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This is over 20 years old, and I'm sure doesn't hold true in all areas, but at least at one point there was high demand to be a "san man" ("san" as in "sanitation") in NYC:

> It's a coveted job to be a New York City san man. When they last gave the qualifying test, 30,000 people took it. The General waited five years after passing the exam before a job came open, which is typical. And though the work is grueling, the pay-- if you're actually on a truck-- starts at $40,000 and can go to $60 after just five years. [note: this is in 2003 dollars!] A good winter, meaning one with lots of overtime for clearing snow-- they clear snow, too-- can make for a $90,000 year for a senior guy.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/249/garbage

These guys are/were unionized, which certainly helps.


And that's how it should be. Trash men should be making $200K and have high social status whereas the devs helping Bezos to his 5th super yacht or Zuck poison more kids should get minimum wage and treated as pariahs. Unfortunately at the country level it's reversed.

Absolutely 100% agree, and I’m glad people are saying this.

The internet has become a joke since the digital advertisement agencies, Google and Facebook and so on got the web under their control.

While high functioning societies invest in their people’s infrastructure, some societies invest in propaganda and premiere greed over keeping the country clean.


You are both wrong and this is why they win the salary of the coder is not high the taxes on bezos and co are less and the public workers pay less. That what needs to be change not labour be paid less no matter what kind of labour

It's mildly anti-fungal as well, which makes it effective in dandruff shampoo since a lot of dandruff is caused by fungal overgrowth, aka seborrheic dermatitis.

Another weird/fun one is using bleach as an anti-inflammatory (topical only, of course...), although these days you can find derivative products that offer the same benefits but are much less harsh.


I take a mild bleach bath sometimes and it’s quite invigorating. Seems to kill off a lot of skin surface bacteria which can sometimes be beneficial (there’s good and bad bacteria on your skin).

Not to be done too often but every once in a while I find it helpful. Not all that different from a strongly chlorinated pool.

Another cool one, especially if you don’t have a sauna, is doing a mustard bath. You will sweat like a stuck pig


> ... doing a mustard bath.

So many questions...

American, English, or Dijon?

*Sponsored by Heinz? ;)


lol. They make formulations you can buy but I make my own. A cup of ground mustard seed, which I buy fairly cheap online, and a few tablespoons of baking soda, plus some essentials oils mainly to cut through the mustard smell.

Pour that in a warm bath and soak for 20 mins. Then get out and wrap yourself in a towel and continue sweating for 15 mins or so.


Maybe chuck in some chilli next time too?

Sounds like you're making human soup? :)


piss on your feet (not in the sauna)

In this case, the lab gloves are shedding materials that superficially resemble microplastics under a microscope but aren't actually microplastics. (I was concerned about that at first too because of the overlap between food service gloves and lab gloves!)

I don't buy the whole premise.

A couple of months ago there were a bunch of news stories, about how maybe oil companies should be sued, just like tobacco companies were.

Then, suddenly out of nowhere, it's actually the gloves that is the problem. It's an excellent counter to such a movement. The scientists are wrong, you see. Microplastics? Overblown!

The average joe will read only the headline/clickbait, and forever doubt microplastics.


If anything I think people who only read the headline will incorrectly assume that gloves are full of microplastics :P

Gloves are full of macroplastics.

Latex gloves aren't plastic.

Nitrile is though. And latex is arguably just a natural plastic (maybe the natural plastic). There is also synthetic latex though I'm not sure if that's used for gloves

Iranian oil is the national security focus now. And Cuba.

The implication here is kind of funny in that even if you do write legal stuff in language that your customers can understand, most of them still won't read it. And to be fair, I'm guilty of this more often than not.

Agreed; I don't think "Not X, but Y" is a reliable tell on its own, but taken as a whole TFA set off my AI writing spidey-sense big time. The intro takes three paragraphs of fluff (ironically) to say "My product used to have long docs, but after using a product with much shorter docs it made me reconsider my approach."

> It seems like he can write whatever.

Not incidentally, he's a PR guy by trade--who still runs his own PR firm! And that firm has done PR for AI companies!

https://archive.ph/2025.10.27-195752/https://www.wired.com/s...

I'm firmly on the skeptic side of the AI skeptic/booster divide, but I wish we had better mouthpieces on the skeptic side. I get the feeling that Zitron is more concerned with getting his newsletter numbers up than anything else.


Agreed. I'm trying to speak up about this more as an engineer https://youtu.be/cJYAK6csXso


Even if the actual specialist labor had been minimal, there's also the amount of time and effort it takes to accumulate enough knowledge to become a specialist. It's like the joke about spending $200 for a repair guy to come kick your printer in just the right spot to fix a print jam--you pay him $50 for kicking it, and $150 for knowing where to kick it :)


> Neanderthal skulls have huge brow ridges and lack chins, with a projecting midface that results in more prominent noses. But the recreated face suggests those differences were not so stark in life.

This surprised me enough to scroll back up and look at the reconstruction again, because it looks the woman definitely has (what I would think of as) a chin--which supports the "not so stark in real life" part. But if the skulls are that different, how would a Neanderthal face end up looking so similar to a human's? Did they have cartilage or something that doesn't get preserved in these skeletal remains?


Whatever the differences, they would have been attractive enough to Homo Sapiens to breed with.


Maybe not willingly, though. Look up Danny Vendramini's neanderthal predation theory, and consider that modern X chromosomes carry no neanderthal DNA, indicating that all interbreeding involved neanderthal males and human females.


A man passes his X chromosome (inherited from his mother) to any daughters. Any female offspring of a neanderthal father and a homo sapiens mother would have a neanderthal X chromosome and a sapiens X chromosome. If it's true that there's no neanderthal DNA on modern X chromosomes, this is not the cause.

What would be stronger evidence for an absence of neanderthal mothers among neanderthal/sapiens hybrid children would be a lack of neanderthal mitochondrial RNA in modern populations. This would point in the direction of no neanderthal grandmothers for us modern humans, though I'd be reluctant to present this as solid evidence. Maybe sapiens mitochondrial RNA is just better and there's selective pressure against neanderthal mitochondrial RNA.

None of this is to suggest that all neanderthal/sapiens couplings were loving affectionate parents. Just that the absence of neanderthal DNA on modern X chromosomes means nothing in this context.


> consider that modern X chromosomes carry no neanderthal DNA, indicating that all interbreeding involved neanderthal males and human females

This is a false implication, it’s possible that Neanderthal X chromosome just doesn’t “play nice” with human dna, and can’t result in fertile offspring. Admittedly I have not read the sources you recommend, so maybe they address this?


Or Neanderthal women lived with their tribe and their hybrid children died with that Neanderthal tribe, whereas modern human women and their hybrid children (or at least the ones who have living descendants) lived with modern human tribes and had a better chance of survival.


Actually I don't think this would be able to explain the observed evidence. Consider this path:

1. Neanderthal woman "Ann" mates with Human man "Hugh"

2. Ann gives birth to son "Ander", who is then raised with neanderthals. Notably, Ander has human Y chromosome via Hugh, but Neanderthal X chromosome via Ann.

3. Ander mates with human woman "Uma". They have a daughter, passing Neanderthal X chromosome into human population.

I realize this is a very specific path, but it would _only have to happen once_ for the neanderthal X chromosome to be introduced into the human genome. I think it is very unlikely that such a path would simply never happen across the thousands of interactions we had. And therefore I think the observed fact (no impact of neanderthal x chromosome in modern genes) can't _just_ be explained by the proposed behavior (neanderthal mothers raise their children in their neanderthal tribe)

I think there does actually have to be some sort of incompatibility, or some other very-very-high failure rate, something like 99.99%.


If first-order hybrids made up only a small proportion of the total population of humans and Neanderthals, then the probability that a pairing between a member of a modern human tribe and a member of a Neanderthal tribe would involve a first-order hybrid is quite small. Like if there are 2 hybrids in a 150-strong tribe at the frontier, and a cross-tribe pairing happens, there is about a 1.3% chance that it involves a hybrid, and half of that that the gender matches up. Even with a higher estimate of 5% hybrids in a tribe, it's a 1.67% chance for a match with the right gender.

And when that chance is realised, and a second-order hybrid is produced, the high child mortality rates of the time would put downward pressure on their numbers. Not zero, but a couple of orders of magnitudes lower than first-order hybrids.

First-order hybrid being having one parent from a Neanderthal tribe, other from a human tribe. Second-order hybrid additionally having at least one parent as a first-order hybrid (as in your step 3).

Also, there actually is Neanderthal DNA in the modern X chromosome. If in your step 2, Ann gives birth to a daughter Andrea, the daughter would have a Neanderthal X chromosome, and she can pass it on within her tribe. But she would have no Neanderthal mtDNA, which is only passed on maternally.

But there is other data that this model does not explain. Like, why is there no Neanderthal contribution to the modern Y chromosome?


I don’t have much experience in this field, so I can’t give satisfying answers to your questions. However, you said two things that I find very interesting:

> Also, there actually is Neanderthal DNA in the modern X chromosome.

> why is there no Neanderthal contribution to the modern Y chromosome?

I think both of these claims contradict the parent! I’m not sure which is correct, I’ve never looked into this before, and was simply trusting that bediger4000‘s assertion about the X chromosome was true. But it seems the opposite is true?


> This is a false implication

No, but it is an overconfident assertion.

Maybe all neanderthalis x sapiens were the results of rape. Maybe the fetuses were only viable from the n. sperm to s. eggs. Maybe something else.

All are possible.


Vendramini's theory appears to be built upon some fairly extraordinary ideas that are not supported by actual evidence. In fact some of his claims (e.g. about face shape and skull placement) are directly contradicted by actual evidence. It's probably worth approaching this with some scepticism.


Measles and chickenpox aren't even similar pathogens. Chickenpox is more closely related to herpes!

(That's also why chickenpox can come back later in life as shingles, the same way cold sores recur... because shingles is reactivated chickenpox, it's not a "relabeled" virus...)


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