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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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  1. In my fantasy world where sanity reigns, there is no reason to increase standards, because it isn't really a competition. If we have 100 guys who can do SEAL stuff instead of 10 guys that can do SEAL stuff, that's awesome! Our SEAL stuff capacity has increased ten-fold! Given how the US has increasingly leaned on media-antiseptic Drones-and-Commandos warfare since the Obama years, we can use all the guys we can get, and we'll always find the funding.

Probably, in the real world, you're right, I concede. And you're definitely right that we need to address the cost of failure. Making SEAL training a life-changing all-or-nothing gamble is a waste of human resources in the literal sense.

  1. In general PEDs follow a Pareto rule. The first little boost is going to give a big change, dosing yourself with tons and tons is going to be marginally helpful at best. If you allowed a small boost, there would be much less incentive to cheat: the likelihood of getting caught when you're being monitored as part of your "official" cycle is high, and the payoff is lower. Not a steroid doctor, but if you're monitoring and dosing for Test level (among other things) and one guy shows up with a much-higher-than-intended level of Test in his system (because he's dosing on his own), then the natural next step would be lowering his "official" dose, making it a wash.