I wish I could say my dad's thymus is saving his life, quite the opposite. He was discharged from the ICU/hospital yesterday after he nearly died from a "myasthenic crisis"—an event that most people with Myasthenia Gravis (MG) will experience. From what I understand, his thymus produces antibodies that destroys receptors connecting the nerves and muscles. He can't keep his head up, eyelids up, can't swallow and during the crisis could not breathe.

Interestingly, a small portion of MG patients have an enlarged/tumorous thymus and end up getting it removed, though there aren't necessarily clear benefits. It's also a quite invasive procedure they wouldn't perform on older folks like my dad (he shows no signs of it anyway).

Overall I agree with you though—this article is not saying anything new. As a concerned son who's spent more than his fair share of time trying to understand what's going on here, I wish it did. I also wish there were some treatments for my dad that worked. For now, exercising, eating healthy, lowering stress, and a healthy dose of steroids are currently keeping him with us. If anyone has advice, I'm all ears.

My mother was diagnosed with MG 25 years ago. Her first symptoms were droopy eyelid and double vision. Plasmapheresis helped, Prednisone had nasty side effects (glad to hear that sounds not to be the case for your father), prismatic glasses to un-double her vision kind of helped?

As her symptoms increased—-speech delay, difficulty swallowing, eye misalignment, all stemming from fatigue-induced nerve conduction delays which can culminate in respiratory failure—-myasthenic crisis, they opted for thymectomy (open surgery). She was probably 50 and while the recovery was lengthy, it drastically improved her symptoms and the amount of activity she could do before arose symptoms appeared. No more prism glasses or multi-second speech delays, or weekly plasmapheresis visits. If she spent too much time being active or driving on a sunny day (squinting), she’d feel the ocular fatigue first and know she had to rest or take a prednisone. Now her eyes are failing for other reasons but the thymectomy bought her 25 years and counting.

I’m glad your father survived his crisis. It sounds like you’re doing all of the conservative treatments (which is good; steroid noncompliance is a risk factor for crisis).

There are new medications that directly reduce or deactivate AChR antibodies. Non-invasive video-assisted thoracoscopic thymectomy is more viable today too (and thymectomy has been shown to decrease the frequency and severity of crises even where the thymus was considered normal). Plasmapheresis remains generally effective, if time consuming.

MG sucks. From one son to another, I hope you can get a few more good decades with your parent too.

And down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole we go! I love your theory, and it's very plausible. In a way this just boils down to "was the money 'good' or 'bad'?" and "will the money be used for 'good' or 'bad'?". It's fun to speculate, it's best to know more of the truth.

My hope this will blow up a bit so we get more information (it's in the public's best interest to know more). This is the way all "conspiracy theories" should go, at least those with credible theories to test.

Many people recycle phones every couple of years. If the phone functions as a typical smartphone with a gaming bent, it could replace traditional smartphones for folks who want to game. Gamers also carry secondary hand-held devices (like the Nintendo Switch) for dedicated gameplay.

I only said it could work, not that it will. I am aware of the many failures in this category. I also wanted to point out that the original premise (nobody would buy an Epic phone because it must be their second phone) is flawed. Not only could it replace their primary phone, but gamers do indeed buy, charge, and carry secondary hand-held devices if the device suits their needs.

"Gamers" represent a tiny percent of the game-playing public. If Epic needs to rely on "gamers" they'd go bankrupt.

Also I like how all of those theories just sit in vacuum, as if we're not going through a major economic contraction due to a two year global pandemic, but sure, everyone has the money to get themselves a second phone, because they decided not to eat anymore.

Those are key points in the article, but I didn't read them in the way you did. This article is largely about many research groups coming together to build a more nuanced understanding of our impact on the environment over the past thousands of years.

It also suggests the prevailing views of climate change are simplistic. We, even in much more "primitive" times, have been mucking up the earth to our benefit. It's bound to happen, of course. All that energy must come from somewhere.

I don't think the article suggests that the situation we're in now isn't happening. The article reads almost breathless—in on the knowledge that we're in a dire situation. Do we really need more reasons to illustrate our impact on the environment?

It also speaks to our strange compulsion to believe in the duality of human and nature. How do you get the public to recognize that there is no such thing, only one symbiotic whole? I hope we can figure out how to work together.

Yes I would argue they aren't denying CO2. They are saying that humans have been doing massive changes to global-scale systems for a while now.

That mean they are trying to say that the simple chemical property of increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases heat retention isn't false, or that humans aren't doing it.

I'd say it's more akin to them warning there may be more insidious or less-well-understood dangers to human civilization and the Earth biome than just global warming.

Personally, mass extinction of species comes to mind. A wide variety of species enables equilibriums to be established with changing conditions, given a proper allowed rate of evolution.

Current anthropomorphic changes to the world are far faster than typical climate shifts, which occurred on the scale of 1000s of years, not decades.

Combined with humanity reducing the number of available species to adapt, mass extinctions seem akin to us playing russian roulette:

- did killing off this species collapse the entire system? No? - how about this one? No? - how about this one? Uhoh.

> I'd say it's more akin to them warning there may be more insidious or less-well-understood dangers to human civilization and the Earth biome than just global warming.

> Personally, mass extinction of species comes to mind. A wide variety of species enables equilibriums to be established with changing conditions, given a proper allowed rate of evolution.

From what I understand, the main existencial issue of CO2 and the subsequent global warming is the extinction of oxygen producing plankton in the oceans, which are apparently much more significant O2 producers than a typical forest.

This isn't a large multi causal multi-species antropogenic extinction, it is a single group extinction failure mode, directly caused by 'just global warming' which will automatically mean game over. We absolutely do need to curb greenhouse gases (not just CO2) and decelerate the trend of global temperature increase.

Agreed, that is a pretty straightforward danger.

But just because that is a simple and direct danger, does that mean that mass extinction isn't killing off "key cog" species in more complicated critical machinery?