radiofreeeuropa

... a simple compound that was already developed and in-use, so the current patent (the one that's made it a big, ongoing news story and a kind of social phenomenon) is rewarding only going through the approval process for using it for weight loss, specifically, not development of a new drug.

Of course there's conflict of interest. I'd prefer we address all the things their actions motivated by that conflict of interest are shielding me from before we smack them down, though. After that, yeah, I'll take up a pitchfork, too.

For now, they're my AnCap-approved optional private enforcement regime against a bunch of the antisocial and market-capturing behavior of the rest of tech, since public regulators are asleep at the wheel. I'd much prefer real, very aggressive (by modern standards, if not historical) enforcement of meaningful consumer protection, standards mandates, and trust-busting across the board, but this is the only option I've got (aside from "just use less tech, and far less-usefully")

All hurting them now does is hand more control of the tech ecosystem to Google.

Meanwhile: yes they in fact have the best mainstream browser, and it's not even close.

I don't want web apps on my phone (or, in an ideal world, anywhere else) so that's also a good thing. If they're not viable, it forces developers to make real apps or else just make a web page instead of whatever awful-UX nonsense they were planning.

> I'm not a Mac user, but I wish I had Safari on desktop as an option today.

Webkit browsers do exist on other platforms. They're far and away the best-performing sorts of actually-usable (in terms of supported Web features and ability to render real pages in the wild—sure, lynx works, but...) browsers on low-end machines, should you have to use one, to the point that they may be viable on a machine that's otherwise basically incapable of using the modern Web at all (which confirms for me that there's some fundamental, deep-down plumbing reasons behind why Safari's so much better on battery life than Firefox or Chrome-based browsers)

None of them are Safari and I can't vouch for how they are as daily drivers long-term, but it's nice to have one semi-up-to-date engine around that still kinda works on bad hardware (and by "bad" I mean still several times stronger than my workhorse many-tabs-browsing multi-tasking machine circa 2003—you'd be amazed how strong a machine has to be these days before trying to use the Web at-all normally in Chrome or Firefox is anything but terribly painful).

It's the only reason you don't see a lot more broken websites on Firefox, which would drive its market share even lower.

Lots and lots of Web development projects target Chrome, then make sure it works on Safari. In that second step, they accidentally fix a lot of bugs that'd show up on Firefox, too.

Not a lot of them are bothering to check Firefox directly these days. Hell, a decade ago it wasn't making the test list in tons of cases.

Chrome did that three ways: 1) performing better and crashing less than mainstream alternatives (just IE and Firefox, then) on non-Mac platforms (so, most desktop computers) for a good long while; 2) aggressive advertising to trick people who don't actually give a shit what browser they're running (or even know) into downloading it because "google said it would make my gmail work better" or "I dunno, google just told me to download this so I did"; and, later in the race, by 3) being the default on most Android installations.

One of three major factors involved actually being good, and I'd bet the other two factors overwhelm that one.

Counterpoint: Safari is by far the best mainstream browser, because it's got the only engine that gives half a shit about battery life, and because they push back on shitty features Google wants to make "standard" so they can trash my UX and the computing ecosystem even more.

... and drugs.

And they had 86% adherence for a year. If they'd studied this farther out and it went the same way as basically any study that's done that, adherence would be a lot worse in another couple years. And that's in a group that's exceptionally motivated vs. the general population—has an actual illness they're trying to treat, and has opted in to the study knowing what it's asking of them and for how long.

Yep, overeating (and, to some degree, not enough moving around) is the reason. True.

But “just personally do better” doesn’t work very well when applied as a medical intervention (they have tried, and checked, over and over, a hundred different ways), even with lots of follow-up and monitoring, and it also doesn’t appear to be how other countries manage to be skinnier than the US. Between those two things, it really doesn’t look like a viable way to solve the obesity crisis—it doesn’t work when we try it, and it doesn’t seem to be what’s working anywhere else.

Yes, it’s a google away.

Run a study of your approach and show good results over a cohort for 2+ years and you'll make an entire sub-field of medical scientists very happy.

[EDIT] It's not that your approach can't work, it's that if (for example) people had as hard a time following the directions for condoms as they do following diet & workout plans, we'd never allow condoms to be sold as contraceptives, they'd not even be close to being OK to promote as useful for that purpose. It wouldn't matter if a few people could follow the directions and it worked 100% of the time for them.

There's anecdotes, and there's science.

Individually, there's (previously) been nothing better to suggest than "try harder (and, maybe, smarter)".

Statistically it was almost useless, but it's the best we had. It's not bad advice exactly, it's just extremely unlikely to work for long-term, sustained weight loss.

It also very much appears to be the case that weight gain and loss are heavily influenced by environmental factors. Skinnier countries aren't skinnier because the people there have more willpower, it seems, but because they live in a skinnier country and are surrounded by the culture, laws, physical layouts of the created world, et c., that come with that. It'd be kinda weird if we expected "just try harder" to work very well when that's evidently not the mechanism by which skinny countries are skinny. Alternatively, if it is willpower doing it, we're just adding a step, because then it appears that environment strongly influences willpower, instead, since the same observations hold.

Sure, sometimes it works for individuals. In fact, it often works temporarily, causing a yo-yo effect. It can work for long periods (many years without a slip) but that's rare.

If your solution to the obesity crisis is "people need to try harder" your solution is demonstrably not helpful. Can it work for one person? Yes. Over a population, will it? No, it won't, it's amazingly ineffective, even very expensive high-touch interventions involving multiple experts aimed at weight loss and lifestyle change and such are wildly less effective than "inject GLP-1 agonists" or "move somewhere skinnier".

Under-discussed benefit: being able to have all your clothes actually fit at the same time (no wardrobe scattered between your "skinny" weight and your "fat" weight and rarely being in the right place for more than a handful of pieces to fit entirely correctly) so you can spend up a little on nicer clothes without worrying you'll only be able to wear them part of the time. Worst case, you start to pack on a little too much and they start getting tight, you increase the dose or go back on the drugs for a week or three (or just do it the old fashioned way—hey, it works some of the time, temporarily) and ta-da, right back where you want to be—you're not going to pack on weight and find yourself unable to lose, so buying "skinny clothes" isn't mortgaged against your future success at forcing yourself to eat less.

I'd describe the effects as basically the opposite of self-torture. Self-torture is dieting/fasting without the drugs. With them, it's great. No afternoon light-headedness and difficulty concentrating, no hunger pangs, no "hangry" effect, no cravings you have to keep suppressing. Just smooth sailing. (though experiences do seem to vary—as do dosage levels)