I guess you didn't see the part in my comment about catastrophic insurance.
And, jackasses that don't take care of themselves and expect 'the system' to foot the bill are the reason I can't afford regular insurance. Read my comment again.
I know that terrible stuff happens to people on occasion, but we live in a society where 95% of the members act like idiots in regard to their health. Americans are profoundly childish about eating and exercise, or really anythning that involves a little self-discipline.
This accords with what I have experienced. Generally we pay less than 50% of the sticker price for all medical care, if we offer cash.
When my latest was born in 2008, we got everything covered for under $5000 at a very good hospital, simply because we offered cash up front. In fact, we were informed that the price would triple if we couldn't pay the full amount up front--even if we paid all the remainder within a week. That's the nature of risk management in the medical business.
As a family man with 3 kids, we find that life is MUCH cheaper without insurance. If you have a generally healthy family, and actually bother to make sure your family eats well and exercises well (growing your own garden is a major plus), and if you bother to learn a little something about health on your own (my wife is a nurse), you can actually manage to live without constant "health care". Seriously, when did people start needing medical care as an ongoing service, like electricity and water? It's pretty easy nowadays to check your own blood pressure, cholesterol, heart rate, and quite a few other things. We only go to doctors when something doesn't add up.
I see the world today as gone somewhat mad about how to take care of the body. I know younger people in their 30s who are already on multiple medications--statins, beta blockers, blood-thinners, you name it. Diabetics are everywhere, and Coca Cola sales are exceeding forecasts. We are finding that "diet food" actually makes you fatter. We are finding that a certain amount of sun is actually good for you. We are finding that sitting all day in a cubicle is horrible for your health. It's time to start putting two and two together. If you want a healthier population, the first thing we need to do is get everyone exercising regularly, spending some time outdoors instead of under florescent lighting or the pallid glows of their LCD screens, and eating real food instead of the crap that comes from factories (and most grocery stores, unfortunately).
Of course there are many types of logic that belong in the application, but generally when I see a developer screaming about "logic in the database", especially when they only want "simple dumb queries", I just have to sigh at all the opportunities for saving one's own ass that are being missed completely. SQL, as clunky as it is, is still a 4GL declarative language that allows one to express things that would take a lot more code to handle procedurally, not to mention the whole concept of constraints that are impossible to enforce in application space.
No, I'm not talking about littering a database with stored procedures that do all sorts of arcane stuff. Of course a database is no place to do stupid things like put in a trigger that emails a vendor with a rich-HTML message when an invoice has been paid. A database is a place to put in a constraint that no invoice record should be marked as "paid" if the associated transaction record has not been processed (or record of check printed, or whatever). It's all about choosing wisely with separation of concerns.
I just checked again and all I see is the hostname, username, databasename and schema. No password.
Of course, I also make it a point to only connect using HTTPS. I like the idea that Adminer being only one.php file, but it needs an optional config file in order to do such things as require HTTPS, prevent certain logins, store standard connections so you don't have to always access the dropdown, etc... Fortunately, there is a plugin system so it shouldn't be hard to do.
That is not true at all. In fact wildly wrong. A good database is the tool you use to manage your data. If your system is properly designed, it is part of your application. A good database will manage concurrency, data integrity, and more. The idea that you move this out into the application geometrically increases complexity, or more likely, is ignored at your peril.
An increasingly unpopular view these days, sadly. It seems to me that with the advent of Agile and NoSQL, critical thinking skills in the development community are going out of style. Notice the original poster decries the idea of "LOGIC" being part of the data management level. That's right, stuff it all ad-hoc into the application layer and then watch things blow up when someone does a manual updated to a table, or someone (inevitably in large corporations) brings another application to connect to that database.
While the best option is to get rid of MySQL completely and use the great tools available for PostgreSQL, If you are stuck with MySQL, Adminer is the best thing out there, period. Even though it is web-based, it is a better GUI for MySQL than all the native clients put together. I say this in all seriousness, having had to support MySQL at a large institution for 2 years. Adminer is the only one, for example, that handles UTF-8 correctly. I kid you not. You have to realize that in order to work with MySQL in a full Unicode environment, EVERY SINGLE CONNECTION needs a couple of queries to be run after connecting, and you CANNOT AUTOMATE THIS. Adminer builds that into it's MySQL connection class. This is just one example of the careful thought put into Adminer. Also, the fact that it is web-based is actually a plus, not a negative, because it has a much more standardized way of handling things like copy/paste. Browse a table in Adminer with Firefox, hit the CTRL key, drag the mouse over a column or section of the output, CTRL-C, and you have a perfect spreadsheet-pasteable grid. I haven't been able to find another GUI tool to do this. Adminer FTW.
Unfortunately, Adminer's PostgreSQL support isn't quite as good as phpPgAdmin, or I would be using it for Postgres. It really has one of the best GUIs I have seen on a web-based app.
Ditto here. 46 (male) and even though I thought I was in OK-ish shape a couple years ago, I was starting to get worried about the aches and pains, and my cholesterol, blood pressure and heart rate were starting to climb. A few months of basic stuff with dumbbells (dead lifts, squats, power lifting, bench press) and getting rid of most grains and sugars from my diet, and it was like a whole new me. And the weekly (sometimes daily) headaches I was getting disappeared also. Now I don't ever let 48 hours go by without some sort of high-intensity exercise, even if I only have 10 minutes to spare. 10 minutes of serious weight lifting beats an hour of jogging, exercise bicycle or other aerobic stuff. Losing 40 lbs of fat and gaining 10 lbs of muscle feels pretty good too. Highly recommended.
That depends on a few variables of economics. Demand is already up for grass-fed beef among a small part of the population--essentially there is more demand than there is production, and grass-fed beef is at least twice the cost of regular beef. If large-scale rotational farming came back into vogue, we would have much more production of grass-fed beef, so it might be enough to meet the demand. Also, the economy would no longer be subject to the *extensive* drain of corn and grain subsidies.
Bizarre. Every time I read something new about industrial farming I get more weirded out by the whole situation. The connection modern farming has with the simple honest-hard-working-folk kind of farming I knew as a kid is just... gone. It's like we're farming on the surface of Mars or something.
Ironically, the best beef for you is not from a cow being fed corn from giant trough which is also sludged up with manure, dead cow parts, and days-old standing water. How about a cow eating grass, seeing as they happen to be ruminants?
So yes, GOOD meat would be less expensive if the government stopped subsidizing the corn industries. In fact, the whole idea of massive farms growing nothing but corn is the stupidest waste of land possible. Corn has very low benefit for both humans and cows, but it just happens to be easy to ship long-distance. Ask yourself "Why do they need subsidies to survive?" It's just like the "too big to fail" banking system that must be subsidized at the cost of huge segments of our economy. Politics and power never seem to collude in our benefit.
The whole concept of the monoculture industrial farming system has ruined generations of farmland. The age-old concept of rotational grazing as well as other sustainable methods has actually been shown to produce much more return for square acre than typical large-scale industrial farming, but our whole government and food-regulation system makes it very hard for these kinds of farms to compete. Check out Joel Salatin's book "Everything I Want to do is Illegal".
There is a problem when geeks try to argue from a priori logic and theory. Empirical evidence. Anyone who has changed his/her diet away from processed carbs and toward meat and fresh vegetables sees the change within days, even without modifying physical activity.
After I changed my diet I was almost embarrassed at the amount of food I could eat and still lose weight. It only starts becoming a problem when I get tempted to start sneak processed carbs or sugars back into the diet. I find that the equivalent of about 1 (maybe 2) slices of bread a day is workable, but once I go over that, I start to bloat up. Meanwhile, I can eat all the meat, cheese, full-fat Greek yoghurt and eggs I want, I see no problem.
Now, I am fully willing to find the hard math in all this. Absolutely. I am a geek, after all. But the simplistic calories-in/calories-out stuff just doesn't wash with me anymore.
This is something I have only just begun to get a picture of, after half a lifetime of carb addiction. I do liken it to an addiction because you get addicted to that glycemic rush in your body from eating a stack of pancakes, or even 3-4 "heart-healthy" granola bars. And then you get that blood-sugar drop an hour later that has you hating yourself, so you look for another quick fix, maybe coffee with sugar, a soda and some chips, and off you go on the insulin roller coaster again.
All you young Slashdotters: it only gets worse as you hit middle age. Learn to recognize the signs. I now can eat an evening meal of meat, fresh vegetables, maybe some cheese, etc... and if I avoid the bread and dessert, I can literally go the whole next day without feeling any real hunger pangs (I try to fast like this once or twice a month). Once you invest in eating nutrient-dense food that produces a slow blood sugar rise (meat, healthy fats, complex carbs), you find yourself on a much more even keel. Less headaches, less lethargy. In fact, you find yourself actively *wanting* to work out instead of dreading it.
You're right, in the sense of the abstract physics of the energy involved. As Daetrin commented, we're sort of doing a Newton/Einstein thing. Yes there is exact accounting of every quantity of mass and energy in the abstract, but in the practical what it means is that calories arriving via different means have different effects. Sort of like data in computer programming. A piece of data might be 2 megabytes, comprising a perfectly discrete number of bits, but that says nothing about what is represented in those megabytes or how they are used. So yes, 2 megabytes will take up an exact amount of storage on a hard drive, but while they are being used inside a computer program, they might represent widely varying degrees of processing, or complexity, and thus widely varying results.
Otherwise we could quite reasonably tell someone to chow down on 2500 calories of sugar a day, supplemented by a few essential vitamin tablets, and some non-dietary roughage such as cardboard. (Come to thing of it, this probably is the philosophy of some of the large food manufacturers.)
I still think there is a geek-fixation to get stuck in the idea of numerical equivalence of food/calories. An over-simplification. It's a temptation to try to reduce everything to a conceptually-manageable equation, when the body is far more complex than that. Why would one have to assume that there is an absolute rule regarding overall number of calories and how much of that goes towards fat? I'm saying that I find this mindset very suspect, given what I have seen. Calories are just a concept. Your body is not a computer that crunches calories the way a laptop crunches bits. Your body has various ways to handle nourishment depending on what type and how fast it arrives, and fat storage is only one of them. I find that when I eat "slow" caloric foods like meat and fats (say cheese, eggs, coconut oil), I maintain a consistently higher energy state for hours, or even into the next day. One study found that people fed a consistently higher amount of protein developed more lean body mass and a higher overall metabolic burn.
Like you, I was very loath to give up grains, having built up a lifelong habit, fairly resembling an addiction. In fact, I think that's really what it amounts to, at least for processed grains. The glycemic effect on the body is very similar to what sugar does: there is immediate gratification, and then your body soon dips into an even lower energy state than before, so you are tempted to gorge on yet another grainy snack+coffee and maybe a little sugar to stay awake, which lasts only so long, etc...You will probably find that this reaction only gets worse as you age. I broke free last year at the age of 45 (but feeling 55) and it's like having a whole new youth handed to me.
And really, I didn't give up grains completely. I just restricted my intake. From two bowls of cereal a day to two a week, etc... I approach grains the way I deal with sweets: an occasional treat rather than the main course.
There's lots of knee-jerk all around when it comes to this topic, I've found. I think there are definitely different "nutritional types" of people, who flourish with different ratios of protein/fat/carbs. However, it still seems obvious from what has happened to our society the past few decades that low-fat, high-sugar, high-carb processed food is the bomb (in your gut). The more refined and processed, the worse.
I think a somewhat balanced approach to this is Dr. Mercola's nutritional typing concept.
I found that I am definitely someone who benefits from removing grains and starches from my diet. It didn't matter if it was the most healthy of whole-grain diets--it just didn't work for me. Cholesterol bad, gut fat increasing. Getting rid of 90% of the grains, 95% of the sugar, and increasing my fat intake, as well as my fresh vegetable intake actually resulted in much better cholesterol and almost 40lbs of weight loss.
I used to think it was purely calories-in/calories-out, but I have changed my mind after thinking through the implications of the glycemic index,and testing it out myself. It is mathematical, but it's not just averaged quantities that matter. The *rate* and fluctuations of caloric processing seems to play a major role. Even though proteins and fats are higher in calories/weight than starches and grains, the body doesn't process the calories nearly as fast. In other words, meat and fat puts your body on a slow-drip supply of calories, whereas a couple pieces of toast with jam will throw all those calories at your pancreas within 30-40 minutes, and whatever you don't use gets turned to fat.
I know there are logical arguments on all sides, but try an empirical test: go for two weeks eating lots of meat, vegetables (especially leafy greens or broccoli), cheese, yogurt, etc... (none of that lowfat stuff, either), and see if that doesn't kick your body into fat-loss mode. I was shocked at how quickly I lost 40 lbs, and how much I could eat. The other benefit of going off grains especially was--no more heartburn, and mo more post-nasal drip or heavy mucous buildup in my throat. I am starting to suspect that modern factory-produced bread is one of the worst things to ever happen to the human race.
Now, I suppose you could argue that since it is the caloric rate that matters, one could snack all day on very small amounts of high-carb food and still not cause insulin spikes. Go ahead, but that sounds like a particularly unsatisfying way to eat.
46 years old here, and the past couple years I had that feeling you're describing. Felt like I was falling apart physically, bored with life, overstressed, working too many hours. Spent a day with atrial fibrillation and then they put me on beta blockers for a few months, which just made me feel more depressed. Cholesterol was high even though I was eating right (according to the conventional wisdom of piling on the whole grains and avoiding fats).
Fact is, I wasn't exercising. I was just fooling myself that a bit of gardening and a couple sets of pushups once or twice a month was enough to stay fit. Also, I was eating way too many processed carbohydrates. Feeling frustrated with my waning strength, I started reading up on diet/nutrition, concepts like glycemic index and came across the concept of the Paleolithic (or Primal) diet, as well as some of the ideas of the high-protein diets as recommended by Gary Taubes. It all boils down to basically a more thoughtful take on the old Atkins diet. Worked magic on me. I know it is being dismissed as a fad by industry-paid scientists and nutritionists, but it plain and simple works. Empirical evidence over specious logic. I cut out at least 95% of the bread, pasta, chips, rice and cereal I had been eating, and almost all sugar and anything with high fructose corn syrup (not that I was eating much sugar anyway). I mostly cut out milk, although ate plenty of cheese and yogurt (full-fat Greek yogurt makes a nice replacement for sour cream), and tried to focus on eating the freshest vegetables (ideally organic locally-farmed, or from my own garden), lots of meat (especially fresh fish, grass-fed beef, and fresh pastured poultry). Also, plenty of quality fats and oils. I now cook almost exclusively with coconut oil or butter, and I even include a little coconut oil in my salads or other foods.
In other words, I worked at getting as far from the industrial food supply as possible. It is easier than it sounds. Every city has local farmers' markets and organic food exchanges, and anyone can grow a vegetable garden.
Then I started exercising. Going off of the grain and sugar insulin roller-coaster suddenly made me energetic I HAD to exercise. I don't go crazy, but I get at least a good solid 20 minutes of exercise a day, and I'm not talking about a leisurely jog. I push myself, with some version of interval training, peak 8 or just a good dumbbell routine. Within 6 months I had gone from a flabby fooling-myself 220 to a fairly muscular 190lb. I have added at least 10lb of muscle so that's 40lbs of fat gone, and I was someone who people didn't even consider overweight. (6'2" hides a lot of flab). The fact is, most middle-age people who haven't kept up a serious exercise routine have spent the past 20 years losing a pound of muscle a year, so even if you have the same BMI, your fat ratio is horribly skewed.
Your body needs to move. It needs to jump and lift things and sprint and climb. That is our optimal state of fitness. Also, your body needs a nutrient-dense diet, which cannot be gotten from a box. I don't care how much they irradiate the food to give it Vitamin [alphabet[x]]. Our bodies either evolved or were designed for an active outdoor hunter-gatherer life, and for eating real food, and if you don't use it you lose it. Modern medicine can keep us alive longer, but if you just take the pill-popping routine, you will spend the 2nd half of your life dying slowly.
Read up on the life of guys like Jack LaLanne. The man was testament to the efficacy of these things. He eschewed food-in-a-box his whole life, did a 2-hour workout every day of his life, and was still performing feats of strength in his 80s and 90s. At 54 he beat a young Arnold Schwarzenegger at a bodybuilding competition. A modern example of this is Art Devany and his wife--both in their 70s and fitter than your average 30-year-old.
It ain't over 'til it's over. I intend to push myself right up until my last year alive. Why go out any other way?
One of my favorite sites on modern health concepts is mercola.com. Eye-opening ideas there.
You're right... this isn't just leftist hippie drivel. It's a fight for freedom vs. fascism disguised as free industry. I am a 46-year-old, extremely free-market libertarian guy who has begun to experiment with small-scale farming, and the things I come across are downright scary.
Recently a friend who is a gardening/farming geek unparalleled, working on his Master Gardener certification, lost the greater part of his organic garden due to aminopyralid damage in the soil. His mistake was to bring several barrels of cow manure from a conventional cattle farm to mix with his soil. It turns out that Dow Chemical has produced an additive to livestock feed that renders the manure unsuitable for soil for up to 2 years. (This affects horse manure also, BTW). His expensive collection of blackberries, blueberries, fruit trees, and tomatoes: gone overnight. If a guy who reads up on all the science and technology of farming the way a Linux contributor reads Unix programming books can't prevent such disaster, what hope is there for the typical local farmer? One simple mistake of involving your food supply *in any way* with the world of corporate farming can wipe you out. And there are so many ways.
And if you think this problem is bad in the USA, it is even worse in India. Literally a quarter million small-scale farmers have committed suicide over the last couple decades because of international food corporations and genetically modified plants.
Between the heads of international food corporations and the international banking elite, I'm not sure which group should become the more hated, but they are both doing their level best to turn the rest of us into serfs. I don't see how it can end well. I am starting to believe there will be a major upheaval in the world in my children's generation.
left to its own devices, the market will naturally, i said NATURALLY, gravitate all power and wealth into the hands of a few.
As versus what we have now? How many trillions in bailouts (leading to nice fat bonuses for the Wall Street oligarchy) will it take to convince you otherwise?
More powerful government == more opportunities for corruption. Yes, NATURALLY.
Seems to me DART is meant to replace the ubiquitous PHP/Javascript combination. Think about it: quick prototypes with untyped code, moving to static typechecking wherever wanted, Server-side and client-side execution, built-in HTML5 DOM library. Its features may be unexciting, but they could provide an easy escape from PHP/Javascript hell without too much learning curve.
If that is Google's primary target with DART, it may prove to be a very strategic move.
This has always worked out well for me at some level or other. If you make it clear that your reason for leaving is not a negative one (IE. hating your boss/job/whatever) and that you are willing to do whatever you can to help them make the transition, usually employers are quite reasonable about such things. One of my former employers (a branch of a very large company) still contacts me occasionally even 4 years after my departure.
Never burn bridges, but never limit yourself due to feeling sorry for your employer.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you didn't see the part in my comment about catastrophic insurance.
And, jackasses that don't take care of themselves and expect 'the system' to foot the bill are the reason I can't afford regular insurance. Read my comment again.
I know that terrible stuff happens to people on occasion, but we live in a society where 95% of the members act like idiots in regard to their health. Americans are profoundly childish about eating and exercise, or really anythning that involves a little self-discipline.
This accords with what I have experienced. Generally we pay less than 50% of the sticker price for all medical care, if we offer cash.
When my latest was born in 2008, we got everything covered for under $5000 at a very good hospital, simply because we offered cash up front. In fact, we were informed that the price would triple if we couldn't pay the full amount up front--even if we paid all the remainder within a week. That's the nature of risk management in the medical business.
As a family man with 3 kids, we find that life is MUCH cheaper without insurance. If you have a generally healthy family, and actually bother to make sure your family eats well and exercises well (growing your own garden is a major plus), and if you bother to learn a little something about health on your own (my wife is a nurse), you can actually manage to live without constant "health care". Seriously, when did people start needing medical care as an ongoing service, like electricity and water? It's pretty easy nowadays to check your own blood pressure, cholesterol, heart rate, and quite a few other things. We only go to doctors when something doesn't add up.
I see the world today as gone somewhat mad about how to take care of the body. I know younger people in their 30s who are already on multiple medications--statins, beta blockers, blood-thinners, you name it. Diabetics are everywhere, and Coca Cola sales are exceeding forecasts. We are finding that "diet food" actually makes you fatter. We are finding that a certain amount of sun is actually good for you. We are finding that sitting all day in a cubicle is horrible for your health. It's time to start putting two and two together. If you want a healthier population, the first thing we need to do is get everyone exercising regularly, spending some time outdoors instead of under florescent lighting or the pallid glows of their LCD screens, and eating real food instead of the crap that comes from factories (and most grocery stores, unfortunately).
Of course there are many types of logic that belong in the application, but generally when I see a developer screaming about "logic in the database", especially when they only want "simple dumb queries", I just have to sigh at all the opportunities for saving one's own ass that are being missed completely. SQL, as clunky as it is, is still a 4GL declarative language that allows one to express things that would take a lot more code to handle procedurally, not to mention the whole concept of constraints that are impossible to enforce in application space.
No, I'm not talking about littering a database with stored procedures that do all sorts of arcane stuff. Of course a database is no place to do stupid things like put in a trigger that emails a vendor with a rich-HTML message when an invoice has been paid. A database is a place to put in a constraint that no invoice record should be marked as "paid" if the associated transaction record has not been processed (or record of check printed, or whatever). It's all about choosing wisely with separation of concerns.
I just checked again and all I see is the hostname, username, databasename and schema. No password.
Of course, I also make it a point to only connect using HTTPS. I like the idea that Adminer being only one .php file, but it needs an optional config file in order to do such things as require HTTPS, prevent certain logins, store standard connections so you don't have to always access the dropdown, etc... Fortunately, there is a plugin system so it shouldn't be hard to do.
That is not true at all. In fact wildly wrong. A good database is the tool you use to manage your data. If your system is properly designed, it is part of your application. A good database will manage concurrency, data integrity, and more. The idea that you move this out into the application geometrically increases complexity, or more likely, is ignored at your peril.
An increasingly unpopular view these days, sadly. It seems to me that with the advent of Agile and NoSQL, critical thinking skills in the development community are going out of style. Notice the original poster decries the idea of "LOGIC" being part of the data management level. That's right, stuff it all ad-hoc into the application layer and then watch things blow up when someone does a manual updated to a table, or someone (inevitably in large corporations) brings another application to connect to that database.
While the best option is to get rid of MySQL completely and use the great tools available for PostgreSQL, If you are stuck with MySQL, Adminer is the best thing out there, period. Even though it is web-based, it is a better GUI for MySQL than all the native clients put together. I say this in all seriousness, having had to support MySQL at a large institution for 2 years. Adminer is the only one, for example, that handles UTF-8 correctly. I kid you not. You have to realize that in order to work with MySQL in a full Unicode environment, EVERY SINGLE CONNECTION needs a couple of queries to be run after connecting, and you CANNOT AUTOMATE THIS. Adminer builds that into it's MySQL connection class. This is just one example of the careful thought put into Adminer. Also, the fact that it is web-based is actually a plus, not a negative, because it has a much more standardized way of handling things like copy/paste. Browse a table in Adminer with Firefox, hit the CTRL key, drag the mouse over a column or section of the output, CTRL-C, and you have a perfect spreadsheet-pasteable grid. I haven't been able to find another GUI tool to do this. Adminer FTW.
Unfortunately, Adminer's PostgreSQL support isn't quite as good as phpPgAdmin, or I would be using it for Postgres. It really has one of the best GUIs I have seen on a web-based app.
Speaking of PNG, you do recall the Unisys GIF debacle? When MySQL dies, may its tombstone read G.I.F.
Haha. Perfect. Forget Rest In Peace. Go In Flames. No other open source application has caused so much bad software to be written.
Ditto here. 46 (male) and even though I thought I was in OK-ish shape a couple years ago, I was starting to get worried about the aches and pains, and my cholesterol, blood pressure and heart rate were starting to climb. A few months of basic stuff with dumbbells (dead lifts, squats, power lifting, bench press) and getting rid of most grains and sugars from my diet, and it was like a whole new me. And the weekly (sometimes daily) headaches I was getting disappeared also. Now I don't ever let 48 hours go by without some sort of high-intensity exercise, even if I only have 10 minutes to spare. 10 minutes of serious weight lifting beats an hour of jogging, exercise bicycle or other aerobic stuff. Losing 40 lbs of fat and gaining 10 lbs of muscle feels pretty good too. Highly recommended.
That depends on a few variables of economics. Demand is already up for grass-fed beef among a small part of the population--essentially there is more demand than there is production, and grass-fed beef is at least twice the cost of regular beef. If large-scale rotational farming came back into vogue, we would have much more production of grass-fed beef, so it might be enough to meet the demand. Also, the economy would no longer be subject to the *extensive* drain of corn and grain subsidies.
Bizarre. Every time I read something new about industrial farming I get more weirded out by the whole situation. The connection modern farming has with the simple honest-hard-working-folk kind of farming I knew as a kid is just... gone. It's like we're farming on the surface of Mars or something.
Ironically, the best beef for you is not from a cow being fed corn from giant trough which is also sludged up with manure, dead cow parts, and days-old standing water. How about a cow eating grass, seeing as they happen to be ruminants?
So yes, GOOD meat would be less expensive if the government stopped subsidizing the corn industries. In fact, the whole idea of massive farms growing nothing but corn is the stupidest waste of land possible. Corn has very low benefit for both humans and cows, but it just happens to be easy to ship long-distance. Ask yourself "Why do they need subsidies to survive?" It's just like the "too big to fail" banking system that must be subsidized at the cost of huge segments of our economy. Politics and power never seem to collude in our benefit.
The whole concept of the monoculture industrial farming system has ruined generations of farmland. The age-old concept of rotational grazing as well as other sustainable methods has actually been shown to produce much more return for square acre than typical large-scale industrial farming, but our whole government and food-regulation system makes it very hard for these kinds of farms to compete. Check out Joel Salatin's book "Everything I Want to do is Illegal".
There is a problem when geeks try to argue from a priori logic and theory. Empirical evidence. Anyone who has changed his/her diet away from processed carbs and toward meat and fresh vegetables sees the change within days, even without modifying physical activity.
After I changed my diet I was almost embarrassed at the amount of food I could eat and still lose weight. It only starts becoming a problem when I get tempted to start sneak processed carbs or sugars back into the diet. I find that the equivalent of about 1 (maybe 2) slices of bread a day is workable, but once I go over that, I start to bloat up. Meanwhile, I can eat all the meat, cheese, full-fat Greek yoghurt and eggs I want, I see no problem.
Now, I am fully willing to find the hard math in all this. Absolutely. I am a geek, after all. But the simplistic calories-in/calories-out stuff just doesn't wash with me anymore.
This is something I have only just begun to get a picture of, after half a lifetime of carb addiction. I do liken it to an addiction because you get addicted to that glycemic rush in your body from eating a stack of pancakes, or even 3-4 "heart-healthy" granola bars. And then you get that blood-sugar drop an hour later that has you hating yourself, so you look for another quick fix, maybe coffee with sugar, a soda and some chips, and off you go on the insulin roller coaster again.
All you young Slashdotters: it only gets worse as you hit middle age. Learn to recognize the signs. I now can eat an evening meal of meat, fresh vegetables, maybe some cheese, etc... and if I avoid the bread and dessert, I can literally go the whole next day without feeling any real hunger pangs (I try to fast like this once or twice a month). Once you invest in eating nutrient-dense food that produces a slow blood sugar rise (meat, healthy fats, complex carbs), you find yourself on a much more even keel. Less headaches, less lethargy. In fact, you find yourself actively *wanting* to work out instead of dreading it.
You're right, in the sense of the abstract physics of the energy involved. As Daetrin commented, we're sort of doing a Newton/Einstein thing. Yes there is exact accounting of every quantity of mass and energy in the abstract, but in the practical what it means is that calories arriving via different means have different effects. Sort of like data in computer programming. A piece of data might be 2 megabytes, comprising a perfectly discrete number of bits, but that says nothing about what is represented in those megabytes or how they are used. So yes, 2 megabytes will take up an exact amount of storage on a hard drive, but while they are being used inside a computer program, they might represent widely varying degrees of processing, or complexity, and thus widely varying results.
Otherwise we could quite reasonably tell someone to chow down on 2500 calories of sugar a day, supplemented by a few essential vitamin tablets, and some non-dietary roughage such as cardboard. (Come to thing of it, this probably is the philosophy of some of the large food manufacturers.)
I still think there is a geek-fixation to get stuck in the idea of numerical equivalence of food/calories. An over-simplification. It's a temptation to try to reduce everything to a conceptually-manageable equation, when the body is far more complex than that. Why would one have to assume that there is an absolute rule regarding overall number of calories and how much of that goes towards fat? I'm saying that I find this mindset very suspect, given what I have seen. Calories are just a concept. Your body is not a computer that crunches calories the way a laptop crunches bits. Your body has various ways to handle nourishment depending on what type and how fast it arrives, and fat storage is only one of them. I find that when I eat "slow" caloric foods like meat and fats (say cheese, eggs, coconut oil), I maintain a consistently higher energy state for hours, or even into the next day. One study found that people fed a consistently higher amount of protein developed more lean body mass and a higher overall metabolic burn.
Like you, I was very loath to give up grains, having built up a lifelong habit, fairly resembling an addiction. In fact, I think that's really what it amounts to, at least for processed grains. The glycemic effect on the body is very similar to what sugar does: there is immediate gratification, and then your body soon dips into an even lower energy state than before, so you are tempted to gorge on yet another grainy snack+coffee and maybe a little sugar to stay awake, which lasts only so long, etc...You will probably find that this reaction only gets worse as you age. I broke free last year at the age of 45 (but feeling 55) and it's like having a whole new youth handed to me.
And really, I didn't give up grains completely. I just restricted my intake. From two bowls of cereal a day to two a week, etc... I approach grains the way I deal with sweets: an occasional treat rather than the main course.
There's lots of knee-jerk all around when it comes to this topic, I've found. I think there are definitely different "nutritional types" of people, who flourish with different ratios of protein/fat/carbs. However, it still seems obvious from what has happened to our society the past few decades that low-fat, high-sugar, high-carb processed food is the bomb (in your gut). The more refined and processed, the worse.
I think a somewhat balanced approach to this is Dr. Mercola's nutritional typing concept.
I found that I am definitely someone who benefits from removing grains and starches from my diet. It didn't matter if it was the most healthy of whole-grain diets--it just didn't work for me. Cholesterol bad, gut fat increasing. Getting rid of 90% of the grains, 95% of the sugar, and increasing my fat intake, as well as my fresh vegetable intake actually resulted in much better cholesterol and almost 40lbs of weight loss.
I used to think it was purely calories-in/calories-out, but I have changed my mind after thinking through the implications of the glycemic index,and testing it out myself. It is mathematical, but it's not just averaged quantities that matter. The *rate* and fluctuations of caloric processing seems to play a major role. Even though proteins and fats are higher in calories/weight than starches and grains, the body doesn't process the calories nearly as fast. In other words, meat and fat puts your body on a slow-drip supply of calories, whereas a couple pieces of toast with jam will throw all those calories at your pancreas within 30-40 minutes, and whatever you don't use gets turned to fat.
I know there are logical arguments on all sides, but try an empirical test: go for two weeks eating lots of meat, vegetables (especially leafy greens or broccoli), cheese, yogurt, etc... (none of that lowfat stuff, either), and see if that doesn't kick your body into fat-loss mode. I was shocked at how quickly I lost 40 lbs, and how much I could eat. The other benefit of going off grains especially was--no more heartburn, and mo more post-nasal drip or heavy mucous buildup in my throat. I am starting to suspect that modern factory-produced bread is one of the worst things to ever happen to the human race.
Now, I suppose you could argue that since it is the caloric rate that matters, one could snack all day on very small amounts of high-carb food and still not cause insulin spikes. Go ahead, but that sounds like a particularly unsatisfying way to eat.
Oh COME ON, people... where are the funny mods?
... no, no, I'm hearing myself say it. Never mind.
Heh... nice turn of phrase. Why have I never heard that one before?
46 years old here, and the past couple years I had that feeling you're describing. Felt like I was falling apart physically, bored with life, overstressed, working too many hours. Spent a day with atrial fibrillation and then they put me on beta blockers for a few months, which just made me feel more depressed. Cholesterol was high even though I was eating right (according to the conventional wisdom of piling on the whole grains and avoiding fats).
Fact is, I wasn't exercising. I was just fooling myself that a bit of gardening and a couple sets of pushups once or twice a month was enough to stay fit. Also, I was eating way too many processed carbohydrates. Feeling frustrated with my waning strength, I started reading up on diet/nutrition, concepts like glycemic index and came across the concept of the Paleolithic (or Primal) diet, as well as some of the ideas of the high-protein diets as recommended by Gary Taubes. It all boils down to basically a more thoughtful take on the old Atkins diet. Worked magic on me. I know it is being dismissed as a fad by industry-paid scientists and nutritionists, but it plain and simple works. Empirical evidence over specious logic. I cut out at least 95% of the bread, pasta, chips, rice and cereal I had been eating, and almost all sugar and anything with high fructose corn syrup (not that I was eating much sugar anyway). I mostly cut out milk, although ate plenty of cheese and yogurt (full-fat Greek yogurt makes a nice replacement for sour cream), and tried to focus on eating the freshest vegetables (ideally organic locally-farmed, or from my own garden), lots of meat (especially fresh fish, grass-fed beef, and fresh pastured poultry). Also, plenty of quality fats and oils. I now cook almost exclusively with coconut oil or butter, and I even include a little coconut oil in my salads or other foods.
In other words, I worked at getting as far from the industrial food supply as possible. It is easier than it sounds. Every city has local farmers' markets and organic food exchanges, and anyone can grow a vegetable garden.
Then I started exercising. Going off of the grain and sugar insulin roller-coaster suddenly made me energetic I HAD to exercise. I don't go crazy, but I get at least a good solid 20 minutes of exercise a day, and I'm not talking about a leisurely jog. I push myself, with some version of interval training, peak 8 or just a good dumbbell routine. Within 6 months I had gone from a flabby fooling-myself 220 to a fairly muscular 190lb. I have added at least 10lb of muscle so that's 40lbs of fat gone, and I was someone who people didn't even consider overweight. (6'2" hides a lot of flab). The fact is, most middle-age people who haven't kept up a serious exercise routine have spent the past 20 years losing a pound of muscle a year, so even if you have the same BMI, your fat ratio is horribly skewed.
Your body needs to move. It needs to jump and lift things and sprint and climb. That is our optimal state of fitness. Also, your body needs a nutrient-dense diet, which cannot be gotten from a box. I don't care how much they irradiate the food to give it Vitamin [alphabet[x]]. Our bodies either evolved or were designed for an active outdoor hunter-gatherer life, and for eating real food, and if you don't use it you lose it. Modern medicine can keep us alive longer, but if you just take the pill-popping routine, you will spend the 2nd half of your life dying slowly.
Read up on the life of guys like Jack LaLanne. The man was testament to the efficacy of these things. He eschewed food-in-a-box his whole life, did a 2-hour workout every day of his life, and was still performing feats of strength in his 80s and 90s. At 54 he beat a young Arnold Schwarzenegger at a bodybuilding competition. A modern example of this is Art Devany and his wife--both in their 70s and fitter than your average 30-year-old.
It ain't over 'til it's over. I intend to push myself right up until my last year alive. Why go out any other way?
One of my favorite sites on modern health concepts is mercola.com. Eye-opening ideas there.
You're right... this isn't just leftist hippie drivel. It's a fight for freedom vs. fascism disguised as free industry. I am a 46-year-old, extremely free-market libertarian guy who has begun to experiment with small-scale farming, and the things I come across are downright scary.
Recently a friend who is a gardening/farming geek unparalleled, working on his Master Gardener certification, lost the greater part of his organic garden due to aminopyralid damage in the soil. His mistake was to bring several barrels of cow manure from a conventional cattle farm to mix with his soil. It turns out that Dow Chemical has produced an additive to livestock feed that renders the manure unsuitable for soil for up to 2 years. (This affects horse manure also, BTW). His expensive collection of blackberries, blueberries, fruit trees, and tomatoes: gone overnight. If a guy who reads up on all the science and technology of farming the way a Linux contributor reads Unix programming books can't prevent such disaster, what hope is there for the typical local farmer? One simple mistake of involving your food supply *in any way* with the world of corporate farming can wipe you out. And there are so many ways.
And if you think this problem is bad in the USA, it is even worse in India. Literally a quarter million small-scale farmers have committed suicide over the last couple decades because of international food corporations and genetically modified plants.
Between the heads of international food corporations and the international banking elite, I'm not sure which group should become the more hated, but they are both doing their level best to turn the rest of us into serfs. I don't see how it can end well. I am starting to believe there will be a major upheaval in the world in my children's generation.
Exactly where do I go to get this?
left to its own devices, the market will naturally, i said NATURALLY, gravitate all power and wealth into the hands of a few.
As versus what we have now? How many trillions in bailouts (leading to nice fat bonuses for the Wall Street oligarchy) will it take to convince you otherwise?
More powerful government == more opportunities for corruption. Yes, NATURALLY.
Seems to me DART is meant to replace the ubiquitous PHP/Javascript combination. Think about it: quick prototypes with untyped code, moving to static typechecking wherever wanted, Server-side and client-side execution, built-in HTML5 DOM library. Its features may be unexciting, but they could provide an easy escape from PHP/Javascript hell without too much learning curve.
If that is Google's primary target with DART, it may prove to be a very strategic move.
This has always worked out well for me at some level or other. If you make it clear that your reason for leaving is not a negative one (IE. hating your boss/job/whatever) and that you are willing to do whatever you can to help them make the transition, usually employers are quite reasonable about such things. One of my former employers (a branch of a very large company) still contacts me occasionally even 4 years after my departure.
Never burn bridges, but never limit yourself due to feeling sorry for your employer.