The drugs at play aren’t limited to androgens. For example in swimming many people have been busted for Methylhexaneamine, a performance enhancing stimulant.

Everyone is looking to shave off any time they can. Just taking drugs alone definitely isn’t enough to put you at the Olympic level. But if you have trained and trained relentlessly and have those sorts of passive genetic advantages you mentioned for your flavor of sport… that may not be enough to assure victory. You can expect your top opponents have similar advantages, since in a world of billions of people who are more mobile than they used to be you are likely not the only person with those particular in-born genetic advantages who trained a ton and has a good strategy… what can you do to get even the slightest edge?

There was already ongoing deinstitutionalization that had emptied out much of the asylums in the preceding decades (though a much smaller portion continue to be institutionalized to this day). That push for deinstitutionalization had happened because of the combo of new drugs emerging that made it possible to treat mental illnesses in ways not possible before (which made releasing people seem viable) and through many many scandals that revealed deplorable, filthy dehumanizing conditions at the asylums (which made people feel motivated to move them out of those hellholes and into community care that was begun to be established by a 1963 act passed by JFK). In theory, paired with treatment this would allow them to live more independent lives and be supported by a community who would care more about them more than the old institutions. That was true for some… However, spread out community care is far more expensive than centralized centers. As the deinstitutionalized population was rising it got well beyond what localities could handle from what was provided in the 1963 Community Mental Health Act. The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 was supposed to fix this… unfortunately, by that point the Carter administration was on its way out and the Reagan administration was elected on a platform of slashing government spending and making big tax cuts. So a recently installed government program that was expensive and primarily benefited the mentally ill was perfect prey to be cut since they’d face a minimum of voter backlash. So the community health centers that were supposed to absorb and help the deinstitutionalized population continued to not be built or to be shuttered due to lack of funding, leaving those not well enough to land on their feet to cling to whatever support nets they had or barring that to live on the streets.

I replied to the other fellow but in no way am I calling them lazy, actually many of the drugs they use allow them to train harder for longer and as an Olympians they take full advantage of that to push the boundaries of what is possible. Those agents aren’t an “I win” button but at the highest levels people will do literally anything to push themselves to be able to shave off even fractions of a second or gain whatever advantage they can, and being able to train more and bounce back quicker is tempting.

I explicitly said they are searching for EVERY edge they think they can get. That includes insane hard work and practice. The hard-training Olympian who is doped will easily crush someone who is doped but just sitting around eating bon bons. Actually many agents people dope with are used because they allow people to train harder for longer and recover more quickly which is invaluable as an athlete. Saying that many athletes are doping is saying many don’t have integrity, not that they don’t work hard - that couldn’t be further from the truth at the Olympic level.

Colombian food isn’t spicy. Spice is high in like Mexico and Central America but that’s not universal across Latin cuisines ex. I know an Ecuadorian who can’t even take a sprinkle of black pepper without having to fan their mouth. Will happily eat vigorously salted green grapes, green apples or green mangos without batting an eye though.

Let’s be real, the regular Olympics are already doped. Their entire careers are on the line with the pride (and eyes) of the nation bearing down on them and demanding results… and we think they and their teams aren’t taking every edge they think they can possibly get away with? All the time famous athletes of yesteryear are being revealed to have been up to shenanigans when science catches up to retest their samples more effectively or some investigation gets a co-conspirator to spill the beans.

There’s microdosing below what tests can detect, novel designer drugs that can’t yet be detected, therapeutic use exemptions for drugs that would normally be banned, setting up situations to evade tests unless you are prepared to take them, tampering with the sample, good old fashioned corruption… probably tons of things that would never occur to me but that would to highly motivated teams with vast amounts of money on the line.

https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

Not having friends has similar health impacts to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Making friends makes you physically and mentally healthier, gives connections that can help you out of rough patches in your life and into opportunities.

You ‘can’ live without them, but probably not as long as you would have otherwise.

I think people are getting their hopes too high expecting him to expire any day now. Actuarial tables for men give only like a 5-6% chance of death in a year for men his age. While he’s obviously not in peak condition, the average Americans those tables are based on certainly aren’t either and unlike most of them he does have the benefit of insane resources to throw at whatever medical challenge (ex. the experimental Covid therapy that saved his life when he got infected with that) and very regular scanning. Plus genetics is a factor and his dad lived to 93 while his mom got to 88.

I’d say good riddance but who knows what sort of creep they’ll put in there. That said, this lives in my brain whenever I hear her name, as does that they had to cover Caesar’s face so she wouldn’t leak his identity:

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

The like one good idea she had is that she opposed war with Iran but her voice clearly lost out against the likes of Bibi and Lindsey Graham.

All these reports beg the question… have they found a country that ISN’T carrying out covert schemes in Canada?

Idk for other ships but their aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov became a meme for always being down for maintenance and/or on fire

They are extremely overpopulated in much of the US, in part because most of the natural predators capable of keeping their numbers down have been killed off and there has been a huge artificial increase in field/forest interfaces where they thrive. Huge amounts of starving deer abound and descend on diminishing native vegetation with a voracious appetite while generally ignoring weird invasive foreign plants. Many native plant gardeners are vexed by their tendency to gnaw native plants, trees and shrubs to death unless those are caged in and some got a taste for venison out of revenge haha.

Would be cool if we could re-introduce red wolves and the like to keep a lid on the deer without like half of the predators ending up shot or run over