True. I visit some of my mother's friends in a nursing home occasionally, and there are some obese people there who LOOK like they might be elderly, but in reality are in their 40s and 50s (or younger).
The trick I found was to stop looking at all the "beautiful people" and just look at myself. Me at 270 looked better than me at 280. 260 was getting downright sexy (OK, I exaggerate, no I outright lie, but anyway)...
Every few pounds was a struggle, but at the end I could look at a picture of myself a few pounds ago and say "Ugh! At least I'm better than that!"
In the end, I lost about 70 pounds, and it took me the better part of a year. And it was a tough year, full of triumphs and tragedies, hard work, failures, and successes.
But now I can jog, I can ride my bike 15 miles each way to work, I can kayak for miles. I can do so many things I simply couldn't. I know the long time I was very heavy will have long-term consequences I'll have to deal with later, but I'm healthy NOW.
That may be, but certainly out in the countryside the obesity rate was very low, or only thin people walk the pedestrian district.:)
Maybe that's another cause/effect thing at work. Since I was mostly in areas frequented by people who walked a lot, maybe I tended to only run into people who walked a lot and were therefore thin.
But, even in the restaurants away from the pedestrian district, I don't think I ever saw anyone I'd describe as obese. Well, no one who spoke French, anyway. A few English-speakers from the US.
Agreed. If someone is overweight, there is a chance that helping them lose weight may not help preserve brain function. But changing nothing sure ain't gonna help out.
And there are so many other benefits to losing weight. I'm not referring to studies, I'm referring to personal experience.
I had the same shock when I went to France and spent a week in Orleans. At the time, I weighed 205 and I'm 6'3", so I didn't stand out amongst the French population. I walked around Paris for a day, then spent most of my time in Orleans (when I wasn't working) walking down the pedestrian district trying French food.
I saw three people who were heavy enough to stand out, and all three were Americans.
When I got back to JFK Airport in the US, it was almost shocking to see how many people were large.
The things we get used to and don't even realize it...
The funny part was that I ATE LIKE AN EFFING KING in France. I denied myself NOTHING, and ate cheese by the ton. And came back 2 pounds lighter. I'm sure it helped that I only used my car to go back and forth to work, and the rest of my time was spent walking (4-5 miles a day, minimum).
I'm sure it also helped that there was very little sugar in what I ate in France, and it was all food prepared by people who care about the quality of what they were serving. Even the cafeteria food at the company I was working for ran circles around the nicer restaurants here in the US, and the restaurants? Oh. My. God. I have never eaten anything like it.
Well, in his case he was a MAJOR developer for the area. He was in the process of building a lot more homes, so he could hardly afford a hit to his reputation that having 100+ homeowners and renters all calling the BBB on him would entail.
But, in my dealings with him, he was always honest enough. When I called his office, someone always answered the phone, and when something needed repairing he usually had someone out within a couple of days (or faster if it was urgent).
People may be eating more, or they may be eating a higher percentage of food that gets turned into fat, or they may be exercising less. I'd actually vote for all three.
Our food is cheaper, more plentiful, and more processed than it was just a few short decades ago. In fact, heavily-processed foods tend to preserve better, and are therefore cheaper to transport (less loss), and are generally cheaper to consume. I can go to Mickey D's and buy Quarter Pounders on white flour buns, and supersize my sugary drink and processed-fat-laden fries for a family for next to nothing and in almost no time.
The new US standard is for both parents to work. This contrasts pretty starkly with the average lifestyle of our parents, who weren't as affluent but also had one breadwinner and one homemaker. This new lifestyle leaves little time for the art of quality food preparation, and therefore parents understandably lean more heavily on prepared food. With money and time not exactly plentiful, a quick stop by a fast food joint or a grab-and-go pizza on the way home is both cheap and easy. Then, when you get home, you want to spend your few precious moments each evening with your kids, so unless you're into outdoor activities exercise is out unless you do it really early or really late, and who wants that?
Add to that the always-increasing choice of sedentary entertainment. TV. Video games. The Internet. All easy, all entertaining, and after a hard day's work it's tough not to have a well-deserved break. And they sure are appealing.
Snacks and sides for the meals need to be chosen based on ease of preparation and durability in storage in the grab-and-go lifestyle, and fruits and veggies and quality proteins have short shelf lives and/or require refrigeration and/or require some form of preparation. Processed, salted, and preserved stuff is just so much easier, and quite often cheaper. So "fruit" becomes "froot by the foot" with very little actual nutritional value and lots of processed sugars.
Nuts are fantastic proteins and preserve very well, but it's rapidly becoming politically incorrect to carry them around with you because of the apparent explosion of nut allergies. You don't want to kill your neighbor's kid by inviting them over to play but forgetting to have your kid change their clothes because they had a BP&J for lunch.
And vegetables? Five a day? I think many harried households are lucky to get five a week, and so many things we call "vegetables" have no nutrition at all and don't deserve the title. Mashed, skinned potatoes are useless, as is corn. Especially ladled with butter or sour cream (although both of those at least represent a decent-quality protein). Many vegetables are cooked or canned beyond any possible nutritional value except residual fiber, then sweetened or enhanced to make them more palatable.
That's quite possible. The article mentions some possible feedback loops, but the overall gist is that there is a correlation between being obese and losing brain function as you get older.
As someone tagged it, "correlation is not causation," and that's a fair accusation of both my choice of headlines and the that of the original article (though the article itself does mention a series of possible reasons for the link).
It could be that reduced brain function leads to overeating or poorer food choices, or a chemical imbalance does, which causes the obesity and the brain function loss.
I think the study adjusts for those factors perfectly well, in fact you're introducing some interesting possibilities as to an explanation for the link. The study (which is small, so we should obviously be cautious about drawing too many conclusions from it) only states that people who are obese appear to have less brain function. A few theories were forwarded to explain the link, but your theory is just as sound, and doesn't disprove the possible link.
Let's follow your chain of events for a moment. John is obese. John avoids his doctor because he's tired of being hassled about his weight. Fair enough - that's pretty common.
John is now in a negative feedback loop. He's receiving almost no advice on his diet, no encouragement to exercise, and probably is understandably demoralized from being called "fatty" and getting unwelcome advice from health freakazoids that he's likely to give up on health maintenance entirely. Poorer nutrition and less exercise mean that John's entire body is going to suffer, including the brain.
It's actually as good a theory as any. Obesity would have a significant correlation with people who are not caring for their overall health properly, and obesity can be both cause and effect in this case. John isn't a bad guy, he's just stuck in a rut, and he's headed for possible trouble.
I know John's story.
I'm 6' 3" and used to weigh very close to 300 pounds. I avoided my doctor for over a decade for the same reason John might.
It's tough to get started losing weight, and having a bunch of skinnyminnies around you crybabying about how you should get off your very large posterior and do something is not, repeat not, helpful. It's demoralizing, and makes the task of getting started look all that much harder.
It took a health scare for me to start the very long, very hard trail, and I'm now down to 215 (still mildly overweight, but I can ride my bike 30 miles a day without any problems). I wish terribly that I had learned my lesson an easier way, but I didn't, and I'm sure being obese for as long as I was will have long-term consequences. But I was where I was, and I understand how very hard it is to get started, and how the general attitude of society toward the obese does not make them want to help themselves. I wanted to just curl up with my Ben and Jerry's and donuts and leave me the hell alone.
I've encouraged several friends over the years to get up and just take short walks with me, and started a couple of them on the road to weight loss, but you've got to approach that sort of overture carefully, and have a sense for when your friend is ready to start helping themselves, then offer them some encouragement.
I agree that the parent post should not have been marked as a troll, though I note that it has since been modded to "4: Interesting".
Anyway...
Concrete moves and cracks, yes. But the movement of concrete is usually very slight. Copper and plastic pipe are more flexible than concrete, so they'll be able to bend to a certain amount of motion (usually FAR more than the concrete could manage). Cracks in concrete, especially in the larger span, are generally very small and don't amount to a great big gap that the pipe couldn't stretch or bend to accommodate.
A motion within a reinforced concrete slab that would be sufficient to even break a 1/2" pipe would amount to a significant crack in the concrete, large enough that a homeowner should probably leave the premises immediately and get an inspector to do some structural checks ASAP. You'd have to have a 1/4" wide crack, at least, to stand a decent chance of breaking a copper pipe. If you start seeing 1/4" cracks in the middle of your slab, you have a serious problem going on. Cooling your computer suddenly looks pretty trivial.
There's a much greater chance that the pipe itself would rupture due to being eaten up by the acid in the concrete, but the concrete would be largely unaffected by that event.
Copper or other pipe is put into concrete slabs all the time. Yes, if the foundation cracks, perhaps the pipe will be compromised. But in this guy's case, what's the loss? He has to switch over to a more standard radiator system.
Plus, if the house settles or the concrete slab shifts enough to crush or break a pipe, I think the movement in the concrete would manifest itself in far more serious ways (such as little details like walls falling down, etc). That includes earthquake-induced shifting - if an earthquake shifts concrete that badly, no one is ever going to see it because those kinds of forces would have collapsed the house anyway. Reinforced concrete should be able to stand up to some serious pounding - certainly better than, say, the 2x6 walls sitting on it.
I rented a house in Kentucky that had this problem. The house was built with copper pipes embedded in the foundation for water, but to save money apparently the builder had just put bare copper pipe instead of putting it in plastic conduit. About 5 years after the house was built, the pipes started failing (in my case, it was a pipe that led to an outside faucet I never used, and I only discovered it when my water bill went from its normal $20 to about $280 one month).
Fortunately, the landlord in my case was the builder, so he sent a team out to reroute all the pipes up through the ceiling (which was a major mess, but the workers were really careful with my stuff and used sheet plastic generously to contain all the drywall dust, etc) and refunded my water bill for the month. He also replaced all the carpet in the house, since the workers pretty much ruined the carpeting running the new water pipes. So after a week or so of hassle, I had a freshly-painted house with brand new carpeting.
Apparently (as it was explained to me by the landlord) bare copper *can* sometimes work in concrete, but it depends on the acidity of the concrete, which probably depends on the stone and filler used. The landlord admitted he messed up and didn't measure the acidity of the concrete (and he had built and sold a lot of houses in my neighborhood, so he was looking forward to a LOT of repairs like this).
In any case, lining the copper with something is probably a good idea, even if it does reduce heat exchange. Or just use radiant heat pipe as the parent suggests.
After all, there's the heat generated by a computer (maybe 150 watts) to deal with, and 6 meters of pipe. With that much pipe, just the copper exposed to air would probably dissipate enough heat without needing forced air, so exchanging the heat through plastic into a concrete biomass should work just fine.
I have been very fortunate - I decided against doing business with Verizon and therefore didn't have to deal with the Fairpoint debacle. And, yes, I do consider myself lucky to have my Internet through Comcast. I'm not a big fan of Comcast, but I have enjoyed low-latency Internet with acceptable reliability. Overpriced at $45 a month for a 3MB Down / 256KB (really about 100KB) up plan, but it's been a pretty solid connection.
But, yeah, there are a lot of people at work who converted to someone, ANYONE, as long as it wasn't Fairpoint. The cable companies around here made a killing, and some of them accelerated plans for digital phone service because people were SCREAMING for it so they could get off Fairpoint.
If they are using traditional WiFi, then there's an easy way to protect the oil platform. Surround it with frikkin sharks, frikkin sharks with frikkin laser beams.
I think you're misunderstanding the whole point of Sarbanes-Oxley.
A SOX auditor doesn't investigate the systems in detail. They are documentors, and usually are hired by the people who are being audited. This isn't like an IRS audit where it's a confrontational thing, it's more of a "discover and document", and it's supposed to be a partnership between the auditor and the company being audited.
The auditing company doesn't know your practices, but they have a list of acceptable (or "best" if you prefer) practices. They come in and ask you how you do things, and if your practices are not acceptable, they are supposed to give you a list of them so you can work on them for the next round of auditing.
Lying to a SOX auditor serves no useful purpose, because the auditor is not there to penalize you for bad practices, they are there to help you avoid them. At the end, they gather information about how the company works from company employees WHO THEN SIGN THEIR NAMES to the audit, along with a list of gaps the company has promised to work on for the next audit.
If/when the company practices are found to deviate from what the company officers claimed, those officers can then be held personally liable for those inconsistencies. So if you lie to a SOX auditor, you can lose your house if your name is on the report and someone can prove that you lied later on.
EXAMPLE:
You hire a SOX auditor who looks into your company's practices on passwords. The auditor asks "Do you require complex passwords that must be changed at least quarterly?" And you don't. You can answer: YES: At which point the auditor checks off the little ticky box and you sign your name to that document. Auditor leaves happy. NO: At which point the auditor tells you that you need them, and the two of you set a date for a re-evaluation of that point, and you sign your name to that document.
A month later, your company is hacked due to a weak or fixed password.
If you answered "YES", then it will be quickly discovered that you lied in your SOX audit, and you will be held personally and possibly criminally liable for your answer. In other words, your house and fancy car go away, and you and Bubba get to know each other really well. And Bubba loves corporate criminals because they don't fight as much.
If you answered "NO", then it will be quickly discovered that you documented this weakness and were working toward fixing it. Depending on the amount of press, you might still get scapegoated and thrown out on the street, but you have a document on file saying you told the truth about the problem, so unless you go in for a conjugal visit you and Bubba will never meet.
3 = Get selves into serious trouble for Gubbmint Bailout.
FairPoint wasn't ready. This was painfully obvious to everyone outside government circles. However, telephony is a vital infrastructure, especially in rural areas where cell just doesn't work, and FairPoint knows it. Verizon knew it, too, but they had other profitable divisions that prevented them from simply shutting down New England and cutting their losses.
New England is too rural for the landlines to be truly profitable at anything resembling a reasonable price, and in Maine the taxes/fees/surcharges added to a landline can easily add up to $10 a month. Last time I looked, I think a basic no-long-distance metered line was about $30 a month. Real service with some long distance included can run in the $50s. So cell phones start looking reasonable for a lot of customers, and of course the VERY inexpensive Vonage and other VoIP services instantly became the favored service for anyone in an urban enough area to have broadband Internet. Which drove the price-per-customer UP, since many who had a choice were already in urban areas where there's a lot less wire to be maintained. The rural folk at the end of their long fiber-and-copper lines had to stay with Verizon, they had no choice since cell service is pretty much nonexistent for a lot of them, and broadband? Verizon actually laughed at my mother when she asked when DSL might be available. (hint: her dial-up capability was Verizon-limited to 14.4K because Verizon didn't have enough available switching capability to support a full voice line for every customer).
FairPoint is a relatively smaller company, and it's possible that a behind-the-scenes deal between the muckity-mucks at FairPoint and Verizon and our esteemed legislators assured that the landlines were transferred out of Verizon so they could shed the unprofitable division. Without a larger company to fund New England, the new company would have a valid reason to cry poverty and stick their hand out, or threaten to go bankrupt. Verizon doesn't have that luxury - they make too much profit elsewhere to claim poverty.
So FairPoint comes in, makes some token improvements in coverage (offering DSL in rural areas, which pleased my mother no end!) with much fanfare and pomp and circumstance so the consumers who still care are happy with their government's decision. Not to mention they could spend their way through their cash quickly since they knew they'd run out soon enough anyway, so might as well do some bread and circuses on the spiral.
Now, phase 2 kicks in. Tax dollars will be requested very soon to keep FairPoint operational, otherwise a LOT of rural and poor people will lose access to "911", not to mention normal phone service and their dialup Internet (which is all they have in a lot of areas). A "think of the pauper children" bill will come on the legislative floors of all three states soon. And it'll have to pass, because telephone is second maybe only to electricity in terms of a "must have" infrastructure.
The only question is what they are going to tax, err, "surcharge" to pay for it.
I remember when FairPoint was trying to take over, the local NPR station in Maine was coming out with an almost-daily feature on specific points of the FairPoint readiness plan. Some of them would have gotten me caught under the new Maine distracted driving law because they were so ridiculous I (as a non-FairPoint customer) was laughing so hard I almost drove off the interstate.
My favorite was the costs assumption. FairPoint, in their infinite wisdumb, decided that the cost of gasoline would remain fixed at $2 or less for a period of no less than seven years. Gas was about $2 at the time the report was written and was documented as such, and $3 when the report was evaluated by the various state legislatures. A few legislators even mentioned that point specifically after the NPR story on it broke. Then, suddenly, it was a non-issue even though the report never changed.
But there were LOTS of things like this. Assumptions that labor costs wouldn't change, assumptions that their customer base would increase by some incredible percentage while support costs would remain fixed or drop, assumptions on the cost of running new cable and upgrading Internet infrastructure that were apparently based on most of the work being done by elves while the workers slept and service being provided by the magical Internet Faeries instead of actual bandwidth from Level3.
FairPoint made up numbers for the auditors, that much is true. But most of their fabrications were obvious enough to be on the daily news. Obviously, the legislatures of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont don't listen to NPR. Or FairPoint and Verizon executives could afford enough bribe money or had the incriminating photos. You choose.
So now I've plunked $20 plus a $20 deposit to get my ez-pass so the 5 times a year I drive down the highway I can pay my $1 toll without rolling down the windows on a rainy or snowy day. Great, sez I. It's largely a waste carrying the stupid thing, but it is nice to be able to drive right on through... at 5MPH, but at least I'm not waiting in line behind the tourist who is counting out his toll in pennies. And they are passing the savings along, so I pay 60 cents instead of a buck.
I'd be OK with a system like this if I could use the SAME UNIT for parking. But if I've got to plunk down another $20 deposit plus $20 initial balance to park in the garage in the "big city" the 2-3 times a year I go down there, fuhgeddaboudit! The parking garage would read my ez-pass unit and the highway toll would read my parking garage unit and who knows what else I'll have to carry one for, I'll be paying fines based on "invalid unit reads" until I'm frikkin' broke, even assuming I can see past the gridwork of white plastic doohickeys stuck to my windshield.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic parking overlords.
Of course, I live in the sticks and bicycle to work whenever I can. When I go to the "big city" (Portland ME), I plan on parking in one of the garages and (gasp!) WALKING to where I want to go.
It's OK, I understand and forgive you. Can I still do business with you if I can accurately describe the mating call of the 300-baud modem? That's GOTTA be solid proof.:)
There are a few minor problems with a law like this:
1: Identifying minors. I remember dealing with COPA on the discussion boards I run, and basically I had a checkbox that says "you cannot access this site if you are a minor, check here to certify that you are, in fact, over 18 or the legal age of independence for your country." I routinely had 13 and 14 year olds on the site, who admitted they were underage, who had checked that box. Guess what? People lie. And if a 13 year old had used the site to hook up with an adult for sex, I probably would have shared some liability even though I had no way of knowing the actual age of my users. The Internet happens over great distances, and you don't get to check ID for or personally interview every user.
2: Logistics. How, precisely, do you go about collecting consent from a parent (assuming the kid tells the truth)? Do you have to physically call every parent when the kid signs up for an account? Is getting verbal consent enough, or do you have to get a signed letter? How do you know it's not forged? What if the kid is located in somewhere other than Maine? Maybe, God Forbid, in another country? This may come as a surprise in Augusta, but kids exist everywhere.
3: Jurisdiction. If I run a web site in Maine, am I required to collect information on minors living in Maine only, or worldwide? Alabama and Japan are not requiring this parental consent, so I'm now running at a disadvantage compared to a web site running from (say) New Hampshire. How about if I run a website in, say, Dusseldorf or Paris and want to sell to someone in Maine. Do I, as a foreign entity, have to adjust my e-commerce systems to suit Maine law?
4: Sense. If Little Jimmy gets ahold of his dad's credit card and buys something, well, that sounds like a discipline issue between Jimbo and Dad, doesn't it? Dad either (a) gave consent by handing over the credit card or (b) will be surprised to find out that Jimbo LIED on the form and claimed to be Dad when he bought his stuff.
#4 is particularly true if somehow the vendor is supposed to know that Jimbo is lying and it's not really his dad making the purchase.
Other than the fact that it's an unenforceable law governing something that Maine has no jurisdiction over in a way that makes it very hard to do business in or from Maine, and that it's trying to fix a problem that can't be fixed this way, heck, it's a great law.
Slashdot Mirror
True. I visit some of my mother's friends in a nursing home occasionally, and there are some obese people there who LOOK like they might be elderly, but in reality are in their 40s and 50s (or younger).
The trick I found was to stop looking at all the "beautiful people" and just look at myself. Me at 270 looked better than me at 280. 260 was getting downright sexy (OK, I exaggerate, no I outright lie, but anyway)...
Every few pounds was a struggle, but at the end I could look at a picture of myself a few pounds ago and say "Ugh! At least I'm better than that!"
In the end, I lost about 70 pounds, and it took me the better part of a year. And it was a tough year, full of triumphs and tragedies, hard work, failures, and successes.
But now I can jog, I can ride my bike 15 miles each way to work, I can kayak for miles. I can do so many things I simply couldn't. I know the long time I was very heavy will have long-term consequences I'll have to deal with later, but I'm healthy NOW.
That may be, but certainly out in the countryside the obesity rate was very low, or only thin people walk the pedestrian district. :)
Maybe that's another cause/effect thing at work. Since I was mostly in areas frequented by people who walked a lot, maybe I tended to only run into people who walked a lot and were therefore thin.
But, even in the restaurants away from the pedestrian district, I don't think I ever saw anyone I'd describe as obese. Well, no one who spoke French, anyway. A few English-speakers from the US.
Agreed. If someone is overweight, there is a chance that helping them lose weight may not help preserve brain function. But changing nothing sure ain't gonna help out.
And there are so many other benefits to losing weight. I'm not referring to studies, I'm referring to personal experience.
I had the same shock when I went to France and spent a week in Orleans. At the time, I weighed 205 and I'm 6'3", so I didn't stand out amongst the French population. I walked around Paris for a day, then spent most of my time in Orleans (when I wasn't working) walking down the pedestrian district trying French food.
I saw three people who were heavy enough to stand out, and all three were Americans.
When I got back to JFK Airport in the US, it was almost shocking to see how many people were large.
The things we get used to and don't even realize it...
The funny part was that I ATE LIKE AN EFFING KING in France. I denied myself NOTHING, and ate cheese by the ton. And came back 2 pounds lighter. I'm sure it helped that I only used my car to go back and forth to work, and the rest of my time was spent walking (4-5 miles a day, minimum).
I'm sure it also helped that there was very little sugar in what I ate in France, and it was all food prepared by people who care about the quality of what they were serving. Even the cafeteria food at the company I was working for ran circles around the nicer restaurants here in the US, and the restaurants? Oh. My. God. I have never eaten anything like it.
Well, in his case he was a MAJOR developer for the area. He was in the process of building a lot more homes, so he could hardly afford a hit to his reputation that having 100+ homeowners and renters all calling the BBB on him would entail.
But, in my dealings with him, he was always honest enough. When I called his office, someone always answered the phone, and when something needed repairing he usually had someone out within a couple of days (or faster if it was urgent).
People may be eating more, or they may be eating a higher percentage of food that gets turned into fat, or they may be exercising less. I'd actually vote for all three.
Our food is cheaper, more plentiful, and more processed than it was just a few short decades ago. In fact, heavily-processed foods tend to preserve better, and are therefore cheaper to transport (less loss), and are generally cheaper to consume. I can go to Mickey D's and buy Quarter Pounders on white flour buns, and supersize my sugary drink and processed-fat-laden fries for a family for next to nothing and in almost no time.
The new US standard is for both parents to work. This contrasts pretty starkly with the average lifestyle of our parents, who weren't as affluent but also had one breadwinner and one homemaker. This new lifestyle leaves little time for the art of quality food preparation, and therefore parents understandably lean more heavily on prepared food. With money and time not exactly plentiful, a quick stop by a fast food joint or a grab-and-go pizza on the way home is both cheap and easy. Then, when you get home, you want to spend your few precious moments each evening with your kids, so unless you're into outdoor activities exercise is out unless you do it really early or really late, and who wants that?
Add to that the always-increasing choice of sedentary entertainment. TV. Video games. The Internet. All easy, all entertaining, and after a hard day's work it's tough not to have a well-deserved break. And they sure are appealing.
Snacks and sides for the meals need to be chosen based on ease of preparation and durability in storage in the grab-and-go lifestyle, and fruits and veggies and quality proteins have short shelf lives and/or require refrigeration and/or require some form of preparation. Processed, salted, and preserved stuff is just so much easier, and quite often cheaper. So "fruit" becomes "froot by the foot" with very little actual nutritional value and lots of processed sugars.
Nuts are fantastic proteins and preserve very well, but it's rapidly becoming politically incorrect to carry them around with you because of the apparent explosion of nut allergies. You don't want to kill your neighbor's kid by inviting them over to play but forgetting to have your kid change their clothes because they had a BP&J for lunch.
And vegetables? Five a day? I think many harried households are lucky to get five a week, and so many things we call "vegetables" have no nutrition at all and don't deserve the title. Mashed, skinned potatoes are useless, as is corn. Especially ladled with butter or sour cream (although both of those at least represent a decent-quality protein). Many vegetables are cooked or canned beyond any possible nutritional value except residual fiber, then sweetened or enhanced to make them more palatable.
That's quite possible. The article mentions some possible feedback loops, but the overall gist is that there is a correlation between being obese and losing brain function as you get older.
As someone tagged it, "correlation is not causation," and that's a fair accusation of both my choice of headlines and the that of the original article (though the article itself does mention a series of possible reasons for the link).
It could be that reduced brain function leads to overeating or poorer food choices, or a chemical imbalance does, which causes the obesity and the brain function loss.
Whatever gets you started. :)
For me, it took a health scare. I hope your reasons are easier and less scary.
I think the study adjusts for those factors perfectly well, in fact you're introducing some interesting possibilities as to an explanation for the link. The study (which is small, so we should obviously be cautious about drawing too many conclusions from it) only states that people who are obese appear to have less brain function. A few theories were forwarded to explain the link, but your theory is just as sound, and doesn't disprove the possible link.
Let's follow your chain of events for a moment. John is obese. John avoids his doctor because he's tired of being hassled about his weight. Fair enough - that's pretty common.
John is now in a negative feedback loop. He's receiving almost no advice on his diet, no encouragement to exercise, and probably is understandably demoralized from being called "fatty" and getting unwelcome advice from health freakazoids that he's likely to give up on health maintenance entirely. Poorer nutrition and less exercise mean that John's entire body is going to suffer, including the brain.
It's actually as good a theory as any. Obesity would have a significant correlation with people who are not caring for their overall health properly, and obesity can be both cause and effect in this case. John isn't a bad guy, he's just stuck in a rut, and he's headed for possible trouble.
I know John's story.
I'm 6' 3" and used to weigh very close to 300 pounds. I avoided my doctor for over a decade for the same reason John might.
It's tough to get started losing weight, and having a bunch of skinnyminnies around you crybabying about how you should get off your very large posterior and do something is not, repeat not, helpful. It's demoralizing, and makes the task of getting started look all that much harder.
It took a health scare for me to start the very long, very hard trail, and I'm now down to 215 (still mildly overweight, but I can ride my bike 30 miles a day without any problems). I wish terribly that I had learned my lesson an easier way, but I didn't, and I'm sure being obese for as long as I was will have long-term consequences. But I was where I was, and I understand how very hard it is to get started, and how the general attitude of society toward the obese does not make them want to help themselves. I wanted to just curl up with my Ben and Jerry's and donuts and leave me the hell alone.
I've encouraged several friends over the years to get up and just take short walks with me, and started a couple of them on the road to weight loss, but you've got to approach that sort of overture carefully, and have a sense for when your friend is ready to start helping themselves, then offer them some encouragement.
I agree that the parent post should not have been marked as a troll, though I note that it has since been modded to "4: Interesting".
Anyway...
Concrete moves and cracks, yes. But the movement of concrete is usually very slight. Copper and plastic pipe are more flexible than concrete, so they'll be able to bend to a certain amount of motion (usually FAR more than the concrete could manage). Cracks in concrete, especially in the larger span, are generally very small and don't amount to a great big gap that the pipe couldn't stretch or bend to accommodate.
A motion within a reinforced concrete slab that would be sufficient to even break a 1/2" pipe would amount to a significant crack in the concrete, large enough that a homeowner should probably leave the premises immediately and get an inspector to do some structural checks ASAP. You'd have to have a 1/4" wide crack, at least, to stand a decent chance of breaking a copper pipe. If you start seeing 1/4" cracks in the middle of your slab, you have a serious problem going on. Cooling your computer suddenly looks pretty trivial.
There's a much greater chance that the pipe itself would rupture due to being eaten up by the acid in the concrete, but the concrete would be largely unaffected by that event.
Copper or other pipe is put into concrete slabs all the time. Yes, if the foundation cracks, perhaps the pipe will be compromised. But in this guy's case, what's the loss? He has to switch over to a more standard radiator system.
Plus, if the house settles or the concrete slab shifts enough to crush or break a pipe, I think the movement in the concrete would manifest itself in far more serious ways (such as little details like walls falling down, etc). That includes earthquake-induced shifting - if an earthquake shifts concrete that badly, no one is ever going to see it because those kinds of forces would have collapsed the house anyway. Reinforced concrete should be able to stand up to some serious pounding - certainly better than, say, the 2x6 walls sitting on it.
I rented a house in Kentucky that had this problem. The house was built with copper pipes embedded in the foundation for water, but to save money apparently the builder had just put bare copper pipe instead of putting it in plastic conduit. About 5 years after the house was built, the pipes started failing (in my case, it was a pipe that led to an outside faucet I never used, and I only discovered it when my water bill went from its normal $20 to about $280 one month).
Fortunately, the landlord in my case was the builder, so he sent a team out to reroute all the pipes up through the ceiling (which was a major mess, but the workers were really careful with my stuff and used sheet plastic generously to contain all the drywall dust, etc) and refunded my water bill for the month. He also replaced all the carpet in the house, since the workers pretty much ruined the carpeting running the new water pipes. So after a week or so of hassle, I had a freshly-painted house with brand new carpeting.
Apparently (as it was explained to me by the landlord) bare copper *can* sometimes work in concrete, but it depends on the acidity of the concrete, which probably depends on the stone and filler used. The landlord admitted he messed up and didn't measure the acidity of the concrete (and he had built and sold a lot of houses in my neighborhood, so he was looking forward to a LOT of repairs like this).
In any case, lining the copper with something is probably a good idea, even if it does reduce heat exchange. Or just use radiant heat pipe as the parent suggests.
After all, there's the heat generated by a computer (maybe 150 watts) to deal with, and 6 meters of pipe. With that much pipe, just the copper exposed to air would probably dissipate enough heat without needing forced air, so exchanging the heat through plastic into a concrete biomass should work just fine.
The truth can never be considered trolling.
I have been very fortunate - I decided against doing business with Verizon and therefore didn't have to deal with the Fairpoint debacle. And, yes, I do consider myself lucky to have my Internet through Comcast. I'm not a big fan of Comcast, but I have enjoyed low-latency Internet with acceptable reliability. Overpriced at $45 a month for a 3MB Down / 256KB (really about 100KB) up plan, but it's been a pretty solid connection.
But, yeah, there are a lot of people at work who converted to someone, ANYONE, as long as it wasn't Fairpoint. The cable companies around here made a killing, and some of them accelerated plans for digital phone service because people were SCREAMING for it so they could get off Fairpoint.
Of course, Verizon (wireless) did well too.
Note: Said phone lines are run by Fairpoint. So even if you want dialup, you're stuck with Fairpoint....
If they are using traditional WiFi, then there's an easy way to protect the oil platform. Surround it with frikkin sharks, frikkin sharks with frikkin laser beams.
I think you're misunderstanding the whole point of Sarbanes-Oxley.
A SOX auditor doesn't investigate the systems in detail. They are documentors, and usually are hired by the people who are being audited. This isn't like an IRS audit where it's a confrontational thing, it's more of a "discover and document", and it's supposed to be a partnership between the auditor and the company being audited.
The auditing company doesn't know your practices, but they have a list of acceptable (or "best" if you prefer) practices. They come in and ask you how you do things, and if your practices are not acceptable, they are supposed to give you a list of them so you can work on them for the next round of auditing.
Lying to a SOX auditor serves no useful purpose, because the auditor is not there to penalize you for bad practices, they are there to help you avoid them. At the end, they gather information about how the company works from company employees WHO THEN SIGN THEIR NAMES to the audit, along with a list of gaps the company has promised to work on for the next audit.
If/when the company practices are found to deviate from what the company officers claimed, those officers can then be held personally liable for those inconsistencies. So if you lie to a SOX auditor, you can lose your house if your name is on the report and someone can prove that you lied later on.
EXAMPLE:
You hire a SOX auditor who looks into your company's practices on passwords. The auditor asks "Do you require complex passwords that must be changed at least quarterly?" And you don't. You can answer:
YES: At which point the auditor checks off the little ticky box and you sign your name to that document. Auditor leaves happy.
NO: At which point the auditor tells you that you need them, and the two of you set a date for a re-evaluation of that point, and you sign your name to that document.
A month later, your company is hacked due to a weak or fixed password.
If you answered "YES", then it will be quickly discovered that you lied in your SOX audit, and you will be held personally and possibly criminally liable for your answer. In other words, your house and fancy car go away, and you and Bubba get to know each other really well. And Bubba loves corporate criminals because they don't fight as much.
If you answered "NO", then it will be quickly discovered that you documented this weakness and were working toward fixing it. Depending on the amount of press, you might still get scapegoated and thrown out on the street, but you have a document on file saying you told the truth about the problem, so unless you go in for a conjugal visit you and Bubba will never meet.
3 = Get selves into serious trouble for Gubbmint Bailout.
FairPoint wasn't ready. This was painfully obvious to everyone outside government circles. However, telephony is a vital infrastructure, especially in rural areas where cell just doesn't work, and FairPoint knows it. Verizon knew it, too, but they had other profitable divisions that prevented them from simply shutting down New England and cutting their losses.
New England is too rural for the landlines to be truly profitable at anything resembling a reasonable price, and in Maine the taxes/fees/surcharges added to a landline can easily add up to $10 a month. Last time I looked, I think a basic no-long-distance metered line was about $30 a month. Real service with some long distance included can run in the $50s. So cell phones start looking reasonable for a lot of customers, and of course the VERY inexpensive Vonage and other VoIP services instantly became the favored service for anyone in an urban enough area to have broadband Internet. Which drove the price-per-customer UP, since many who had a choice were already in urban areas where there's a lot less wire to be maintained. The rural folk at the end of their long fiber-and-copper lines had to stay with Verizon, they had no choice since cell service is pretty much nonexistent for a lot of them, and broadband? Verizon actually laughed at my mother when she asked when DSL might be available. (hint: her dial-up capability was Verizon-limited to 14.4K because Verizon didn't have enough available switching capability to support a full voice line for every customer).
FairPoint is a relatively smaller company, and it's possible that a behind-the-scenes deal between the muckity-mucks at FairPoint and Verizon and our esteemed legislators assured that the landlines were transferred out of Verizon so they could shed the unprofitable division. Without a larger company to fund New England, the new company would have a valid reason to cry poverty and stick their hand out, or threaten to go bankrupt. Verizon doesn't have that luxury - they make too much profit elsewhere to claim poverty.
So FairPoint comes in, makes some token improvements in coverage (offering DSL in rural areas, which pleased my mother no end!) with much fanfare and pomp and circumstance so the consumers who still care are happy with their government's decision. Not to mention they could spend their way through their cash quickly since they knew they'd run out soon enough anyway, so might as well do some bread and circuses on the spiral.
Now, phase 2 kicks in. Tax dollars will be requested very soon to keep FairPoint operational, otherwise a LOT of rural and poor people will lose access to "911", not to mention normal phone service and their dialup Internet (which is all they have in a lot of areas). A "think of the pauper children" bill will come on the legislative floors of all three states soon. And it'll have to pass, because telephone is second maybe only to electricity in terms of a "must have" infrastructure.
The only question is what they are going to tax, err, "surcharge" to pay for it.
They showed an incredible amount of competence in pulling the wool over the collective eyes in Augusta, Concord, and Montpelier.
I remember when FairPoint was trying to take over, the local NPR station in Maine was coming out with an almost-daily feature on specific points of the FairPoint readiness plan. Some of them would have gotten me caught under the new Maine distracted driving law because they were so ridiculous I (as a non-FairPoint customer) was laughing so hard I almost drove off the interstate.
My favorite was the costs assumption. FairPoint, in their infinite wisdumb, decided that the cost of gasoline would remain fixed at $2 or less for a period of no less than seven years. Gas was about $2 at the time the report was written and was documented as such, and $3 when the report was evaluated by the various state legislatures. A few legislators even mentioned that point specifically after the NPR story on it broke. Then, suddenly, it was a non-issue even though the report never changed.
But there were LOTS of things like this. Assumptions that labor costs wouldn't change, assumptions that their customer base would increase by some incredible percentage while support costs would remain fixed or drop, assumptions on the cost of running new cable and upgrading Internet infrastructure that were apparently based on most of the work being done by elves while the workers slept and service being provided by the magical Internet Faeries instead of actual bandwidth from Level3.
FairPoint made up numbers for the auditors, that much is true. But most of their fabrications were obvious enough to be on the daily news. Obviously, the legislatures of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont don't listen to NPR. Or FairPoint and Verizon executives could afford enough bribe money or had the incriminating photos. You choose.
We got what we (or FairPoint) paid for.
STILL glad I'm a Vonage customer.
So now I've plunked $20 plus a $20 deposit to get my ez-pass so the 5 times a year I drive down the highway I can pay my $1 toll without rolling down the windows on a rainy or snowy day. Great, sez I. It's largely a waste carrying the stupid thing, but it is nice to be able to drive right on through... at 5MPH, but at least I'm not waiting in line behind the tourist who is counting out his toll in pennies. And they are passing the savings along, so I pay 60 cents instead of a buck.
I'd be OK with a system like this if I could use the SAME UNIT for parking. But if I've got to plunk down another $20 deposit plus $20 initial balance to park in the garage in the "big city" the 2-3 times a year I go down there, fuhgeddaboudit! The parking garage would read my ez-pass unit and the highway toll would read my parking garage unit and who knows what else I'll have to carry one for, I'll be paying fines based on "invalid unit reads" until I'm frikkin' broke, even assuming I can see past the gridwork of white plastic doohickeys stuck to my windshield.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic parking overlords.
Of course, I live in the sticks and bicycle to work whenever I can. When I go to the "big city" (Portland ME), I plan on parking in one of the garages and (gasp!) WALKING to where I want to go.
Silly billy, that's because your dictionary is for English, not whatever it is you spell in England. :)
It's OK, I understand and forgive you. Can I still do business with you if I can accurately describe the mating call of the 300-baud modem? That's GOTTA be solid proof. :)
Disclosure: I live in Maine.
There are a few minor problems with a law like this:
1: Identifying minors. I remember dealing with COPA on the discussion boards I run, and basically I had a checkbox that says "you cannot access this site if you are a minor, check here to certify that you are, in fact, over 18 or the legal age of independence for your country." I routinely had 13 and 14 year olds on the site, who admitted they were underage, who had checked that box. Guess what? People lie. And if a 13 year old had used the site to hook up with an adult for sex, I probably would have shared some liability even though I had no way of knowing the actual age of my users. The Internet happens over great distances, and you don't get to check ID for or personally interview every user.
2: Logistics. How, precisely, do you go about collecting consent from a parent (assuming the kid tells the truth)? Do you have to physically call every parent when the kid signs up for an account? Is getting verbal consent enough, or do you have to get a signed letter? How do you know it's not forged? What if the kid is located in somewhere other than Maine? Maybe, God Forbid, in another country? This may come as a surprise in Augusta, but kids exist everywhere.
3: Jurisdiction. If I run a web site in Maine, am I required to collect information on minors living in Maine only, or worldwide? Alabama and Japan are not requiring this parental consent, so I'm now running at a disadvantage compared to a web site running from (say) New Hampshire. How about if I run a website in, say, Dusseldorf or Paris and want to sell to someone in Maine. Do I, as a foreign entity, have to adjust my e-commerce systems to suit Maine law?
4: Sense. If Little Jimmy gets ahold of his dad's credit card and buys something, well, that sounds like a discipline issue between Jimbo and Dad, doesn't it? Dad either (a) gave consent by handing over the credit card or (b) will be surprised to find out that Jimbo LIED on the form and claimed to be Dad when he bought his stuff.
#4 is particularly true if somehow the vendor is supposed to know that Jimbo is lying and it's not really his dad making the purchase.
Other than the fact that it's an unenforceable law governing something that Maine has no jurisdiction over in a way that makes it very hard to do business in or from Maine, and that it's trying to fix a problem that can't be fixed this way, heck, it's a great law.