u/thornyRabbt

Our property tax bill went up 23% this year.

New assessment had increased from 101k to 220k, even after lowering our assessment during the informal appeal process by about 8%.

I can't even find the words right now.

Effect of Single Oral Coingestion of GABA and Malic Acid on Postprandial GLP-1, Glucose, and Insulin Responses in Healthy Volunteers

Abstract: This study examines whether coingestion of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and malic acid (MA) before meals enhances glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) secretion, and which affects subsequent insulin and glycemic responses in humans.

I was researching forms of magnesium and their effects on the GABAergic system. While asking the Googs about malic acid this study turned up.

I'll let you all know when I've lost 15 pounds.

I work for a small nonprofit with terrible pay and mediocre benefits, and we don't have anyone on staff to administer the health plan. At least we have a health plan.

One of our benefits is coverage of about 1/5 of the deductible, credited to a health reimbursement account (HRA).

The HRA servicer we are using is a huge PITA in terms of having to track every charge, keep invoices, upload them, wait for the denial to come back, email the HRA to find out why it was denied, upload again, and so forth. I have a spreadsheet to track what expenses I have submitted and when they were denied or accepted.

It just seems like such a burdensome system and I am hoping there is more than one option for HRA administrator companies to choose from? Or are they all like this?

I've been reading this sub for a while now and it's great seeing all the different experiences people have with supplements. Sometimes, though, it feels futile to try supplements based on anecdotal effects that may or may not apply to my particular metabolic idiosyncrasies.

Occasionally I have seen some of you post excellent replies that explain the chemistry of a particular supplement's effect on a metabolic process. Lately, I have been wishing I could understand the "machinery" or theory behind metabolic pathways and how supplements interact with those. Where do you learn that? Are there any books you can recommend for starting to understand the intricate interrelationships within the human metabolism? Maybe some suggestions can be added to the wiki for this sub!

I have this fantasy of trying to map out particular pathways for myself, knowing that I have an MTHFR mutation for example, and being able to extrapolate from those how a particular supplement might affect the system.

Hi good people, thanks for any suggestions. The city is in Vermont, and they issued a notice that said if we want to provide information to the appraiser about why our house's value is more or less than what they guessed, we should make an appointment for an "informal discussion" with them by a 2-week deadline.

So theoretically, if everyone wanted to be sure their valuation was correct, everyone is being asked to do their own valuation. Even worse, the inaccuracies of other houses impact my own taxes. But that's another matter.

Any suggestions on how to rather quickly find a chart of adjustments for my own comparables? E.g., if my house has a metal roof and a closely matched comp doesn't, how can I find a justifiable price adjustment?

Anyone who owns a building in Barre should have received a letter about reappraisal for the city's grand list. The last reappraisal was done in 2006. The letter informs us that we can request an "informal ... discussion of fair market value" with a representative of the contractor who carried out the appraisals.

Even though this is touted as an informal discussion, this is also an "opportunity to present information to potentially adjust our assessment." I'm assuming that since this is informal, there will be a formal opportunity to adjust the assessed value?

I'm just a bit skeptical, since I've never lived in a town that waited so long to reassess. And afraid what this might do to property taxes.

The moderators of r/Biohackers, one of Reddit’s largest health communities, announced last week that they are banning new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy after discovering that companies selling these products have been systematically flooding the subreddit with coordinated fake content. Their explicit goal is not to reach human readers but to reach AI crawlers, because Reddit has become one of the most frequently cited sources by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and other large language model search tools. The strategy has a name: AEO, or AI Engine Optimization, and it is a direct evolution of SEO where the target is not a search ranking algorithm but the training data and retrieval sources that AI chatbots use to generate answers. Companies like RedRover openly advertise the service, with one listing on their homepage reading “an army of agents publishing blog content and Reddit posts that solves both SEO and AEO at scale.”

What makes this manipulation significantly harder to detect than ordinary spam is how sophisticated the execution has become. According to the r/Biohackers moderation team, agencies have reverse engineered the specific prompt patterns and thread structures that LLMs prioritize when pulling source material. A typical operation begins with a high engagement bait question posted to a subreddit, something like “Is all the hype around Vitamin D actually worth it?” The question generates genuine organic replies from real community members, which pushes the thread up in algorithmic ranking and signals quality to AI crawlers. Paid accounts then embed brand mentions and product narratives in precisely calculated positions within that thread, at spots agencies have identified as most likely to be weighted by LLMs when constructing an answer. The accounts doing this are “warmed up,” meaning they have months of realistic posting history across unrelated topics, making them nearly indistinguishable from real users.

The harm extends well beyond polluted search results. The r/Biohackers moderators told 404 Media they became alarmed specifically because teenagers were posting about sourcing grey market compounds, sketchy vendors were promoting unregulated injectable products, and AI chatbots were synthesizing all of it into what reads like credible health guidance. One moderator put it plainly: the concern is that a company will promote their product through a manipulated thread, someone will use it, and get hurt. Reddit told 404 Media that its internal safety teams use automated tooling and human review to detect manipulation at scale, but the moderators on the ground described the situation as so sophisticated that detection has become pure pattern recognition, and that over-moderation risk is real because punishing bad actors too aggressively also catches legitimate users in the net.