Why do they even have quotas? We are talking about humans here.

I don’t know how one can even avoid it? Especially if you work as white collar worker - it’s injected in just about every application on the job. This is why I think the bubble is almost guaranteed - it’s practically at the level of a spelling checker in that it’s a commodity that certainly has its uses, but you still cannot rely on it, and there is seemingly little to distinguish the various options. Also, there seems to be a limit to the amount of data they can feed these models.

I think there is a business model to be had, but right now I’m getting very much the same kind of vibes we had just before the dot-com meltdown…just who is going to be paying out the kind of money that is implied by the current valuations of these companies? If the various players think they are going to be able to gouge the shit out of companies they got hooked on this slop, I would think most companies might flee to much cheaper, or even just host their own open source models instead. It doesn’t take much.

Preserves it?

Prior to becoming vegetarian, I remember reading a book meant to be paired with Bowflex, but it could be really applied to any general weight training program. He apparently was a body builder while going to school and thought he had to take lots of protein powder. One of his professors challenged him to measure the protein in his urine, IIRC. He was surprised that he was basically pissing lots of money away. The author obviously had a pragmatic counter to all the protein hysteria that was prevalent even back then.

Also, as you point out - the kidney stone risk.

Oh, and the Atkins thing, LOL. I remember that, too. I’ve often wondered if the manner of his death resulted in not hearing much about it for a while, and then, what seemed like an Atkins remix - the Paleo diet started to become the next fad.

I cannot tell you how many people I knew on the “paleo” diet were gobbling bacon like no one’s business, telling me it was way “healthier” than eating “rabbit food”. Never mind that even according to the supposed diet, bacon is not on the list, LOL. I saw the same thing on Atkins, though I think bacon was on the list of things that were okay to eat. Honestly, I just think some people want a permission structure to eat food that is so very obviously horrible for you. I mean, bacon? Healthy? It doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

I guess the thing about these fad diets is this, and of course it’s anecdotal, but I cannot name one single person that has been on one of these things for decades. Paleo, keto, Atkins, carnivore (lol), etc…I don’t know anyone that did it for more than 6 months to maybe a year. There are peopleI know personally that have been vegans or vegetarians for decades. Large studies can be done on groups like Seventh Day Adventists, large populations in India, etc…I don’t know of any such thing for these fads…

Wow, that’s a wild grift. People are so gullible. I have no idea when and how the protein thing started, but it seems to somehow be getting even stupider.

Wait, this guy was some kinda sooper-dooper narcoterrorist from a cartel, but they released him?

What happened?

I am so ashamed of this country right now.

“May contain worms”

Eh. I honestly think that’s the real sign of the truly rich. Not sure how much Bannon has, but you’ll notice that the centimillionaires and billionaires don’t tend to spend a lot on truly useless signifiers of wealth like suits (or stupid sneakers that are way overpriced, or absurd clothes that advertise their own brand so you can be a walking billboard for someone’s clothing line, etc. - that’s for the underclass to aspire to, generally) and other baubles.

At least I don’t see many of the men doing that. The women that have access to this wealth may do it, but it might be about trying to keep having access to that wealth, if you know what I mean.

You’ll see some millionaire celebrities/music artists engaging in this sort of dumbassery, I suppose. It’s a cliche of the nouveau riche to engage in buying up useless and pointless fashion.

The people that have true fuck you money? They tend to dress like shit and don’t seem to spend much on clothes. Honestly, I get it - who are they trying to impress? They aren’t trying to climb any corporate or social ladder. It’s actually kind of a power move - they can wear whatever the hell they want because what else is anyone going to do about it? Dress codes are for the lower classes.

When it comes to Bannon, I think he’s not quite in that stratosphere, but rubs elbows with such types. I think his brand at this point is to look like some bum that just rolled off a mattress under a bridge and sauntered to his current location. You think he would maybe trying to climb the socioeconomic ladder and dress the part, but…?

Oh yes. The marketing people have hit the absolute jackpot on the protein myth, that’s for sure.

I’m just surprised that Tyson or others have not started selling specially-branded chicken breasts (with EXTRA PROTEIN!) for all the gym bros that throw back lots of chicken breasts as-is. I haven’t actually looked, maybe they are already doing that.

I remember having a bit of chuckle over the “protein bars” in the 90s and instead of laughing, maybe I should have started my own version of these candy bars protein bars to sell to marks consumers.

Yes. Yes to all of this. The silly bro science from gym rat types has infected a lot of the public mind, that’s for sure…

Another corollary to this is the one people use is that “but I’m an athlete”. LOL, no. Just because you have a gym membership and go for a bi-yearly jog does not make one an athlete. People seem to have severely perverted that term for one, and secondly, except for the very most extreme of athletes, the protein in the typical diet (omnivore or otherwise) is probably more than sufficient.

But yeah, if someone has done even one pushup in the past year they think they have to maximize their protein intake to keep their muscle gains, bro!

Yeah, if there is one (uncontroversial) thing to cut out of your diet it’s probably soda. I have not verified the claim above, but adding all that refined sugar into your diet in a way that doesn’t even curb your hunger is bound to spell trouble.

PepsiCo said it also plans to accelerate the introduction of new offerings with simpler and more functional ingredients, including Doritos Protein

Oh, FFS, this shit again. Holy shit I am so tired of the obsession with protein. You’d think there was some kind of shortage or that this was a miracle macronutrient.

Protein is now like Idiocracy’s electrolytes.

It was already crazy stupid having conversations about things like vegetarianism prior to all this dumb marketing (and never mind the fad diets like keto and carnivore and paleo and ancestral, JFC), but now it’s like you have all that background noise to deal with when the topic of being a vegetarian comes up - “do you supplement with PROTEIN? You don’t? How are you even alive?”

/facepalm

I definitely do see pockets of this among liberals in my anecdotal experience, going back to the 90s. Prior to that, other than Amish and Mennonites, I never really heard of people being anti-vaxx.

One thing I did notice is that older liberals (boomer age) would openly mock the younger liberals that were doing the “I’m not vaccinating my kids” thing. I think that is because some of them may have seen or heard things and it stuck. A lived experience/wisdom kind of thing. If you were old enough to see or hear about the situation before vaccines, you were old enough to know better and that younger people were just being morons. Listening to a centerfold when it comes to autism and vaccines instead of, you know, actual experts.

The harder you mandate it, the more people will get nutty about it.

I don’t know that for sure. We had decades of norms long before this shit started in the 90s. Those norms resulted in most people not really even questioning it. Sure, you always had a few on the fringes like the Amish and Mennonites, but they also have minimum contact with the public anyway…

I think the craziness probably resulted from -

1. Primarily - vaccines being a victim of their own success, ironically, along with the way the culture pushes aside older people and the wisdom they may have. People don’t see these diseases and their effects and assume, incorrectly, that they don’t need to vaccinate. Older generations that did see this and were/are still around are largely ignored by some of the younger generations, probably mostly really getting going with younger Gen Xers, and getting progressively worse with younger and younger generations. It’s all too natural for every generation to think they are uniquely different than everything that came before, most especially when they are young. Even in the 20th century, marketing and advertising has always made this narcissistic tendency of the young worse than it already is, but now with the atomization of everything and narrowcasting of so much content, this has been weaponized to an extent never seen before. The more ignorant and younger populations get anecdotes from others about how they didn’t vaccinate and didn’t get sick and instead of knowing that is because of everyone else doing their work for them (herd immunity), they think it’s because they are not really needed. I remember my grandmother (Greatest generation) and mother (boomer) both getting quite annoyed when they started to see this phenomenon in the 90s. They were both nurses, and this royally pissed them off, and rightfully so, because this kind of ignorance among the young is dangerous. But again, the culture, now more than ever, worships the young. Old people are to be ignored and mocked, never learned from. Saying old people are just “stuck in their ways” is used to dismiss any wisdom that might be passed on. So here we are…my mother and grandmother are both now gone, and I guess one blessing about that is that they don’t have to watch this clusterfuck unfold.

2. I think the 'net is partly to blame. People with like interests can find each other and start really maximizing those interests, which includes nutty conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism. It’s not like it’s all high-minded scientists and intellectuals are the only ones finding each other…the nutbars find each other and probably work to push each other’s Overton window to even further extremes.

3. The phenomenon of more people being diagnosed as on the spectrum. People wanted something to blame. Even if the more obvious answer might be that screening has changed over time, at least some people felt that vaccines were the real reason…

A completely preventable disease, and here we are.

All because we have so many stupid people in this country…if Democrats ever get a decent majority, I hope they bring back vaccination requirements with a vengeance, and for public schools and working in hospitals and things like the military and so on, close the loopholes for people that have “religious” objections to basic science and medicine.

Don’t like it? Too bad. Citizenship also comes with responsibilities.

I sure hope every one of them gets doxxed, and people are able to track what each and every one of them did under this shithole administration.

I agree. I hate that education is ONLY valued in what it might do for a pipeline to a job.

I remember telling people about UBI and the coming automation and the possibility of AI coming for a lot of jobs. I’ve been saying this kind of thing since early to mid-00s, if not the 90s. People looked at me like I was crazy, for the most part.

It’s not like I’m all that prescient or brilliant or anything…I just happen to read.

Even now, when it’s very obviously eating into jobs, there are lots of people still mostly following celebrity gossip and doing fantasy football picks or whatever and still seemingly oblivious…

Those jobs are all getting automated. And jobs that used to pay decent wages like trucking and being a taxi driver are slotted to be automated away, too.

Same for many, many white collar jobs that were supposed to be the path out of this trap of poverty that the rust belt and other places were thrown into, starting in the 70s. A whole lot of MBAs think that they need to get rid of all the “excess” people on payroll…