> Nearly two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are women, but the reasons why women are more vulnerable are still not fully understood. Scientists have long theorized that the loss of estrogen after menopause may reduce the brain’s natural protection against memory loss and neurodegeneration.
The part that makes no sense for me is men ending with smaller rates of dementia, given they had much less estrogen to begin with. Men have less incidence of dementia. Men also have much lager incidence of baldness. Did somebody already study if baldness and dementia are inversely correlated? I don't know, perhaps sunlight exposure in the scalp have neuroprotective effects?
Given the prevalence of baldness, and the downside of the condition for sexual attractiveness of its bearers, I suspect we will still discover some strong unexpected upside to explain why this trait was selected for regardless.
> baldness, and the downside of the condition for sexual attractiveness of its bearers
Just a guess, and I highly doubt there are any reliable statistics on this, but perhaps balding men are less likely to be tempted to abandon their family unit, thereby making it more likely that their children will thrive and carry on their genes?
I base this theory on my own experience, which is that I went completely bald in my early thirties and haven't had a second look from a woman ever since. Even if I were the sort to want to cheat on my wife, there wouldn't be any takers![0]
[0] I'm not claiming that bald men are necessarily sexually unattractive. I just know that it didn't work for me, looks-wise.
Just chiming in for anyone else reading this and worried about their hair thinning, this is a thing men worry about much more than women. Bruce Willis, Patrick Stewart, Michael Jordan, Vin Diesel - there have been plenty of bald sex symbols and plenty of women who enjoy that look (and the look of many average men of various builds and ages)
The factors of attractiveness are by far more related to basic self care (hygine and being fit enough to care for yourself and others), kindness and the ability to share in others' joy, and passionate interest in something, and a lightness or humor in your manner.
I started balding at 18, shaved it all at 22. Its not an issue. Height, hair, etc might get immediate reaction and attention, but hardly matter for real connections.
I just want to add that I wholeheartedly agree with this, and I would hate for anyone who's losing their hair to conclude that it's the end of the road for their love life.
Good grooming, a good sense of humor, and most importantly, generally being a good person, are what really matter.
This seems like an odd conclusion to draw. I'm married with a full head of hair and I couldn't tell you whether or not any woman has ever been interested because I'm not paying attention nor am I trying to draw it.
Good for you. I always did notice if there was a spark between me and someone I encountered. I wasn't going to act on it if I was already in a relationship, but I found it nice to feel that I had some physical appeal.
Just anedoctal evidence, but I have a group of older coworkers, most in late 40s-early 50s, all divorced, and by their reports on their attempts at getting back at dating, success pretty much track how much hair is left. That made me a bit upset, as I'm slowly getting bald myself.
there is a huge difference between balding and bald
nobody wants to see a guy in denial clinging onto something, lean in fully
and yes it is unfortunate that different people are attracted to the bald variant than the ones you already know, but you gotta show resolve and confidence
> The part that makes no sense for me is men ending with smaller rates of dementia, given they had much less estrogen to begin with. Men have less incidence of dementia.
My understanding was that they have lower incidence specifically of Alzheimer's, but greater incidence of other forms of dementia.
Those numbers are bullshit. The bottom of a grown woman’s cycle is around 100 pg/ml. I have no idea where they’re getting those numbers but I assure you they’re wrong, and even if they were remotely correct about E levels being close to one another at some point in the cycle the majority of the time they’re much farther apart.
Vaguely reminds me of that planet in Hitchhiker's Guide that started to lose too much mass to tourists leaving. So,
> Thus today the net balance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave; so every time you go to the lavatory there, it is vitally important to get a receipt.
I looked up videos on YouTube about this topic, but the few that I clicked were AI slop with the prompt of something like "Generate a video from the contents of this article, use clip art videos and English male narration".
> IMO The missing link is that, as long as humans still have political power, that is the basis of their economic power under the new system.
It's because of this Big Tech is busy undermining the basis of democracy, isolating people in bubbles, poisoning political discourse with slop and pimping would be autocrats. They want to strip political power from common citizens, turning toward sefdom.
I wonder if it helps explain in part why the Publish or Perish culture is wrecking science and stalling scientific progress. The stressful environment it tends to create it's not conductive to learning and thinking in depth.
I don’t think we should miss the forest for the trees. If you incentivize people to publish as much as possible, and institutions to apply as little oversight as possible, and peers to positively review and cite as much as possible, you end up with a system that produces a huge volume of the easiest “science” to produce over quality, meaningful work. Modern academia is mostly a ponzi scheme and that’s that.
Its aggravated because the "water sensor" appears to fail early with age. Elderly people tend to not get the thisty feeling as often, but get dehydrated anyway.
I wonder how much of the effects of ageing are due to cascading failures downstream of alterations like these. For example, it's common for people to lose teeth in advanced ages. How much of this is due to dry mouths from insufficient water intake? Fallen teeth then may become entry points for infections, et cetera. Perhaps fixing a few early causes we can avoid a lot of negative effects and live more, without the need to go full spartan in lifestyle discipline.
I don’t know the exact things. I only know that diabetes would make this loss tremendously. As to teeth loss, it’s mainly because periodontitis but not age though it always goes worse as the age increases because of their life behaviors.
> The Brazilian government wanted to control the flow of information across borders, while academia championed unfettered access to international research, both of which were hampered by local telecoms that coveted monetization.
For context, by 1975 Brazil was still aproximately halfway under the brutal military dictatorship that started in 1964, through a military coup supported by Operation Brother Sam[1], and ended only in the late 80s. The movie "The Secret Agent", Oscar nominated in the 2026 ceremony, unfolds in 1977, roughly the same timeframe. It would be a very interesting topic for historical research to comb national files from that period to see if the military surveiled or acted against the named researchers, in some form, for those first attempts to conect to the proto-internet.
> HR has a reputation for claiming that they are here to help employees but actually only prioritizing the desires of the corpos
Unions were the institutions that actually helped employees. It's a shame they had their reputations smeared and many were busted, leaving workers out in the cold. The worst run union probably does more for employees than the best HR department.
Disagree with the last one. Back when unions were more common in my country, union officials were the gatekeepers of career progress or even entering the profession, and they were taking bribes. I've never seen an HR department half as bad as an average union from that era (when was the last time you heard someone bring $1000 in cash to a job interview?).
That said, in the USA the pendulum has swinged too far the other way so as of now, unions don't have any capacity to be this bad. Unionizing would be a huge improvement for every employee in pretty much every situation.
The problem with Unions is its just the labor. Its the people who do the work. They don't have the money or the political power.
The Bosses and Owners have the money, the property, the machines, and political connections.
And power/money builds more power/money. And because its a boss vs worker arrangement, the worker's power will invariably get whittled down year by year.
The real solution here isnt socialism or communism. Its Worker Cooperatives. This makes the worker = the boss. And the previous conflict between the 2 go away. And the workers can make better decisions with all the information.
For example, when a dictatorial company announces layoffs, it just happens. But losing people also loses knowledge of the company, which is bad long term. In those cases, a worker cooperative could explain the situation, and make a decision together to temporarily cut wages INSTEAD of laying people off.
> And power/money builds more power/money. And because its a boss vs worker arrangement, the worker's power will invariably get whittled down year by year.
Unions used to solve this issue by occasionally dragging a boss out of their home and killing them in the street, or kneecapping scabs. To end such violence, we enshrined in law pretty strong protections for unions, so that they could fight in the courts rather than in the streets. A couple generations of prosperity later, business folk and their bought politicians who wouldn't know Chesterton's fence if it fell on them decided those protections were inconvenient. And so here we are.
Reminding just how bloody Union history was is kind of a heretical thing to mention here.
The CEO class thinks their lives matter more than the masses. But talking about history or giving a nudge that violence did work certainly makes the CEO fellators come out en masse.
The reason why we're seeing firebombing, shooting, arson, etc is because the public feels they have absolutely no legal way for grievances. And with the NLRB at 2/5 and no quorum, and inequality so extreme, its true. So its illegal. And violence absolutely does work - just you cant ever admit it. Violence is how the USA got the NLRB, and a decent legal process for grievances.
I still look at unions and companies, and the real problem is still the unresolved split between the 2. And the only counter to massive resources and money is violence. And we're already seeing it. Only good solution is worker cooperatives. It the only path that solves the arbitrary dichotomy of owner/worker, democracy in the workplace, and allays feelings powerlesness leading to mass shows of violence.
What is the tradeoff when layoffs are harder to do?
Layoffs happen when bets don't pay off. If you want a world where people are guaranteed a job, look at Europe. Also, they don't innovate and have no interesting industries.
They go hand in hand. Companies need to be able to innovate. And yeah that means hiring and firing teams as they see fit.
The second part of your proposal always, always goes unsaid: companies will hire less under a scheme where layoffs are harder.
Cut wages? That sounds horrible and demoralizing. I guess you've never led a team before. Please explain how that company would remain competitive in the marketplace when their salaries are 20% lower than a competitor? They lose talent, fail as a business, and suddenly everyone is out of a job.
> They go hand in hand. Companies need to be able to innovate. And yeah that means hiring and firing teams as they see fit.
Think about any job you ever worked at.
When layoffs happened, did the work ever get easier or done to a higher standard because of the layoff, or did the sudden loss of knowledge and manpower make your job harder?
When things were bad enough that layoffs were being talked about, who jumped ship, the low performers who don't really do anything or the high performers who can get a job anywhere?
When innovation happened, did it tend to come from the team that would be fired for screwing up, or the team that could confidently experiment and incorporate lessons from past trials.
The idea that weak labor protections is a key requirement for innovation doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Um, yes? Layoffs have helped. Teams are faster, products ship more efficiently.
Sometimes (believe it or not!) companies over hire. Or they try a thing and it fails. Or you need to pivot. (called "innovation")
Why is this so hard to understand?
America is, indeed, an outlier in terms of innovation right now.
Honestly, do you think high performers are ever mad that people just coasting are let go? Do you think a team has great morale when 20% of the team aren't pulling their own weight?
Every layoff is different, so your generalizations don't make any sense. But they are, in fact, a necessary part of an innovative market. The alternative is a company paying people to do nothing productive because they can't fire them.
Over-hiring is inneficient. If not being able to easily lay people off prevents that issue, it's a good thing.
You're making an logical leap that trying a thing and it failing, or otherwise pivoting requires layoffs despite clear evidence to the contrary.
I can tell you for a fact high performers don't want to see their coworkers laid off, and layoffs destroy team morale more than anything else.
The generalizations make perfect sense because what makes something a layoff makes all the conditions I described true.
I can't imagine any intelligent person arguing in good faith that there is no middleground between freely laying people off on a whim and paying people to do nothing because they can not be fired.
Please avoid strawmans when using this forum. Also the personal attacks weaken your already weak argument, FYI.
Nobody said layoffs are happening on a whim. Companies obviously would like to avoid them when possible. No idea what your argument actually is. Layoffs cost a lot of money to do. They don't just "happen". I have done them - the company, and employees, in the long term, were better off. Guess what? People are resilient, they don't need coddled their entire lives.
Yeah, overhiring is inefficient. Guess what is even more inefficient? Keeping those people on the payroll forever. 10 dollars > 5 dollars. :)
Please use your "functioning neocortex" to understand that if a company is limited to fire people in 5 years, they are much, much less likely to hire anybody. Please talk to literally anybody in a hiring role.
Your ideal, I guess, is to have people sitting around in jobs doing nothing (or less busy than they could be) so they aren't building experience, learning, challenging themselves, etc all because company XYZ is legally bound to not fire them? So people's feelings aren't hurt? What a sad, low-ambition, pathetic worldview that is. Nobody wants to work in that environment, that's for sure.
I'm not going to respond any more to this chain because you clearly don't have team leadership experience or have built a company, so are not equipped to engage in this topic at full throttle. Maybe when you start your company you can guarantee the jobs for life! Let me know how that works out for you. :)
American Companies stopped innovating about 15 years ago (AI does not count as innovation ). The last innovation that happened in America was cloud computing. Since then innovation happened in China, Korea and Japan.
I personally am reverting to early 2000 tech, because today’s American tech is unusable.
The average American would be far better off with union protections than with corporate “innovation”
There's a big difference between "All Workers" owning "All The Means Of Production" (Communism), and "Workers in a company" owning "Their Means of Production" (Worker cooperative). Your comment is attempting to smear and collapse the 2 very different structures as if they are the same thing. And they're not.
Communism is this weird monopoly/monopsony structure. Dont like what you do? Too bad, its the same owner you're working for.
Whereas with a worker cooperative, there could be 10's of thousands of them. You dont like one? You can go to a different one.
The part that makes no sense for me is men ending with smaller rates of dementia, given they had much less estrogen to begin with. Men have less incidence of dementia. Men also have much lager incidence of baldness. Did somebody already study if baldness and dementia are inversely correlated? I don't know, perhaps sunlight exposure in the scalp have neuroprotective effects?
Given the prevalence of baldness, and the downside of the condition for sexual attractiveness of its bearers, I suspect we will still discover some strong unexpected upside to explain why this trait was selected for regardless.
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