Bear, 40, he/him i guess | twitch and ko-fi: thecraftybear | warnings: coarse language, cultural dissonances, depression, anxiety and general awkwardness | treasure trove of useless info | vocally proud dad | omnivore, birophile, caffeinist, depressed ADHD dumbass | bg by me, ink on grey paper
Decades-long campaign powered by patient perspectives results in switch from PCOS – a name that caused confusion and undue suffering – to PM
a health policy paper has been published saying the name is officially updated to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS)
polyendocrine= multiple endocrine factors
metabolic = affecting/affected by metabolism
ovarian = from the ovaries
essentially, instead of using the symptomatic term (many people with PMOS do not develop cysts) the new term widens the diagnostic area and makes it easier to diagnose, treat, and do research on people with PMOS (even atypical types, such as no cysts).
it may seem like a waste of time to change a name instead of focusing on research, but for a lot of medical professionals a name can be associated with a hard set collection of symptoms, so the name needs to change to acknowledge that the disorder is not well understood and has a broader, subtler, and often missed set of symptoms. for example ADD is considered an antiquated/unused term, and now comes under the ADHD umbrella. in healthcare names and terminology changes all the time, and this is a positive change. your local healthcare professional may not know about this unless theyre really up on the news though!
in case you want to read about the name change process that was published in the Lancet (one of the most impactful and well respected medical journals):
Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), previously named polycystic ovary
syndrome (PCOS), affects one in eight women. However, the
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS FUNDRAISER IS UK BASED AS THIS IS WHERE I WAS FORMERLY BASED, AND M… Natalia Lee needs your support for Please help me
Simply put, it has become impossible for me to remain here in Bali. Not only financially, but in terms of my physical safety and survivial. Even though most people think of Bali as some idyllic “paradise”, for those who live here, reality is different, and my case is worse than most.
Back in June, a friend of mine from the UK sent me a care package of UK snacks. What was also in the care package was a THC vape pen: fine in the UK, but what my friend did not know is that this is super illegal in Indonesia. Even though I didn’t ask for or buy the pen, because it was sent to my address and my name, my home was raided. I, my father, and my driver were taken in for questioning. Due to administrative delays and a long weekend I spent 6 days in Polda Bali, the central police compound on the island, in the narcotics division. Living with no privacy on a small cot surrounded by police who would spend all day smoking while I was trying to quit nicotine, eating foods I could not stand, and watching TikTok on full volume. They would also regularly harass me, inappropriately probing into my private life, my relationships, demanding to know why I don’t have children, making insinuations about my sex, and displaying an absolute lack of regard for mental health. At one point it got so bad I suffered a psychotic break. I was eventually released but the ordeal has not only given me PTSD, but has brought up past trauma as well. Since then I’ve been constantly struggling just to stay alive.
My mental health is in full-blown crisis, but Indonesia has limited mental health services, and even those that exist often come with long wait times and high fees. My family and Indonesian society in general have a very tenuous grasp of mental health and will actively make my bipolar worse while also forcing me to mask and pretend to be coping which in turn exacerbates my state even more. Every day I am slipping further and further down the rabbit hole and I’m not sure how much longer I can keep going.
On top of this, being Indonesia, my family had to pay some £10,000 to get me out out Polda Bali. Money I am now expected to pay back without any job or stable income. In truth, this debt isn’t about the money, rather it is being used by my father to keep me here in his house where I, and the rest of my family, have to suffer his narcissistic and psychopathic outbursts. Every day it seems to get worse as his mood becomes more erratic and he is more and more prone to sudden aggression, coercive control, and displays of violence. We all live in fear that one day soon he will kill one, if not all of us.
Compounding this, as many will have seen on social media, tensions in Indonesia are at breaking point and Bali is no exception. There are protests regularly and government buildings, including the police compound where I was held, are being targeted. While I have nothing to do with these protests and do not attend, we live very near to the military police HQ (Brimob) on the island and are afraid that martial law will soon be imposed. Worse yet, I am ethnically part Chinese-Indonesian. While this would not be significant information in the West, here in Indonesia the Chinese population are regularly targeted for racial violence. This is partly due to long standing inter-ethnic distrust, but moreso because in times of crisis the government will try to save themselves by driving the peoples’ anger towards ethnic minorities. And we are one of the most visible and most othered minorities in the country. Many of my Chinese friends around the country are living in fear that they could be targeted next.
Ultimately, I just cannot stay in Indonesia. Every day is already a struggle just to stay alive and to be blunt, I won’t survive an other year here. This envornment is not only toxic, it is going to kill me. I have tried to find a way out of this situation but there’s nothing here in Indonesia that I can do. It’s all dead ends. My only hope is to go to Europe, find work, and start to build up a life that I can actually live. The irony of course is that to find a job, you need to be in Europe, but to go to Europe you already need to have a job offer. Catch 22. So, my best chance is the Chancenkarte, a job seeking visa in Germany. Unfortunately in order to even qualify to apply, I need to have just over €13,000 show money to prove that I am a legitimate job seeker. Money which I do not currently have.
I have tried every resource and connection I have at my disposal to get out of this pit but nothing has worked and despite my skills and capacities, and dozens of wonderful people in Europe who would happily vouch for and help support me, my passport and myopic migration laws are holding me back. This is my last ditch effort to save myself. If I can raise enough money to apply for a job seeking visa, I can finally escape this nightmare I’ve being held in, move to a stable country, get the help I need, find work, pay off my family, and be free to live my own life.
Any help, no matter how little, is a step in the right direction for me. I am not expecting money for free; as a Social Anthropologist with an MA in Humanitarian and Environmental Crises from the UK, I have been offering editing, proofreading, and university-level academic coaching services for over four years. I am a hard worker and do not expect handouts. If you find yourself in need of my services, any donation above £100 will come with editing assistance for any 2500 word essay.
I also ran the popular Elder Scrolls recipe and worldbuilding blog, @tastesoftamriel/Talviel's Kitchen between 2017-2024. If you would like a custom stylised fantasy tavern menu (please bear in mind I'm an Elder Scrolls expert but can attempt other franchises) of 4-6 courses, donations above £25 are eligible for one!
Hi all, it's been a while since I posted anything about this, but it's coming up to almost a year since I was detained at Polda Bali (the main police HQ) and donations have stalled entirely. My plan for moving to Berlin by the end of August is a hope that has been dashed and honestly, I am doubtful I will be out of here by the end of the year.
I will be going on holiday to Norway and the UK from next month until the start of August, and please rest assured that I have not touched any of the money I have thus far received from the very generous donations I have gotten for my trip. I just really need to get out of here for a while for my own sanity. I have also been throwing into my savings as much as I possibly can from the odd jobs I do here and there, but I'm still a long way off from my goal.
I would be eternally thankful for any donations or reblogs of this post to get things moving again. You can also donate directly to my P*yp*l here (please select Family and Friends Payment or else I get slapped with a fee as I have a business account). If you're after any of my skills and services, here is what I can offer; my rates are reasonable and negotiable:
Tutoring and proofreading services for university level Social Anthropology and Sociology (BA and MA level)
Custom fantasy menus and recipes for RP and personal use (not only Elder Scrolls)
Proofreading and editing for fiction and nonfiction (5+ years of professional experience)
“The medieval warrior, realizing the consequences of his impulsive act, immediately approached the owner of the drone and offered to pay for the damage.
The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.
Drone owners have another year to develop a unique “dragon-like” design for their flying machines.” (x)
I am 100% cooler with this knowing that the spear-thrower realized “oops maybe I shouldn’t have done that” and tried to make it right, and that the guy who the drone belonged to was cool with it
I’m coming to GUELPH, ONTARIO TOMORROW (May 8) to deliver the Musagetes Lecture.
I am on record as saying that every economic bubble is terrible, but some bubbles do at least leave behind a salvageable productive residue while others leave behind nothing but ashes; indeed, this is the thesis of my next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI:
Here's a historical comparison that's illuminating: Enron vs Worldcom. Both were monumental frauds, the CEOs of both companies died shortly after the frauds were discovered, but they have very different legacies. Enron – a scam that pretended to secure billions of dollars' worth of new efficiencies through "energy trading" but was actually just engineering rolling blackouts in order to jack up energy prices – left behind nothing.
Well, not quite nothing. Enron did leave behind a little useful residue after it burned to the ground: a giant repository of emails. You see, after Enron went bust, it was sued by its creditors, who demanded access to relevant emails from the company's Outlook server. But the company execs decided they didn't want to spend the money to weed out the irrelevant emails before the court-mandated disclosure, so instead they published all the emails ever sent or received by anyone at Enron, including tons of extremely private, personal, sensitive information relating to Enron's employees and customers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_Corpus
This became the "Enron Corpus" and it was the first large tranche of emails that were in the public domain and available to researchers. As a result, it became the gold standard dataset for researchers investigating social graphs, natural language, and many other subjects that subsequently became very important computer science fields and commercial applications.
As legacies go, the Enron Corpus is pretty small ball, and even so, it is decidedly mixed, both because the Enron Corpus constitutes a gross, ongoing privacy violation for a huge number of people; and because a lot of that social graph and natural language work that it jumpstarted has been put to deeply shitty purposes.
Then there's Worldcom: also a gigantic fraud, Worldcom falsified billions of dollars' worth of orders for new fiber optic lines, which it then dug up streets all over the world and installed. When Worldcom went bankrupt, all that fiber stayed in the ground, and many people are still using it today. My home in Burbank has a 2GB symmetrical fiber connection through AT&T that runs on old Worldcom fiber that AT&T bought up for pennies on the dollar.
So while you have to squint really hard to find any benefit that can be salvaged from Enron, it's really easy to point at Worldcom's productive residue – it's a ton of fiber and conduit running under the streets of major cities around the world, ready to be lit up and bring the people nearby into the 21st century. Fiber, after all, is amazing, literally thousands of times better than copper or 5G or Starlink:
Even though Enron's CEO Ken Lay and Worldcom's CEO Bernie Ebbers both received prison sentences after their fraud was revealed, the bubbles never stopped, and indeed, they only got worse. AI is the biggest bubble in human history, worse even than the South Sea Bubble:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company
And like those earlier bubbles, some of our modern bubbles will leave behind nothing, while others will leave behind some productive residue. Take the cryptocurrency bubble. Crypto will go to zero, and when it does, all it will leave behind is shitty monkey JPEGs and even worse Austrian economics:
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
As with Enron, you can find some productive residue from cryptocurrency if you look hard enough. A lot of programmers have had a heavily subsidized education in Rust programming and cryptographic fundamentals, both of which are unalloyed goods in our otherwise very insecure digital world.
Some of the underlying mechanisms from the crypto are useful, even without blockchains. Take Metalabel, a system that lets collaborators on creative projects automate how they handle revenues from those projects by plugging DAO-like logic into traditional, dollar-based bank accounts. They're recycling some of the tooling from the crypto bubble to create a very useful utility, without the crypto:
https://www.metalabel.com/
But, as with the Enron Corpus, this is pretty small ball. The world has flushed away hundreds of billions to get paltry millions' worth of value out of crypto – the rest of that value disappeared into the pockets of crooked insiders who defrauded the public into parting with their savings.
If crypto will be Enron-like in its post-bubble life, what about AI? I think AI is more like Worldcom: there's a bunch of useful stuff that AI can do, after all. Take away the bubble and we'd call the things AI can do "plug-ins" and some people would use them, and others wouldn't, and some of those uses would be productive, and others would be foolish, but we wouldn't bet the world's economy on them, nor would we squander our last dribbles of potable water to cool their data centers.
After the AI bubble pops, there will be a lot of durable residue. The data centers will still stand. The GPUs will still be there, and if we don't "sweat the assets" by running them as hot and hard as they can tolerate, they won't burn out in 2-3 years. There will be lots of applied statisticians, skilled data-labelers, etc, looking for work. And there will be lots of open source models that have barely been optimized (why make an open source model more efficient when you're raising capital based on the promise of outspending everyone else in order to dominate a world of ubiquitous, pluripotent, winner-take-all centralized AI?):
That's a situation not unlike the post-dotcom bubble of the early 2000s. Almost overnight, the legion of humanities undergrads who'd been treated to subsidized training in perl, Python and HTML found themselves looking for work. Servers could be purchased in bulk for pennies on the dollar (with user data still on them!). I bought a "dining room set" of six $1,000+ fancy office chairs for $50 each (still wrapped in plastic!) from a dotcom founder who was selling them on the sidewalk out front of his failed startup's office in the Mission. He offered to sell me ten lifetime's supply of branded t-shirts for $20. I turned him down.
That was the birth of Web 2.0. All of a sudden, people who wanted to make real things that were good could do so, because they could find skilled workers, hardware, and office space at such knock-down prices that they could be funded out of pocket or put on a credit card. People got to pursue the web they wanted, free from asshole bosses and VCs. Not everything that got built in those heady days was good, but many good things got built.
I can easily imagine that the post-bubble AI scene will produce benefits comparable to Web 2.0 – projects built by and for people who want to do useful and fun things, without being distracted by the mirage of illusory billions promised by the stock swindlers who created the bubble.
I can easily imagine that I will find some of those post-bubble tools useful, and that in 20 years I will still be using them, just as today, I am still using some of those early post-dotcom bubble services and tools.
And despite all that, IT IS NOT WORTH IT.
The residue that is left behind by every bubble is subsidized, but that subsidy doesn't come from the deep-pocketed investors who are gripped by "irrational exuberance." It comes from mom-and-pop, normie, retail investors who have been tricked into giving their money to the insiders who inflated the bubble.
From Worldcom to Enron, from crypto to AI, the point of the bubble wasn't ever the residue or lack thereof – it was a transfer from working people to crooks. Bubbles are a system for moving the painfully sequestered life's savings of people who do things to people who steal things.
Since the Carter years, workers have been forced to flush their savings into the stock market, after the traditional "defined benefits pension" (that guarantees you an inflation-adjusted sum every month until you die) was replaced with 401(k)s and other "market-based pensions" (where you only get to survive after retirement if you bet correctly on the movement of stocks):
Despite this having all the appearances of a rigged game – finance industry insiders are always going to be better at betting on stocks than teachers, nurses, janitors and other productive workers – proponents of this system always insisted that workers weren't really the suckers at the table. But the stock market is like Kalshi or Polymarket in that one bettor's losses are another bettor's gains, and in those markets, nearly all the money is harvested by less than 1% of bettors:
Somehow, supposedly, we could beat those insiders and survive into our old age without having to eat dog food or become a burden on our kids by betting on the whole market, through index-tracker funds:
Supposedly, this would "diversify" our portfolios, which would insulate us from risks we could not understand, much less estimate. But thanks to private equity and the AI bubble, betting on "the whole market" is basically "betting on AI." 35% of the S&P 500 is tied up in seven AI companies, who are engaged in the obviously fraudulent (and Worldcom-adjacent) practice of passing the same $100b IOU around really quickly and pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once:
When the AI bubble pops, it will vaporize (at least) 35% of the US stock market and wipe out everyday savers who have been swindled into betting their futures on AI, based on the fraudulent representations of AI pitchmen. Millions of people who worked hard all their lives and deprived themselves of small comforts in order to save for their retirement will be wiped out. They will be made dependent on the Social Security system that Republicans are determined to starve into bankruptcy and then turn into (yet another) "market based system" that you will be required to convert into chips at the stock market casino where you're up against professional players who hold all the cards:
Because wiping out the life's savings of everyone else will tank consumption for a generation. Retirees who have to sell their family homes to pay their medical bills won't be buying breakfast at the local diner or catching a Tuesday night movie. They won't be indulging their grandkids with nice birthday presents or helping their own kids buy their first home.
Worse still: the only thing our society knows how to do about economic catastrophe (for now, anyway) is to impose brutal austerity, and austerity drives voters into the arms of fascist strongmen, who blame all their woes on a scapegoated minority in order to win office, and then steal everything that's not nailed down:
Which is all to say, there's a world of difference between recognizing that the AI bubble is the superior sort of bubble in that it will leave a productive residue, and endorsing the AI bubble as a productive or morally acceptable way to produce that residue. It's one thing to anticipate salvaging something useful out of a catastrophe, and another thing altogether to deliberate induce or prolong that catastrophe so as to maximize the amount of salvage.
The swindlers who created this bubble are crooks who have set out to destroy the futures of a generation of savers. They are monsters, and their bubble needs to be popped as quickly as possible.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Hey everyone! In case you haven't checked it out yet, my Ko-Fi shop is live! I have removed my itch.io first edition recipe book, and you can get the second (way better and nicer) version here.
If you're not after anything in the shop but would like to help me out with a wee bit of mutual aid, you can help here. I have to take Skooma to the vet next month, pay for my medication, and now it looks like I will have to visit an endocrinologist too because my body clearly has it out for me 🙃 I only have enough left in my checking account to pay for my monthly bills next month before I have to dip into my moving fund, which I really don't want to have to do, so every penny helps.
I'm also open for fantasy menu commissions, so if you're after a snazzy little tavern menu for your own worldbuilding, I am available! And yes, I can even add irl ingredient substitutes if you'd like to make anything yourself! If you're interested, just shoot me a DM and let's bounce ideas, whether you're after something based on The Elder Scrolls or any other franchise I'd love to help yall out with your culinary worldbuilding 🖤
Anyway, have a great week everyone! Stay safe, eat well, be kind. ~Tal
Edit: for the new followers, this is Skooma, she says hi
Hi again I'm sorry to be a bother but I just did a check on my medication and I have 4 anxiety pills left and I take two a day to be able to function at a bare minimum and I don't know what I'll do when they run out (probably freak out).
A month's prescription is Rp. 1.5 million (£65), which I currently do not have spare as my storage bill of £68 is coming up and I am panicking.
Please please help by getting yourself a copy of the book or dropping a donation or subscribe to my Ko-Fi, even £2 will help. ~Tal
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