You may already know this but Dwayne Johnson is pretty obviously on steroids or some other kind of anabolic agent.
In Hollywood anabolics are quite common, since preparing for a role can be a very short term thing, testosterone decreases with age, and very low body fat but large physiques are seen as normal.
Also, shorter people generally have it easier to have a muscular looking physique because of how the muscle mass limit scales with size.
> You may already know this but Dwayne Johnson is pretty obviously on steroids or some other kind of anabolic agent.
People typically know this, but the social script is to ignore and deflect because we're culturally invested in the story of transformation through personal virtue. It's like pointing out that Santa Claus isn't real.
You can still have transformation through personal virtue, just read the comments above. You just can't have the same magnitude of results without the steroids.
You can have that transformation, but the issue is a person who goes on steroids and barely works out will realize bigger gains than a natural lifter who structures their entire life around optimizing their gains. Obviously the dedicated lifter on steroids will have the biggest gains, but it is a situation where anyone can get jacked by merely injecting themselves with stuff and not having an ounce of dedication.
Sadly for the casual roid user, all that bulk will fall off within a couple of months of stopping the drugs (along with other issues like elevated estrogen which can have unwanted side effects, unless they planned out a drug cycle carefully).
It’s a shame that there is such a stigma around anabolics for training, or even as a medical intervention. If you want to transition to another gender doctors will hand steroids out no problem; I believe you can even get then from Planned Parenthood these days. But if you simply want to take steroids to address low testosterone (Which is a societal crisis), most physicians will treat you like a drug addict. They will say it’s normal if a healthy 30 year old male has the T levels of an 80 year old.
But aren't those anabolics with a very significant trade off and health implications?
I'm not sure if stigma should exist, but if something gives someone a huge advantage over a natural, but at the same time at the cost of life or health and other things, without telling they are doing it, it gives a false impression to everyone who may be comparing themselves to these people.
Not to mention the issues some young people get into when they work out a lot and compare themselves to those people and think they are never big enough, and then they get into this state of big, that is only appealing to the very same community, but not average person being misled by groups of celebrities, influencers and other people.
And also if you do go on TRT I think there's no good coming back, so usually it would be much better to try to achieve normal test with natural means first, because otherwise you are going a path with side effects and dependence for life.
Also young people wanting higher test don't understand life very well yet, they will tunnel vision on their single insecurity and think this is the golden path to solve it, while with a little perspective this understanding can change a whole lot.
In my limited understanding - as with many drugs - they're the best (or least worst) available option for people with a condition that's affecting their wellbeing. Untreated gender dysphoria can have terrible outcomes for mental health, and so therapies have been developed which are medicine's best solution so far.
And, as with T, this is where "normal for you", "normal for other people", "normal for the person you think you should be", "normal for the person society thinks you should be" overlap and interact with all sorts of potentially destructive interference patterns - especially if you're young.
Because "normal" varies from individual to individual by a factor of at least 2.
But there's no harm IMO in getting tested (2x) so you know where you stand, and have a baseline against which to measure if natural interventions are effective for you.
Though I've never heard of there being a stigma for treating low T, I agree that there shouldn't be. But that's not the point. Dwayne Johnson isn't taking anabolics to treat low T levels. You've built a straw-man by conflating the uses. Steroid abuse can cause long term damage.
There's no stigma for treating clinically low T. But as with most things in life, there's a spectrum. And strength / resistance exercise / ability to build & retain muscle will be impaired way before you hit the clinical threshold. There's a fairly solid correlation across the normal range.
Having said that, if there's no medical reason, what we're really talking about is people taking medication that they'd be, on balance, physically healthier without, in order to better fit in with society's expectations (endurance exercise, triathlons and so on, is associated with good long-term health outcomes, being jacked is not). And while I don't think artificially boosting T within the normal range is necessarily any worse for your body than, say, being on hormonal birth control long-term is for women, it's still pretty messed up that people feel like they have to.
This is the first I hear of this stigma. If people want to take steroids to bulk up they are free to do it, it's just not fair to do it in the context of competitive sports.
As I understand it there has been a noticeable dip (~25%) in the last few decades. I don't know if that's a crisis, but it's been theorized to be caused by any number of things, including a less active lifestyle, stress, and endocrine disruptors in the environment. Given the range of possible causes, "Just throw more Testosterone at it" seems like a poor initial solution.
Well when a 30-year old finds out that it's not that rare for a 70-year old to have "higher T" naturally compared to younger men on average, I guess that could trigger their own personal "crisis" ;)
Plenty who are 70 are not in the Viagra generation yet either.
Google has Open-Match[1] for matchmaking where you just have to provide an API that takes a batch of players and returns groups, and it handles the surrounding stuff, also integrates with Agones[2] to automatically provision servers on k8s.
An example of what seems to be a reasonable usecase for UDP proxy is Quilkin[1] from Google.
Made for hosting game servers on Kubernetes, and supports session auth, routing, monitoring, and various other features, some of them using prefix bits in UDP packages.
Also used for DOS protection without the traffic hitting the server.
Not sure how usable it is but Google actually has a lot of open-source stuff for game hosting on kubernetes with agones + openmatch + quilkin, I am somewhat tempted to play with them at some point.
Small note: Zermatt (the town you are probably talking about) is not the only car-free one in Switzerland.
There are quite a few others[0], 10 towns in total, according to this website.
I just learned that Switzerland has a nationwide RTK network for cm level positional accuracy using GPS, Galileo, GALILEO, and/or Beidou, GNSS systems.
And they have a nice map of all the station locations[0].
It's a bit of shame that the pricing seems to be rather steep for frivolous use, but it seems to be rather new.
It would be interesting to see what possibilities a totally free nationwide RTK system would open up.
Swisstopo is a government organization that already provides many services like highly accurate maps for free.
> It's a bit of shame that the pricing seems to be rather steep for frivolous use
The pricing norms for RTK correction networks were set 20 years ago, when operating your own base station meant buying a second $20,000 dual frequency receiver, and taking an extra guy any time you go out to do a survey, whose job is just to guard the base station.
This made a $2000 a year network correction service seem like great value for money!
Some networks offer more affordable options these days - such as weekly and hourly licenses for drone pilots.
That is insane. My mower runs for ~100 minutes per day. This means 50CHF per day which as I see is around 50 euros. Home made base station cost with unicore gnss is around 220 euros…
I have no affiliation, and no strong opinion on their specific approach, but I do find it interesting and have thought about running a node, especially since enjoying fiddling around with LoRa / Meshtastic.
We've got a ublox ZED-F9P feeding into that. Station name JasonWiebeDairy. We set it up for RTK for AgOpenGPS - a FOSS auto-steer/mapping/control for agriculture.
However, you can easily setup your own RTK base station for a few hundred bucks. Very convenient to use the free service to determine the static coordinates of your base station.
I'm not totally sure why, but it was free for nonprofit research (university) use until 1-2 years ago. Now it's still cheaper than for the rest of the users, but still very expensive also for researchers.
If I remember correctly Hack The Box (The CTF Platform) used to require solving a small challenge to even create an account. Though I wouldn't exactly classify it as social media.
