What about,
"The government agencies, scientists, doctors, media is controlled by the food industries that keep real science away and promote fallacies so that their foods don't look bad".
For most of my adult life I was 30 lbs over weight and tried all of the tricks. I'm a mechanical engineer so intuitively I knew energy in vs energy out was the key. So I said screw it, this year I'm going eat less no matter how much it sucks. I personally can't stand eating small meals so I decided to eat one meal a day. I drink coffee and tea during the day and have a big meal at night. I estimate the average daily calorie went from 3000 to 1800. Guess what? I lost 30 pounds over 4 months. Was it hard? You bet your ass it was. I was/am hungry most of the time. But at least I can look forward to that one nice meal at night. And it's not always a "healthy" meal. Sometimes it's a 1/2 lb cheese burger with fries. But that's still less than 1800 calories and that's all that counts.
Congratulations.
Now, the hard part is keeping those 30lbs from coming back.
The failings of "diets" isn't that you don't lose weight, it's that the weight comes back and comes back stronger. Fighting hunger eats away from a limited pool of willpower and when you have a huge project or a stressful event if your life that eats away your reserves to fight hunger, you will find after that the pounds have come back.
My point is that calories in, calories out model is wrong on the big picture.
I don't know why people keep repeating the "eat less, workout more" mantra in its various forms fed by bad science. There is a huge debate on if the "sloth gluttony sins" cause of obesity is scientifically correct.
People are not active because the body's hormones has been switched to get fat mode. If people ate more and the body did not get into fat conserving mode, they would be crazy active to burn off the extra calories - like little children in supermarkets running around. The human body loves burning energy, all our fondest memories and times of great joy have been activities where we used up a lot of calories.
The whole evolutionary advantage of storing fat argument is bullshit. Our body only stores fat and no other nutrients. At 10% body fat, low enough to get six-packs, it is enough fat to live off a month without eating. Our body regulates temperature, blood sugar level, acidity, blood composition and hundreds of other things but doesn't regulate our weight and we have to actively regulate it when even a 5% error either way can result in obesity from normal in a few years.
Anybody who equates breaking the speed limit as automatic excessive speeding is a tool. The speed limit on my local highway is 55mph, the average speed is close to 70. It's a safe speed.
The safe speed varies by car, time of day, experience of the driver and segment of the road. The speed limit has to be set to the lowest safety standard, not the standard of hey we can tolerate a few hundred deaths per year speed as long as it gets the hundreds of thousands across.
There is a segment of the highway that I drive daily where it is marked that the speed limit is 55 and people go 70. For 99.99% of the time, it's a safe speed but once or twice a year, there is an accident at that segment and 2-3 people die, most of the time young people in smaller cars.
Well, right, you hit the nail on the head with that last part. As long as there are manual overrides -- and there will *always* be manual overrides -- there will be people who use it to game the system. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if human drivers actually drive more recklessly because they know that the automated vehicles around them will always yield, always be aware of the vehicles around them, and always avoid collisions. This would provide a huge disincentive for people to use automated vehicles, especially in rush hour traffic where they're needed most, because the automated vehicle wouldn't be aggressive enough, and the manual driver wouldn't be hindered by the same set of programmed restrictions as the automated vehicle. If people see a measurable advantage to driving manually, they will continue to do it.
This is where vehicular networking comes in. A car spots another car acting like a douche and then warns every cars around it about the douchey car. Then after the car is flagged and verified by other cars as driving aggressively, cars ahead will act to limit the aggressive behavior and notify the cops and the pervasive cameras about the vehicle.
I'm all for looking at our biology for ways to improve our health, and studying our evolution is certainly one way to do that. But assuming that we're going to come up with any kind of "natural, and therefore healthy" lifestyle based on dim of ideas of how long-ago proto-humans lived in a vanished world is just silly.
Look at the AHA recommendations, food pyramids and television ads and dieting gurus. Some say sugar is fine, some say it's poison. Some say animal products are great while others poison. Some say fruits are great others say limit it because of fructose. Even for veggies, people warn of the starch if they aren't eaten raw with lots of fiber. Every food our there is on the bad side of some diet and recommendation.
The whole thing is a big joke now. Americans are fat, the nutrition advice and science say conflicting things all the time and nobody has a solution. Among the vast wasteland that is nutrition science in the US, the caveman diet and related low-carb seems to be the best working. Yes, people will say the fats in the diet will lead to CVD while others say it will not and I guess time will tell. The great American low-fat experiment resulted in our freakshow obese population and it's good to give something else a try.
Fast food is hardly the ideal food, but for weight loss all that really matters is calories.
Please stop perpetuating that myth (a calorie is a calorie).
Carbs act completely different to other foods. The glucose, fructose and starch react completely differently. Fat reacts differently because insulin is not involved. They go through completely different biochemical cycles. Even combinations of different foods do different things.
So, please if you have any experience in fitness, you know nutrition is very important. Not just calories what kinds of foods.
Is the outrage because the country is China? Every laptop I've bought in the past five years have come from China.
I think the biggest fear we have is that China is now going to create companies that as the article says are global players. We have constantly dismissed China as a cheap labor pool where work would vanish if the wages went up, then as backstabbing reverse-engineers who dare betray the sacred trust of US companies of moving their operations to China for profit, and then to mindless cultural inferiors where American exceptionalism would outshine and blaze away anything the Chinese could do. Now, we're fighting the fear that Chinese could become global players with these thinly-veiled outrage stories.
As they used to say in the 80s movies, "are you afraid of a little competition?"
Goodness me, two posts and both of you show tremendous lack of knowledge of how evolution works. This is why we have to teach evolution in school!
To the first poster, evolution only happens when there's selection pressure, i.e. large portion of the population is dying in their reproductive ages from something. If you're assuming that movement in the parking lots creates any sort of selection pressure and thus helps evolution, then it must resemble a scene from MW2.
Second poster, helping evolution does not mean reducing gene pool. The genes for inheritable diseases are usually recessive and when paired with a dominant one, it can be actually better than having two dominant ones. Like sickle cell anemia and malaria. Anyway, in times when there's no selection pressure, we should be maintaining as much a genetic diversity and as deep a gene pool as possible because when that selection pressure comes along, we don't know which gene in the gene pool is going to be the ones that takes us to the next step in the path of evolution.
I walk around a good portion of my day talking to users and seeing how things are going. I am the opposite of aloof and quite approachable. However, I have been told on many occasions, "Why do you have to make things so complicated?". Drives me nuts.
As a programmer, even I say the same thing to the IT people. Not that computers are complicated, it's the labyrinthine policies and the circuitous explanations about why something cannot be done. IT people guard everything so you can't do anything yourself, obscure information so you can't show how simple what you want done is and make simple communications extremely difficult so you can't just talk them into doing something.
Working on your "career" is a very sad and lonely life, only fools chase that rabbit.
What you're defining as career is very nebulous. For a lot of people, career means being very good in what they do and creating something of really high quality or achieving something really great. This may give the person as much joy as you got from rebuilding cars and traveling. For some people, career means being a workaholic and just staying in the office and working while ignoring many aspects of life. I think everyone will agree that this is not desirable. I really can't tell if you're just against the second kind of career or all forms of career that results in income.
The other thing you're not considering is that careers can be built in 5 years or so. I'm not saying that careers last 5 years but you can start from nothing and become good in your career within 5 years. Once their careers are built then they can work 30 hours per week and enjoy life. Lots of people start from being only able to do minimum wage jobs and work very hard to acquire the skill-sets so that working 30 hours a week will be enough to buy a house and a car. Once you climb up high enough the corporate ladder, you don't have to work as hard. Once you become a partner in a firm, you don't have to work as hard. So, the people who are working so hard for the career are doing so in a plan that they don't have to work so hard in the future.
However, I do agree with you basic point that you have to do what makes us happy. Sometimes people are duped into chasing the rabbit and sometimes they're not really chasing the rabbit but trying to figure out life. Sometimes people can't see a way out by things like debt, or lack of information or bad habits. People want to be skilled, build beautiful things and want to be paid well for what they do. I doubt anyone wants to just work and spend the money and work and spend the money in an cycle of unhappiness. Look at people who are obese, can you honestly say they're enjoying overeating? So, my point is that this kind of workaholic chase of career is pathology and not a choice.
If you want lots of high-paying jobs in the US and EU, kill every single guest worker program (fraud-ridden at any level), get rid of the ability to use length of unemployment (or employment) as a direct or indirect means of discriminating against the unemployed, and get rid of the tax and benefit dodges with second-class forms of labor (e.g. contractors, consultants). Finally, make it harder to not hire US citizens, within the US by making any tax cut follow the worker and is dependent on the length of time.
The US benefits considerably from the guest worker program at the cost to China, India and other foreign countries. The US is basically able to hand-pick the best and brightest from around the world and have them come to the US through the guest worker program (the largest being H1-B). A lot of countries, especially India and China, lose their best emerging scientists and engineers to either graduate schools in the US or to large multinational firms in the US. Ending the guest worker programs would divert those talent to a different country who would then work for companies and start companies and compete against the US. Guest worker programs are immensely beneficial to the US and ending would it would be harmful to the US.
On the other hand, I understand your disagreement for the guest worker program as you feel it directly or indirectly depresses wages in the field you are employed in. If there were no guest workers, then companies would be forced to find local workers and local workers would be in higher demand and thus higher wages. The guest workers who were employed because of some shortage would soon become permanent residents and then citizens of the US, and then directly compete in the marketplace in your field. Yes, it is completely reasonable and rational to be against a policy that depresses the wages in your field.
To a certain extent, the furor over H1B did get is severely restricted but the consequences weren't what you thought it would be, it wasn't high-paying jobs, the consequence was outsourcing. In the middle 00s, the H1b caps were severely restricted and getting H1Bs for a foreign worker became considerably harder. The consequence became that foreign companies used the situation to offer outsourcing services where work could now be shifted from the US soil to foreign soil. If foreign workers couldn't be brought to the US, then the work would go out of the country to the foreign workers. Attacking the H1B did nothing for the American worker, it actually made the situation worse through outsourcing.
Your final point is that it is fraught with fraud which I don't have enough experience to comment on but as someone who has worked with H1B holders, there is a lot of regulation in H1Bs. H1Bs can only be issued if a local worker was not found after the position was advertised. The foreign worker must be paid prevailing wages and the qualifications and salary for the position must be posted in public at the workplace. An American worker can at any time demand an H1B worker's position if he or she meets the requirements of the qualifications required to do the job. In most cases, hiring foreign workers on H1B is costs more money and is a bigger headache than hiring a local worker. I suppose fraud is possible but from my limited experience with H1Bs, most H1B are under so much scrutiny and regulations that companies would be exposing themselves to severe criminal fraud to defraud the H1B system.
Lastly, I have known and worked with and for many admirable people who are US citizens but were previously H1B holders. One of my bosses in a small startup was such a person and a few researchers I've worked with as well. I think the US is much richer and better place for them to be here in the US and I think everyone has directly or indirectly benefited from their presence here.
Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.
I know you meant this as a quip but accuracy isn’t as important as people make it out to be. If you watch TV shows and movies, there are so many inaccurate and misleading interpretations of technologies or scientific laws to enable the story. The purpose of news and literature is in many cases entertainment and if it serves that purpose, it does not need to be fully accurate. In mathematics or computer programming, inaccuracy can mean the theorem is wrong or that the program will not function correctly. However, for other fields, there is no need for absolute accuracy and if the gist of it is accurate, then it should good enough.
In human communications, sometimes inaccuracy can actually be beneficial. There have been many scientific breakthroughs because the scientist was working under a faulty assumption and came up with something totally new because of it. One such example is the Bose-Einstein statistics. I can venture to guess that sometimes inaccuracies in news could be beneficial because it would color the news story in a different shade and have people thinking a different way. I know we stride for perfect accuracy but an inaccuracy could mean a new viewpoint or a new idea that could lead to a new story or a scientific breakthrough.
The increase in the percentage of spelling errors is an artifact of his experimental procedure. He randomly takes a Wikipedia article instead of analyzing the most popular ones. As Wikipedia has become larger, it has attracted more fringe topics, probably from authors in different countries in the world where English is not their first language. Wikipedia now probably has more articles that aren’t viewed and revised as much. Thus, randomly sampling has now higher chances of selecting such articles and thus, higher spelling mistakes.
He should change his experiment so that he analyzes the spelling mistakes on the most accessed and modified pages in Wikipedia or discard articles where the activity on the article is below a certain threshold.
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The government keep advertising on TV that not being active is the cause of being fat.
The truth is that it is bullshit.
A fit guy probably spends more time in the kitchen than in the gym, he will probably have more recipes to offer than exercise routines and techniques.
What about, "The government agencies, scientists, doctors, media is controlled by the food industries that keep real science away and promote fallacies so that their foods don't look bad".
Congratulations.
Now, the hard part is keeping those 30lbs from coming back.
The failings of "diets" isn't that you don't lose weight, it's that the weight comes back and comes back stronger. Fighting hunger eats away from a limited pool of willpower and when you have a huge project or a stressful event if your life that eats away your reserves to fight hunger, you will find after that the pounds have come back.
My point is that calories in, calories out model is wrong on the big picture.
I don't know why people keep repeating the "eat less, workout more" mantra in its various forms fed by bad science. There is a huge debate on if the "sloth gluttony sins" cause of obesity is scientifically correct.
People are not active because the body's hormones has been switched to get fat mode. If people ate more and the body did not get into fat conserving mode, they would be crazy active to burn off the extra calories - like little children in supermarkets running around. The human body loves burning energy, all our fondest memories and times of great joy have been activities where we used up a lot of calories.
The whole evolutionary advantage of storing fat argument is bullshit. Our body only stores fat and no other nutrients. At 10% body fat, low enough to get six-packs, it is enough fat to live off a month without eating. Our body regulates temperature, blood sugar level, acidity, blood composition and hundreds of other things but doesn't regulate our weight and we have to actively regulate it when even a 5% error either way can result in obesity from normal in a few years.
The safe speed varies by car, time of day, experience of the driver and segment of the road. The speed limit has to be set to the lowest safety standard, not the standard of hey we can tolerate a few hundred deaths per year speed as long as it gets the hundreds of thousands across.
There is a segment of the highway that I drive daily where it is marked that the speed limit is 55 and people go 70. For 99.99% of the time, it's a safe speed but once or twice a year, there is an accident at that segment and 2-3 people die, most of the time young people in smaller cars.
This is where vehicular networking comes in. A car spots another car acting like a douche and then warns every cars around it about the douchey car. Then after the car is flagged and verified by other cars as driving aggressively, cars ahead will act to limit the aggressive behavior and notify the cops and the pervasive cameras about the vehicle.
Look at the AHA recommendations, food pyramids and television ads and dieting gurus. Some say sugar is fine, some say it's poison. Some say animal products are great while others poison. Some say fruits are great others say limit it because of fructose. Even for veggies, people warn of the starch if they aren't eaten raw with lots of fiber. Every food our there is on the bad side of some diet and recommendation.
The whole thing is a big joke now. Americans are fat, the nutrition advice and science say conflicting things all the time and nobody has a solution. Among the vast wasteland that is nutrition science in the US, the caveman diet and related low-carb seems to be the best working. Yes, people will say the fats in the diet will lead to CVD while others say it will not and I guess time will tell. The great American low-fat experiment resulted in our freakshow obese population and it's good to give something else a try.
Please stop perpetuating that myth (a calorie is a calorie). Carbs act completely different to other foods. The glucose, fructose and starch react completely differently. Fat reacts differently because insulin is not involved. They go through completely different biochemical cycles. Even combinations of different foods do different things. So, please if you have any experience in fitness, you know nutrition is very important. Not just calories what kinds of foods.
Is the outrage because the country is China? Every laptop I've bought in the past five years have come from China.
I think the biggest fear we have is that China is now going to create companies that as the article says are global players. We have constantly dismissed China as a cheap labor pool where work would vanish if the wages went up, then as backstabbing reverse-engineers who dare betray the sacred trust of US companies of moving their operations to China for profit, and then to mindless cultural inferiors where American exceptionalism would outshine and blaze away anything the Chinese could do. Now, we're fighting the fear that Chinese could become global players with these thinly-veiled outrage stories.
As they used to say in the 80s movies, "are you afraid of a little competition?"
Goodness me, two posts and both of you show tremendous lack of knowledge of how evolution works. This is why we have to teach evolution in school!
To the first poster, evolution only happens when there's selection pressure, i.e. large portion of the population is dying in their reproductive ages from something. If you're assuming that movement in the parking lots creates any sort of selection pressure and thus helps evolution, then it must resemble a scene from MW2.
Second poster, helping evolution does not mean reducing gene pool. The genes for inheritable diseases are usually recessive and when paired with a dominant one, it can be actually better than having two dominant ones. Like sickle cell anemia and malaria. Anyway, in times when there's no selection pressure, we should be maintaining as much a genetic diversity and as deep a gene pool as possible because when that selection pressure comes along, we don't know which gene in the gene pool is going to be the ones that takes us to the next step in the path of evolution.
In conclusion, you both misunderstand evolution.
As a programmer, even I say the same thing to the IT people. Not that computers are complicated, it's the labyrinthine policies and the circuitous explanations about why something cannot be done. IT people guard everything so you can't do anything yourself, obscure information so you can't show how simple what you want done is and make simple communications extremely difficult so you can't just talk them into doing something.
What you're defining as career is very nebulous. For a lot of people, career means being very good in what they do and creating something of really high quality or achieving something really great. This may give the person as much joy as you got from rebuilding cars and traveling. For some people, career means being a workaholic and just staying in the office and working while ignoring many aspects of life. I think everyone will agree that this is not desirable. I really can't tell if you're just against the second kind of career or all forms of career that results in income.
The other thing you're not considering is that careers can be built in 5 years or so. I'm not saying that careers last 5 years but you can start from nothing and become good in your career within 5 years. Once their careers are built then they can work 30 hours per week and enjoy life. Lots of people start from being only able to do minimum wage jobs and work very hard to acquire the skill-sets so that working 30 hours a week will be enough to buy a house and a car. Once you climb up high enough the corporate ladder, you don't have to work as hard. Once you become a partner in a firm, you don't have to work as hard. So, the people who are working so hard for the career are doing so in a plan that they don't have to work so hard in the future.
However, I do agree with you basic point that you have to do what makes us happy. Sometimes people are duped into chasing the rabbit and sometimes they're not really chasing the rabbit but trying to figure out life. Sometimes people can't see a way out by things like debt, or lack of information or bad habits. People want to be skilled, build beautiful things and want to be paid well for what they do. I doubt anyone wants to just work and spend the money and work and spend the money in an cycle of unhappiness. Look at people who are obese, can you honestly say they're enjoying overeating? So, my point is that this kind of workaholic chase of career is pathology and not a choice.
The US benefits considerably from the guest worker program at the cost to China, India and other foreign countries. The US is basically able to hand-pick the best and brightest from around the world and have them come to the US through the guest worker program (the largest being H1-B). A lot of countries, especially India and China, lose their best emerging scientists and engineers to either graduate schools in the US or to large multinational firms in the US. Ending the guest worker programs would divert those talent to a different country who would then work for companies and start companies and compete against the US. Guest worker programs are immensely beneficial to the US and ending would it would be harmful to the US.
On the other hand, I understand your disagreement for the guest worker program as you feel it directly or indirectly depresses wages in the field you are employed in. If there were no guest workers, then companies would be forced to find local workers and local workers would be in higher demand and thus higher wages. The guest workers who were employed because of some shortage would soon become permanent residents and then citizens of the US, and then directly compete in the marketplace in your field. Yes, it is completely reasonable and rational to be against a policy that depresses the wages in your field.
To a certain extent, the furor over H1B did get is severely restricted but the consequences weren't what you thought it would be, it wasn't high-paying jobs, the consequence was outsourcing. In the middle 00s, the H1b caps were severely restricted and getting H1Bs for a foreign worker became considerably harder. The consequence became that foreign companies used the situation to offer outsourcing services where work could now be shifted from the US soil to foreign soil. If foreign workers couldn't be brought to the US, then the work would go out of the country to the foreign workers. Attacking the H1B did nothing for the American worker, it actually made the situation worse through outsourcing.
Your final point is that it is fraught with fraud which I don't have enough experience to comment on but as someone who has worked with H1B holders, there is a lot of regulation in H1Bs. H1Bs can only be issued if a local worker was not found after the position was advertised. The foreign worker must be paid prevailing wages and the qualifications and salary for the position must be posted in public at the workplace. An American worker can at any time demand an H1B worker's position if he or she meets the requirements of the qualifications required to do the job. In most cases, hiring foreign workers on H1B is costs more money and is a bigger headache than hiring a local worker. I suppose fraud is possible but from my limited experience with H1Bs, most H1B are under so much scrutiny and regulations that companies would be exposing themselves to severe criminal fraud to defraud the H1B system.
Lastly, I have known and worked with and for many admirable people who are US citizens but were previously H1B holders. One of my bosses in a small startup was such a person and a few researchers I've worked with as well. I think the US is much richer and better place for them to be here in the US and I think everyone has directly or indirectly benefited from their presence here.
I know you meant this as a quip but accuracy isn’t as important as people make it out to be. If you watch TV shows and movies, there are so many inaccurate and misleading interpretations of technologies or scientific laws to enable the story. The purpose of news and literature is in many cases entertainment and if it serves that purpose, it does not need to be fully accurate. In mathematics or computer programming, inaccuracy can mean the theorem is wrong or that the program will not function correctly. However, for other fields, there is no need for absolute accuracy and if the gist of it is accurate, then it should good enough.
In human communications, sometimes inaccuracy can actually be beneficial. There have been many scientific breakthroughs because the scientist was working under a faulty assumption and came up with something totally new because of it. One such example is the Bose-Einstein statistics. I can venture to guess that sometimes inaccuracies in news could be beneficial because it would color the news story in a different shade and have people thinking a different way. I know we stride for perfect accuracy but an inaccuracy could mean a new viewpoint or a new idea that could lead to a new story or a scientific breakthrough.
The increase in the percentage of spelling errors is an artifact of his experimental procedure. He randomly takes a Wikipedia article instead of analyzing the most popular ones. As Wikipedia has become larger, it has attracted more fringe topics, probably from authors in different countries in the world where English is not their first language. Wikipedia now probably has more articles that aren’t viewed and revised as much. Thus, randomly sampling has now higher chances of selecting such articles and thus, higher spelling mistakes.
He should change his experiment so that he analyzes the spelling mistakes on the most accessed and modified pages in Wikipedia or discard articles where the activity on the article is below a certain threshold.