I sometimes wonder how many of the commenters actually read the article itself. All the discussion in comments is about residential properties when in the article it clearly says:
"
Another concern the report outlines is that the U.S. anti-money laundering regime is focused on residential purchases, when a significant portion of the cases GFI reviewed involve commercial real estate transactions.
"
Or another:
“When you talk about residential real estate, the heart of it is identifying who is the beneficial owner, [because] if you find out who the beneficial owner is, it also tells you who the criminal is,” Kumar told ICIJ. “In a commercial real estate investment, you don’t have to own the majority stake to be a criminal. You can own 2% of a $500 million property, and you are [still] laundering millions through it.”
In case of human rights, what would more advanced mean other than one that is more fair to all humans of a particular society or country?
More advanced human rights just simply means more fair human rights, it has nothing to do with chronology or recency. There are plenty of examples of countries that had more advanced human rights in the past and regressed and made things worse over time.
Easy example: Russia had much better human rights for LGBT community not so long ago, however, it has regressed and gotten much worse over last 10-15 years.
If you mean better, why not just say better? Using the word advanced implies that "progress" is monotonic, but you just gave an example of how it isn't. Some regressions may have seemed like advances at the time. We should probably just refer to "changes."
“Advanced”. “Fairer”. (In massive air quotes) lol. Like the advanced and fair culture that is responsible for all the permafrost melt this year? I dunno man, I think it’s the inverse of that. I think all those that adopted Capitalism are at the bottom of those subjective lists you just mentioned.
Companies pay different amounts based on the location due to market price differences for software developers not because of differences in cost of living.
If you relocate to Zurich or Vancouver from SF, highly likely most companies that re-adjust salaries will decrease your salary even though cost of living is pretty high in both of those places.
I think one of the clearest examples of this is London, where tech salaries are 20-30% lower than SF despite it being roughly as expensive.
My friends at Google say Zurich is a better deal that it might seem. Between lower taxes and moderately lower cost of living, your google salary goes a lot further in Zurich than it does in Mountain View.
"developers not because of differences in cost of living."
No, the primary driver of those differences is cost of living.
Vancouver is not actually a 'high cost of living' place - it's just the real estate.
It's supply and demand as well and since most people work 'local' and Van doesn't have huge and powerful software companies HQ'd there, pay will be less.
But cost of living is a primary factor.
The 'my wife is pregnant' thing isn't a fair comparison because it's an individual artifact, not general for a location.
The fact maybe a spouse is pregnant will 100% affect pay because it will affect the demand curve i.e. change the nature of someone's willingness to work at what salary.
It's one thing to whine about compensation but if engineers in Zurich or Vancouver want things to change they must vote with their feet and come to the Bay Area.
Either that or get VC funding on par with what's happening in the valley.
From Vancouver this is a fairly straightforward proposition (or as I understand it, was one pre-COVID). From Europe, it is _incredibly_ difficult to get a work visa for US. The most egregious example of the difference here is London vs San Francisco.
The cost of living is not crazily different, yet the entry level comp in SF is high senior level for most technical jobs. However, my experience is that the Bay Area has a lot of British immigrants (I encounter a new (to me) at least weekly at the large company I work at), so perhaps people are indeed voting that way.
Agreed, it probably is time for that deal to be dramatically improved.
Currently however, for a Canadian to move from Canada under a TN series visa than any of the visas available to Europeans, other than some limited cases such as diplomatic missions.
"Extraordinary individuals" only, max three years, tied to a job and an "event". Definitely not a path to living in SF. Do you know anyone who "simply" got an O-1?
While information is public on blockchains and everyone has same level of access to it, transaction execution is not democratized.
The premise of this whole reverse-exploit is that there are people who are extracting value by getting preferential treatment with their transaction execution by doing deals outside of the blockchain itself (which are hidden and not public by default).
Trading in exchanges doesnt happen in the blockchain though. But the exchanges provide apis to the order books and all the L2 data you'd usually pay $24k/yr for via a bloomberg terminal for the stock market.
Its specific to the kind of blockchain/DLT that it runs on.
If you use an DEX that doesn't rely on miners who can pick Tx then you dont have this problem.
For example the XRPL DEX does not allow any party to pick which order to execute. There is also no mempool where someone could look for bundles of Tx. A DEX order is, once submitted, added to the state of the ledger (added to the blockchain) and executed as soon as possible.
Weight loss and proper exercise will probably deliver 99% of the improvements for 99% of the people. Stressing about heat, radiation, micro plastics, or other random stuff seems like extra stress for not that much benefit.
Most people in Western world are either out of shape, or straight up obese. It makes sense that, that will have huge negative effects on fertility.
> Weight loss and proper exercise will probably deliver 99% of the improvements for 99% of the people.
In addition to be factually incorrect, consider how what you said sounds to the many people who are healthy, active but are having problems with something they thought would be easy. This is very stressful for many people, seeming especially cruel after years of worrying about accidental pregnancy, and the medical treatments are a figurative (and often literal) pain in the ass. Unqualified strangers taking the opportunity to offer judgmental “advice” is not something anyone wants even in general, and it’s certainly not more appropriate in this situation.
We spent about 5 years on this (and have a great 3yo). If anyone reading this has questions, feel free to ask.
At least in men, there is a very clear mechanism. If you have excess body fat, your aromatase may be overexpressed, and if so, you will convert more of your testosterone to estradiol. This interacts with the hypothalamus' negative feedback loop, lowering your GnRH, (and therefore your LH/FSH) making you less fertile and lowering your testosterone until homeostasis is achieved.
I was recently watching a video on Doublespeak[0], one of the types of doublespeak is to bombard the audience with technical jargon which means you automatically win, unless they know more technical terms than you do!
In your case, your comment does not mean anything to me (or probably 99% of the HN users). Instead of this, you could at least cite a reputable source for this claim, this would be 100 times more effective and also useful for the readers.
Cheers.
I get what you’re saying but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here at all. His main statement is that there’s an biological explanation which is perfectly comprehensible. Backing it with a link instead of stating the explanation himself may be preferable but that doesn’t mean he did it to shut anyone down or that it should have that affect.
I understand that and I really really want to believe them. But this biological explanation could be obvious (to a biologist) or could be heavily controversial (among biologists). A reputable source would be helpful for us the non-biologist to know that this is either common knowledge or this is the SOTA, recent breakthrough, or simply disputed theory. That's what I was trying to say. Cheers.
I found your tone entitled than the one you were responding to. No one here is under any obligation to spoon feed another. Comments are there, take it or leave it. In the era of search engines, if you care enough, you can do your own follow up.
I personally find this entitlement culture annoying. If one really wants more information and leads one can ask for that without a lecture about doublespeak
A reputable source typically does not help non-experts dilucidate whether something is controversial in the field, except if the document specifically caters to non-experts. But then the information is watered down and analogies strain the actual information.
Sometimes it will be useful to provide appeals to authority as a shortcut to skeptical verification of internet facts, but it seems wrong to attack the fundamental basis of clear communication - asserting a clear and concrete statement that enables you to independently check if it's true or who thinks the same.
We can't go around the internet citation-needing every statement; you should find the equilibrium of faith-disbelief-verification that works for you, that's the only thing that scales.
Ha, "pretty basic biochem/endocrinology", followed by a link to a 10-year-old study of 43 men which concludes:
"This study found obesity to be associated with poor semen quality and altered reproductive hormonal profile. Weight loss may potentially lead to improvement in semen quality. Whether the improvement is a result of the reduction in body weight per se or improved lifestyles remains unknown."
I did not say they are nonsense, or obscure. I said "technical jargon".
I said to most of the audience, this doesn't mean anything, and to those that this means something, they probably already know this anyways.
So, for the general public (non-biologists) you have to either explain it differently (at least don't use acronyms).
or at least cite a reputable website so that we, normies, know you are not trolling!
This is a forum for technical discussion. Use google if you want to to understand something and you don't.
It is unreasonable and not the goal of this forum use a level of discourse here so that all comments can be understood by general public. This a bunch of nerds chatting, not US Weekly.
I think your comment, particularly your use of the phrase "bombard the audience with technical jargon", is a much better example of double speak than then comment you're replying to.
rhinoceraptor gave such a clear explanation of the process, that I'd honestly pay for an entire set of bio and chem mechanic breakdowns prepared by them.
It's not that esoteric... spend the same amount of time you did on watching that Youtube video on reading about the topic. Alternatively, search for questions on Youtube and you will have a similar explanation read out to you from a selection of 40,000 different bodybuilders.
That video (which has nothing to do with biology, and is related to discussion and arguments, the thing we are doing now) is 16 minutes long. Are you seriously suggesting that with 16 minutes of reading biology I will know:
* What is aromatase and what is the relationship between an overexpressed aromatase and excess body fat
* What is estradiol and what is the possible reasons for converting testosterone to estradiol
* What is the negative feedback loop in the hypothalamus and what is the interactions between estradiol and the hypothalamus' negative feedback loop
* What is GnRH and what causes the lowering of my GnRH
* What is LH/FSH and why is it obvious that low GnRH causes a lower LH/FSH
* How are these related to fertility
All of this in 16 minutes?
IMPORTANT:
To be honest I am willing to read (obviously more than 16 minutes) to learn about this stuff, as you can see in my comment, I'm asking for something to read! a link to a place that explains these. Even if it takes more than 16 minutes. Of course, I'm sure somewhere on the internet these information exist. But just writing a claim without any citation, is not helpful.
Before asking for material to read you launched into a moral and self righteous lecture on doublespeak. I doubt whether that is the most effective or even a pleasant way to ask for information
Doesn't just about everyone outsource their judgement on a regular basis? Most people rely on others to do tasks they either cannot do at all or as efficiently because we trust that our doctor, lawyer, programmer, sysadmin, carpenter, electrician, auto mechanic, etc. has better judgement than we have time to acquire.
What makes that work is what the person you're replying to asked for: sources. I don't get medical advice from random strangers on the street, I get it from people who have credentials or organizations which hire those people. When I get a contractor, I'm looking at their licenses to assume that they at least know how to install a dishwasher to code.
Did you really? You understood the "very clear mechanism"?
Can you repeat the mechanism? Do you know what GnRH and LH/FSH are?
Does this comment prove to you that there is a biological explanation? Or does it say some technical terms that might be disputed? Maybe only a small portion of biologists think this way and the majority disagree!
I understand the English part! What I'm saying is this comment without a source doesn't prove a "very clear mechanism".
Note that I wasn't saying that it wasn't _ever_ true — only the 99% hyperbole. It'd be awesome if the solution was that simple and most of the couples I know would love to have something which could be done with that level of difficulty, expense, and personal risk.
Side question, any idea how being thin and inactive affect your sexual health? I'm not looking to have kids, but i've been slowly working on healthy activity primarily for my heart and longevity, but i've not heard anything conclusive on sexual health.
Searching for this stuff is difficult due to the lack of knowledge (on my side) and all the blog spam out there.
Yeah this is like people telling me my sleep apnoea will get better if I lose weight. Nevermind that I was underweight when I was diagnosed because my sleep issues had ruined my appetite.
I get that it will help a lot of people whose issues are caused or worsened by weight but those people will have doctors who can tell them, you don't need to make assumptions about my lifestlye, and even if you do it seems weird to assume I wouldn't have already been told that by my sleep specialist
I used to be really chubby, and increasing exercise barely changed it. My body decided to randomly change one day and the problem mostly went away. The body just plain has a mind of it's own.
But we are also not designed for desk jobs. Most of our ancestors sweated on farms or in quarries. One of the best pieces of evidence against Intelligent Design is that the designer forgot to design us for desk jobs.
In some communities, weight gain is a down-stream effect of "metabolic syndrome", and the "solution" isn't to count calories or exercise more - it's to simply eat _differently_.
Sugar is a particularly odious contributor to problems.
Like OP, my wife and I also struggled with infertility for a few years (two miscarriages, years of doing everything "right", and not getting pregnant.) We're finally pregnant, and out of the most dangerous time period.
Our traditional fertility doctor was pushing us hard to do IVF (we didn't want to), so we said "eh, thanks, we'll just take a break for a while."
I asked the doc if there was any association between diet and pregnancy, and she said no. I facepalmed so hard.
Might be worth skimming the notes to determine if it's worth reading the book.
Oh, and for others trying to get pregnant, and curious to learn more about endocrine disruptors and the effects of diet and metabolic syndrome on fertility (for men and women) I'd recommend reading _It Starts With The Egg_ [0].
This book walks you, the reader, though a lot of recent research, boils it down to a "do this/don't do that" checklist at the end of each chapter, it was perfect for my engineering brain.
Curious on your age range. We also struggled with 3 miscarriages and most of our friends had the exact similar issues and had to conceive via IVF. There were more IVF babies than natural pregnancies in my group of friends. We were lucky and didn't need to resort IVF. We all waited till we were past 35 to have kids. Our fertility doctor said age makes a huge a difference and professionals are waiting till later in their life to have kids which makes it harder conceive with a healthy embryo.
This is going to be the dominant driver for female infertility. My wife and I waited until she was 32 and I was 40 and we struggled for two years. Eventually we talked to a doctor and both got tested. I was in the 98th percentile for sperm health, but unfortunately her egg production was closer to a woman 10 years older. We did IVF and got very lucky on the first try, with one viable embryo, who is now a curious and amazing four-year-old.
> We all waited till we were past 35 to have kids.
Many people were grandparents by that age 150 years ago.
I too have many friends who waited until their 30s to have children. Most ended up in IVF (or adopting.)
Fertility (not precisely the right term, but one commonly used) charts — based on age — are very steep. After the peak in the early to mid 20s, it plummets very quickly. For women, anyway.
The low-sperm count issue, on the other hand, is very curious... not entirely sure if they have a grip on the true cause.
I celebrated my 32nd birthday a few days ago. I'm one year older than my wife.
We've been trying to get pregnant now for 3 years. We tried IUIs (very different from IVF, think "turkey baster" a few times, to no success.
Ironically, it wasn't until we stopped trying to get pregnant that we got pregnant. We did a one-week intensive marriage counseling program (strongly recommended, not cheap, worth every penny of the $6k cost) and it possibly healed so much in our marriage we got pregnant _the week after the counseling_.
After trying, with great adherence to all the best practices, for the prior 3+ years.
I blame in part the extremely high housing costs in US metro areas. We are both in tech, but also want to live in a nice place (Golden, CO). Housing affordability is a joke, I have no doubt that the price of housing affected our child-rearing plans.
We bought a house in Golden (barely. Inflation and all, it's a stupid rigged system oppressive to everyone.)
Now I want to fix the housing cost problem here in Golden, in Lakewood, and ultimately in Denver.
It'll take some years, but if all goes according to plan, I'm going to die, peacefully, in my sleep, in about 80 years, within 150 feet of where I'm sitting right now.
I've got time to work on these affordability problems.
I'm shocked that any doctor's first recommendation isn't starting to do fertility awareness with ovulation test strips. I got pregnant on the first try with our second kid doing that. It was much more challenging for the first one and we even talked to a doctor who suggested fertility drugs. Thankfully, those weren't necessary in the end. Oddly, after we saw the doctor, we stopped trying as hard to conceive, and then it just happened on accident.
Really glad to hear you got pregnant. It makes me so happy now when people do after finding it so hard. It’s a shame this info isn’t more easily found by most people.
I had the exact same experience with doctors just saying there was nothing a man can do to improve fertility. “It’s just genetic”.
I also second the case against sugar. I should have called out refined sugar specifically in my list. That was one thing I cut out 100% even in ingredients lists (this is tough. It’s in EVERYTHING. Even loads of savoury things that have zero business having sugar in).
Side pondering - I’ve often wondered if McDonalds got a really raw deal from Super Size Me (great documentary) and that it was just the super size soft drinks that were the cause of problems - remember the guy in there who has eaten thousands of Big Macs? But he never had the drink. And he was thin as a rake (dunno how many kids he had though!)
Thanks for your kind words! It wasn't until we had the miscarriages that all these people came out of the woodwork, sharing their stories with us, about how difficult it was for THEM.
I, too, have tried hard to eliminate all sugar. We're not perfect, but we're way past the 80/20 principle of diet improvement.
I only eat twice a day (sometimes once) and the primary meal is a mushroom/spinach/egg omelet, usually with avocado or sardines, some tumeric/curcumin powder from Costco sprinkled on top, EVOO/Coconut oil, and usually some cheese.
Zero sugar, technically even zero carb.
Dinner varies a bit more, biased towards avoiding things that can be metabolized into blood glucose. It was my birthday recently, my wife got me an icecream cake. I protested a little as I tucked into it. :)
It's amazing the effect that avoiding processed sugar can have, and a little intermittent fasting baked in.
When my wife and I host family, I always am struck by how much work breakfast is. Extra eating, extra dishes, etc. My wife doesn't do that eating schedule, but it works for me.
Re: Super Size Me and the sugar - that's a great point! The soda is a particularly odious offender, I'd love to see the effect of eating just the burger every day.
Allopathic medicine is a disaster, the overwhelming majority of the modern medical establishment refuses to acknowledge that diet has anything to do with health, where in reality diet is easily the largest contributor.
Western medicine: "What you eat is nearly irrelevant as long as you are not fat, at which point it's not what you eat it's how much and how much you exercise."
Also Western Medicine: "We don't understand why we've lost credibility in broad swaths of the population! Don't you see the degrees we've granted ourselves?"
My dad's a doctor, firmly rooted in the western style of things. He's blind to some of the ways western medicine's gotten it wrong. Taints the conversations we'd have, when I AM trying to get medical advice from him.
It's hard for him to get over me not wanting to take max doeses of painkillers, 3x/day, for a week straight, to "heal" lingering back pain.
I'm like "yeah, yeah, lets skip the meds part, and talk about healthy rehabilitation via strength training and stretching and all that". And he lectures me for my ignorance and resistance to "Established Medical Science".
While I tend to agree with you WRT to diet and exercise, I think this is a secondary issue to what's being described here, similar to how I think modern science and technology has skewed the natural selection process with a bias that may select for undesirable attributes. Some of this bias may be for good intentions (allowing less fertile couples to conceive) while some may have questionable outcomes (selection based purely on socioeconomic status). Again, I think these are separate issues. Efforts I worked with looked at effects of contaminants such as manganese artificially introduced in natural water systems but that's just one, there's dozens of concern.
The issue discussed in this article has quite a few biologists I've interacted with concerned which deal with products we redistribute or manufacturer back into the environment that may be causing these issues. Endocrine disruption is occurring in other species in the wild less or not clearly effected by the issues described above (selection bias, cultural biases in exercise/diet, etc.), and for all intents and purposes, seem to be going along with a sort of survival of the fittest model yet they're still having endocrine issues.
In the anthropocene era, it's quite possible some of our behaviors are causing this and it wouldn't be the first time: lead and CFCs come to mind in the past. We have what appears to be a smoking gun, but we still haven't identified the shooter. We should definitely improve the factors that we can like diet and exercise and look to remedy socioeconomic selection biases for reproduction but the issue at hand may be one you can't simply diet and exercise your way out of and we need to continue to investigate it and find the root cause.
"Some of this bias may be for good intentions (allowing less fertile couples to conceive) while some may have questionable outcomes (selection based purely on socioeconomic status)."
First let's not anthropomorphize nature, or natural selection. But secondly, in 1st world countries, the more money you make, the less likely you are to have kids! We've done a terrible job at incentivizing couples to have kids since women have entered and made up a good part of the work force, and it's hard to blame someone in a good career, married to someone in a good career, to take off 10-15 prime years of their lives to have children.
I think that waiting to have children until later (late 20's to early 30's) is a big problem in terms of fertility and successful child bearing. Unfortunately the human clock doesn't really jive with the "4 years of college, work a bit and then think about marriage and kids".
I don't have a conclusion except we might want to think about increasing the birth rates among high and medium earners in our populations where they are struggling, lest we become like Japan or other countries (some in Europe which depend on importing labor in order to satisfy demand)
I feel like a wealthier and wealthier population, slowly shrinking, might be the sustainable future we need. Yes there will be challenges, but geometric, or even linear, population growth of the human species is not sustainable.
Shocking to think that our society would discount the future for the present...
On a serious note however, babies and a growing population is an enormous advantage to a nation. I would think it would be massively popular to increase benefits to those who are having children. Full disclosure, I found out my wife is pregnant yesterday, but still.
Babies and a growing population is an enormous advantage only if there are enough resources for everyone and they are distributed in such a form that does not end up cause social infighting. Otherwise it just contributes to instability.
There are also women who are infertile due to no fault of their own (e.g. cancer, etc.), why should they be excluded from any resources whatsoever due to something that is not their fault?
>There are also women who are infertile due to no fault of their own (e.g. cancer, etc.), why should they be excluded from any resources whatsoever due to something that is not their fault?
For the greater good of others, taking one for the team.
I often wonder if it's something like car tire dust. All those vehicles eroding away the tire material which then goes into the air, soil and water. It goes somewhere.
This falls under the umbrella of "particulate matter" and is studied quite a bit. I'm not that familiar with particulates from road dust (specifically from tire erosion), but particulate matter is frequently studied (though not as much for endocrine disruption, at least not that I am familiar with):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particulates
> modern science and technology has skewed the natural selection process with a bias that may select for undesirable attributes
But that's hardly "modern" at all. Any improvement since the dawn of time that increases survivability for any creature that otherwise could not have lived and bred without it would lead to that result. Where does one draw the line?
Unfortunately, I have no idea. I just did EVERYTHING. I was more concerned with making a baby than figuring out exactly what worked and what didn’t. There are just so many potential things it would require a lot of testing to know.
It takes 3 months or so for sperm to grow, so on that time frame the exercise can’t have made a difference to your sperm quality, it was probably fine already and you just had to wait to get lucky.
Unless you’ve been trying for over a year that’s just a perfectly normal amount of time for it to take anyway
Overall this is good advice for anyone, so I think it's the best first step for anyone who's inactive or overweight. I'm not a doctor but I suspect this is how a doctor would approach it too.
I know it's anecdotal, but of my friends with fertility issues (3 couples who mentioned it to me), none are remotely overweight, they're regularly active, and they eat well. I'm sure inactivity and obesity are a major issue in regards to fertility, but I'm not personally seeing that.
Is it possible that endocrine disruption could be related to issues with physical fitness too? There are many factors, but this could also be one, perhaps.
There seem to be quite a lot of misunderstandings in this post. Not sure how familiar author really is with inner workings of crypto markets.
First thing first, is Tether sketchy? Yeah, pretty sketchy. But not for the reasons provided in the article.
USDT is the most traded asset against other crypto because it is the easiest vehicle to use for all sorts of arbitrage. USDT is available to trade with on every non-US exchange and it is the easiest asset to move around. As overall market size increases, it makes sense that demand for USDT is increasing because it is used in most of the trading/arbitraging/etc...
When looking for highest USDT/USD trading volume, it isn't Kraken that you should be looking at, but Curve. Curve is a DEX that does largest amounts of stable coin trading volume. Curve also has incredible liquidity depth. Right now, you can go there and exchange: 10 million USDT to 9.99 million USDC in a single transaction. USDC can be cashed out for USD very easily and is regulated not just by regular US regulators but also NY financial department too, which is the most aggressive regulator to ever exist probably. If you wanted to, you would be able to cash out billions of USDT to other NY regulated stable coins in a single day.
While USDT is certainly very sketchy, it is the dominant market player specifically because of its sketchiness (and due to it being the first one). USDT's independence from US regulators is a huge plus for most of the major non-US crypto players. Those players would be more worried about holding USD (or USDC) directly, because they are more worried about US government freezing their funds, rather than Tether going insolvent.
" Another concern the report outlines is that the U.S. anti-money laundering regime is focused on residential purchases, when a significant portion of the cases GFI reviewed involve commercial real estate transactions. "
Or another:
“When you talk about residential real estate, the heart of it is identifying who is the beneficial owner, [because] if you find out who the beneficial owner is, it also tells you who the criminal is,” Kumar told ICIJ. “In a commercial real estate investment, you don’t have to own the majority stake to be a criminal. You can own 2% of a $500 million property, and you are [still] laundering millions through it.”