bbayles

Also anorexia by another name in many cases, alas.

A lot of it is anorexia by another name. There is a subspecies that involves compulsive exercise. Doing lots of athletics without proper nourishment is a good recipe for low performance and injury.

This sort of thing seems to have really fallen off after the Grand Theft Auto "Hot Coffee" scandal. Having hidden stuff in a game went from being a fun thing to a potential liability.

Anecdata, but an acquaintance of mine struggled with lifelong anorexia. Severe enough that he was hospitalized a few times. With great effort he could cling to the bottom of the "normal BMI" range, but his life was generally ruled by the eating disorder - he couldn't have meals with people, he had to do various exercise rituals.

He was an early participant in one of these psychedelic studies a few years ago. After the first treatment, he said he couldn't really tell if it had any effect. But six months later, he was totally changed - able to function almost normally.

We should exercise our usual amount of skepticism about miracle treatments, but my hope is that his experience can be replicated.

There are short term and long term bonds.

Debt-to-GDP ratio is useful for comparing the debt loads of two countries, but not terribly useful in assessing the serviceability of debt for a single country.

That is, suppose two countries both have $100B in debt. One of them is a small island nation; the other is a global superpower. Obviously the global superpower will be better able to handle that - dividing by GDP helps make that clear.

However, this simple division doesn't tell you some important things. How much of the debt comes due very soon? It's worse if the answer is "most of it." How was it incurred? "Winning a war" is much better than "losing a war."

The United States has lots of debt, and personally I'm worried about the long term serviceability of it. But the ratio to GDP isn't why!

Michał Zalewski's article on page 42 is very funny.

I've reported a few very serious issues to vendors of widely used tools in recent weeks, and it's been even more difficult than usual to get them to be acknowledged - the teams that respond are reportedly swamped.