The Pill That Women Are Taking for Everything From Speeches to First Dates: Propranolol has become the go-to pill for dealing with all sorts of stressful situations. Prescriptions are on the rise, up 28 percent from 2020. By slowing down heart rate and lowering blood pressure, the drug can reduce the physical symptoms of anxiety.
Where other beta blockers focus on specific parts of the body, propranolol affects beta receptors in the heart and everywhere else in the body, including the brain. The effects on the brain are the effects that cause the decrease of anxiety.
Compared to Xanax or Valium, propranolol is considered nonaddictive and is among the mildest variety of anti-anxiety medication, but it is not without risk. Because propranolol works to reduce blood pressure and heart rate, if you reduce it too much, the person could faint.
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Szeder, founder of the AI gambling startup MonsterBet, says his tools give customers an edge. “We have some people who are probably hitting around 56 to 60 percent of the time, myself included,” he claims. He created an assistant called MonsterGPT to select bets on professional sports in the US. It uses projection models he designed combined with information scraped from across the internet.
MonsterGPT accesses web scrapers through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a process that allows AI tools to incorporate new data from external sources on top of their training materials. He charges $77 a month for access to MonsterGPT and other tools.
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The percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend. This coincides with a growing belief among Americans that moderate alcohol consumption is bad for one’s health, now the majority view for the first time.
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The Share of Americans Having Regular Sex Keeps Dropping.:
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More than 16 million people aged 65 and older in the U.S. live alone. That represents 28% of that age group, almost triple the share in 1950. Among the reasons: increased longevity, higher divorce rates among older adults and children more scattered than previous generations. Many are women who outlived their spouses, and at least one-fourth of older adults with dementia live alone.
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A stock or a bond is a tangible claim on some future revenue stream; real estate and commodities are physical things that you can use even if their price drops. Crypto coins, or tokens, or however it pleases you to visualize these bits of ephemeral code, are pure speculative baubles, endowed with value only to the extent that you can convince another person to pay you more for them than you paid. They are a claim on nothing. They are the grandest embodiment of Greater Fool Theory ever invented by mankind.
Major banks have now decided to allow crypto to be used as collateral for loans. This sets the stage for a rapid collapse in crypto prices to spread its harm much more broadly throughout the financial system.
There is an ongoing phenomenon of companies that are not doing well simply buying a bunch of Bitcoin and rebranding themselves as crypto holding companies and then seeing their stock price shoot up. Because we are still in the frothy phase of the bubble, it turns out that investors will actually pay more for crypto held by a company like this than they could just buy the crypto for themselves on the open market. So a, you know, declining ball bearings manufacturer can go out and buy $1 billion of Bitcoin and announce that in a press release and then see their stock value increase by $2 billion.
This obviously irrational thing is a symptom of financial mania. History tells us this ends poorly. A rational government response would be to hedge against the fallout that will come when this bubble pops. Instead, our government is doing the opposite: leaning in to trying to skim money on the bubble’s upside.
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Summers (warm days) last longer than they used to:
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Foreign countries love U.S. stocks:
And they love U.S. treasury bonds:
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Tuna Thoughts 