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[Il Palazzo]

Human skin is not a smooth manifold. Ask any virus.

[Max™]

Yo momma so fat if she wore a belt she'd risk falling under her own Schwarzschild Radius and collapsing into a black hole!

[TD1]

That was singularly ( ) bad.

[Kagus]

My favorite is still the classic: "Yo momma so fat, when she hauls ass she gotta make two trips"

[Starver]

Topologically, we are all coffeemugs.

Not true. A coffeemug would not have (or would only have) a nostril or the other nostril, to start with. Two-handled teapot, then. Before you add the tearducts (two more), and a woman technically has a trans-fallopian space that I don't think exists between tesyes. So teapot with four more handles than usual. Not sure about eustachian tubes. Probably not. Lungs don't change anything (unlike the vills of fish), nor normally belly-button, but an active piercing of the belly-button (or indeed other places, common or less so) would add to the count to arbitrary degree.

[MrRoboto75]

They're developing pills to cure loneliness.  Such an american way to solve the problem, really.

[Trekkin]

They're developing pills to cure loneliness.  Such an american way to solve the problem, really.

Technically "they" (by which we both mean Cacioppo's lab, but why start caring about who's doing research now?) are testing orally administered pregnenolone's effectiveness in reducing the exacerbating effect of loneliness on cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease, but hey, if you want to boil everything down to "stupid Americans keep trying to solve problems with science", we have a pill for that too.

[wierd]

Still better than Japan's "friends and family rentals."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/japans-rent-a-family-industry

[Trekkin]

I'm kind of curious what the preferable way to solve the problem would be, as opposed to the American way.

I'd assume he wants some kind of nationally accessible database of lonely people, but dating sites already exist.

[MrRoboto75]

They're developing pills to cure loneliness.  Such an american way to solve the problem, really.

Technically "they" (by which we both mean Cacioppo's lab, but why start caring about who's doing research now?) are testing orally administered pregnenolone's effectiveness in reducing the exacerbating effect of loneliness on cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease, but hey, if you want to boil everything down to "stupid Americans keep trying to solve problems with science", we have a pill for that too.

We throw pills at a lot of things, really.  Opioid epidemic and all that.  You can call it science, but American healthcare is a private operation that seeks profit.  Pharmaceuticals are doubly that.  Seriously time how long it takes between turning on the tele and some commercial prattling on some pills side effect list.  If it isn't that its selling you insurance so you can ask your doctor if Prilozac OTC is right for you.  Or you can look at how epipens and insulin can go up in multiples of price, because there's profit to be made when your consumer base is literally held captive with their lives.

Frankly, its treating symptoms, not disease.  There's a societal problem when massive proportions of the population suffer from depression, anxiety, and loneliness.  Tackling social issues typically isn't profitable in terms of short term quarters, so pill prescriptions it is.

[Kagus]

Topologically, we are all coffeemugs.

"I'm a little per-vert,
short and stout.
This is my handle,
it's also my spout!"

[Trekkin]

Tackling social issues typically isn't profitable in terms of short term quarters, so pill prescriptions it is.

Again, I have to ask: what, from the perspective of individual patients and care providers, is your alternative? You can't prescribe someone with low pregnenolone some friends or a better society any more than you can prescribe "having avoided allergens" to someone currently suffering from anaphylactic shock. You can tell them to do that going forward, to be sure, but it would be irresponsible not to treat patients with the quickest and most reliable means available, particularly when faced with ongoing risks of dangerous sequelae. Drugs may be offensive to you for being profitable, but they're profitable because they're more effective and faster than complaining.

Plus which, while drug prices are a gigantic problem with the American health care system, medical research isn't one of the causes, except in the trivial sense that if drugs didn't exist we couldn't sell them. Surely the problem is that poor people can't have the drugs they need, not that rich people can, all edgy posturing aside. Yes, FDA approval is too expensive. Yes, courting doctors is profitable and can also lead to overperscription. Yes, hospital chargemasters are insanely inflated. All those things can and should be addressed, but none of them are the fault of academia -- and while there are problems with how academic medical research is incentivized, an American preference for effective medicine is not one of them.

Nobody's making you take the pills, though, so if you really want to screw Big Pharma out of all the profit you can, you're absolutely free to switch to organic homeopathic vegan open-source sustainable free-range placebos.

[Reelya]

Still better than Japan's "friends and family rentals."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/japans-rent-a-family-industry

Two years ago, Kazushige Nishida, a Tokyo salaryman in his sixties, started renting a part-time wife and daughter. His real wife had recently died. Six months before that, their daughter, who was twenty-two, had left home after an argument and never returned.

I don't think this is necessarily something we should be mocking. Lots of cultural things we take from granted as acceptable and going to seem weird to any other culture. Japanese are far more outright disgusted / freaked out that western people wear shoes in the house and even put their dirty outdoor shoes up on furniture, beds etc.

BTW often, how the West interacts with Japanese culture, what the West takes away, and what it ignores says more about the West's values than Japanese values: We think hiring companions is weird and screwed-up, but if you're paying to fuck them, it's perfectly normal.

[Kagus]

BTW often, how the West interacts with Japanese culture, what the West takes away, and what it ignores says more about the West's values than Japanese values: We think hiring companions is weird and screwed-up, but if you're paying to fuck them, it's perfectly normal.

Gods no, prostitution? Prostitution is amoral and illegal in all the civilized countries!

You need to film the act in order for it to be okay.

[redwallzyl]

What it actually resembles more is a kind of therapy. Ironically, prostitutes are frequently hired by people who just want to have a therapeutic interaction and not a sexual one.