Hey, there. It sounds like you’re less concerned about your genetic proclivity to an autoimmune arthritis and more looking for ways to stave off any kind of arthritic degeneration, including your standard-issue osteoarthritis. I’m a 38-year-old who is embarking on a race against the progression of arthritis and other skeletal/connective tissue maladies due to a genetic joint hypermobility disorder that I’m similarly trying to get out in front of. Here’s what I’ve found so far, with the obligatory “I am not a doctor,” and, “Your mileage may vary.”:

1. Keep baseline-inflammation down wherever you can. It sounds like woo-woo crap, but finding things specific to your body that cause inflammation and cutting them out will go further than you think. That goes for both diet and activities. Consider an elimination diet to help you figure out what those things are. For me, anything that’s particularly acidic makes me feel like crap, as does sugar and processed meats. I go through phases of being good at avoiding these things followed by phases where I completely fail at it. A lot of people swear by ginger/turmeric for anti-inflammatory properties but I try to avoid taking supplements of it because there have been recent studies that show a lot of the supplements made from dried/ground down fibers like that tend to keep your kidneys from functioning as well as they should.
2. Omega 3s and 6s are great for maintaining (and possibly also repairing?) cartilage. Glucosamine, too.
3. Strengthen your muscles so you aren’t relying so much on your tendons and bones to support you as you age, thus reducing the overall load on them and keeping them healthy for longer. Probably want to do low-impact stuff. I’m personally doing Pilates because yoga over-stretches my hypermobile joints and I also just find it boring. Lifting weights is also proven to increase your bone density, so it’s just good for you overall. And I feel like this part is obvious, but the less weight you carry, the less you’ll tax your body.
4. This may be less applicable to you, but the things I take to keep my bones and connective tissue as healthy as possible include: Multivitamin, an extra Vitamin D supplement, a manganese B12 supplement, and collagen-based protein powder (though be careful of lead levels in protein powders in general).

I wish you luck in your quest. I personally am just holding out for a full-body exoskeleton. That’d be pretty badass.

Tennessee: a state in the USA.

For some completely unrelated reason, I suddenly have this song stuck in my head…

https://www.tiktok.com/@originalsinfluencer/video/7443873893430971678

Making a career change from an industry with several active unions (all of which continue to be proven as vital, even after over 100 years), into the tech industry in the mid-2010s, where there was no union and you’d hear horror stories (especially from the video game industry), I can’t help but feel like this was inevitable and I’ve been excited to watch it happen for almost 10 years. I hope it continues.

Who’s going to get rich making the app that actively trashes this data before it can be read by fingerprinting-ware? Because shut up and take my money.

Oh, look. Polk County being themselves out-loud again.

Agreed. I think we’re in the, “fuck around and find out,” era of tech company unionization, and I’m fortunate enough to work for a company whose legal team is smart enough to know that a reasonably happy, fulfilled, and compensated workforce is significantly less likely to even start discussing unionization, and so I don’t think that my company will see it anytime soon, if ever (which I also think is fine, for the record). But to your point, with the way that the vast majority of the video game industry treats their employees, I hope that every single one of those large game companies ends up joining a union, because the employees deserve better.

Seeing the rebirth of unions in tech companies might be one of my favorite things about this timeline.

Yep! For all the psych nerds, it’s pretty much a direct lift of the Milgram Shock Experiment

That and, their action for low-risk is all wrong. The stakes are too high to not give someone help, regardless of the risk level.

Yep. The ones who manage to slip notes to their veterinarian to help them get away are the exception.

That is absolutely fascinating, kinda disappointing, and a really good find.

Could a human have judged it better? Maybe not. I think a better question to ask is, “Should anyone be sent back into a violent domestic situation with no additional protection, no matter the calculated risk?” And as someone who has been on the receiving end of that conversation and later narrowly escaped a total-family-annihilation situation, I would say no…no one should be told that, even though they were in a terrifying, life-threatening situation, they will not be provided protection, and no further steps will be taken to keep them from being injured again, or from being killed next time. But even without algorithms, that happens constantly…the only thing the algorithm accomplishes is that the investigator / social worker / etc doesn’t have to have any kind of personal connection with the victim, so they don’t have to feel some kind of way for giving an innocent person a death sentence because they were just doing what the computer told them to.

Final thought: When you pair this practice with the ongoing conversation around the legality of women seeking divorce without their husband’s consent, you have a terrifying and consistently deadly situation.

Yep. But it also seems like people are so shocked by the data that maybe they’re missing the moral of this story, too? …sure it’s impressive that Valve has done so much with such a small workforce, but I think the reason they’ve been able to move so quickly is because they have such a small workforce. Companies get slow because they get big…I don’t care how much you tout your SAFe processes; you will always lose efficiency as you grow. It’s the difference between steering a canoe vs a cruise ship…the more you grow, the more you have to fight against momentum. So, my takeaway from this is that they figured out the secret to continued success as a maturing company, and good for them.

Now, I say all of this with sincere hopes that they don’t work their smaller number of employees to death and ask them to take on inappropriately burdensome workloads. Because if that’s the case, they should fuck right off with the rest of their peers.

This is not something yet widely known in Florida arts circles…thank you for sharing this.

Pretty sure the data they’ll be getting will be payment enough.

I no longer have the energy for additional sarcastic remarks regarding this vacuous tool’s culture-war-pageantry.