They don't own your opinions. But what you do with your opinions can still get you fired. Being publicly critical of management policies in a particularly attention-getting way will get you fired most places, unless you have a union.
Now having read the manifesto myself, I wouldn't have fired this guy. But that's because in my experience people are contradictory. People can have enlightened opinions but unelightened behavior and vice versa. Plenty of people love humanity but treat people like trash.
But if his *conduct* towards female colleagues were less than professional he'd be out in a heartbeat. It's one thing to have an unpopular opinion, it's another thing to cause trouble.
I read the manifesto, and I see it as a sincere effort to be thoughtful, but ultimately pseudo-scientific.
For example it's absolutely true that women and men are exposed to different ranges of testosterone in utero, but to draw a causal link between that and the rate at which they become programmers takes an enormous leap of faith.
Likewise he peppers the piece with references to the "average woman", but the average woman doesn't become an engineer any more than the average man. It takes an uncommon set of aptitudes and inclinations, so talking about typical specimens of either gender is neither here nor there. Engineers are outliers by nature.
I absolutely agree with him on the issue of "viewpoint diversity", although it has implications I suspect he hasn't considered. He argues that women (on average) are fundamentally different from men; in that case the natural proportion of engineers in the female population (does that concept even make sense?) is not necessarily the optimal one for a company.
If Google were my company, I probably wouldn't be as aggressive on diversity as this person seems to think they are. A lot of the safe workplace stuff can be subsumed in the old-fashioned idea of professionalism, which nobody would like because it involves a healthy dose of STFU all around. People today seem to think every place and every situation is their own personal soapbox.
The author is making a social scientific argument, however is clearly not trained in the field. As a sociologist once told me: never trust averages. In other words, don't fall into the fallacy of division.
The author repeatedly uses the term "average woman". But the average woman doesn't become an engineer, any more than the average man does. And attraction to and ability to do engineering at a high level is a rare trait; talking about gender "averages" is almost laughable in that context. Likewise most of his arguments are non-negatable. Yes, men and women differ in their in utero exposure to testosterone, and they end up becoming engineers less often, but to draw a causal link between those two things is a leap of faith.
Most people here are too young to remember a time when it was almost universally assumed that women who could do something like engineering simply didn't exist. Let's call this the strong gender hypothesis. Almost nobody believes the strong gender hypothesis anymore. But a lot of people still believe in a weak gender hypothesis: that the probability that a woman has the ability and inclination for engineering is less than the probability a man will.
Let's suppose the weak hypothesis is false. Then affirmative action is potentially justifiable in bringing the female pool of engineers (there are never enough *good* ones) to its full strength. On the other hand, suppose the weak hypothesis is true; it doesn't necessarily follow that affirmative action is unjustifiable; for that you have to show that the current levels of female participation equal their natural potential as a population. That's a massive assumption.
If I had to venture a guess, I'd guess the weak hypothesis is true, but I have no position on what the natural spread between the male and female populations are, other than I suspect it is narrower than currently reflected. There isn't enough data. In effect Google is conducting an experiment. If their level of engineering suffers from their diversity efforts, that will be a significant result.
I do agree with the author on viewpoint diversity, but the argument cuts both ways. He says women, as a group, are different from men as a group. If so then viewpoint diversity brings into question whether the natural ratio of women to men is optimal. Again this is something best answered by a company putting is money where its mouth is.
Well, any system devised by humans can go haywire; there's a lot to be said for a system where your coworkers grade you, but such a system is susceptible to group-think and prejudice.
That said, it shouldn't really even come up in the context of the workplace. If your political views cause dissension, you leave them at home. Same with your religion, or anything else. If it pisses people off, you button it.
But we all know that kind of person. The one who is convinced he's misunderstood because he's smarter than everyone around him. That was probably true in middle school, which accounts for why they were never socialized to work with peers. But by the time you get to work as an engineer you're in the big leagues; everyone around you was the geeky smart kid back in the day.
My town recently reduced the speed limit to 25. They put in solar powered radar signs which show your speed in green if it's below the speed limit, red it it's above. If you slow down to the speed limit or below the red speed is replaced by a bright orange "Thank You!".
And the thing is, the damned things actually work. You can see people all around town slowing down to get the "Thank You!" message.
It reminds me of Febreze. Febreze is based on a molecule that traps most unpleasant odors, but when they test marketed Febreze it was a dismal failure. It turns out you can't establish a habit of buying a product by eliminating odors. So P&G added fragrence to their odor eliminating. Or the disinfectant Bactine; it doesn't have to sting but they add alcohol so you know its working. Or the urinals in the Amsterdam airport that have a target painted on them, which eliminates sloppy peers peeing on the floor.
People are very reward driven. It doesn't take much to be effective. Just seeing something happen is enough to motivate people to do something.
I hear this often: so and so is only a success because he spent money on marketing. I've heard it about Jobs, but I've also heard it about J.K. Rowling.
It's a convenient and easy-to-understand explanation for what otherwise seems inexplicable. But if that were true, you could *duplicate* that person's success by spending comparable amounts of money. Usually you can't.
You have to give the devil his due. Jobs was 't an engineer. He wasn't even a designer; the three design elements he is unequivocally responsible for are mediocre: the brushed aluminum QuickTime dialog boxes, the pseudo-highlights and color scheme in the early MacOS 10 "lickable" UI, and the MacOS dock. But at running a consumer tech company, there was none better.
Here's the problem with rockets: they work right on the knife edge between inferno and explosion. Catastrophic failure is normal in testing new, cutting edge designs.
During the space race a lot of rockets failed. This is how the Russians got so good at it without having anything like the funding NASA had: they failed a *lot* but kept trying because they were behind the US. Once the Moon race heated up the US was able to reduce its failure rate in its very public program by spending almost inconceivable amounts of money.
So it's the old engineering tradeoff: cost/quality/schedule. Either you spend a lot of money, put up with a lot of failure, or spend lots of time. NASA in the 60s spent money; the Soviets of that era put up with failure; and on their super-heavy launch vehicle SpaceX has spent more time.
Ultimately in business there's no such thing as being your own boss. When you own the show, your customers are the boss. So what would potential customers say if SpaceX kept to schedule but had the kind of failure rate the old Soviet space program had?
He didn't *invent* the things he supposedly invented. He just figured out how to make already existing things successful.
And Jobs could do that because he *was* a genius at choosing the features to leave out.
Any engineer is aware of tradeoffs. Everything you add to a project has *some* undesirable consequences. But even so the temptation to hit every conceivable point on the punch list is overwhelming for most people.
Where most people would be struggling with that basic impulse, Jobs would play 11-dimensional feature chess. Case in point, the original iPod touch. It didn't have a speaker or hardware volume control. Any normal person would have put *some* kind of a speaker. It didn't make sense; what did it save, maybe $0.25?
But it wasn't something that made a difference in sales; they sold millions of the things, which meant the choice translated into millions more in profit. But still, a speaker and hardware volume controls are things are something you'd want occasionally. Remember with the first gen touch there was briefly a thing where iPod users would unplug their earbuds and offer their jack to another iPod user?
Then Jobs introduced the second gen iPod Touch, and it had a speaker and hardware volume controls. And people who shelled out $299 for the first gen Touch wanted them, and after all the second gen was cheaper at $229. Result: you ended up spending $528 over the course of two years instead of $300.
And that's the difference between genius and mere cleverness: genius is thinking ahead, and also in other dimensions that a clever person isn't considering. That makes genius surprising at the time and obvious in retrospect.
in a world where you could put eight miles of new subway line in a major city without checking to see what's there first. But after hundreds of years of development, most without the benefit of geographic information systems, you can't be certain what kind of weird shit (or people) down there.
The author seems shocked that it'd take ten years of planning before you could start workers digging. The reality is you need to figure out the impact on water, sewer, gas, electricity, telecom, peoples basements -- and chances are none of that stuff is all on one map; a lot of it is likely not mapped at all, or mapped incorrectly. Ten years before your break ground seems very reasonable to me.
Likewise he's mortified that the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel project had to spend two years on geological and environmental impact studies before breaking ground. That's a twenty-three mile long complex of causeways and tunnels across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, one of the most important fisheries in the country as well one of the world's busiest shipping routes. Two years of study! He calls this a "run-of-the-mill highway". Sure, anything seems easy if you no abso-frickin' nothing about engineering. Bridges and tunnels are the most prestigious projects for a civil engineer to work on because they're ridiculously complex. Just look at all the pieces of the thing. Two years of preliminary geological and environmental study to build the thing sounds outstanding.
This is just Dunning-Kruger run amok. These aren't cases of preliminary studies holding back engineering. Assessing the feasibility and impact of a project is a *major part* of civil engineering. Sure, you could start digging and hope you don't rupture a gas line, breech a high pressure water main, start a plague of rats in Manhattan's Upper East Side (average annual income $180K), damage a fishery that that brings in 290 million dollars per year, or find out the soil you're tunneling through won't support the weight above it. And then you'd be forced to stop and figure out how to fix it. In fact you'd almost inevitably be forced to stop and redesign your project.
A basic principle of engineering project management is that it's waaay cheaper to anticipate a problem than to figure out what to do about it when you're halfway done.
If you can define what that means. But that's not even what the guy is saying. He's saying ISPs shouldn't be in charge of securing customers computers or traffic.
If you imagine what a "secure by default" Internet would do for you, it would protect you from any unintended consequences from your actions. Now imagine how good ISPs would be at doing that for you. Most of them can barely run their own networks competently, much less understand their customers' businesses.
ISPs certainly have a role in responding to certain kinds of cyber attacks, like DDOS, or attacks on DNS infrastructure. But they don't really have the ability to protect customers from themselves.
Well, it's a short bit, and one of the things covered under fair use is criticism. It's actually quite interesting to see such a well-known scene with the music removed, so it does make a critical statement about the way music alters a scene.
Big companies don't have national loyalties. GM and Ford assisted the Nazis in their militarization efforts all the way until Pearl Harbor, and possibly beyond, while at the same time resisting converting their plants to US military production.
Companies are bigger than national borders now. They are difficult enough to police, but there isn't the political will because of the Achilles heel of modern democracy: money.
All the people involved in this, and they get just two? They could get a lot more if they wanted. This is not enough to deter companies from doing stuff like this. Nor is the supposed billions Volkswagen "pays out"; which is peanuts to both the US and Volkswagen, and includes a lot of money Volkswagen gets to spend on itself.
Clearly this is at best a token effort; they're throwing two people out of the hundred who must have been involved under the bus.
And it's different whether you eat that pasta with meat sauce or rice with a steak too. The fructose in a banana is the same compound as in HFCS sweetened soda; but it's not the same because it bound up with fiber and protein.
Digestion and energy metabolism is incredibly complicated, and people are looking for/selling shortcuts and simplications which almost never work. Like equating all carbs, regardless of their exact form or the way they're incorporated into food.
There are really only four rules that I've found to be useful:
(1) Avoid manufactured food. Prepare your food yourself as much as possible. (2) Eat a wide variety of real foods over the course of a week, and rely on that for nutrition rather than supplements. (3) Exercise every day and do a variety of exercise over a week. (4) However much fiber you're consuming, try to get a little more.
I'm fortunate in that unlike many people I've never had a sweet tooth, or a special attachment to pasta or muffins. Cutting down carbs was easy for me, although I don't specifically try to go ketogenic.
I also learned to deal with the feeling of being hungry. People react to a hunger pang like it's a health emergency. In fact the first pangs are just an early signal to go look for food soon. I enjoy the way I feel when I'm on calorie restriction (1800 calories per day usually), I feel sharper, more energetic, although I do occasionally feel hungry. I am not wasting away.
However calorie restriction does require a great deal of attention to quality; blowing 350 calories on a flour tortilla means you have to do without a lot if you are going to make your overall goal for the day for nutrients.
It's so common in my family I hardly need to do a genetic test. Autoimmune diseases also run in my family, and there is some evidence that Type 2 for some people at least has an autoimmune component.
I agree on Type 1. On Type 2 -- it's complicated. Sugar is certainly associated with risk factors like central obesity, and there is now some evidence that there is a link, and more evidence pointing to sugar's effect on the liver. But the point is that even if there *is* a link, it's not as simple as "people who get type 2 diabetes because they eat too much sugar."
I believe what drives that misperception is the need to believe that bad things only happen to bad or irresponsible people.
One recent study found that 3/4 of the food purchased by American households contain added sugar, so it's not that easy for most people.
That said, I prepare nearly all of my own meals from scratch; having grow up in a restaurant family it's second nature. The last 4 pound bag of sugar I bought was purchased maybe three years ago and it's still not empty. So I don't eat much sugar one way or the other, and I'm certainly waay below the average 100 pound/per capita/per year average for an American.
Yet I still developed Type 2 diabetes, which two of my siblings also have and which killed my mother and grandmother.
IT's not as simple as "people who eat sugar get diabetes." Some people do and do; some people do and don't. Others like me don't touch the stuff and still get it.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't own your opinions. But what you do with your opinions can still get you fired. Being publicly critical of management policies in a particularly attention-getting way will get you fired most places, unless you have a union.
Now having read the manifesto myself, I wouldn't have fired this guy. But that's because in my experience people are contradictory. People can have enlightened opinions but unelightened behavior and vice versa. Plenty of people love humanity but treat people like trash.
But if his *conduct* towards female colleagues were less than professional he'd be out in a heartbeat. It's one thing to have an unpopular opinion, it's another thing to cause trouble.
I read the manifesto, and I see it as a sincere effort to be thoughtful, but ultimately pseudo-scientific.
For example it's absolutely true that women and men are exposed to different ranges of testosterone in utero, but to draw a causal link between that and the rate at which they become programmers takes an enormous leap of faith.
Likewise he peppers the piece with references to the "average woman", but the average woman doesn't become an engineer any more than the average man. It takes an uncommon set of aptitudes and inclinations, so talking about typical specimens of either gender is neither here nor there. Engineers are outliers by nature.
I absolutely agree with him on the issue of "viewpoint diversity", although it has implications I suspect he hasn't considered. He argues that women (on average) are fundamentally different from men; in that case the natural proportion of engineers in the female population (does that concept even make sense?) is not necessarily the optimal one for a company.
If Google were my company, I probably wouldn't be as aggressive on diversity as this person seems to think they are. A lot of the safe workplace stuff can be subsumed in the old-fashioned idea of professionalism, which nobody would like because it involves a healthy dose of STFU all around. People today seem to think every place and every situation is their own personal soapbox.
And yet you're still here posting anonymously.
The author is making a social scientific argument, however is clearly not trained in the field. As a sociologist once told me: never trust averages. In other words, don't fall into the fallacy of division.
The author repeatedly uses the term "average woman". But the average woman doesn't become an engineer, any more than the average man does. And attraction to and ability to do engineering at a high level is a rare trait; talking about gender "averages" is almost laughable in that context. Likewise most of his arguments are non-negatable. Yes, men and women differ in their in utero exposure to testosterone, and they end up becoming engineers less often, but to draw a causal link between those two things is a leap of faith.
Most people here are too young to remember a time when it was almost universally assumed that women who could do something like engineering simply didn't exist. Let's call this the strong gender hypothesis. Almost nobody believes the strong gender hypothesis anymore. But a lot of people still believe in a weak gender hypothesis: that the probability that a woman has the ability and inclination for engineering is less than the probability a man will.
Let's suppose the weak hypothesis is false. Then affirmative action is potentially justifiable in bringing the female pool of engineers (there are never enough *good* ones) to its full strength. On the other hand, suppose the weak hypothesis is true; it doesn't necessarily follow that affirmative action is unjustifiable; for that you have to show that the current levels of female participation equal their natural potential as a population. That's a massive assumption.
If I had to venture a guess, I'd guess the weak hypothesis is true, but I have no position on what the natural spread between the male and female populations are, other than I suspect it is narrower than currently reflected. There isn't enough data. In effect Google is conducting an experiment. If their level of engineering suffers from their diversity efforts, that will be a significant result.
I do agree with the author on viewpoint diversity, but the argument cuts both ways. He says women, as a group, are different from men as a group. If so then viewpoint diversity brings into question whether the natural ratio of women to men is optimal. Again this is something best answered by a company putting is money where its mouth is.
What people assume you can do is also important.
If you're a young man in tech, wait until you're middle-aged and you'll find this out.
Well, any system devised by humans can go haywire; there's a lot to be said for a system where your coworkers grade you, but such a system is susceptible to group-think and prejudice.
That said, it shouldn't really even come up in the context of the workplace. If your political views cause dissension, you leave them at home. Same with your religion, or anything else. If it pisses people off, you button it.
But we all know that kind of person. The one who is convinced he's misunderstood because he's smarter than everyone around him. That was probably true in middle school, which accounts for why they were never socialized to work with peers. But by the time you get to work as an engineer you're in the big leagues; everyone around you was the geeky smart kid back in the day.
My town recently reduced the speed limit to 25. They put in solar powered radar signs which show your speed in green if it's below the speed limit, red it it's above. If you slow down to the speed limit or below the red speed is replaced by a bright orange "Thank You!".
And the thing is, the damned things actually work. You can see people all around town slowing down to get the "Thank You!" message.
It reminds me of Febreze. Febreze is based on a molecule that traps most unpleasant odors, but when they test marketed Febreze it was a dismal failure. It turns out you can't establish a habit of buying a product by eliminating odors. So P&G added fragrence to their odor eliminating. Or the disinfectant Bactine; it doesn't have to sting but they add alcohol so you know its working. Or the urinals in the Amsterdam airport that have a target painted on them, which eliminates sloppy peers peeing on the floor.
People are very reward driven. It doesn't take much to be effective. Just seeing something happen is enough to motivate people to do something.
I hear this often: so and so is only a success because he spent money on marketing. I've heard it about Jobs, but I've also heard it about J.K. Rowling.
It's a convenient and easy-to-understand explanation for what otherwise seems inexplicable. But if that were true, you could *duplicate* that person's success by spending comparable amounts of money. Usually you can't.
You have to give the devil his due. Jobs was 't an engineer. He wasn't even a designer; the three design elements he is unequivocally responsible for are mediocre: the brushed aluminum QuickTime dialog boxes, the pseudo-highlights and color scheme in the early MacOS 10 "lickable" UI, and the MacOS dock. But at running a consumer tech company, there was none better.
I didn't know they held a pageant for that.
On the other hand he has pressure not to fail.
Here's the problem with rockets: they work right on the knife edge between inferno and explosion. Catastrophic failure is normal in testing new, cutting edge designs.
During the space race a lot of rockets failed. This is how the Russians got so good at it without having anything like the funding NASA had: they failed a *lot* but kept trying because they were behind the US. Once the Moon race heated up the US was able to reduce its failure rate in its very public program by spending almost inconceivable amounts of money.
So it's the old engineering tradeoff: cost/quality/schedule. Either you spend a lot of money, put up with a lot of failure, or spend lots of time. NASA in the 60s spent money; the Soviets of that era put up with failure; and on their super-heavy launch vehicle SpaceX has spent more time.
Ultimately in business there's no such thing as being your own boss. When you own the show, your customers are the boss. So what would potential customers say if SpaceX kept to schedule but had the kind of failure rate the old Soviet space program had?
He didn't *invent* the things he supposedly invented. He just figured out how to make already existing things successful.
And Jobs could do that because he *was* a genius at choosing the features to leave out.
Any engineer is aware of tradeoffs. Everything you add to a project has *some* undesirable consequences. But even so the temptation to hit every conceivable point on the punch list is overwhelming for most people.
Where most people would be struggling with that basic impulse, Jobs would play 11-dimensional feature chess. Case in point, the original iPod touch. It didn't have a speaker or hardware volume control. Any normal person would have put *some* kind of a speaker. It didn't make sense; what did it save, maybe $0.25?
But it wasn't something that made a difference in sales; they sold millions of the things, which meant the choice translated into millions more in profit. But still, a speaker and hardware volume controls are things are something you'd want occasionally. Remember with the first gen touch there was briefly a thing where iPod users would unplug their earbuds and offer their jack to another iPod user?
Then Jobs introduced the second gen iPod Touch, and it had a speaker and hardware volume controls. And people who shelled out $299 for the first gen Touch wanted them, and after all the second gen was cheaper at $229. Result: you ended up spending $528 over the course of two years instead of $300.
And that's the difference between genius and mere cleverness: genius is thinking ahead, and also in other dimensions that a clever person isn't considering. That makes genius surprising at the time and obvious in retrospect.
in a world where you could put eight miles of new subway line in a major city without checking to see what's there first. But after hundreds of years of development, most without the benefit of geographic information systems, you can't be certain what kind of weird shit (or people) down there.
The author seems shocked that it'd take ten years of planning before you could start workers digging. The reality is you need to figure out the impact on water, sewer, gas, electricity, telecom, peoples basements -- and chances are none of that stuff is all on one map; a lot of it is likely not mapped at all, or mapped incorrectly. Ten years before your break ground seems very reasonable to me.
Likewise he's mortified that the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel project had to spend two years on geological and environmental impact studies before breaking ground. That's a twenty-three mile long complex of causeways and tunnels across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, one of the most important fisheries in the country as well one of the world's busiest shipping routes. Two years of study! He calls this a "run-of-the-mill highway". Sure, anything seems easy if you no abso-frickin' nothing about engineering. Bridges and tunnels are the most prestigious projects for a civil engineer to work on because they're ridiculously complex. Just look at all the pieces of the thing. Two years of preliminary geological and environmental study to build the thing sounds outstanding.
This is just Dunning-Kruger run amok. These aren't cases of preliminary studies holding back engineering. Assessing the feasibility and impact of a project is a *major part* of civil engineering. Sure, you could start digging and hope you don't rupture a gas line, breech a high pressure water main, start a plague of rats in Manhattan's Upper East Side (average annual income $180K), damage a fishery that that brings in 290 million dollars per year, or find out the soil you're tunneling through won't support the weight above it. And then you'd be forced to stop and figure out how to fix it. In fact you'd almost inevitably be forced to stop and redesign your project.
A basic principle of engineering project management is that it's waaay cheaper to anticipate a problem than to figure out what to do about it when you're halfway done.
If you can define what that means. But that's not even what the guy is saying. He's saying ISPs shouldn't be in charge of securing customers computers or traffic.
If you imagine what a "secure by default" Internet would do for you, it would protect you from any unintended consequences from your actions. Now imagine how good ISPs would be at doing that for you. Most of them can barely run their own networks competently, much less understand their customers' businesses.
ISPs certainly have a role in responding to certain kinds of cyber attacks, like DDOS, or attacks on DNS infrastructure. But they don't really have the ability to protect customers from themselves.
Well, it's a short bit, and one of the things covered under fair use is criticism. It's actually quite interesting to see such a well-known scene with the music removed, so it does make a critical statement about the way music alters a scene.
Big companies don't have national loyalties. GM and Ford assisted the Nazis in their militarization efforts all the way until Pearl Harbor, and possibly beyond, while at the same time resisting converting their plants to US military production.
Companies are bigger than national borders now. They are difficult enough to police, but there isn't the political will because of the Achilles heel of modern democracy: money.
All the people involved in this, and they get just two? They could get a lot more if they wanted. This is not enough to deter companies from doing stuff like this. Nor is the supposed billions Volkswagen "pays out"; which is peanuts to both the US and Volkswagen, and includes a lot of money Volkswagen gets to spend on itself.
Clearly this is at best a token effort; they're throwing two people out of the hundred who must have been involved under the bus.
Does mental "down time" perform any useful function?
Because that's what we're eliminating: time you spend neither doing something explicitly purposeful nor being entertained.
I often find restating a question makes it better: how good an analogy is "addiction" for the way people use their mobile devices?
And it's different whether you eat that pasta with meat sauce or rice with a steak too. The fructose in a banana is the same compound as in HFCS sweetened soda; but it's not the same because it bound up with fiber and protein.
Digestion and energy metabolism is incredibly complicated, and people are looking for/selling shortcuts and simplications which almost never work. Like equating all carbs, regardless of their exact form or the way they're incorporated into food.
There are really only four rules that I've found to be useful:
(1) Avoid manufactured food. Prepare your food yourself as much as possible.
(2) Eat a wide variety of real foods over the course of a week, and rely on that for nutrition rather than supplements.
(3) Exercise every day and do a variety of exercise over a week.
(4) However much fiber you're consuming, try to get a little more.
You're a lucky git
Aside from the diabetes and autoimmune diseases, absolutely.
I'm fortunate in that unlike many people I've never had a sweet tooth, or a special attachment to pasta or muffins. Cutting down carbs was easy for me, although I don't specifically try to go ketogenic.
I also learned to deal with the feeling of being hungry. People react to a hunger pang like it's a health emergency. In fact the first pangs are just an early signal to go look for food soon. I enjoy the way I feel when I'm on calorie restriction (1800 calories per day usually), I feel sharper, more energetic, although I do occasionally feel hungry. I am not wasting away.
However calorie restriction does require a great deal of attention to quality; blowing 350 calories on a flour tortilla means you have to do without a lot if you are going to make your overall goal for the day for nutrients.
It's so common in my family I hardly need to do a genetic test. Autoimmune diseases also run in my family, and there is some evidence that Type 2 for some people at least has an autoimmune component.
I agree on Type 1. On Type 2 -- it's complicated. Sugar is certainly associated with risk factors like central obesity, and there is now some evidence that there is a link, and more evidence pointing to sugar's effect on the liver. But the point is that even if there *is* a link, it's not as simple as "people who get type 2 diabetes because they eat too much sugar."
I believe what drives that misperception is the need to believe that bad things only happen to bad or irresponsible people.
One recent study found that 3/4 of the food purchased by American households contain added sugar, so it's not that easy for most people.
That said, I prepare nearly all of my own meals from scratch; having grow up in a restaurant family it's second nature. The last 4 pound bag of sugar I bought was purchased maybe three years ago and it's still not empty. So I don't eat much sugar one way or the other, and I'm certainly waay below the average 100 pound/per capita/per year average for an American.
Yet I still developed Type 2 diabetes, which two of my siblings also have and which killed my mother and grandmother.
IT's not as simple as "people who eat sugar get diabetes." Some people do and do; some people do and don't. Others like me don't touch the stuff and still get it.
I actually find RT usefhttps://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10953959&cid=54946717#ul. I just keep in mind that it's Russian propaganda.
Well, by that token, why doesn't Russia simply come out and say "this message was brought to you by the Russian Federation"?
I'll answer my own question: because nobody would believe the message. And they'd be right.
Yes, everyone does this; it's called "information warfare". This doesn't make it good for the target country.