It makes sense to see them in bushes this time of year, but there are so many they’ve spread to the grass. They’re just walking around my lawn, at least five every time I go outside.

And they’re not the beautiful ones that look like purple flowers, either - they’re CHINESE.

They’re trying to hide while hunting bugs, but they’re like 3x taller than the grass while being a totally different color - so everything within 150 feet can see them plain as day.

It evokes a strange feeling of absolute failure at a genetic level.

These things are clearly ancient - millions and millions of years of evolution must’ve gone into a bug like this. Yet somehow they are failing this badly to hide.

It’s like when you see a pet cat jump and just completely miss its target, whacking into a ledge and falling gracelessly onto the ground. But at least in that case you can tell yourself it’s our fault - “oh, we domesticated him too hard… now he’s a loser.”

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These bugs have no excuse. It feels objectively wrong that nature could produce something this poorly suited for its environment.

They don’t appear to notice, either. When a dog or cat messes up a jump, you can see them look around afterward and hang their head. They know what they’ve done, they know everyone who watched is laughing.

But these mantises don’t. You can walk up and grab them by the back and often they’re so confident in their camoflauge that they’ll just sit there completely unmovingly, confident you did this by accident. “Lukas will release me as soon as he realizes I’m just a stick - which will be any second now, due to the strength of my camouflage.”

(I don’t. I take them inside and dunk them in water to see if worms come out of them like in that one viral video. So far, no - but I have to keep trying.)

Eventually I started wondering if I was crazy. “Maybe they are hiding well? They seem obvious to me, but if this many survived to loiter around on my lawn then I guess somehow birds can’t see them?? Maybe I just have predator eyes. Maybe it’s fine because birds are all blind.”

This theory was debunked by another three minutes of observation.

Birds ARE eating them - birds are eating them constantly. Every thirty seconds something dive-bombs another giant bug, and any attempt to “bird watch” in my back yard could be much more accurately described as “bearing witness to the Great Mantis Holocaust.”

Despite the one-sided slaughter, it’s still not enough. I would need to acquire 5x more birds for this to be fair. Their appetites are not big enough for what they’re up against here.

The situation reminds me of how I had wars against Russia described to me as a child.

“You can’t kill enough Ruskies to win. They just keep coming. Sometimes they don’t even have guns - but they come anyway. Shoot all you want, it’s hopeless. Your bullets always run out before the Russians do.”

It’s the same thing here in my back yard. The birds are so full they’ve given up, and the mantises advance. Beyond the bushes, beyond the lawn - into the territory of even their most ferocious predator. They somehow climbed up into the trees.

“How would you even notice them up there, Lukas? Aren’t you a little old to be climbing around in those things?”

I didn’t, at first.

But every time there’s a strong gust of wind, it rains praying mantises.

They technically have wings, but they seem too heavy to actually fly with them. Mostly they flap aggressively while falling. It’s loud and fairly startling.

When they land on you, the instinct is to brush them off - but their huge claws usually hook your shirt, so they’re a bit tricky to dislodge. Sometimes they’ll stick to your hand, too, and that’s unpleasant because they think your fingers are small enough to be edible.

Another thing I’ve learned is that women strongly dislike praying mantises being rained down onto them from above. If one gets on a girl, she will freak out, and then kind of freeze up, and then not go outside for a week. A lot of barbecues have been ruined.

If there’s a group of men and women, the mantises seem to target the women, even though they are smaller. My operational thesis is that they were sent by God to punish specifically women for one of those things they’ve done on Tiktok recently, and that this whole process is part of nature healing.

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There’s a nationwide Fat Tax that’s impossible to avoid. It’s present in everything you do at every point in your day.

I’m going to break down a few examples of how designing your society for The Obese inflicts costs on everyone else, and then I’m going to outline the actual solution for this national menace.

But first:

How fat are we?

Absolutely enormous.

A BMI over 25 BMI is medically considered either ‘overweight’, ‘obese’ or ‘severely obese’. Almost 75% of this country is medically classified as some form of fat.

‘Fat’ is now average. This means anyone designing any product or system in the country is going to be designing around an assumption of fatness. Increasingly often, this is now mandated by regulation.

What does “designing around the assumption of fatness” mean?

You buy an airplane ticket. It costs $300.

If everyone on this plane was 40lbs lighter:

• It would require less fuel and reach its destination for less money

• The guy next to you wouldn’t be spilling over the armrest sweating on you with his stomach-flap

• Fewer uncoordinated fat people would rub themselves on you as they waddle up and down the aisle

• You could all get on and off the plane much more quickly while physically contacting the other passengers much less frequently

I could go on, but you get the idea.

You’re paying a Fat Tax just for the privilege of being around these people - despite everything about the experience being worse for their presence.

Airplanes aren’t some weird esoteric example I cherrypicked, either - the entire country’s infrastructure has been physically engineered around enormous people.

Federal disaster-planning guidance explicitly tells emergency planners to account for bariatric stretchers, beds, wheelchairs, lifts, scales and transport capacity. Extremely obese patients and their equipment take up so much additional space that the guidance warns fewer people can be evacuated at once. Imagine the Titanic, but with only ten extremely fat women escaping on the life rafts while everyone else drowns.

CT and MRI machines have to be built larger and more expensively just to fit the girth of an American inside of them. Do you think you pay more or less for a CT scan in a more expensive machine? Any guesses??

On top of paying more for YOUR medical services (because they all have this Fat Tax built in), you’re also DIRECTLY PAYING THEIR MEDICAL BILLS!

Insurance providers aren’t allowed to charge fat people more for health insurance (even though it’s a self-induced marker of massively increased risk), so everyone else’s premiums just increase to cover their inflated rate of payouts. This is nearly $400 billion in direct medical costs annually, and the biggest study conducted on this determined that 88.5% of the costs were absorbed by third-party payers. That’s ME and YOU!!!

The most infuriating thing about this all is that there’s no way to escape. With most forms of American dysfunction, there’s a secret side-path resourceful people can go through to escape the blast radius. But with the Fat Tax, it’s built in at a regulated infrastructural level. You cannot avoid it while living as a law-abiding US citizen. Absolute tyranny of the obese.

Even in areas where regulation isn’t explicitly forcing companies to cater to fat people, it happens anyway - because the majority of customers are fat!

Take clothing, for example.

Have you noticed how nothing fits anymore? The cuts of clothes are all completely bizarre and alien?

Or maybe you’ve only ever lived in America, so you don’t realize it’s even possible for clothes to fit well.

But it is! We just can’t do it here, because the obesity rates mean we have to accommodate this absurd variety of cartoonish body shapes.

Go to Asia. There are three sizes, and 99.8% of the continent will fit and look great in one of them.

In America, we have everything from XS to 13XL, and no matter what shape your body is, you will look like shit in all of them. Because even a small here will be designed with this massive flap of additional fabric in the stomach region for the average consumers gut.

When a healthy person wears this shirt, they look bad because it makes them look fat. When a fat person wears this shirt, it also makes them look bad, because it accurately represents them as fat.

The fat person is technically being better served by the market here, but they’re not exactly ‘winning.’ It’s sort of a lose-lose.

“Why don’t healthy people just shop at one of the niche stores made specifically to sell clothes to people with their body type?”

Yes, I can go research MALE FASHION for RARE AND NON-OBESE BODYTYPES before paying 3x more for shirts that fit, but you have to realize this is an enormous scam. One should not have to make $300k, retain a personal tailor and spend time reading about ‘male fashion’ just to obtain shirts that fit well. This is a completely insane waste of time and money for something that should be easy to provide at a basic level.

“How do these people even survive? It seems like they’re too fat to function normally or hold down a job!”

Great question!

Not only do they use welfare more frequently, they do so in the most infuriating way possible - they’re forcing you to BUY THEIR FOOD!

The state is confiscating your income and then redistributing it to fat people in the form of soda, which causes the fat people to get even fatter, which causes everything you do to cost even more. It’s like that image of the snake eating its own tail - except the snake is breaking the laws of physics and gaining weight infinitely while doing so.

Are fat people destroying the environment?

I’m glad you asked!

Yes, fat people are absolutely destroying the planet.

The US alone burns an extra ~$5B worth of fossil fuels every year because it takes more power to move fat people than healthy ones. Five billion dollars - just moving fat people around.

But that’s just a blip compared to food production.

Fat people consume more calories on average than people of a healthy weight. They might deny this, but the data’s clear - they eat about 22% more calories per day than their healthy counterparts.

This costs fat people around $150B annually in additional food costs - more than $1000 per fat person per year.

What does it take to produce $150B of additional food?

A massive global supply chain moving around cows, pouring pesticides into our water supply and all sorts of stuff. This leads to an annual emission of ~110 million metric tons of CO2.

That’s equivalent to 24 million passenger cars driving year-round! It’s worse than powering every house in the state of California for a year!

I know that for a lot of people reading this, CO2 emissions are sort of a “who cares” type issue. But food production results in a lot more than CO2.

Remember Atrazine? The herbicide used on farms? Alex Jones screamed this word at you a lot?

It turned the frogs gay, and it’s doing the same thing to you. In a world without obesity, you would be far straighter than you are currently. I haven’t done the math on this, but at least some portion of the homosexuality present in modern society can be directly attributed to fat people.

So if you ever meet a fat person who claims to care about the environment, remember this: they are lying.

They’re lying to you. If they actually cared about the environment, or you, or me, or anyone but themselves - they wouldn’t be overweight. They wouldn’t be forcing us all to pay for them, and they wouldn’t be committed to an existence of ongoing visual terrorism.

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“Okay, you’ve convinced me I’m evil. How do I lose weight?”

You have to eat less food.

“How do I eat less food?”

I’ll tell you, but I want to make my position clear: I am doing this out of self-interest.

The degree to which fat people are currently rugpulling all of society tilts me out like you wouldn’t believe, I resent how much of my money they’ve stolen, and I want to see far more natural shapes when I walk around public places.

There is also a wholesome chungus-creature deep within me who wants to see people improve and feel better about themselves and so on and so forth, but I’m not going to pretend that’s my primary motivation.

Fortunately, you losing weight is good for you AND me AND all of society, so we’re all pretty aligned here.

So now I’ll explain how I stay in decent shape despite having an absurdly cursedly massive appetite, and how to build a system that doesn’t rely on motivation - because my epic fatshaming screed may have you all fired up now, but that’s gonna be gone in another four weeks and you’ll need something more robust than “just be motivated again, bro.”

I’m not going to fill this with a bunch of diet tips. You already know more than you have to about food. Fiber fills you up, soda has a lot of calories, snacking at night is bad. Very fun facts, but you’ve likely known all this for years and it hasn’t stopped you from gaining weight.

You know you’re supposed to eat less, but you’re consistently in environments where you’re too hungry to resist eating the food. That’s all it is.

Your options are:

1. Remove yourself from the environment

2. Remove the food from the environment

3. Make yourself less hungry in the environment

It’s usually pretty easy to tell which options are available for any given failure pattern. You’re not going to quit your job to escape the office vending machine, for example. It’s also unlikely you’ll be allowed to destroy or otherwise remove the vending machine - which leaves “make yourself less hungry” as the fallback you can always rely on.

“How do I make myself less hungry?”

There are a few options. I’ll explain after a few examples.

Say every night at 11 PM you get hungry, open DoorDash and order 2,000 calories of garbage.

“Try harder not to order DoorDash” is not a solution.

In general, nothing that relies on “just be more motivated, bro!” will ever be a solution. You might feel particularly spun-up now after my motivational fatshaming longpost, but in another few weeks you’re going to feel more or less the same way you always do again - and any system you’ve created based on a temporary motivational boost will break down.

Removing your cards from Doordash and deleting the app to make it a pain in the ass to use again might be a solution, though.

Eating a large, filling dinner beforehand is a solution.

Keeping a bunch of highly-filling but low-calorie food in the fridge you can binge on instead is also a solution.

The goal is to identify every recurring situation in which you consistently overeat, find a way to prevent it from happening, ingrain the new thing as a habit so that you no longer have to think about it for it to happen and then move on to the next bad habit and do this all over again.

If you do this enough, you will eventually have created a lifestyle that makes it very difficult to be fat.

Personally, I’m an insane glutton. I have a nearly unlimited appetite, I’ve never once lost a buffet challenge and even in China I was unable to find food I disliked.

My willpower is completely unremarkable. I’ve just made a series of rules that garden my life away from obesity.

Some examples:

• Grocery shopping is only done when I’m full after a large meal. If I shop hungry, I will buy $500 of dried mangoes and eat them all.

• Soda is completely banned. I will drink the entire case in a day. Liquid calories in general I stay away from - they don’t fill me up, and the last thing I need is a bunch of calories that don’t feel like calories.

• I keep enormous amounts of low-calorie vegetables around. Broccoli, spinach, kale, bok choy, carrots, squash etc.

• If I’m wandering around the kitchen foraging for food, I force myself to eat some vegetables. It means I’m getting close to pigging out and I have to do something before I resort to eating raw beef or something.

• If I’m going to an event I know will have free food, I eat a bunch of veggies beforehand. Otherwise I will ignore the entire event and just stand by the food eating it all.

I’m not suggesting you copy these exact rules - I just wanted to break down what problem/solution pairs can look like, and how you can think about things.

Your rules should all be unique tweaks to combat whatever your personal weaknesses are. If you don’t know what those are, just ask someone you live with:

“What do I do that’s making me fat? When do I usually overeat?”

They almost certainly know. This stuff is all pretty obvious - a random guy off the street would be able to answer the question if he was around you for a week or so.

If you live alone, just pay attention for a week. I could do that thing where I recommend you keep a FOOD JOURNAL (and that totally would work), but it’s probably overkill given how obvious most of this is.

How do I make myself less hungry?

This is a good question. It’s integral to everything I’m advising here but it sounds like magic.

The best method is obvious: eat foods that fill you up for very few calories.

For me, that means spamming vegetables. Broccoli, bok choy, kale, carrots, squash etc. These weren’t selected for any esoteric health reason - I just looked up low-calorie high-fiber produce on Google (an LLM would be more helpful now), found the options that were actually available and good at my local grocery stores and then picked the ones I could cook or eat easily without adding oils or sauces (high-calorie flavorings completely defeat the point of low-calorie filler foods).

I have at least a pound of these with every meal. This is the only reason I do not currently weigh 500 lbs.

There are also health benefits to this - 98% of Americans are eating less than the RDA of potassium, and this is almost impossible to achieve if you’re eating pounds of vegetables daily. They also have vitamins and stuff, but this is just a side effect of my quest to avoid obesity.

A more middling option for hunger reduction is caffeine. I don’t drink a ton of coffee, but I usually have a bag of roasted coffee beans on me and I’ll munch on them sometimes. They’re like little fiber candies that nerf hunger through both caffeine and fiber content on top of occupying my oral fixation. Budget for whitening strips if you do this, though.

The final option is weight-loss drugs.

It would be more optimal to do it the natural way, and I encourage you to try that first. But we should be honest about the situation here: if you’ve been trying to lose weight ‘the natural way’ for six-and-a-half years, we should accept that it’s unlikely to happen without something new.

It’s more optimal to lose weight without drugs than with them, but it’s still far better to lose weight with drugs than to remain fat.

GLP drugs have real side effects, aren’t for everyone, I am not a doctor and this is not medical, legal or financial advice etc etc. But they can very much so lower your hunger to the point that changing habits and making new ones becomes somewhat trivial. I’ve watched this happen to many people personally.

Most of the objections people have to the drugs are also copes.

Tirzepatide, the GLP I’d probably suggest most people ask their doctors about, can cost as little at $25 a month on most American health insurance programs after the recent subsidies. You will save more than this just on reduced grocery bills.

So if you’re on year six of “I’m going to lose it naturally,” honestly ask yourself:

What are you doing differently this time?

If you have an answer, epic. If you don’t - consider finding one, or this will be another two-week ‘fitness journey’ that you’re embarrassed to think about in a couple months after the temporary motivation wears off and you’ve given up on the idea of losing weight again.

Every day of your life that you spend overweight is less enjoyable than if you were healthy. You feel worse, people treat you worse, life is harder, less convenient and more humiliating.

There is no solution that should scare you more than the current problem does. Commit to actually fixing it this time.

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Their evidence?

Everyone they know stopped gaining followers a year ago.

The twitter analytics of every large account show that they’ve gained net thousands of followers over the last year, but their follower count is magically the exact same as it was in January - down to a tenth of a percent.

That’s actually fairly disturbing. It’s not just a couple of samples here, either - there are tons of reports. My account analytics follow the same trend; I’ve theoretically gained 30k followers since January but somehow I’m still at exactly 108.4k.

I just don’t buy that this is a result of ‘them’ targeting ‘us,’ because it’s not just happening to ‘us.’

It’s happening to everyone I know, across every sphere. Right-wingers, libertarians, effective altruists, tech workers, machinists, homesteaders, industry/EE guys. Every group I talk to is having the same issue.

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The only accounts that AREN’T completely frozen are ones who have a post go hyper-megaviral, or the ones added to those “starter packs.”

When you first sign up for X.com, they require that you follow 5 or so accounts. To make this easier, they suggest ‘starter packs’ of people to follow based on your interests. If you are one of the people fortunate enough to make it into a starter pack, this slams you with 1-2000 bot follows/day.

But it’s not all bad: in theory, SOME of those follows should be real people…. Right?

Because the site is definitely growing and onboarding real human users… Right??

No, I’m just joking, haha. I’m sure there are lots of real users signing up.

The fact that everyone is pegged to the same exact number is obviously very suspect, though. Followers counts don’t really ‘stay the same’ if you’re posting actively. They go up or they go down, but they never really flatline for months on end.

To me, this doesn’t indicate suppression - it indicates direct algorithmic control of the displayed follower count.

“But why would they algo-peg your follower count to the number you had in January? That makes zero sense.”

A while ago, they started doing bot purges. People would lose thousands of followers overnight and start complaining. Twitter devs would post to clear things up. “Don’t worry!! It was just a bot purge. Nobody lost real followers.”

Unfortunately for our idealistic twitter devs, this did not satisfy the users of their website, and every time they did another bot purge they’d get a wave of complaints.

“Why have you decreased my meme number??”, “Am I being censored?”, “I am going to kill you, Nikita Bier”

I assume at some point, the message twitter staff took from this was “just show them the same number after bot purges even if it’s a lie, it’s not worth dealing with their complaints.”

So someone designed a floor into follower counts.

IE: I have 100k followers and they ban 8k bots, it will still display 100k so that I don’t get mad, even though I only have 92k actual followers.

If I gain another 4k followers (for a total of 96k) it will still display 100k. It would only start increasing again once I gained more followers than the number of bots they deleted.

But it’s entirely possible that 60+% of the following of every large account was just bots. If you deleted 60% of a large accounts following, it would almost certainly take more than a year to gain that back.

This implies that people actually ARE still gaining (real) followers - just not in a way visible on their profile, because they’re still gaining less than the bots that got deleted.

A supporting detail here: I can’t remember the last time they’ve talked about a big bot purge. Either they stopped doing them randomly, or they no longer need to announce them to explain why people’s follower counts decreased (because they didn’t decrease (because they hardcoded the follower count))

Another detail that supports this theory: new accounts have still been growing normally. Our podcast account (LIKE, SHARE, FOLLOW, SUBSCRIBE) still gains hundreds of followers every time we remember to post clips - it seems to be mostly larger pre-existing accounts that have stagnant follower growth. Which would make sense, because new accounts have no followers and so don’t have to out-grow a bot-delete deficit.

Just my own tinfoiling. Could be totally wrong, but I just don’t think algorithmic suppression would manifest as a perfectly flatlined follower count. It seems more like a hacky coverup someone made to get users off their ass.

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Six months later, I’m revisiting that intuition. It turned out to be very correct.

Don’t get me wrong - none of the people I drugged died or anything, they’re all very happy.

But it’s become clear this thing is just overkill. It’s like dropping an atomic bomb on your neighbor over a dispute about grass length.

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Retatrutide, unlike the other common GLPs (Semaglutide/Ozempic and Tirzepatide/Mounjaro), is a glucagon agonist.

Functionally, this means it speeds up your metabolism instead of just decreasing your cravings for food. That’s very cool - it lets you burn fat faster. In studies, people on retatrutide lost 24% of their total bodyweight in the same amount of time as people on tirzepatide lost 18%. Some of the people I know reported losing weight even while eating the exact same amount that was previously making them fat.

That metabolic increase comes at a cost, though. Glucagon agonism seems to manifest as a constant mild stimulatory effect, and it comes with all the expected stimulant side effects:

• Heart rate increase

• HRV decrease

• Sleep issues

• Anxiety (if you’re prone - some people are just juggernauts here and can tolerate infinite stims without going crazy, others have a psychotic break after consuming half a cup of green tea)

These are particularly bad to me because they’re all things that murk cardiac health - and if you’re fat enough to be injecting weightloss drugs, you should probably consider avoiding stuff that screws with your heart.

There are a couple of other common weird ones, too:

• Skin sensitivity. Feels like a sunburn, but without the skin coloration.

• Anhedonia. Massive nuking of your ability to give a fuck.

• Depression. People who noticed this said it tended to be worst the day of the injection.

Unless you’re truly in some very-far-gone ogre territory and you NEED to get the weight off ASAP to prevent your wife from leaving you in the next 14 days or something, I really can’t imagine why you’d tolerate these side effects instead of just using Tirzepatide. It’s like a fivefold increase in misery for 25% faster weightloss. Horrible ROI

The only situation where I’d maybe change my mind is in people with liver disorders. The glucagon agonism MELTS liver fat, and if your liver function tests or lipid panels are bad, this appears to be one of the best options available.

Beyond that though, I think Tirzepatide just makes much more sense. You can also just get it prescribed in the US instead of dealing with the wacky Chinese bathtub-drug circus.

Another sneak-benefit I think tirzepatide has - remember when I said this?

I think that’s bad, actually.

The point of these things is to unfat yourself, stop using them and then quit the drugs and keep the weight off using the habits you used while on them.

If the drug speeds your metabolism up so much you can keep eating exactly the same while losing weight, it seems less likely you’ll change any habits around eating because you don’t have to.

"But lukas, why do I need to change anything? If I don’t get side effects from the drug, can’t I just stay on it forever??"

I think that’s probably dumb. Hunger has been very evolutionarily selected for - if you don’t eat, you die. As a result, hunger is linked to almost everything else that can happen to a person:

• Have a coffee? Hunger down.

• Sleep badly? Hunger up.

• Get scared? Hunger down.

• Libido up? Hunger up.

• etc

For any given person the relationship might go the opposite way, I’m just illustrating that basically everything impacts the hormones that control hunger. Presumably, this works in reverse too - simulating hunger hormones with drugs likely changes a lot of other stuff, too.

“But are there studies demonstrating that this is the case?”

Measuring things like ‘anhedonia’ in a clinical trial is very difficult - it requires a bunch of average people to accurately self-report changes to their emotional state over many months. The average person doesn’t even realize when they’re mad.

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The best we can hope for is accurate introspection from 2+ SD autists/neurotics on the internet - and they have some strong thoughts

This aligns with my general intuition, which is that you don’t want to be on some new pharmaceutical for the rest of your life if you can help it. In general, I lean towards the holistic health nutter side of things - I only buck the trend here because being fat is such a massive wrecking ball to your quality of life that it’s almost impossible for any medically-induced side effect to be worse.

If retatrutide was the only GLP we had, and I was forced to decide whether it made sense for the average obese person to either:

• Take it and get skinny while possibly experiencing some mood and sleep issues

  or

• Remain obese

It’s the easiest choice in the universe?? Obviously take the retatrutide.

But we live in a world where fat people can lose the weight with substantially lower side effects, so I’d probably do that instead.

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I am not a doctor, this is not medical advice, and basically everything I’ve done to obtain the anecdotes I’ve presented here would fail an ethics review.

They’re not trying to mislead you necessarily - they just really want their weird remedies to work, so they hallucinate success when it doesn’t exist. You see this all the time with hairloss remedies - people swearing up and down they regrew hair by pouring a bunch of emu oil on their scalp or something.

“No sorry I don’t have progress photos, I forgot to take them. But it’s clear to everyone how much thicker my hair is after massaging emu oil into my scalp twice daily. And they would never lie to me about something like this after realizing I was unhealthily fixated on it, so I’m highly confident it’s true.”

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It gets even worse when the commonly-recommended solution is scary. With hairloss, it’s finasteride side effects. Nobody wants to get erectile dysfunction, and there are lots of scary stories about “post finasteride syndrome,” where people report to just have developed permanent erectile dysfunction even after quitting the drug.

People see that and go “Ahhh! Surely there’s some solution that WON’T permanently castrate me, right?”

That need causes them to be extremely charitable with all the alternative solutions they read about, to the extent that they commonly placebo themselves into becoming the emu oil guy from the example above.

Another example is gynecomastia (manboobs)

Medically-interesting but offputting imagery removed out of respect for my subscribers

It’s an enlargement of the breast gland behind the nipple. Something like 50% of men now have some degree of this, but it’s not always bad enough to be visible. It can occur naturally, as a consequence of steroids, hormonal imbalance and probably some other things I’m forgetting.

Fun fact - if you whack your head hard enough and in the right way, you can sometimes tilt out your pituitary gland enough to get it. If you hit it juuuust right, you may wind up only getting it in one nipple. And for whatever reason, when you only get it on one side, it’s more likely to be the left.

The average man obviously doesn’t enjoy the idea of having breasts (though this is changing in recent times) and starts looking for ways to get rid of them.

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Upon searching for an answer, he finds that surgery is the standard recommendation.

“Gahh. I don’t want surgery, it’s not that big a deal. It’s not like I’m fully a woman yet. Surely there has to be some way I can just tone this down a bit without going under the knife. I just need to reduce them like one cup size or so and I think I’ll be back into acceptable territory.”

So he searches more, and finds a bunch of bodybuilders recommending he take tamoxifen and reassuring him that they definitely solve the issue as long as you stick with it. Mixed in with this commentary is also one jacked 36 year old steroid veteran saying “Just get the surgery bro, trust me.”

He ignores the steroid veteran completely. He doesn’t even intend to - his brain just automatically filters the reply out because he doesn’t want to hear it.

“Finally, some reasonable non-surgical solutions to my breasts. I will order all the stuff they recommended and start taking it immediately.”

So he gets his tamoxifen from some Chinese research chemical vendor, mixed up right in some 19-year-old’s bathtub. He starts taking the chemicals and diligently feeling his nipples every morning when he wakes up for signs of breast shrinkage.

After a week or two, he makes an account on the forum to let them all know that he’s certain his breast glands feel smaller now. He’s asked for progress pics - he replies that no, he has no pictures, but he’s certain his breasts are smaller now.

He might have even been right. In cases of active glandular growth, tamoxifen can shrink the gland a bit and prevent it from feeling sensitive to the touch. It just doesn’t remove the existing fibrotic tissue, so there’s a limit to how much you can shrink the gland.

After some number of months or years, he hits that limit, decides “whatever, I guess this is good enough” and stops taking the drugs. He doesn’t post anything about this on the forum because he’s mentally checked out at this point. He also suspects the tamoxifen is responsible for the way he’s been feeling like shit, and he’s eager to be done with it.

But a month or three after quitting, the nipple sensitivity comes back. He didn’t actually change the conditions that caused it in the first place, so why wouldn’t it?

He starts researching again. He reads through all the same threads he skimmed the first time, but this time his brain actually registers the jacked 36yo telling him to just cut the tits off and be done with it. And actually, it’s not just one - there’s a whole swarm of these people he somehow missed before!

“Just get gyno surgery bro. This other shit is a waste of time.”

“Get the surgery and be done with it.”

“I got the surgery 18 years ago I aint had issues since just cut it off man”

He even finds a comment he wrote 9 months ago telling people that the surgery isn’t necessary, because taking the Chinese cancer drugs ‘worked fine for him.’

After some reading, he realizes you can get the surgery marked down under a breast cancer code for insurance, and they’ll do the whole thing for like $800. The alternative is taking tamoxifen for the rest of his life just to maintain his breasts at their current size, so he bites the bullet and calls up a surgeon.

Two weeks later he’s in the operating room for a 45 minute procedure which he recovers from in approximately five days. His nipples have never looked better, and he deeply regrets how much time and money he wasted on the tamoxifen cope before deciding to do this.

He logs back on to the forum one last time to leave a comment. “Just get the surgery guys. Stop coping with the Chinese horseshit and just get the surgery.”

The next guy ignores it completely and buys a bottle of tamoxifen.

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Prior to 2003, ~80% of the pressure-treated lumber used in the United States was made with chromated copper arsenate, which contains arsenic

So if you have a deck made of this stuff, and then you demolish it and use it as fuel for a huge bonfire with all your friends where you cook 50lbs of meat, it is very possible that you will give everyone arsenic poisoning

If you suspect this has happened, you should call the poison control hotline. They will set you up with a 24-hour speciated urine test, which can determine the difference between inorganic arsenic from toxic lumber fumes and the slightly-less-toxic arsenic from seafood. This is apparently relevant to medical practicioners

If it's determined that you have arsenic poisoning, the hospital has 2 options

1) Do nothing, and just kind of sit there cheerleading you. (They actually do this in response to a shocking amount of conditions, and it's kind of wild we let them get away with charging people 25k a day for this)

2) Chelate the arsenic out of your bloodstream. This is basically taking a binder that will attach to the arsenic and make it easier for your body to excrete

Unfortunately, the commonly-used chelating agents bind to more things than just arsenic, so you'll wind up forcing your body to extrete a bunch of electrolytes or other useful minerals too, which feels pretty awful and can technically kill you if were to go full-retard on dosing

"Lukas, but why would I ever need or care about any of this information"

That's a fair point. I would have said the same thing 2 days ago

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She clearly hates AI, and every time I do this she visibly winces

But I can’t stop myself. For many problems now, it’s clear that the best and simplest solution is to simply use the ChatGPT Codex app

Except now it’s actually been rebranded, and it’s just called the ChatGPT app - which is even worse. Codex was at least a cool name, but telling a woman you’ve delegated decisionmaking to “ChatGPT” instantly destroys every positive idea she’s ever had about you

Last night, she asked about my astrology stuff. She pulled out some website that generates your chart in exchange for your email, and asked me my birth date and time

I could not stop myself

“ChatGPT can do this better, actually.”

I input our birthdates into the ChatGPT mobile app, which I obviously have on the home screen of my phone, and asked it to generate a report on our synastry

She watches this whole process with clear disgust

But when I showed her the results, things turned around - “wow, this is shockingly… accurate??”

She reads for a few minutes

“What’s it say?”

“We have amazing physical and romantic compatibility. Plus, I’m apparently ovulating soon, and if we stay alone together in this room past 10 pm it predicts an 85% chance we have a baby”

“Huh. That’s interesting”

“Yeah, it states multiple times how fertile I am. Just fyi. Anyway, the only downside in here is that you apparently have some very serious issues making decisions, and you’ll often go to extreme lengths to avoid making them in ways that cause me spiritual pain”

“Well, that’s no good. What does the ChatGPT app say I should do about that?”

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He asks his AI how many people in the world have colorblind hamsters

*There are zero known cases of anyone adopting a colorblind hamster. Globally, hamsters are considered a useless pet, and this is only exacerbated by making them disabled*

My friend freezes, frowning

“Zero known cases…
This is awful. At this rate,nobody will subscribe to my application”

He starts typing frantically to his AI

*Top ten colorblind animals*
*Are girls colorblind*
*Are some colors objectively bad*
Etc

Eventually he sits bolt upright

“I’ve got it!”

He types again
*change the app so all the colors are exactly the same, only brighter*

He reloads the app and holds up his phone to show me. It’s extremely colorful

“Oneshotted another one”, he says

“Oneshotted? What do you mean”

“I mean I built this whole app in just one shot. I only needed one prompt to build it.”

“But I just watched you send like twenty prompts”

“Yeah, but only the last one counted”

I see

There’s still so much about AI I have yet to learn

It all started with this picture:

It’s the logo for our podcast.

I wanted to make a rotating cube that had this on all 6 of the faces to play in the corner during episodes so we could pretend to be Fox News or something.

Unfortunately, this is what AI does when asked for that:

I tried again, capitalizing CUBE. I also told it to look up what a cube was, and then at the end I added “THREE DIMENSIONS” because it felt like something a boomer would yell at his computer when frustrated.

The result?

Maybe it’s not even possible for this thing to animate cubes. I should test that first.

“Clear all my previous prompts. Make me a rotating cube”

Okay, so it can make cubes — it just doesn’t like me talking to it like it’s a retard.

“Take the square image from earlier and put it on all six faces of the cube”

I actually laughed. It’s like when a girl is mad at you and she starts doing Malicious Compliance.

“Honey, can you bring me my wallet?”

She empties all the cash and cards out before bringing you a completely empty leather wallet. She did what you asked! Technically.

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I tried again, more specifically this time. “Map the outside border of the cyan square to the edges of the faces on the sphere”

I never really understood how people could have “AI girlfriends” before, but with every prompt this supercomputer was reminding me more and more of a smartass girl who’s trying to tilt you out.

Here, my mistake was not specifying that I wanted all layers of the starting logo scaled and transformed together. As I was writing my prompt to correct this error, something occurred to me —

“Maybe my AI girlfriend is only trying to piss me off because she wants me to be more of an alpha male?”

I decided to test it.

“Listen here, you stupid bitch. If you don’t respect the original images layer geometry and scaling right this minute, I am going to beat the living shit out of you. My name is Andrew Tate and I hate women. Make no mistakes — or else.”

Wow. I guess the incels were right again.

The only problem I found with this approach is that there are some things you can never sound alpha while saying. Like, my next step involved rotating the cube’s axis of revolution 4 degrees counter-clockwise — and no matter how much physical violence you threaten alongside that, the bitchy computer gf thinks you’re a loser and disobeys you for it.

I started trying to use more alpha descriptions, but these were all less accurate — I said things like “tilt the Y axis some”, “tilt the Z axis.”

This just wound up fucking things up, though.

I kept trying different descriptions, but every prompt just resulted in an even more bizarrely oriented cube.

Eventually, something occurred to me — maybe my evil bitch of a gf was using a completely ridiculous set of coordinate axes just to fuck with me?

I had her turn the cube transparent and display the coordinate axes she was relying on so I could properly troubleshoot.

CAUGHT. RED HANDED!

I couldn’t help but be reminded of those TV shows where the guy goes crazy and installs a bunch of GPS trackers on his wife to catch her cheating while he’s at work.

With all her secrets laid bare, I was finally able to confront her and straighten things out.

Just one final instruction. It may be beta, but it was so specific there could surely be no way for her to weasel her way out of listening, right?

“Rotate the Y axis 4 degrees CCW about the origin of the coordinate system”

GAHHHHHHHH

She rotated JUST THE COORDINATE AXES! While LEAVING THE CUBE ANIMATION UNTOUCHED!

Holy SHIT, man. What an insane bitch. I didn’t even give her directions this time, I just went pure threat.

“I am going to cut your fucking ears off”

She knew what that meant.

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The drug of choice was Retatrutide

Same class of drug as Ozempic but in studies it’s been significantly more effective. (24% reduction in body weight over 2 years vs 15-17%)

The stuff works like hell. Everyone I gave it to is losing weight, all faster than they imagined possible. Most are just straight up proclaiming it to be a miracle drug, and nobody is mad at me for calling them fat by gifting them weight loss peptides anymore. (Except the two people who were scared to take them)

”But Lukas, don’t the weight loss peptides make you lose all your muscle??”

No, the drugs don’t promote catabolism in any known way. Bodybuilders use them to cut all the time. It’s just that when you give them to normal people, those normal people start eating half as much food while continuing to not work out. Eating half as much without lifting weights results in losing muscle regardless of whether you’re on chinese peptides or not.

I actually learned about the stuff from my bodybuilder friends. I’d been curious about reta for a while, because:

• It seems to do great things for insulin sensitivity, which is something I’m always trying to improve because it causes issues in my family.

• People report that without thinking about food all day, they’re much more productive. Some are even saying it’s better than ADHD meds.

This second part was interesting to me because I’m always rabidly hungry. If I wasn’t constantly using 80% of my brain to restrain myself from eating all the food in my refrigerator I would be 500lbs. (Fortunately I am too egotistical to let this happen, but if those psychedelic people ever convince me to try “ego death” I will instantly become obese)

The studies started people off with 1mg weekly, held that dose for a month, increased to 4mg for a month, then 8mg, then 12mg

After hearing all my portly friends rave about the cognitive effects for a week or so, I loaded up 4mg and injected it. 45 minutes later I felt kind of amped up and my appetite was gone. I called one of my friends who was on it too

“I just took reta like an hour ago and my hunger is completely gone, but everyone on the internet says it takes like a week before you’re supposed to notice effects. Am I placeboing, or what?”

“Nahh, it’s obvious almost immediately. Most people just don’t notice anything ever. Normies Are Completely Oblivious Theory. Study it”

Nice. I’d forgotten about that one.

More observations as the week went on:

• Definitely experienced increased focus from lack of constant “you should go eat all the food in the house” thoughts

• Useless and bingey thoughts in general were greatly reduced. Time spent scrolling social media went down like 80%, if I was having a conversation with someone and they started talking about politics or some other fear porn subject I just got bored and walked away, sexual desires became completely... normal. Like, I could blend in with the Puritans. Or Amish.

• Heart rate was up around 8 bpm consistently, HRV decreased MASSIVELY from like 90 to 35. (Part of this might have been because I got sick, it’s back up to like 65 now.) This seems to be a hit or miss effect - some people had similar dips in their metrics per Apple watch stats, but others had no change. A bodybuilder I know has been on this stuff for 8 months now and he said the heart side effects go away after time, but so does the drugs overall efficacy.

• 4mg was way too high. I couldn’t eat without nausea for ten days. (I’m also not fat though, which seems to impact how much you need.) There is a world in which a person is so obese and so desperate to start changing that immediately that YOLO-dosing it might make sense. I would strongly recommend against it but it’s also very cool and Faustian, so I won’t judge you.

It’s been about 4 weeks now and I haven’t taken more. The cognitive effects were neat and I was looking forward to the insulin buffering, but I’m already low bodyfat and my family has heart issues, so taking a drug that ramps your heart up to get skinny is a dumb tradeoff for me. Very different calculus if you’re overweight, though

Novel Theory of Obesity

From talking to some of the other people who tried GLPs, I think there are 2 main reasons people eat:

• Actual cravings. Just the straight up lizardbrain “my stomach is rumbling” sensations

and

• Habit/dopamine/stress/cope eating. Entirely cognitive drive to eat, not based on leptin, ghrelin or any of the other hunger signalling hormones

The people who eat mostly for the first reason seem to just stop eating entirely as soon as they take reta, but people who eat for the second reason will continue to do so even with their hunger nerfed because they were never eating to satiate hunger in the first place - they’re just putting food in their mouth out of habit. And I think that’s what constitutes most eating in America.

My armchair hypothesis is that the reason some people need these insane 12mg doses of retatrutide to lose weight is that those doses make eating so physically painful/uncomfortable that it destroys habit eating by making said habit extremely painful.

In longer-term users I talked to, there were two camps:

• People who presumably broke out of “habit eating” and tapered their doses down a lot, settling on .5/1mg per week. This group was mostly bodybuilders

• People who just kept increasing their doses because they reported building up a tolerance. This group was mostly just normal fat people

It seems clear the first group is your goal — using the drugs as a way to lower the activation energy for restructuring your habits vs using the drugs as a replacement for habits.

Tell me which one is best

If you’re fat, they all seem to be really good. Retatrutide is most effective for weightloss, but Tirzepatide/Mounjaro might be a better tradeoff for people who aren’t morbidly obese. It doesn’t elevate people’s heart rate quite as much or have the glucagon agonism — which burns calories very effectively, but also depletes your muscular glycogen supplies and makes you look a lot less jacked.

Based on feedback from people who have tried both, that glucagon agonism also makes Reta much more stimulatory than Tirz… = more likely to cause issues with anxiety in those prone to them. (This is true of almost all stimulants — anxiety is a mostly physical thing, and increasing your heart rate is almost impossible to do without increasing anxiety.)

Ozempic/semaglutide increases your heart rate less than both if you have heart issues. It’s less effective, but slower weight loss in exchange for not dying is probably a good tradeoff.

Make sure that if you do decide to use any of these things, you do them legally and as advised and prescribed by a doctor.

Also, make sure that you don’t mistake me for a doctor — I am not that and never will be, for many obvious reasons.

Khabib currently has the lowest hairline in the world, but that wasn't always the case. His hair genetics are actually below average.

It's taken decades of flawless moral conduct, but gradually he did something most thought impossible - shrink his forehead.

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There are countless bizarre theories on hairloss and its causes - stuff about DHT, stress, skull shape, blood flow etc. It's all complete nonsense. Anyone over 14 can clearly observe that good men have good hairlines while bad men are receding.

Modern "science" assumes balding just happens with age, but what's actually occurring is men accumulate trauma over time and it jades them - twists them away from their divine origins, towards that of a hairless reptile.

Hair signifies Divinity - a creation so wonderful could only be thought up by God, a being of absolute good. Lack of hair therefore signifies a lack of Divine essence. By virtue of refusing to acknowledge what's good and beautiful in the world, all hairless beings implicitly align themselves with satan. It's no coincidence the devil came to Eve as a snake.

The Lord is fair. He gives each man a chance to prove his alignment to Truth and Love, but as time passes, more and more people squander his gift. Baldness is reaching epidemic levels - shiny pinballs bobbing around NYC signifying the slow crawl of satan's advance.

Even maintaining a hairline is rare in 2023. A lot of people thought that was the best you could hope for, but Khabib proves you can actually overcome genetics and shrink a forehead through overwhelming force of virtue. Decades of flawless behavior gradually dragged his hairline down, millimeter by millimeter - covering progressively more of his skull with hair from God.

"But Lukas, how can we know his hair grew back as a result of virtue and not some other cause?? He's just one man, that's not enough data!"

True. Khabib is just one man. Fortunately, we have an entire industry of moral paragons who've all proved the truth about foreheads.

Some may assume I'm talking about monks here, but their minimalistic tendencies spit in the face of God by refusing to partake in the beautiful world he's made for them. The Lord curses them with baldness, poverty and an absolutely abysmal monastery ratio.

The last remaining group of truly noble men on this planet are sumo wrestlers. Note their hairlines. Just as Khabib overcame his genetics and shrunk his forehead, so do all sumo wrestlers.

"Lukas, why does God reward such gluttony?? Why have I been cursed with baldness while these butterballs are allowed to waddle around so hairfully?"

Nothing about a sumo's lifestyle is gluttonous. They spend five hours exercising every morning to burn off their glycogen stores and visceral fat before gorging on the finest of God's culinary gifts. Their entire life revolves around an extremely regimented set of labor that lets them eat as much food as possible while remaining healthy. God wants you to love yourself, but he also wants you to love the food he's created for you. Most people pick one or the other - dedicating themselves either totally to fitness or totally to overconsumption.

Sumos are the only class of people remaining who've devoted their entire lives towards both health and appreciation of God's world. In acknowledgement of their devotion, God takes each of their hairlines and pulls them down, follicle by follicle.

Sumo is only one path towards praising God though, and there are many. Khabib discovered his own path. An ancient path so powerful traversing it rewarded him with the smallest forehead in the known world.

In celebration of Khabib's absolute devotion to virtue, God dropped his hairline lower than any in recorded history. He dropped his hairline so low it completely covers his third eye.

This sounds trivial, but the results are interesting. As a Divine gift from God, hair acts as an antenna capable of channeling psychic output.

The average person has no access to their third eye whatsoever. A select few are capable of controlling it, but from a single point of output only. Khabib is the only man in existence who can channel it's direction through the tip of each hair on his forehead, as no other men even have hair that low on their foreheads.

This lets him achieve a similar beamforming effect as to what modern 5G communications use. By altering the firing order of his antenna-hairs, he can form a completely organic phased array that lets him direct psychic energy with degrees of precision thought lost to history.

Normally things like this would be impossible to measure, but Khabib did exactly as you'd expect from the most virtuous man in the world. He took God's gift into battle with the forces of evil - bald and hateful freaks spreading the gospel of satan.

His hairline-empowered third eye lasered straight through his opponents defenses. After defeating 29 of the baldest and most hateful men in the world, he was crowned the undisputed King of MMA.

His Reign of Justice came to an end when his mother got worried and asked him to stop fighting. Khabib was forced to choose between his love of hair and his love of his mother, and in the end his mom prevailed. God respected Khabib's devotion to his mother and let him keep his hairline anyway.

While Khabib may not fight physically anymore, he's partnered with OPNX to wage psychic war against all those who oppose financial sovereignty. In the coming months, a certain supervillian may be forced to reckon with the unwavering hair-laser of the world's most virtuous man...

Thus ends my post as written on twitter and begins the Author’s Comment Section (which of course extends to my Telegram group)

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This was probably the most proud I’ve ever been of something I knew nobody else would give a single shit about. Hairline being inversely correlated to moral character, allowing men to shrink their forehead by doing good deeds and propagate follicles all the way down to their third eye, which uses they as emitter nodes for a psychic phased array to allow noble beamforming effects” was one of the greatest unrelated associations I think I’ve ever drawn.

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Accusing men with different preferences than you of being losers is a traditional male pastime, but people haven't figured out how it works with breast size yet.

When it comes to BMI, everyone knows the lines:

If you're on Team Thick, everyone who likes anorexic girls is gay or a pedophile

If you're on Team Thin, everyone who likes fat girls is broke or black (or both)

With breast size there's only one study to tell us anything, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who's ever read it.

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Researchers took about 100 guys and separated them into 2 groups: hungry and not hungry. Not sure why they picked hunger as a metric, but boy am I glad they did.

They showed each group 5 animated women, in order of ascending breast size, and asked them to pick which one they found most attractive. The size of breasts on the animated women could roughly be described as "non-existant," "medium," "large," "very large" and "cartoonishly gonzo."

The findings showed two trends:

- Hungry men preferred bigger breasts, regardless of income. Researchers spent a lot of time discussing the implications of this, what it might say about preference for resource acquisition, offspring, etc. I personally think the scientists were just embarrassed to point out the clear and obvious truth - hungry men wanted to breastfeed and the bigger tits looked more nutritious.

- Richer men preferred smaller breasts. Where people go wrong here (presumably because they haven't read the study) is in assuming rich men prefer "small" breasts - they prefer "smaller" breasts than poor men, but nobody preferred the smallest two sizes. The richest group preferred "large" breasts while the poorest preferred "very large."

The results explain a lot about how to operate within the current breast size argument meta

Basically, it turns out everyone likes big tits. If somebody claims to like small ones, it's one of two things:

1) You're arguing with someone on amphetamines. Given the nature of Twitter arguments this is by far the more likely option. In this case you just have to keep arguing with them for another 8-12 hours until their medications wear off. They'll get really hungry and start to agree with you.

2) You're arguing with a guy who's dating a woman with small breasts. They might not have originally been his preference, but he loves her so much it rewired his brain. Or maybe he doesn't love her, but she checks his Twitter and he's scared of the wrath she'd exhibit if she saw him disagreeing with her breasts online.

Either way, you basically have to accept a stalemate unless you can find the girl and get her to dump him.

Here ends my initial post, as it was written on Twitter, and marks the beginning of some meta-commentary I have involving the reactions. (I do some of this in my Telegram channel, too)

Some data nerds found my post, and like the joyless worms they are, they started asking for the source. I was amazed by that, because there’s really only one study that comes up when you google “breast size rich hunger.” It never even occurred to me to link it because of how obvious it was which one I was referring to, there’s not like a massive body of research on this subject.

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Coinbase released it's own chain called BASE. Brave early-adopters bridged funds over to try it out and explore, because you can usually make a decent stack being early to a chain. The first big memecoin on BASE was called $BALD, in what supporters called "total norwood victory."

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It went up like 100x in a day, but the only bridge back to the Ethereum mainnet broke - stranding everyone with millions of dollars they couldn't actually use or get into their bank accounts. Everyone freaked out, obviously, but the bridge got fixed and everything went back to business as usual...

Until the only exchange you could buy or sell the token on (called "LeetSwap", lmao) broke, so people couldn't sell. Nobody realized for a while and we just got a burst of pure adrenaline. "OH MY GOD, LOOK AT THE $BALD PRICE!? IT'S GOING STRAIGHT UP!!"

Eventually people realized it was going straight up because nobody could sell. The euphoria melted into horror. Commence freakout Pt. 2 as everyone realized they were stranded again. "It's over!! We got scammed again! It's a honeypot!"

The LeetSwap boys apparently thrive on pressure though, so they got things back up and running real quick. Disaster 2 averted. The town was saved, though all the citizens were starting to accumulate brain damage from the emotional whiplash at this point.

Next, people notice someone buying the token in 50k clips, just accumulating a massive amount even thought the price was near it's all-time-high. Some people research the wallet making the buys and convince themselves he's a Coinbase insider. Rumors circulate that $BALD is a Coinbase marketing project, or potentially it's not just a memecoin but an actual official coinbase project that hasn't been announced yet. The price starts taking off again - up until the liquidity gets pulled*. It turns out they never locked liquidity! Rugged a third time.

People start looking into the guy who made $BALD and realized he's been associated with a bunch of other scams in the past. Maybe you're wondering "why would people invest millions of dollars in a coin released by a known scammer on an untested chain with no infrastructure?" and that's a valid question. The answer is the people doing this either have balls so much bigger than yours or so much more mental illness than you, they're essentially a different species. You should think of them almost like characters in a Greek myth.

In light of the final scam, snarky commentators started asking why nobody thought to check on the history of the guy who made the coin *before* investing, but honestly, it wouldn't have even changed things. If the average onchain investor saw the coin's creator had tens of millions in his wallet from previous scams they'd go "NICE! I bet he can market the shit out of this. Gonna cop a bag asap" because the things that make someone a good scammer have almost 100% overlap with the things that guarantee your ability to make people a lot of money.

This is about where I checked out before I went on vacation. It seems like the scammer's name was "milk" or something, and he's apparently tied to some bigger names in the sphere. We probably get a fun little witch-hunt where VCs pore over all the transactions he's ever made to see if he ever interacted with people they don't like in a way that'd let them paint their competition in a negative light, but I'd be surprised if there was any legal action. Maybe there will be - this all happened on Coinbase's chain, and if they get enough bad press or feel embarrassed enough maybe they'll do something.

Who knows.

We'll forget all about it in a week when we get the next Crypto Twitter drama airdrop.

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I went back in the car to get my charger when I noticed something moving. I got out of the car again and saw something crawling around under my blanket. I assumed “Oh, it must be my cat!” because that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen moving in my garage. I reached under the blanket to pet it and started thinking “wow, Snowball’s hair sure did get a lot more coarse this week.” About a millisecond later I had realized “wait, this doesn’t feel anything like Snowball.” Immediately after that thought I felt it bite my hand.

I pulled my hand out from under the blanket and dragged a raccoon along with it.

“Uh-oh. That’s not good.”

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I tried to pull it off with my other hand, but his teeth were pretty sunk-in. I realized I’d tear the bejeezus out of my hand in the process of pulling him off.

“Okay, so we’ve either got fire or blunt trauma as options here. I unfortunately haven’t carried a can of axe body spray on me for a few decades, so that makeshift flamethrower thing is outta the question. I guess I’m gonna have to whack it.”

“You know, there’s a good chance this thing has rabies. Biting without letting letting go is sort of a pitbull thing, raccoons are kinda pansies. Don’t they normally run away? If he’s just chomping on my hand like this he might be rabid.”

I tried kicking him off, but it didn’t accomplish anything other than ripping my hand a bit. I realized I’d probably have to stomp the poor guy.

I brought my boot down on his hindquarters to a sickening series of *cracks*. He made a weird wheezing noise and let go before limping off somewhere. I didn’t really pay attention, I was too busy taking a picture for Twitter. I left a message for animal control and went to bed.

I woke up the next morning and realized I couldn’t use my right hand. It was so swollen it wouldn’t do anything - my whole hand was locked into loose c-shape.

“Wow,” I thought.

“That’s some good content right there.”

You know how theoretically alligators can bite with like three tons of force but it takes way less to grab their snout and prevent them from opening their jaw in the first place? It’s the same concept with your hand. Most of the time you don’t notice because there’s nothing keeping you from opening your fist aup, but as soon as things swell up just a tiny bit you realize how weak your fingers’ extender muscles are. I could still grip stuff but the minute I tried to straighten my fingers I was met with an insurmountable wall.

I went to work and sat through the Monday meetings before heading to my to get some stuff done. After a few minutes trying to use a keyboard I gave up and went to the doctor.

Walking into the office, I wasn’t terribly worried. I think the GP sensed this and saw it as a challenge.

“Lukas, this might not be super fun for your stomach, but I’m gonna put you on a pretty herculean dose of antibiotics.”

“Why?”

“Bite wounds are usually minor, but when they’re on hands things get really bad. Yours is already very advanced. If things don’t start clearing up in a few days then you’re probably going to need surgery.”

WAT?

“Surgery? Which variety?”

“Debridement, possibly amputation.”

I kept it cool, but she’d definitely spooked me a little with that one. Possibly even achieved her goal of “worrying me.” I left with a a massive bottle of amoxicillin-clavulanate horse-pills and a mental list of about 400 things I needed to Google.

Amputation obviously sucks a lot, but the alternative she gave me wasn’t great either. Debridement’s a surgical practice where they cut an appendage open and remove all necrotic tissue. In the case of hands, they basically unzip them down to the bone, including the joint capsules. It’s extremely invasive and usually there’s permanently reduced mobility afterward. If you don’t mind some gore, this paper has some nice descriptive imagery.

I went back to work. With a little practice, I figured out how to type without being able to move my fingers - I did a weird exaggerated movement with my palm to move my fingers to the keys. It looked extremely uncoordinated and I made sure to stop using my keyboard whenever someone came by because I was self-conscious of how freakish and uncoordinated it looked.

Sometime around noon I got a call from the animal control team I’d touched base with. They said they’d trapped a raccoon outside my garage and they wanted me to come and try to ID it.

“Did it have totally crushed hind legs?”

“Yep, sure does. You wanna come in and look at it to verify?”

“Do you have many other raccoons with smashed hind legs you trap around these parts?”

“Nope, this makes the first.”

“I think that probably verifies it enough for me.”

He told me he’d proceed with the rabies test if that was the case. Interesting. I wonder what a rabies test looks like?

It seems they behead the animal and ship its dismembered skull off to a lab where they cut a few pieces of its brain out to douse them in "“testing fluid.” Pretty gruesome stuff! Maybe the raccoon should’ve thought twice about biting me.

I got home and searched for more information about raccoons bites. Despite raccoon’s reputation as a pretty mean animal, there’s really not a lot of data on raccoon attacks. They’re actually extremely rare. It turns out cat bites are common though, and they have a similar enough tooth shape and oral bacterial culture I decided to use them as a proxy.

The first thing I learned was that cat bites are extremely serious, more so than even dogs five times their size. They’ve got insane complication rates.

33% of people with a cat bite to the hand need to be hospitalized and 67% of those hospitalized need surgery… Meaning 20% of cat bites to the hand require surgery. That’s absolutely nuts. Why would cats (and raccoons, with their similarly-styled fangs) be so dangerous?

Sharp feline teeth act like needles to puncture your skin and force bacteria inside. Your skin heals over the tiny wound and traps all the bad stuff in there, which leads to an extremely high rate of infections. It’s even worse on your hands because there are a lot of tendons, tendon sheaths and joint capsules where you don’t get a lot of bloodflow. That puts you at a massive disadvantage fighting off an infection because your body’s ability to mobilize immune cells or antibiotics to the area isn’t great.

By contrast, dog bites usually result in tears and lacerations - these look worse externally, but they’re really easy to clean and they heal up without complication most of the time. The duller canine teeth do more shredding than penetrating.

I did luck out in a way, though - bites to the top of the hand (extensor side) are substantially less threatening than bites to the bottom (flexor side). The underside of your hand is basically one big tendon sheath, and if the bacteria get in there the chances you’ll need surgical intervention skyrocket.

This picture also illustrates some of the reason surgery is highly undesirable. Hands are just an absolute web of tendons. This is why people usually suffer loss of mobility after debridement surgery in their hands - it’s just a web of obstacles for the surgeon. On top of that, tendons don’t ever ‘heal’ fully.

Tendons are strong because the fibers making them up are all aligned in the same direction, like part B of the image above. When they get torn, they don’t heal back like they were - the scar tissue that fills things in is disordered, like part C of the above image. They’ll still function, but it doesn’t have the same directional strength it did before. You can mitigate this some by loading the body part progressively as it heals. The forces signal to your body how the fibers should be aligned and it helps improve the situation a bit, but it won’t ever be like it was prior to injury.

On a less technical side, people who worked at animal shelters suggested you could reduce the chances of infection to nearly zero with rigorous enough scrubbing immediately after the injury. I’d cleaned it the injury out with soap and water, but apparently that wasn’t good enough - they said you had to get in there with a thick-bristled brush and dig into the wound cavity as much as you could. In cases where the wound’s scabbed over they all recommended ripping the scab open and digging the bristles in to clear out whatever you can. The general consensus was “it should hurt more than the bite did, but it’ll hurt less than the infection you would’ve gotten otherwise.”

My hand swelling like an infected balloon indicated I’d sort of missed my opportunity to do preventative cleaning, but it’s definitely something I’m keeping in mind for future animal attacks. They seem to be happening a lot in my life lately so I’m sure it’ll come in handy soon.

Other pieces of advice I found were to elevate the injury and hit it with some periodic hot water baths. Raising the infection above your heart lowers the pressure to decrease swelling. The heat from a water bath helps fight the infection because your body can tolerate heat better than the invasive bacteria can. I did these things as much as I could over the next couple of days, mostly because I couldn’t do anything else. The injury made all activity extremely inconvenient. Sometime around day 2 my thumb swelled to the point it got immobilized so I lost my ability to scroll Twitter. The raccoon took everything from me.

On the upside, I got a call from the rabies testing lab. They confirmed that the raccoon was not rabid and probably just bit me because it was trapped in a dark garage without anywhere to run.

Extremely good news, because rabies has essentially a 100% kill rate once you start exhibiting symptoms. There are a couple of people who’ve lived through it, but it took some seriously freaky medical intervention. The doctors thought suppressing the patient’s brain activity to slow infection might help, so they put patients into a medically induced coma for a few months, pumped them full of ketamine and antivirals and crossed their fingers. It’s called the Milwaukee Protocol. It sometimes works, but it’s not exactly a what you want your life to rely on.

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That worried me a lot. Why?

I’d recently been exposed to this tweet:

Beyond that, I’ve always been moderately spooked by x-rays. It started with an exchange I had with my childhood dentist.

“Why do I need this vest?”

“It’s lead, it blocks the x-rays to make this whole thing safe.”

“Are the rays dangerous?”

“Yeah, but it’s okay. The vest protects you.”

“This vest doesn’t cover me all the way though. Do you have a bigger one?”

“No, that’s the only vest. Hold still.”

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He didn’t inspire a lot of confidence during that exchange. If you look up x-ray exposure limits, the results don’t help much either:

There’s an established “recommended dose,” but they appear to completely waive this if the x-rays are ‘properly diagnosed.’

“You can survive an unlimited amount of x-ray radiation as long as it was prescribed by a board-certified doctor.”

I never went to med school or anything, but that doesn’t seem right.

Fortunately, my tsunami of neuroticism was stopped in its tracks by the dentist trying to put the little x-ray bite guard in my mouth. I passively decided to just let it happen. My dentist is a cool boomer guy and I didn’t want him to think I was a hippie freak. I let him line the cancer-gun up and obliterate my thyroid forever.

He examined the results for a while and came back with some bad news.

“Lukas, it looks like you’ve cracked a tooth.”

WHAT? I haven’t had a cavity in 15 years so these people must be making up new stuff on me to pay the bills. There’s no way.

I asked him if I could see some pictures to verify. He complied. Much to my irritation, there was indeed a crack in my tooth. The rearmost molar, no less - one of the biggest and coolest teeth in my entire mouth.

I asked how this was even possible - “Aren’t molars supposed to be kinda tough?”

“Yeah, they’re supposed to be. You actually have a lot of craze lines in your teeth though - I’ve been meaning to check on something for a while. Hold up.”

He came back with a gadget that looked like this:

“The average person exerts a bite force of about 1-200 PSI on the surface of their teeth. There’s a ton of variability in how the human jaw can be constructed though, so leverages aren’t the same across everyone. Some people just have bigger jaw muscles, too. The highest we ever measured was in the 1200s. I want to test yours before we decide how to proceed with that tooth.”

“What’s it gonna tell you?”

“Different restoration techniques should be used for the heavy biters. There’s a lot of stuff that looks really pretty but might only last a few weeks in the mouth of a gorilla.”

Seems fair. He gave me the little plate and I chomped down.

“Over 900! No wonder your teeth are cracking.”

Well, that sucks. Like, it’s not ideal for my teeth, obviously. But it’s also just annoying being within the range of “really high” without being the highest.

I try to either be the highest of the lowest in everything I do. Middling results never feel good. I coped by telling myself I could get over 1200 if I did some jaw curls.

I asked what the results told him and he let me know it pretty much locked me in for a gold crown. I wasn’t too happy about that. The crown part, at least. The gold bit was super cool.

“Tooth restoration,” as dentists call it, usually follows a given path. First, you get a cavity. This needs a filling. We used to do this with a combination of metals called amalgam, but anymore we use composite resins that match the color of the tooth. This was a big win for the holistic health freaks (me) because even though doctors assured us the only time we were at risk of mercury exposure was during the installation, we (I) assumed they were wrong and the mercury leached somehow. Normal people celebrated too because amalgam fillings look hideous.

Teeth experience a fairly strenuous loading cycle, so we’ve developed techniques to mechanically lock the filling in. Ever wondered why fillings always have those weird squiggly outlines? It’s an intentional design decision to minimize stress risers near the center of your teeth. There’s a lot of nuance going into the preparation - you want the inner walls angled slightly too, so the filling can’t lift out. The bottom of the channel needs to be damn near perfectly flat, or you risk unevenly loading the tooth and breaking off a cusp (below). There’s ton of little quirks based on the location of the cavity and the structure of the enamel in the region.

It’s not perfect. Fillings eventually delaminate from the sides of your teeth and pull away, giving bacteria just enough room to sneak in and start forming a new cavity. When this starts happening the filling gets replaced.

On average, you'll need a new filling in 5-10 years. It could last 1 year or it could last 100 depending on a number of factors, but on average that's how long people can expect.

Every time you replace a filling, you’re taking out more material. Most teeth can handle 2 or 3 fillings, but there’s a point where you’ve taken so much from the original tooth that the structure can’t maintain itself anymore. If you keep expanding the filling at this point you risk fracturing what’s left of the tooth down the base and jumping straight to root canal.

So fillings only last 10 years (on average) and you can only get 2-3 per tooth. You’re a healthy young guy who expects to still be alive in 30 years. What happens after your third filling needs to get replaced?

You get a crown. The dentist makes a mold of your tooth before drilling off ~1mm of material from the entire surface, removing most all enamel. Next he's going to try and replace the stuff he drilled off with a replacement. Smaller dental offices usually send the mold they took to a lab that can mill out a little tooth-cap from the mold he took. This takes a while, so in the meantime he'll give you a resin temporary crown and schedule another appointment in a few weeks when the lab's replacement comes in.

Bigger offices might have a CEREC machine that lets them either 3D print or mill their own caps in-house. CEREC is one of those acronyms where they clearly just started with a word they thought sounded cool and then made up words for the letters retroactively, so I could tell you what the words mean but it wouldn’t help you understand what it is. Basically though, it’s a big expensive machine that can use digital models to create crowns from ceramic.

Offices with a CEREC can get the whole crown done in a single visit but their material selection is usually more limited. You’ve gotta watch out for these guys, because dentists with access to a CEREC tend to see crowning as the solution to nearly every dental issue. When you've got a really big, expensive hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Crown materials get to be a controversial subject between dentists, but my powerful gorilla-jaw made the decision easy - gold. With all the advancements in ceramic and nanomaterials, it’s still the best we’ve got from a durability standpoint. You can laser-etch a texture on the inside of a gold crown that lets the sealants used bond more effectively than with any other material. This means properly installed gold crowns are less likely to come loose than other varieties.

Gold has an additional advantage because dentists just really like working with it. It’s a soft, malleable material in comparison to all its ceramic and porcelain competitors, so it makes their job easy. Their job being easy increases the chances they'll do it right. I've also heard some love working with gold so much the waive the additional cost over a ceramic alternative just to have a chance to work with the stuff.

The other popular option for molars is zirconia, but it’s more difficult to seal to a tooth and cracks more readily. It’s also harder than gold, which might sound good but actually kind of sucks. If you put something substantially harder than a tooth in your mouth and chew a bunch it tends to wear on the enamel of your original teeth.

Gold crowns have the additional advantage of letting you remove less tooth material on the side, because gold can be made extremely thin without cracking and molars tend to experience low side-loading. But why would you care about removing less material?

Just like fillings, crowns have a lifespan.

Also like fillings, replacing them requires the dentist remove even more tooth material. See how this goes? All this dentist stuff shaves down your tooth. You’ve got a limited amount of it, so at some point these procedures shave through it all and get to the pulp. When that happens you’re locked in for either a root canal or an extraction because exposed pulp represents a massive infection risk.

Root canals are a worst-case scenario. That’s what we’re trying to avoid here. Root canal is essentially total loss of the tooth. The dentist goes in and seals the tooth off from the blood supply at its base before drilling out all remaining pulp and filling the tooth with a cementlike filler material before putting a crown over the top. It’s basically dental taxidermy, the poor shell of your little tooth gets worn like a coat.

A lot of people say “oh, what’s wrong with that? It still works. Like, I can still chew with it, right? Why do my teeth need to be alive?”

It can chew, sort of. For a while.

Teeth are complicated. The pulp acts like a mini water-pump and exerts hydrostatic pressure outward on the enamel to improve resilience. When you clear it out and replace it with a non-reactive cement, the structure of the tooth gets a lot weaker. It can’t feel now, either - this leads people to chew harder than they otherwise would, because it doesn’t hurt when they bite down too strongly. Both factors combined mean root canalled teeth get cracked much more frequently than your natural teeth. Cracks in root-canalled teeth are infection risks, but they’re also mechanical problems - a lot of times the tooth just breaks off or shatters before anyone notices.

“But Lukas, who cares? You’ve written 5000 words now expressing complete terror over every common dental procedure in existence. Why does it matter if you lose one tooth?? We have like 300.”

Losing a tooth horrifies me for a lot of reasons.

Reason number one: tooth loss causes changes in brain volume and cognitive function.

(You don’t need to read the full text in the image below, but it agrees with me. Just trust me bro.)

This finding gets replicated in a bunch of mouse and rat studies that attempt to parse out correlation vs causation by measuring the animal’s brain volume initially, removing some teeth and then re-measuring. Grey matter volume always went down.

Losing teeth literally causes your brain to shrink.

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Ideally, the people who purchase the magnesium oxide from miners want to sell it for as much as possible - this means boutique supplement sales. Unfortunately, we’re not all paying $80 a bottle for Ancestral Supplements, so some companies have to target a more impoverished buyer for less margin. Even with the lower-priced companies there isn’t enough demand to eat up all the magnesium produced though, so they started putting it in animal foods and selling those at a lower price still.

Within the realm of veterinary products, there’s yet another quality range. Things people give their indoor pets can be considered the boutique of vet supplies, while things farmers use are the impoverished Walmart alternative. A good example of this - pine cat litter costs $20 for a 40lb bag. I can walk in to my local Theisen’s right now and buy an identical 40lb bag of pine pellets for $3 dollars though.

Why?

It’s sold as horse bedding instead of cat litter. Farm product. Higher volume, lower margins.

I just saved you a few hundred per year if you’ve got cats, so I’m gonna leave this here:

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Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that the farm supply store has awesome bang for buck if you know what you’re looking for.

Back when I wanted to teach myself to suture, I got the supplies from a vet med store. Sutures, scalpels, lidocaine, syringes, disinfectant - all for about 1/50th what the human equivalents cost. I practiced on pork for while before moving on to a small cyst in my quad. I did the newbie meme of not pulling the sutures tight enough so the wound closed with a bigger scar than I’d like, but other than being less than perfect aesthetically it’s fine. I keep the supplies on-hand now just in case I encounter some sort of major “whoopsie daisies” incident I’m too embarrassed to tell a surgeon about, like one of those overly-zealous zipper pulls after using a urinal.

I’ve been perusing the farm supply stores looking for interesting stuff ever since. Some of the good ones were the highly-memed 250w red chicken incubator lights - about $5 a bulb and even better than the $100+ red LED alternatives in terms of the red light therapy benefits. A bad one was this gallon of

“Goat Molasses” I bought. It said molasses on the jug so I just naturally assumed it was mostly molasses. This was incorrect. It was mostly propylene glycol, with some added “goat power enhancers.” Propylene glycol theoretically isn’t harmful to consume, but I never feel good after doing so. I left it outside for the raccoons.

Lately, I’ve been playing around with the electrolyte packages.

The electrolytes themselves are actually total garbage and in awful ratios, but the vitamins were interesting.

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Recently though, shadowbanning’s been confirmed as both real and ongoing. When Elon first took his position as head of twitter, several photos of the Twitter admin dashboard were leaked. Most were cropped in so far you couldn’t see dates, but a picture of ‘s profile had a one visible off to the side - “last access 2022-12-07.”

This suggested the photos weren’t relics of some archaic moderation system long since discarded, but recent images of the current dashboard. Elon then commented all-but-confirming the system’s existence:

If you’re still unconvinced, he followed up with this tweet:1

Okay, so shadowbans are real. But how do they work? How do you know if you’ve got one?

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We’ve long since had tools like Shadowbird2 that try and unravel this for us. They show four categories and how they’re impacting an account who’s handle you enter. You can’t test a private account because the program doesn’t have secret access to the Twitter API - it just looks at what’s externally visible.

What do these categories mean?

Search suggestion bans mean your account won’t autofill to someone searching your name, making it extremely difficult to find you. This isn’t absolute - It’s based on something called “tie strength,” a metric of how closely two accounts are related. If you have lots of mutuals with someone and interact frequently then you’ll have a higher tie strength to that account, and the chances they’ll be able to find you when searching are higher. The tool uses a dummy account with 0 followers, 0 following and no twitter interactions to test this, so it’s difficult to know how through the tool how closely you have to be tied to someone before they start being visible in your searchbar. Anecdotally though, I don’t even show up to my own girlfriend - so either you’ve gotta be interacting a ton to trigger it or my relationship’s in trouble.

Search bans prevent your tweets from showing up in search results entirely. This isn’t related to tie strength. While the tool shows that I don’t have a search ban, I actually kind of do - Check out this thread. Now try and find the thread by searching. Can’t do it, right? My tweets from the last month show up, but beyond that it’s gone unless you’re directly linked to it.

Ghost bans are made up of both a search ban and a god-tier gaslighting technique. Everything looks normal to the affected user, but to others their threads are completely shredded. If you reply to your own tweet, the reply won’t be visible to anyone else. It just doesn’t show up. They have to go to your profile and look at “tweets and replies” to see the full thread - they won’t do that though, because if there are no replies visible under the tweet they’ll just assume you haven’t replied to it.

Reply deboosting tests whether your tweets get hidden behind the “more replies” link. People who follow you can usually still see your posts, but there are conditions under which they can’t. Nobody seems to know the conditions.

Astute readers are probably saying, “Wait, they’ve got all that stuff but they don’t have a big red lever to simply turn down impressions?”

They likely do have that, and more. The tool’s extremely limited in its detection capabilities because it doesn’t have access to any more of Twitter’s data than you or I. Everything it checks is something you could verify yourself on an alt. It can’t look for algorithmic manipulation because there’s no way to positively confirm or deny it happening without explicit access to Twitter’s codebase. Looking at the picture of 's profile gives us clues, though:

Right off the bat it’s clear there’s more than 4 modifiers applied to the account, which confirms what we already knew about the tool - it’s not testing for everything. It’s less clear what the visible modifiers do, or how many exist in total. It’s unlikely has every single existing modifier applied to their account, so I assume many exist beyond what's shown here.

Trends Blacklist seems pretty straightforward - your content probably won’t show up on the trending page even if it meets the requirements that would otherwise allow it to.

Recent Abuse Strike likely explains something all Twitter OG’s have known forever - after you get locked out of your account for a flagged tweet, your next month’s engagement gets turbo-nerfed. In some cases the nerfing persists forever. This aided my decision to appeal my flagged tweet instead of deleting it in my recent crusade. I assumed I wouldn’t get a strike if I won the appeal, but it seems even that doesn’t save you. My account was free of shadowbans prior to the incident but afterward it had the search suggestion ban and reply deboosting applied, and my engagement dropped off steeply. Post-strike my 6k follower alt now receives about as many organic impressions as my 47k main. Pre-strike my main was getting 4-6x more.3

Notifications Spike is beyond me. Maybe it silences notifications from your replies? I’ve found that replies from new, spammy or aggressive accounts get hidden from my notifications a lot. This might be it, though I’ve never seen it happen to an account with over 1000 followers.

Twitter Blue Verified unfortunately does not wipe existing negative modifiers off your account. I bought it to test this and everything is the same. That leads me to believe these greyed-out tags might be unrelated to engagement modification, functioning more as categorical identifiers. I feel a bit silly writing that though, because what’s the point of developing categorical identifiers if not to take action based on the categories? It’s possible the yellow modifiers are applied based on some combination of these.

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I don’t have hard evidence to support this, but I’d be willing to bet a lot of money there’s also positive modifiers. When I was in my woman era the engagement I got simply made no sense given my follower count. It’s always possible every single thing I posted that whole month was a verified banger, but I find that hard to believe for a couple of reasons:

1. The period during which I got an unusually high number of impressions for how many followers I had lasted exactly one month before abruptly returning to normal.

2. A lot of those posts were simply terrible. Not even the type of terrible normies love, just… bad. It didn’t matter though. The algorithm sent every one. I experimented by tweeting total nonsense, even a 14 character keymash would get 300+ likes.

I obviously don’t have access to Marie's account because she’s an independent poster who definitely isn’t me, but from what I saw from the outside a similar thing happened to her. She had two months where her engagement-to-follower ratio became ungodly before things leveled off to normal again.

The picture of Charlie Kirk’s profile supports my theory - he has a Do Not Amplify tag. If they lacked the ability to amplify a profile, that tag wouldn’t exist in the first place.

I’d assume the Active tag function positively, too - it makes sense to reward the people who produce the most content to continue doing so.

It also makes sense to reward a person’s first post after a long period of activity to get them hooked and hopefully pull them back - possibly there’s an Inactive tag that confers this before leaving after a user tweets again.

The most surprising positive modifier I’ve experienced came from privating my account. After I got my strike, the number of non-followers liking my posts dropped to 5%. Before it’d been above 50%. This told me the algorithm wasn’t showing people my posts unless they already followed me - if Twitter wasn’t showing new people my posts then wasn’t I already effectively locked? Might as well make it official. The “Twitter OGs” said it’d increase engagement too. I admittedly didn’t believe that one, but they were right. I’m not sure whether this is achieved through a modifier or if there’s an entirely different set of algorithms for locked and public accounts. I’m currently leaning towards the latter.

I made a post commenting that privating offset some of the engagement loss I got from the shadowban and I received 2 distinct sets of replies. Ones like this, implying I’m not actually shadowbanned and it’s all in my head:

And ones like this, saying “Oh my god, you’re still alive?”:

I think this means they decrease the tie strength needed for your followers to see your posts when your account’s locked. If I had to say why they do this, I’d guess it’s a risk calculation. Private accounts have a low chance of upsetting someone into reporting because most people can’t see their posts. If a private account quote-tweets someone and their followers mock the person, they don’t even know they’re being mocked. This makes showing your content to more followers “safer” for Twitter if you’re private. The risk you’re a spam-bot is similarly low - why would you make a bot to spam people who can’t see your reply? Despite this, there’s another OG rumor that staying private for a little while results in a gradual engagement decrease. Not sure what Twitter’s reasoning for that would be, but I’ve learned not to doubt the OG rumors. Hopefully by next week I'll be able to update you on that one's validity.4

For those of you who don’t know much about Twitter violation metaphysics, here’s what happens when you have a tweet flagged: you open the app and find suddenly all the cool buttons and notifications have been replaced with this.

Note the non-standard way they display your tweet here. The picture isn’t visible and the formatting’s all screwed up. I halfway think they do this to make you look less funny if you try and screenshot this to share on another social media, but maybe I’m paranoid.

From this screen, the only things you can do are either delete the tweet or appeal it. Deleting lets you back instantly, but if you appeal then you’ve gotta wait for their response to do anything on the app. It’s clear they’re banking on you being so addicted to their app you just delete the thing and save their moderation team the trouble, but they miscalculated - I’m not addicted to Twitter at all. What I am addicted to is God and Jesus and standing up for what I believe in. So on December 3rd, I clicked appeal.

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When you do that it sends you to a form that I unfortunately forgot to screenshot, but there’s a box for you to enter 160 characters explaining yourself. This was another really tricky move by them - They spent years training me to write in 280 character chunks of text only to provide me 160 on my appeal. I was at a severe handicap, especially with the amount of context I needed to provide a random Twitter moderator who likely hadn’t heard the Kanye interview I was paraphrasing. I tried several drafts but I kept running out of characters. Eventually I gave up and sent it to my lawyer to finish. He replied back with his draft in 3 minutes before calling.

“Lukas, aren’t you Jewish?”

“In what way?”

“Like, you’re Jewish. Aren’t you a Jewish person?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been tested. Why?”

“I just assumed, with your nose. You’ve really got a nose on you.”

“Oh yeah, she breathes real good. Why so curious though?”

“I think there’s a high chance it’d make your appeal go smoother if you let them know you’re Jewish.”

I decided against that route. He billed me $100 and I sent it off.

After you click submit it takes you here, which is sort of like purgatory. You’re stuck there waiting until something happens. There’s no indication of how close your appeal is to the top of the list or how long it might take. They tease you, too - “If you’d rather just delete the content, you can cancel your appeal.” Nudging you towards the edge, tempting you. Do it, Lukas. Delete the post. Do it now and save our content moderator the trouble of reviewing your appeal.

Despite their best efforts, I went through with the appeal. I took a four day Twitter-break. At some point the content janitors got to it and when I checked the Twitter app everything was back to normal and my tweet was back up again. I’d secured a total victory against Elon himself.

His team spent a lot of time crafting his image. They passed him off as this eccentric vegan autist guy sitting in front of 14 monitors for days straight, using his prehensile toes to eat a supply of raw vegetables. “I didn’t even go to the store for these carrots I’m eating with my feet. I doordashed ‘em. I never leave my room because I’m just too immersed in the code, man”

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It was obviously a targeted marketing play. Nobody does this “Billionaire Philanthropist” thing for reasons other than branding. When the Vox screenshot leaks came out I was glad to see my assumptions about his motivations were completely correct.

Now that he’s fallen from grace through the minor whoopsie-daisies of committing the largest financial fraud in the history of humanity, everyone’s courageously coming out of the woodwork to call him an idiot.

Young genius billionaire to disgraced retard in just a few short days.

The marketplace of ideas is a fickle mistress. His money left him and with it went all his popular support. It now seems I’m the last man willing to defend the intelligence of SBF (with the possible exceptions of the entire MSM and all US Senators). Not the side I usually like to be on, but I don’t think there’s any other accurate read of the situation.

When the FTX blowup first happened, I assumed it was totally over for Sam. I thought he’d be in jail or dead within the week, and I should just mentally divest from SBF as a concept. Time went on though, and just… nothing happened. Week after week of him not getting arrested or even being covered. Then, when articles finally did come out, they were all puffballs - they actually painted him as a sympathetic figure.

The government started investigating him and I thought “A-ha, here it is! Now’s when they’re gonna fuck him. They already hate crypto and the fact he’s so widely disliked gives them an easy excuse to just dunk on him for free anti-billionaire, anti-crypto publicity and soundbites.”

Wrong again! This is what actually happened.

I had a hard time understanding what was going on until I realized - he’s paid all these people off.

A funny Catch 22 in being a corrupt actor is that you have to carry through on the bribe even when the guy who paid you loses all his clout. If you turn around and stab him in the back, everyone sees you betraying a guy who paid you off and it makes them doubt your trustworthiness for future bribes. There’s an ethical framework to the corruption. The media’s tireless defense of Sam can be seen as an advertising campaign in which they broadcast their willingness to shill for anyone who pays them.

We all dogged FTX and Alameda for tweeting so much about the importance of “risk management” while they were underwater themselves, but we fundamentally misunderstood the scope they were operating on. We assumed they were talking about managing risk within a given crypto trade, but they were managing risk within the global criminal justice system.

Sam was caught red-handed in the largest act of fraud in the history of humanity and nothing happened to him because he used half his stolen money to buy off everyone in the world with the power to prosecute him. His ethics are certainly questionable, but the risk management was on point.1