From competitive cycling perspective GLP1 drugs are not helpful, least of all at the highest levels of sport where doping would be a concern that actually gets testing and enforcement.
When I was at the peak of my training, it was legitimately hard to get enough calories. I had days where my caloric intake was approaching 5000kcal (long zone 2 rides). When you're doing that kind of metabolic load, being unable to consume the calories you need means being unable to recover properly.
Outside weight-class or aesthetics-driven sports, it’s hard to imagine any scenario where a GLP-1 analog creates a net advantage.
In endurance disciplines the binding constraint is almost always fuel throughput: if an athlete can’t take in and process enough calories, recovery and performance fall apart. Anything that suppresses appetite or slows gastric motility is basically disqualifying.
You can already see how narrow that margin is in the sheer amount of gels, bars, and mixes riders consume during long sessions.
From that angle, GLP-1 simply doesn’t occupy the same decision space as substances that expand performance capacity or recovery bandwidth.
I am no expert. But I think issue with these discussions is that "hormone" is quite wide area. And they have varying effects. With doping we are focusing on those that affect things like muscle growth or EPO which accelerates red blood cell production. Both which can have harmful side-effects.
With GLP-1 and others there is other effects than those. And thus probably they should not be treated as same. The reality is that discussion lacks this sort of nuance and hormone automatically means bigger muscles...
If you compare the viewership of Game of Thrones with the readership of the original novels, the gap is enormous — not because one is “better,” but because different media win different kinds of attention.
Most people are never choosing between Being and Time and an HN thread.
But if they were forced to choose, we already know which one would dominate sheer engagement.
That doesn’t mean HN replaces philosophy — it just means that attention has its own economics.
And any medium that captures attention will inevitably show qualities (good and bad) that heavyweight works simply can’t compete with.
>If you compare the viewership of Game of Thrones with the readership of the original novels
The novels are unfinished though and I hardly believe they will be completed by him seeing how the penultimate novel has taken him over a decade to do about 75% of it and him being 77 already. I would never start a series I know it is unlikely to be completed.
I'll point out that I read Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, which started in 1983, is projected to run to 19 books with 17 done. Brust is 70, but he appears to be in reasonable shape, and the books have been pretty regular of late, so it looks like he'll finish.
I also read the War Against the Chtorr series by David Gerrold. That also started in 1983, but the last published book, the 4th of 7, came out in 1993. Gerrold being 81, despite his claims for almost a decade that books 5 and 6 are near completion, I am confident I will not see the end of the series written by him :-(
Last I read was early 2025, Brust was saying that he had over half of the next-to-last book written, and as I said, he's been on a pretty regular schedule. Plus, he's not (only) telling a single story that has to come to some earth-shattering conclusion (as GRRM is). It would be nice if he pulled that off, but there is a lot going on in the background of his Dragaera that I expect he won't fully resolve: there are multiple types of death, multiple types of magic, Vlad is the reincarnation of an ancient Dragaeran, he's going to/has killed a god, the Jenoine are a mystery to resolve, and the whole planet has a science fictional foundation despite very clearly being fantasy in general.
But maybe he will; I'm actually several books behind at this point -- I'm pretty much waiting for him to finish so I can (re) read the whole thing from start to finish.
I wish george martin took care of his health. Surprised to see Gerrold mentioned here! I read The Man Who Folded Himself a long time and it is the first fiction book I ever had the pleasure to read where all characters were the same person
I started A Game of Thrones in 1996, when I walked into a bookstore out of the cold in Toronto, and asked for a recommendation (I will always remember that day for several reasons, not just A Song of Fire and Ice!)
30 years later (give or take a week), I don't expect to ever see the end; I have a feeling GRRM has kind of lost interest/passion in the Song of Fire and Ice series, since he's started churning out other stuff like Dunk, but you know what, its ok.
Finish what you start — When starting a work that has readers or viewers, complete it if it is financially rewarding to do so. You have unfortunately made an aesthetic promise to your readers in exchange for money. Suck it up.
Keep Your Customers Informed — If you will not be able to do the first, inform people as soon as possible.
I'm with Gaiman on this. No author has any obligation, ethical or otherwise, to provide further books in a series to the readers unless those readers are paying hard cash upfront for the missing books.
from the phrase I would expect that "aesthetic promise" is similar to a monetary promise, except as applied to aesthetics instead of money. A promise that something will be given.
from reading the article "aesthetic promise" seems to be "that particular bit of aesthetic satisfaction that you counted on when starting out on the series", in other words, one of the aesthetic promises of a continuing series of books is that there is a conclusion, so you read one book and the next, expecting that at some point they will all be put together into a whole.
Rather like how readers of Dickens day started reading his serialized novels in their papers expecting that the novel would in fact have an ending.
> I would never start a series I know it is unlikely to be completed.
As someone who can relate, I advise revisiting that stance. I discovered there is a lot of value to be gained from some unfinished works, and there are some finished works which would had best be left unfinished.
It’s strange that in 2025 we still don’t have even a minimal, per-capita baseline tier for electricity.
If a household uses less than the monthly per-capita average, why not cap that baseline at something like $10?
Yes — that gap would need to be subsidized, probably through taxes.
But that’s already how grid maintenance works: we socialize the fixed costs while pretending rates are purely volumetric.(and I might be overstating this slightly).
Right now we punish low-usage consumers and reward structural inefficiency.
A baseline tier would at least make the incentives coherent.
Then we should socialize that infrastructure as well. Otherwise if we're merely _amortizing_ the costs then a total capacity metric should apply to each user.
A private company shouldn't be allowed to socialize important shared infrastructure simply because a weak PUC pretends to engage in oversight.
I get the intuition behind fully socializing it,
but I wouldn’t go that far.
Single-operator systems lose redundancy fast, and that’s dangerous for infrastructure.
A layered mix — county-level public utilities, some private operators, and some hybrid/municipal entities — might be closer to a resilient structure.
You say this like it is a law of nature, but we can plan and build it directly if we want it. Redundancy is not something that only emerges from an indirect 4d-chess strategy of ownership mixes.
I live in a province in Canada where the electrical system is owned and operated by a crown corporation. They are mandated to maintain a very high uptime and they do through several means including redundancy. Our electrical bills are cheaper than much of the US. It certainly can be done; there are other means than competition to ensure adequate service.
The reason we're all here is because the government currently is dictating those rates in representation of the utility companies needs and not the citizens. How this is essentially socialized is beyond me; yet, I do concede that the same rules applied differently would much more likely meet that standard.
We already have an independent systems operator (ISO) to match the amount of load on the grid with the amount of generator current supplying it. I think this model could be expanded to where the state could literally own the transmission lines and equipment and use various regional contractors which would be engaged to maintain it in coordination with the ISO.
Then we have stable infrastructure where generation _and_ maintenance are open markets which may allow customer rates to no longer be controlled by a utilities commission and instead be directly computed from the actual suppliers costs plus taxes. It may even allow for more regional electric companies to form to provide better service to peculiar areas of the state.
That's more or less the system that exists today? You pay a lower rate up to a certain threshold and then a higher rate kicks in.
The problem with PG&E isn't the rate structure, which isn't all that different from utilities anywhere else in the world. It's that their costs are exceedingly high, through a combination of regulatory pressures and grift. This is exacerbated by municipal and state regulators who are pushing consumers to be more reliant on electric power (bans on gas appliances in new construction, pushes toward EVs, etc).
There are vast swathes of the country where people pay 5-10x less for electricity.
My point was simply that electricity has a “civilization tax” aspect to it, and lower baseline access feels closer to the kind of future-proof system we should be aiming for.
If the floor is gentle, people can actually reduce usage without feeling punished for doing the right thing.
At the moment the baseline tier feels… maybe a “C-rating” version of what a real baseline could be?
So who pays the tax? I mean, California already has some of the highest income taxes, corporate taxes, extra capital gains taxes, sales taxes, etc, etc. If you want to lower the cost of electricity for tens of millions of people without addressing systemic problems that make it ridiculously expensive in the first place, you gotta tax someone.
The effective income tax rate for many SF Bay Area techies is around 50%. Do we jack it up to 65% so that PG&E bills can go down from $400 to $100, like almost everywhere else in the country?
The long version would take us far off-topic,
so here’s the short one:
if the tax-paying base collapses, none of this matters.
At that point the debate isn’t about pricing — it’s about survival of the system.
I could outline the full methodology behind this view,
but that would turn the thread into a private seminar — and that’s not what comment sections are for.
All the majority of people heard from you is “I pay more taxes”
We’ve become an incredibly selfish nation on average, and until these systems collapse and people get to feel the hot stove, they aren’t going to change their minds about keeping any sort of system or infrastructure in place
So PG&E already has something like this. It’s called either E-1 or TOU-C, depending on whether time-of-use billing applies. The price for the baseline tier is higher than you’d expect, though.
I might be missing some procedural detail,
but if there’s no formal “warning → fixed-window for correction → penalty” sequence,
isn’t that just state overreach?
If the issue has existed for years,
retroactively jumping straight to fines feels less like regulation
and more like the government exploiting its timing advantage.
Statistics about humans only work if the population equals the sample,
if every respondent tells the truth,
and if the quantitative definitions are correctly specified.
Dial-up was slow, but at least the internet still felt human.
Fiber gave us speed, not soul.
Sometimes I miss yelling “Corp Por” into the TUBE — back when the screen wasn’t a window, but a passage.
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