SovietMen

Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.

Ozempic users like Taylor aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant. “Wegovy destroyed my taste buds,” a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding: “And I love it.”

Given Big Food’s track record, it’s likely that the companies will succeed at finding products Ozempic users crave. But what if they’re too successful? I asked Nicole Avena, a professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai who studies sugar addiction, if she believed it could be possible for food companies to engineer, intentionally or not, compounds that would make GLP-1 drugs less effective. Avena told me it was plausible. The food industry, she pointed out, has cabinets of formidable reward-triggering compounds with which to experiment. Companies could end up counteracting the drugs to some degree in their efforts to make foods more rewarding, she said.

1DaySooner’s Trump II Health Policy Proposals

This is from Astral Codex Ten. There are actually some good ideas here:

Better Post-Marketing Surveillance: Improvements in transparency for existing data could be paired with modernized surveillance of the real world effects of drugs after they’ve been offered to the public. Unlike countries like England and Israel, America’s healthcare systems are highly fragmented and make it hard to aggregate evidence. A focused attempt to modernize data collection could build on the FDA’s Sentinel Initiative and give the public real-time transparency into who’s taking what drugs and what effects are being observed.

Random Musings

First, to AI news.

As new models keep blowing past every test we can give them, an organization has set up Humanity’s Last Exam. They get experts from various fields to formulate the toughest questions they can think of. Here are a couple of examples:

You can see other examples at the site. Most were gobbledygook to me.

Here’s model performance on various tests so far:

New Chinese LLM just dropped. Apparently riffed (ripped?) off ChatGPT and made super-cheap. Some say it’s pretty powerful. Have a look.

Italian soccer club Lazio fires falconer for posting photos of his penis implant

Lazio has fired the man who handled the Italian soccer club’s eagle mascot after he posted photos and videos online of his own prosthetic penis.

Falconer Juan Bernabé shared the images on his private social media accounts after undergoing surgery for a penile implant, which he said was for non-medical reasons.

Bernabé also gave an interview to controversial Italian radio show La Zanzara on Monday and elaborated on his reasons for undergoing the procedure.

Bernabé added that he felt “very proud” and “more masculine” being part of Lazio. The Serie A club clearly did not feel the same as it fired the Spaniard shortly afterward.

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US city tells residents to stop sticking googly eyes on its statues

“It would cost $0 to leave them on,” replied one Facebook user, while another praised the artworks’ additions.

“My daughter and I went past the flaming chicken today and shared the biggest laugh,” she said, using a nickname for the “Phoenix Rising” sculpture.

“We love the googly eyes. This town is getting to be so stuffy. Let’s have fun!”

Japan ranks lowest among 31 nations in love life satisfaction survey for 2nd year in a row

Satisfaction levels among Japanese people regarding their “romantic and sexual lives” ranked the lowest among 31 countries in an international awareness survey conducted by France-based public opinion research firm Ipsos.

Japan was placed at the bottom of the rankings for two consecutive years, suggesting that its citizens are “clearly dissatisfied” with their love life and the relationships they have with their partners, according to Ipsos.

The online survey was carried out on 24,269 adults from 31 countries. Participants were asked if they felt satisfied with their romantic and sexual lives, their feeling of being loved, and their relationships with partners or spouses.

According to the results, the proportion of people satisfied with their “romantic and sexual lives” was the highest in India and Mexico, at 76%, while Japan had the lowest satisfaction rate at 37%. 

By generation, Japanese members of Generation Z showed more dissatisfaction with their “romantic and sexual lives” compared to baby boomers and millennials, with a gap of more than 10 percentage points.

If a tornado hit the outback and no one was around to hear it, would it make a sound?

So hot right now: WA orcas are wearing dead salmon on their heads in latest fashion fad

Washington orcas have reportedly revived a macabre fashion trend: dead-salmon hats. West Coast killer whales were last spotted sporting expired salmon in the 1980s, according to Live Science. After a nearly 40-year hiatus, whale watchers and scientists witnessed the resurrected fad last month off Point No Point in Kitsap County and in South Puget Sound.

Nephew of Equatorial Guinea’s president filmed hundreds of sex tapes with wives of top officials

Baltasar Ebang Engonga, the head of Equatorial Guinea’s National Financial Investigation Agency and nephew of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, was taken into custody on October 25 as part of a corruption investigation.

The 54-year-old was arrested on charges of embezzling public funds and allegedly depositing the money in secret Cayman Islands bank accounts.

Mr Engonga was detained in Malabo’s infamous Black Beach prison when dozens of videos began flood social media of the civil servant — known as “Bello” for his good looks — having sex with numerous women, sparking uproar and titillation in the Central African nation of 1.7 million people.

Mom Jailed for Letting 10-Year-Old Walk Alone to Town

The sheriff drove Soren home and left him with his grandfather. After returning to the house, Patterson scolded her son—and that, she thought, was that.

But at 6:30 p.m. that night, the sheriff returned with another officer. They told Patterson to turn around and put her hands behind her back. As three of her kids watched, Patterson was handcuffed. The sheriff took her purse and phone, put her in the cruiser, and hauled her off to jail.

To Patterson, none of this made sense. She had grown up in the area with plenty of unsupervised time to wander and play and was raising her kids that way, too.

EXCLUSIVE: FEMA Official Ordered Relief Workers To Skip Houses With Trump Signs

A FEMA supervisor told workers in a message to “avoid homes advertising Trump” as they canvassed Lake Placid, Florida to identify residents who could qualify for federal aid, internal messages viewed by The Daily Wire reveal. The supervisor, Marn’i Washington, relayed this message both verbally and in a group chat used by the relief team, multiple government employees told The Daily Wire. 

FEMMES FATALE: Inside deadly trend of ‘Passport Bros’ lured by honeytraps & murdered for cash… with £6 drug ‘rubbed in chest’ on dates

Speaking about the night she preyed on the unsuspecting victim in a club, she recalls: “A man came out and he had a lot of money.

“We were two girls. I had already given him the liquid and my friend gave him another dose so he overdosed and had a heart attack at the nightclub. Right there he became stiff.

“So we left and flew away, of course, but I knew from the television, from the newspapers, it was a problem.”

Justifying her crime, she says: “I know it’s bad but it’s my job. We all have to survive. I have children to look after. It seems better than prostitution.”

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A blaze burns down a brand-new fire station in Germany that lacked fire alarms

…The fire broke out early Wednesday morning at the Stadtallendorf fire station in Hesse and destroyed, among other things, the equipment hall and almost a dozen emergency vehicles, German news agency dpa reported. Initial estimates put the damage at between 20 million and 24 million euros ($21 million to $26 million). No one was injured.

Local officials told dpa that no fire alarm system was installed in the building because experts had considered it not necessary — much to the astonishment of many observers now that the station has burned down.

The fire broke out on an emergency vehicle belonging to the fire department, which contained lithium-ion batteries and an external power connection.

The station opened less than a year ago, local media reported.