"That gave Matthew Gallagher breathing room to fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers. Some photos on Medvi’s homepage remain A.I.-generated."
Cool, another scammy internet company preying on people's insecurities. Glad the NY Times spent the effort to tell us about it and didn't spend any time questioning this company [1].
Most of us should be honest and admit we're jealous of this guy.
He basically chose a sector where customers are desperate (weight-loss drugs), slapped a website and an interface for connecting with a drug prescription provider together, did effective marketing, and now his business generates millions a month in profit.
Like, there are a half dozen companies like his running around that essentially offer the same product and prices because they are all customer interfaces stop the same provider.
Just the other day I was downvoted and called out for suggesting that perverse incentives are hard to resist, yet here we are with the Times (apparently) showcasing another such instance.
In this case GLP1's clinical effects are widely understood though, so it is immaterial if an "artist's depiction" (artificial agent's depiction) is of a real person or purely hallucinated.
This is just like when Paypal got started and was basically operating their own bank. Good luck doing that without getting in trouble. This is selling pharmaceutical drugs over the internet. You're playing chicken with going to jail they just happened to get lucky.
My teacher (former gelug monk of 20+ years) said during one talk years ago that Buddhism could be considered a form of Hinduism, as of course there are so many streams of Hinduism and no singular form of it. Buddhism had to be in dialogue with the environment that it sprung from, even if it rejected core tenants of mainstream "Hinduism" of the time (primarily caste, ritual purity, the denial of atman, etc). And of course the Jains were doing similar things in that early period.
So yeah, Buddhism came out of Hindu tradition, and Hindu tradition brought teachings from Buddhists back into their spiritual paths as well (like Hatha yoga in the Amrtasiddhi [1] and even Patanjali's yoga sutras contain a good amount of early Buddhism in it [2]). It's almost as if the teachings on interdependence are correct!
Yeah, agreed, there's a lot of misinformation. I'm always encountering people that say they just started, followed a guided meditation on the jhanas and entered fourth jhana within a week. And then the signs they describe are all just your basic things that arise when you first start having some facility over your practice, probably not even stability in the first jhana. Not to mention that it's impossible to be following a guided, external voice when you're in such a state of absorption.
As Chogyam Trungpa would probably say, they're all practicing spiritual materialism.
I held off on upgrading because I heard how much people hated it. I bought the new XDR display last week and finally had to upgrade for it to work properly and... it's totally fine? I'm not sure what the big deal is. It's way more annoying on iOS than it is on macOS.
The Stranger at #1 sort of tells me everything I need to know about the list. It's a fine book, and I ended up liking it a lot more when I went back and re-read it in French many years later, but #1 of the 20th century. Yeah, not even close.
I know this is primarily a Francophone list, but not having Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy or so many of the great Latin American authors on it makes me wonder how much makes it into French via translation.
This is one of the criticisms[0] of at least some Great Books curricula. The skew tends too strongly towards the Anglo-American and the “canon” is too rigidly held.
Cormac McCarthy is decently translated (for having read him in both English and French) and is well known.
But for the average French litterati, American literature harks back to Hemingway, Steinbeck, Salinger, Burroughs, Capote, Nabokov and so on much before McCarthy.
Toni Morrison isn't well known here yet, if only because her writing is embedded with Afro-American reality which is off-phase with Europe culture. For the same reason you'd hardly hear about Ralph Ellison in France if you're not in circles aware of post-colonial African diaspora writing.
To the same token, French authors who make it across the Atlantic aren't always the most valued here.
It's interesting Nabakov is thought of as American. Yes, an American citizen beginning age ~46 (in 1945) but born in Russia, wrote in multiple languages, lived much of life in Europe.
I write him down as American because that's his elective nation, although he's quintessentially European.
After all you might not chose where you live, but how you live and where you die can be up to you. And as far as I can I try to respect what people chose for themselves.
I know it's subjective, but personally I think Nausea by Sartre is the much better "The Stranger", and it always saddens me a bit to see Camus so high up on every list while missing Sartre.
Or, like, not haze kids in their 20s for residency and make them take hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Whereas in Europe and other countries, residents work something like 50 hours per week and graduate with zero debt.
I've watched friends go through it here in the US and I have zero interest in working 24 hour shifts and sleeping in break rooms, working 80+ hour weeks for years. There just is no need other than hazing and keeping artificial scarcity of doctors for inflated wages. There are plenty of brilliant, scientifically minded, hard working people that care about others that probably could be great doctors, but the US training system is just hostile towards most people.
Do you mean it won't be legalized because of stigma, or you personally wouldn't try them because of stigma?
People that think psychedelics are evil are just closed minded people that probably need psychedelics in their life. You probably don't want to pay attention to what they think. If you're genuinely looking for healing there are plenty of people that practice psychedelic assisted therapy around the world that could help you take those first steps. It's underground, but not terribly hard to find with some online searching.
While I agree that I'd love to have a guarantee on purity, the way to do that is just to make LSD legal, rather than have some private equity backed pharma company tie up the supply. LSD should be a case like insulin or the polio vaccine, as it offers an immense amount of potential for the planet.
Sure, if they want to make money by offering retreats in clinical settings for people too afraid to spend an afternoon with a loved one on 100ug of LSD, by all means. But jumping through hoops to lock up the supply of a truly revolutionary molecule that could improve the lives of millions just feels bad to me.
Edit: Also, no one is putting 2c-i on a tab of LSD. The doses are way different (~100ug vs 15mg) and chemists that make LSD tend to be pretty sold on it's potential to help humanity and try to keep the supply as pure as possible.
You may be thinking of "tusi" or pink cocaine, which is a drug mixture that tends to have ketamine and mdma mixed, and often has had fentanyl creep into the supply. Someone just decided to name it similar to Shulgin's 2C class of drugs for some reason, which is annoying and dangerous.
Except just legalization is no guarantee of safety or purity. Look at the Vitamin Industry as an example. The general public thinks that manufacturers of those bottles in the vitamin aisle are required to follow the same standards set by the FDA as those in OTC pain relief in the next aisle over.
well yes, of course. I'd assume any mind altering substance should have purity standards if legal and not treated like buying herbal supplements. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Cool, another scammy internet company preying on people's insecurities. Glad the NY Times spent the effort to tell us about it and didn't spend any time questioning this company [1].
[1] https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
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