in many cases it would be beyond CRISPR-CAS to make them functional again. In this case, using a donor with with functioning pancreas and just knock out antigenic regions that could result in rejection is way easier and more practical. The study only described the results after 12 weeks under observation. It is likely that funding term is over and they published their results they had at that point. It does not mean that they are not doing follow-ups and publish e.g. what happens after 1 year. Also the clinical trial registration ran out at this point and more paperwork might be needed to extend.

Oh, not anymore left the country a while ago but still have friends and collaborators. Though federal partners all but vanished. The issue, I think, is that we old folks still think online and real life as separate things. In the younger generation, things are increasingly mixed.

Define "better". What has been discussed was infant mortality. So better in this context, I presume, would be lower.