because an enormous part of the problem is the percentage of our food today that is processed, and the percentage that contains vast amounts of sugar (and particularly high fructose corn syrup).
I realize this is a common tenet of anti-farm conglomerate arguments, and I am all against farm conglomerates. But this tidbit simply isn't true. HFCS is not mostly fructose as the name implies. The most common forms used in soft drinks and processed foods are 55% fructose, 42% glucose. Or 42% fructose, 53% glucose. Your body breaks down sucrose (e.g. natural cane sugar) into 50% fructose, 50% glucose. So for all intents and purposes they're the same thing once your body gets a hold of them.
I'm aware of this. However, I've seen some articles which explain that even this small difference is enough to cause problems—either that, or that it's something to do with how the fructose and glucose are connected. Or something; I'm afraid this type of chemistry isn't my strong suit.
And while we're on the topic, carbs are just lots of sugars linked together into a longer molecule. Heck, wood/cellulose is just lots of sugars linked together (in a form which is extremely difficult for animals to break down; ruminants do it by chewing it twice and digesting it 4 times, termites do it with the assistance of a special kind of bacteria in their gut). It is extremely difficult to avoid sugars in your diet even if you eat no simple or processed sugars. Bread is sugar. Rice is sugar. Noodles are sugar. Potatoes are sugar. So it's quite misleading to blame things on the "vast amounts of sugar" in processed foods. (Unless you're talking at the caloric level, and taking into account all forms of sugar like starches and carbohydrates.)
Now you're just oversimplifying beyond the point of reason. That's like saying because they're all made up of the same elements, we might as well just drink gasoline.
Our bodies treat sugars (simple carbohydrates) and starches (complex carbohydrates) quite differently. Pretending otherwise because they're both examples of carbohydrates will get you laughed out of any biology class anywhere.
I suspect that's why the low-carb diet trumped the low-fat diet. Those on the low-carb diet were restricting their intake of sugar (in the form of carbs), while in the back of their minds they were conscious about avoiding too much fat. Those on the low-fat diet figured since they were avoiding fat, everything was ok so they piled on the carbs.
Or...maybe there's actually something different about a low-fat, high-carb diet and a low-carb, high-fat diet that convinces our bodies to store less energy as fat, and your attempts to rationalize away something that challenges your worldview are just that.
I'm not denying there are knock-on effects from eating certain foods. Satiety and insulin and all that stuff plays a part, certainly. But if you're having trouble measuring the number of calories in your food and it seems like there are more calories than there should be, it's because your measurements are off, not because the value of a calorie has changed from food to food. Stop underestimating your intake and overestimating your output.
You are also being overly simplistic about it.
Yes, obviously, one calorie of energy gained from an apple is equivalent to one calorie of energy gained from a chocolate bar.
But the point is, we don't eat food purely for the energy they give us, and health in general and weight gain in particular are governed by much more than the pure thermodynamics of the intake vs usage.
For one thing, maybe I can extract more calories from that apple than you can. And it's also known that eating certain types of food makes the body more likely to store energy as fat if they're eaten around the same time, regardless of how much energy is being expended. (More or less.)
So if you and I took identical meals, and ate them, and then performed identical exercise, there's a good chance that one of us would end up putting on more weight (or losing more weight) than the other. Because our body makeups and chemistries are different, our metabolisms are different, and our gut flora are different.
So yeah, if you want to be as stupidly pedantic as possible, one calorie is identical to every other calorie. But if you want to actually talk about something meaningful like health, different foods can be very different in the effects they will have on us, even if they have the exact same calorie count.
Also, what the hell is a "hipster" diet? I think this is a big sign that people need to stop talking about "hipsters". Since when were "hipsters" known for being fat?
I've really come to believe that the word "hipster" doesn't mean anything anymore. It's just an adjective that you attach to things you don't like.
As to humans as a machine, I'm trying to separate what is healthy from what is psychologically going on in people's heads. They're different arguments that I'm not going to let you lump together.
You say that you can't sustain certain diets because psychologically you are compelled to break the diets when on them. Fine... that is a different argument then whether either diet is healthy.
You're welcome to argue that over there in your world of spherical cows in a vacuum; however, I live in the real world, where real humans have a very important psychological aspect that simply can't be ignored. Thus, a diet that might be, in theory, absolutely ideal, but which leaves anyone attempting to eat it feeling hungry and lousy all the time really isn't going to be useful.
I personally am able to eat carbs all the time and not over eat. This is largely because I have a different threshold for hunger. I eat when I get actually hungry.
Good for you. You're lucky. That doesn't mean that everyone is that lucky, or that people who aren't as lucky as you are lazy, or have no willpower, or are otherwise just not as good a person as you. It means that they didn't get as good a number in the genetic/metabolic lottery.
The main reason we do the 3 meal thing is because it structures our meals and syncs our social activities. If we lived together all the time and gathered food all the time then every minute we are awake would be a meal time. And at that point, it was. Over time we developed social patterns that have us eat in organized social meals. But our bodies don't need that. They just need a certain amount of calories per day.
No. That is exactly the fallacy that I have been trying to refute this whole time, and you seem to be simply ignoring it.
Our bodies don't "just need a certain amount of calories per day" (or week, or whatever time period). They need a certain amount of nutrients of the right types. Calories are important, yes, but they're not the be-all and end-all. We need proteins, and vitamins and minerals, or we'll develop all kinds of interesting diseases from malnutrition. We need a balanced diet.
It's not about how often one eats, or even how much one eats, though obviously those are important at a higher level. It's about what one eats when one does eat. And different people's bodies are different, in various ways and for various reasons, so there isn't one hard-and-fast rule "this is what you must eat, in these amounts, this frequently"—which is why you can cheerfully eat loads of carbs and I can't. (Well, I'd be cheerful temporarily, but it would catch up with me in the end;-) )
It should be obvious that a calorie is not a calorie. When it's not even true for car engines (try pumping diesel into a gasoline car) we shouldn't be assuming it's true for human metabolism.
Secondly the last I checked most people don't measure the excreted calories in excrement.
Hah! An excellent point, and one I hadn't even considered.
In any case, while I definitely agree with you, every time there's a story about nutrition, weight, or health in general, there's a large number of comments that express exactly that fallacy.
This "feeling more full" idea is only relevant if people eat more calories if they don't feel full. If you eat a pre packaged processed meal and regardless of feeling full or not just stop there... then that aspect doesn't matter.
If we talk about calories in... the feeling full aspect only matters if you increase the calories in.
In other words, if we treat humans as a machine, in which you can simply flick a switch marked "stop eating when you have actually eaten what you need," everything's hunky-dory.
Unfortunately, humans are very much unlike that sort of machine. Even a human with a great deal of what we generally term willpower is, by and large, dependent upon his body's signals to indicate when he has eaten enough. When those signals are interfered with, it's not just a matter of being a good enough person to stop eating, it's a matter of how do you actually know when to stop?
As to a calorie not just being a calorie... if you were interested in surviving... as in not starving to death... a calorie would actually be a calorie.
Even then it gets a little dodgy, but sure, we'll grant this for the sake of argument.
But that's not what we're talking about, are we? We're talking about being healthy. In particular, we're talking about what causes people to gain or lose weight. And while yes, eating twelve thousand calories of pizza and not exercising will cause you to gain weight, and eating a small bowl of brussels sprouts and running a marathon will cause you to lose weight (and probably die;-) ), there's a lot of middle ground where the details of the food you're eating (percentages of carbs, fat, proteins, etc, and what kinds of each of those) matter more for what you can get out of the food than the straight-up calorie count.
Do different calories get processed differently? Yes. High density food... food that has a lot of energy in it per unit volume tends to not be processed well by the body if you're sedentary. If however you are active, then you can eat high density food and not feel like a slug afterwards.
Try it. Spend a day being active all day... swimming or something. And then go home for a big meal. Then try again about a week later spending the entire time being very inactive... only this time do not be active on that day and eat the same meal. You will not feel as good about it. The food will sit in your stomach.
If people were more active they could eat pretty much what they want within reason.
Sure. I don't think any of that is in dispute. But that's not what you said. (And as I understand it, there are also more nuances than simply energy density, but that is starting to get into details where I'm fuzzier on how it all works.)
Furthermore, it's also not feasible for a great many people in this day and age to "spend a day being active all day" more than once in a while. I know I work at a desk all day, and a lot of other people do the same. That makes it highly impractical to get the kind of exercise you're talking about. And just increasing exercise a little bit doesn't even always help. Indeed, I moved 3 years ago to be closer to my job, and started walking a mile and a quarter to and from work most days...and my weight didn't even budge.
However, last fall I cut nearly all carbohydrates (simple and complex—that is, sugars and starches) out of my diet, and lost 50 pounds in 4 months. Yes, I was eating a little bit less, but not nearly enough to account for the amount of weight I lost. And I was having bacon and eggs for breakfast many mornings, and plenty of other very rich foods—just not sugary foods or starchy foods. (And it was hard to do. But suffice it to say that I had some strong motivation specifically to cut out carbs for that period of time—the weight loss, in my case, was a nice bonus.)
Now, that's just an anecdote. On its own, it would mean very little. But given that the article we're both commenting on is about a scientific study that shows that I'm not the only one that can be true for, I think it's quite relevant.
Then why were people from 50 years ago not hugely fat? Because they were not eating all your little hipster diets and they were not fat.
The lack of understanding betrayed by this is almost ludicrous.
They didn't need to eat a "hipster diet" 50 years ago to avoid getting hugely fat, because an enormous part of the problem is the percentage of our food today that is processed, and the percentage that contains vast amounts of sugar (and particularly high fructose corn syrup). Which is exactly what (many of) the "hipster diets" strive to emulate.
I realize that on Slashdot, where people tend to be highly math-oriented, it's a popular fallacy to believe that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. However, studies like this one have been coming out for years now showing that that's simply not true.
Some kinds of energy are easier for our bodies to extract from food than others. Some kinds of food make our bodies feel more full than others. And our bodies need more in terms of nutrition than just calories—so, contrary to one of your other posts, no, a 12 thousand calorie diet of pizza cannot be healthy, unless the toppings on that pizza are very carefully selected to provide the nutrients that our bodies actually need.
It would be nice if nutrition were a simple formula, where you could just calculate calories in minus calories expended and come out with a nice, pleasing mathematical formula. But the human body isn't a spherical body in a vacuum, and "calorie" isn't a unit of nutrition, no matter how much you try to make it so.
I can't wait to hear from all the pundits why this means Apple—and only Apple—is doomed.
After all, it's not as if they're taking significantly more marketshare and profitshare from Samsung than from Apple or anything...oh, no; every single event that can be broadly construed to be in the cellphone or consumer technology space, no matter how loosely related to Apple, can only ever mean that Apple is in trouble, and all its competitors are poised to take over in everything.
If you're a small shop, you will not be able to deal with credit cards except through intermediate handlers, such as PayPal. And most of them have massive up-front fees that you cannot afford.
Well, technically, I suppose that statement may still be true, but there is at least one very prominent "intermediate handler" that does not charge any up-front fees; in fact, they give away the hardware for free: I'm talking about Square.
They are, however, mainly helpful offline, because I believe their fees for non-in-person transactions are considerably higher than the 2.7% or whatever they charge when you actually swipe a card. Though they do have an online marketplace.
Either way, it's definitely good to see a serious (potential) competitor to PayPal.
Is that different for normal people or is the Comcast CEO living under a rock?
When all too many "normal people" notice that something is slow on the Internet, they are as likely to blame the printer they just plugged in, the new game their teenage son installed, or even the new swimming pool their neighbour just put in, as anything that could actually have affected it.
What would be cool is if this super PAC returned everyone's money if they don't raise the critical mass of dollars to make a difference. Ultimately that's my main worry. I'd rather donate $1000 to a cause that would give me my money back if it failed to raise enough money to make a real difference, than donate $10 that was gone forever regardless of whether it is used effectively.
Wasting my already-spent mod points by posting, but I think it's worth it:
That's exactly what they're doing. If you look at their FAQ, the second section explains that they will set certain funding targets, people will "pledge" their contributions, and only if they meet their total pledge target will any money actually change hands. Just like Kickstarter.
I've already pledged $20, and I wish I could give more, but our financial situation isn't super-stable at present:-/ I think what Lessig is doing is probably about the most important political action of our time.
I've been playing LoL for about a year now, on and off, and while I can hardly claim to be playing at a high level (I think I was Bronze II last time I qualified in ranked play), my experience has largely been a positive one. Sure, there are occasional assholes, and I've even had to mute one or two people, but most games I play don't have any serious negative attitudes, blue-streak profanity, or other jerkiness.
Personally, I always try to have a good attitude myself, since I know from experience that negativity can far too easily breed, especially when more than one person in a given group is acting that way, and cheerfulness can also be contagious.
I have high hopes for the introduction of the Team Builder matchmaking system, which should reduce or remove the contention for roles and positions that has far too often marred the pre-game lobby in League...once they can make sure its wait times are reasonable.
Because the rich are mostly the people who look short term. The poor in this country are looking to the long term and have a better handle on that. Right?
You can not see the fallacy there can you.
The outlook of the poor in this case is irrelevant. They have no power to actually change things. The rich do. It is the policies of the rich that are being implemented, which results in the poor suffering.
So...no, I don't see the fallacy, because none exists. You're reading things into my post that simply aren't there.
You really believe that the rich successful people are too stupid to understand what will and what will not make them money.
Good luck with that thought process.
I believe that a significant majority of the rich in this country are heavily focused on short-term gains. Often at the expense of potentially much greater long-term gains. That's been a huge part of the problem in the economy for years now.
The problem here is that you think that every job should be able to support a family. It should not. If all jobs need to put out a living wage where will young people get there first jobs? How will they learn?
They will learnon minimum wage jobs. At $15/hr. What's wrong with that? Do you think there's some kind of deep injustice being committed when teenagers can make $15/hr? Now, most likely, they won't be working full-time—after all, teenagers have school to go to. So they won't be making as much overall as the 50-year-old working the same job because the company he worked at for 20 years laid him off, so that they could pay their CxOs more.
You are pricing students and first job people out of the market.
But this still doesn't make much sense. If the cheapest you can possibly hire someone is $15/hr, how can anyone be priced out of that? If you need a worker, you will hire one at that wage, whether they're a teenager or not.
Every study done on past minimum wage raises will show you the number of jobs it costs.
Yeah, and it's not nearly as many as the jobs it creates.
Any change—any shock to the system—will cause some short-term pain. Raising the minimum wage could very well cause a fair number of job losses at minimum-wage employers over the first few months after it goes into effect.
But do you know what the best, most clearly proven way to stimulate the economy—and thus create jobs—is? Put more purchasing power in the hands of the poorest.
They will spend that extra ~$300/week immediately, on basic necessities. That money will push up the local economy, and make it that much easier for other business owners in their area to hire another minimum-wage worker. This is basic economics.
The rest of your post sounds, to me, basically like, "Things have always been this way, so I don't see why they should ever be any other way" and "It doesn't matter if people are made poorer, teh evul liberals will give them all my hard-earned money so they can loaf around doing nothing." (To be fair, it sounds like you're exaggerating the latter for effect as much as I am.) SoI'm not even going to bother to respond to it.
I don't think you actually want to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. I just think that, as the title suggests, you've drunk the Kool-aid, and have come to believe the lie that increasing the minimum wage will make the poor worse off. And it is a lie; a despicable one that has been sold to the American people in order to prevent anyone from actually improving the lot of the poor. Because that would mean that the super-rich would not be able to take quite as large a slice of the pie as they can now.
The really, really stupid part is that for a significant percentage of the rich, there's a high probability that they would actually make more money if the poor were doing better. They might have a smaller piece of the pie, but the pie would be enough bigger that it wouldn't matter.
When you price people that are only worth $8/hr out of the market they do not suddenly just make more money. They loose their job to someone capable of working at $12 or $15/hr. Set the minimum wage to $30/hr. See what happens to the people who work at McDonalds. Most of them will be out of work.
I understand that you mean well and want people to be happy, but we have to think clearly before we put restrictions on a market based on what would make me feel like a better human being.
Yeah, except that no one I've ever heard is advocating setting the minimum wage to $30/hr. The proposal floated by the president says $10.10/hr. The most radical ones I've heard—the ones that would try to make the minimum wage a living wage, and in line, proportionally, with what the minimum wage was during the country's best times—say to push it up to around $18/hr.
And...I'm really not sure what you mean by "people capable of working at $12 or $15/hr". Do you really think that if the minimum wage was raised to a level that would allow anyone working full-time making it to actually feed, house, and clothe themselves, that suddenly the requirements of every minimum wage job would change to require a significantly higher level of service? That McDonald's and WalMart would suddenly start requiring their cashiers to also be their accountants?
I've heard a lot of arguments against the minimum wage, but this one is one of the more baffling to me, I must admit. It's possible that that's just because I don't quite understand what you're trying to say.
You stated that like a minimum wage is good for the poor.
It is not.
Riiight, because it's great for the poor to be unable to find a job that makes more than $2/hour!
And it's really the super-wealthy who benefit when the people who work at the shops not they, but their maids and housekeepers get food and clothing at, start making enough that they can actually feed their families without government assistance
But do you have any evidence that the fictional POTUFOP is completely democratically elected according to the true will of the people? Have you ever seen anyone on the show vote, discuss who they're going to vote for, etc? Do you see heated political debates in ten forward?
Glossing over the blatant and pointless ad hominem...
It's true, the show never really talks about politics. From my perspective, that's simply because that's not what the show is about. It can also be accounted for pretty much completely if we postulate that members of Starfleet—i.e., the serving military—are not allowed to participate in politics in any way. This is a relatively common restriction on the military (at least in other scifi I have read ^_~ ), and since 99%+ of the Federation members that appear on screen are serving members of Starfleet, it would pretty much preclude any significant role of politics in the show.
It's hard to overstate, however, the importance of the fact that it is Gene Roddenberry's Federation, since he was very clear that it was intended to be a truly Utopian society: no scarcity, no poverty, essentially no conflict within the crews of the ships we get to see, etc.
And, once again: Politics is simply never what the show was intended to be about. If you introduce politics, it's likely to change the show quite a bit. In fact, in the later seasons of Deep Space Nine (a few years after Roddenberry was dead), more politics and internal conflict did begin to crop up—and frankly, it made the shows more interesting. Utopia's nice to live in, but it makes lousy television.
In any case, to the best of my knowledge, there is no real canon about this. Given that absence, you are well within your rights to call into question the legitimacy of Jaresh-Inyo's election; however, I am just as well within my rights to refer to the stated intentions of the creator of the franchise to back up my claim that it is legitimate.
Elected covers a wide range of things. Anglo-Saxon kings and Holy Roman emperors were elected.
Yeah, and you really think the President of Gene Roddenberry's United Federation of Planets is anything less than completely democratically elected according to the true will of the people?
I can't say I've seen every episode, but do they ever discuss politics, elections and the like? If so I don't recall it.
I don't believe they ever make it a major focus, but there are enough episodes where things are mentioned that you can draw a pretty clear picture.
For instance, in the fourth-season Deep Space Nine two-parter "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost", we actually see the Federation president for the first time, and learn that he is, indeed, elected.
I'd personally give it until after BETA is sorted out. If Dice somehow miraculously sorts out the commenting problem, Slashdot stands a chance as sticking around.
If they don't, then you'll definitely see an exodus.
I disagree. If Mr. Perens is going to set this up intending it to be a haven for refugees from a broken Slashdot, it needs to be up and running before the beta site goes live, then crashes and burns.
Otherwise, far too many people will just disappear, rather than migrating over.
The biggest mistake MBAs make is thinking that management/administration is a plug-in skill - you can move to a different business and manage it without knowing the ins and outs of the business.
No, actually, there's a bigger mistake that they make.
They think that management/administration is a skill that having an MBA gives you. A formula, that once you take those classes and have those letters after your name, you can apply to manage businesses, and no one else has it.
I know a few people who are actually really good at management and administration. None of them are MBAs, or studied it in any formal capacity—they just have a natural talent for it, which they have honed by years of experience. And at least some of them have shown that if you do really know what you're doing with management, you can apply it to a different business and do quite well, after an initial period of learning the ins and outs of the new business.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize this is a common tenet of anti-farm conglomerate arguments, and I am all against farm conglomerates. But this tidbit simply isn't true. HFCS is not mostly fructose as the name implies. The most common forms used in soft drinks and processed foods are 55% fructose, 42% glucose. Or 42% fructose, 53% glucose. Your body breaks down sucrose (e.g. natural cane sugar) into 50% fructose, 50% glucose. So for all intents and purposes they're the same thing once your body gets a hold of them.
I'm aware of this. However, I've seen some articles which explain that even this small difference is enough to cause problems—either that, or that it's something to do with how the fructose and glucose are connected. Or something; I'm afraid this type of chemistry isn't my strong suit.
And while we're on the topic, carbs are just lots of sugars linked together into a longer molecule. Heck, wood/cellulose is just lots of sugars linked together (in a form which is extremely difficult for animals to break down; ruminants do it by chewing it twice and digesting it 4 times, termites do it with the assistance of a special kind of bacteria in their gut). It is extremely difficult to avoid sugars in your diet even if you eat no simple or processed sugars. Bread is sugar. Rice is sugar. Noodles are sugar. Potatoes are sugar. So it's quite misleading to blame things on the "vast amounts of sugar" in processed foods. (Unless you're talking at the caloric level, and taking into account all forms of sugar like starches and carbohydrates.)
Now you're just oversimplifying beyond the point of reason. That's like saying because they're all made up of the same elements, we might as well just drink gasoline.
Our bodies treat sugars (simple carbohydrates) and starches (complex carbohydrates) quite differently. Pretending otherwise because they're both examples of carbohydrates will get you laughed out of any biology class anywhere.
I suspect that's why the low-carb diet trumped the low-fat diet. Those on the low-carb diet were restricting their intake of sugar (in the form of carbs), while in the back of their minds they were conscious about avoiding too much fat. Those on the low-fat diet figured since they were avoiding fat, everything was ok so they piled on the carbs.
Or...maybe there's actually something different about a low-fat, high-carb diet and a low-carb, high-fat diet that convinces our bodies to store less energy as fat, and your attempts to rationalize away something that challenges your worldview are just that.
Dan Aris
I'm not denying there are knock-on effects from eating certain foods. Satiety and insulin and all that stuff plays a part, certainly. But if you're having trouble measuring the number of calories in your food and it seems like there are more calories than there should be, it's because your measurements are off, not because the value of a calorie has changed from food to food. Stop underestimating your intake and overestimating your output.
You are also being overly simplistic about it.
Yes, obviously, one calorie of energy gained from an apple is equivalent to one calorie of energy gained from a chocolate bar.
But the point is, we don't eat food purely for the energy they give us, and health in general and weight gain in particular are governed by much more than the pure thermodynamics of the intake vs usage.
For one thing, maybe I can extract more calories from that apple than you can. And it's also known that eating certain types of food makes the body more likely to store energy as fat if they're eaten around the same time, regardless of how much energy is being expended. (More or less.)
So if you and I took identical meals, and ate them, and then performed identical exercise, there's a good chance that one of us would end up putting on more weight (or losing more weight) than the other. Because our body makeups and chemistries are different, our metabolisms are different, and our gut flora are different.
So yeah, if you want to be as stupidly pedantic as possible, one calorie is identical to every other calorie. But if you want to actually talk about something meaningful like health, different foods can be very different in the effects they will have on us, even if they have the exact same calorie count.
Dan Aris
Also, what the hell is a "hipster" diet? I think this is a big sign that people need to stop talking about "hipsters". Since when were "hipsters" known for being fat?
I've really come to believe that the word "hipster" doesn't mean anything anymore. It's just an adjective that you attach to things you don't like.
Don't look at me, it was his term ;-)
Dan Aris
As to humans as a machine, I'm trying to separate what is healthy from what is psychologically going on in people's heads. They're different arguments that I'm not going to let you lump together.
You say that you can't sustain certain diets because psychologically you are compelled to break the diets when on them. Fine... that is a different argument then whether either diet is healthy.
You're welcome to argue that over there in your world of spherical cows in a vacuum; however, I live in the real world, where real humans have a very important psychological aspect that simply can't be ignored. Thus, a diet that might be, in theory, absolutely ideal, but which leaves anyone attempting to eat it feeling hungry and lousy all the time really isn't going to be useful.
I personally am able to eat carbs all the time and not over eat. This is largely because I have a different threshold for hunger. I eat when I get actually hungry.
Good for you. You're lucky. That doesn't mean that everyone is that lucky, or that people who aren't as lucky as you are lazy, or have no willpower, or are otherwise just not as good a person as you. It means that they didn't get as good a number in the genetic/metabolic lottery.
The main reason we do the 3 meal thing is because it structures our meals and syncs our social activities. If we lived together all the time and gathered food all the time then every minute we are awake would be a meal time. And at that point, it was. Over time we developed social patterns that have us eat in organized social meals. But our bodies don't need that. They just need a certain amount of calories per day.
No. That is exactly the fallacy that I have been trying to refute this whole time, and you seem to be simply ignoring it.
Our bodies don't "just need a certain amount of calories per day" (or week, or whatever time period). They need a certain amount of nutrients of the right types. Calories are important, yes, but they're not the be-all and end-all. We need proteins, and vitamins and minerals, or we'll develop all kinds of interesting diseases from malnutrition. We need a balanced diet.
It's not about how often one eats, or even how much one eats, though obviously those are important at a higher level. It's about what one eats when one does eat. And different people's bodies are different, in various ways and for various reasons, so there isn't one hard-and-fast rule "this is what you must eat, in these amounts, this frequently"—which is why you can cheerfully eat loads of carbs and I can't. (Well, I'd be cheerful temporarily, but it would catch up with me in the end ;-) )
Dan Aris
It should be obvious that a calorie is not a calorie. When it's not even true for car engines (try pumping diesel into a gasoline car) we shouldn't be assuming it's true for human metabolism. Secondly the last I checked most people don't measure the excreted calories in excrement.
Hah! An excellent point, and one I hadn't even considered.
In any case, while I definitely agree with you, every time there's a story about nutrition, weight, or health in general, there's a large number of comments that express exactly that fallacy.
Dan Aris
This "feeling more full" idea is only relevant if people eat more calories if they don't feel full. If you eat a pre packaged processed meal and regardless of feeling full or not just stop there... then that aspect doesn't matter.
If we talk about calories in... the feeling full aspect only matters if you increase the calories in.
In other words, if we treat humans as a machine, in which you can simply flick a switch marked "stop eating when you have actually eaten what you need," everything's hunky-dory.
Unfortunately, humans are very much unlike that sort of machine. Even a human with a great deal of what we generally term willpower is, by and large, dependent upon his body's signals to indicate when he has eaten enough. When those signals are interfered with, it's not just a matter of being a good enough person to stop eating, it's a matter of how do you actually know when to stop?
As to a calorie not just being a calorie... if you were interested in surviving... as in not starving to death... a calorie would actually be a calorie.
Even then it gets a little dodgy, but sure, we'll grant this for the sake of argument.
But that's not what we're talking about, are we? We're talking about being healthy. In particular, we're talking about what causes people to gain or lose weight. And while yes, eating twelve thousand calories of pizza and not exercising will cause you to gain weight, and eating a small bowl of brussels sprouts and running a marathon will cause you to lose weight (and probably die ;-) ), there's a lot of middle ground where the details of the food you're eating (percentages of carbs, fat, proteins, etc, and what kinds of each of those) matter more for what you can get out of the food than the straight-up calorie count.
Do different calories get processed differently? Yes. High density food... food that has a lot of energy in it per unit volume tends to not be processed well by the body if you're sedentary. If however you are active, then you can eat high density food and not feel like a slug afterwards.
Try it. Spend a day being active all day... swimming or something. And then go home for a big meal. Then try again about a week later spending the entire time being very inactive... only this time do not be active on that day and eat the same meal. You will not feel as good about it. The food will sit in your stomach.
If people were more active they could eat pretty much what they want within reason.
Sure. I don't think any of that is in dispute. But that's not what you said. (And as I understand it, there are also more nuances than simply energy density, but that is starting to get into details where I'm fuzzier on how it all works.)
Furthermore, it's also not feasible for a great many people in this day and age to "spend a day being active all day" more than once in a while. I know I work at a desk all day, and a lot of other people do the same. That makes it highly impractical to get the kind of exercise you're talking about. And just increasing exercise a little bit doesn't even always help. Indeed, I moved 3 years ago to be closer to my job, and started walking a mile and a quarter to and from work most days...and my weight didn't even budge.
However, last fall I cut nearly all carbohydrates (simple and complex—that is, sugars and starches) out of my diet, and lost 50 pounds in 4 months. Yes, I was eating a little bit less, but not nearly enough to account for the amount of weight I lost. And I was having bacon and eggs for breakfast many mornings, and plenty of other very rich foods—just not sugary foods or starchy foods. (And it was hard to do. But suffice it to say that I had some strong motivation specifically to cut out carbs for that period of time—the weight loss, in my case, was a nice bonus.)
Now, that's just an anecdote. On its own, it would mean very little. But given that the article we're both commenting on is about a scientific study that shows that I'm not the only one that can be true for, I think it's quite relevant.
Dan Aris
Then why were people from 50 years ago not hugely fat? Because they were not eating all your little hipster diets and they were not fat.
The lack of understanding betrayed by this is almost ludicrous.
They didn't need to eat a "hipster diet" 50 years ago to avoid getting hugely fat, because an enormous part of the problem is the percentage of our food today that is processed, and the percentage that contains vast amounts of sugar (and particularly high fructose corn syrup). Which is exactly what (many of) the "hipster diets" strive to emulate.
I realize that on Slashdot, where people tend to be highly math-oriented, it's a popular fallacy to believe that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. However, studies like this one have been coming out for years now showing that that's simply not true.
Some kinds of energy are easier for our bodies to extract from food than others. Some kinds of food make our bodies feel more full than others. And our bodies need more in terms of nutrition than just calories—so, contrary to one of your other posts, no, a 12 thousand calorie diet of pizza cannot be healthy, unless the toppings on that pizza are very carefully selected to provide the nutrients that our bodies actually need.
It would be nice if nutrition were a simple formula, where you could just calculate calories in minus calories expended and come out with a nice, pleasing mathematical formula. But the human body isn't a spherical body in a vacuum, and "calorie" isn't a unit of nutrition, no matter how much you try to make it so.
Dan Aris
I can't wait to hear from all the pundits why this means Apple—and only Apple—is doomed.
After all, it's not as if they're taking significantly more marketshare and profitshare from Samsung than from Apple or anything...oh, no; every single event that can be broadly construed to be in the cellphone or consumer technology space, no matter how loosely related to Apple, can only ever mean that Apple is in trouble, and all its competitors are poised to take over in everything.
:-P
Dan Aris
Hope they've reduced the incidence of iatrogenic schizophrenia...
Dan Aris
If you're a small shop, you will not be able to deal with credit cards except through intermediate handlers, such as PayPal. And most of them have massive up-front fees that you cannot afford.
Well, technically, I suppose that statement may still be true, but there is at least one very prominent "intermediate handler" that does not charge any up-front fees; in fact, they give away the hardware for free: I'm talking about Square.
They are, however, mainly helpful offline, because I believe their fees for non-in-person transactions are considerably higher than the 2.7% or whatever they charge when you actually swipe a card. Though they do have an online marketplace.
Either way, it's definitely good to see a serious (potential) competitor to PayPal.
Dan Aris
Is that different for normal people or is the Comcast CEO living under a rock?
When all too many "normal people" notice that something is slow on the Internet, they are as likely to blame the printer they just plugged in, the new game their teenage son installed, or even the new swimming pool their neighbour just put in, as anything that could actually have affected it.
Dan Aris
What would be cool is if this super PAC returned everyone's money if they don't raise the critical mass of dollars to make a difference. Ultimately that's my main worry. I'd rather donate $1000 to a cause that would give me my money back if it failed to raise enough money to make a real difference, than donate $10 that was gone forever regardless of whether it is used effectively.
Wasting my already-spent mod points by posting, but I think it's worth it:
That's exactly what they're doing. If you look at their FAQ, the second section explains that they will set certain funding targets, people will "pledge" their contributions, and only if they meet their total pledge target will any money actually change hands. Just like Kickstarter.
I've already pledged $20, and I wish I could give more, but our financial situation isn't super-stable at present :-/ I think what Lessig is doing is probably about the most important political action of our time.
Dan Aris
...as if a million Star Wars EU geeks had suddenly cried out in terror, and then immediately took to the Internet to vent their rage.
Dan Aris
I've been playing LoL for about a year now, on and off, and while I can hardly claim to be playing at a high level (I think I was Bronze II last time I qualified in ranked play), my experience has largely been a positive one. Sure, there are occasional assholes, and I've even had to mute one or two people, but most games I play don't have any serious negative attitudes, blue-streak profanity, or other jerkiness.
Personally, I always try to have a good attitude myself, since I know from experience that negativity can far too easily breed, especially when more than one person in a given group is acting that way, and cheerfulness can also be contagious.
I have high hopes for the introduction of the Team Builder matchmaking system, which should reduce or remove the contention for roles and positions that has far too often marred the pre-game lobby in League...once they can make sure its wait times are reasonable.
Dan Aris
Because the rich are mostly the people who look short term. The poor in this country are looking to the long term and have a better handle on that. Right?
You can not see the fallacy there can you.
The outlook of the poor in this case is irrelevant. They have no power to actually change things. The rich do. It is the policies of the rich that are being implemented, which results in the poor suffering.
So...no, I don't see the fallacy, because none exists. You're reading things into my post that simply aren't there.
Dan Aris
You really believe that the rich successful people are too stupid to understand what will and what will not make them money. Good luck with that thought process.
I believe that a significant majority of the rich in this country are heavily focused on short-term gains. Often at the expense of potentially much greater long-term gains. That's been a huge part of the problem in the economy for years now.
Dan Aris
The problem here is that you think that every job should be able to support a family. It should not. If all jobs need to put out a living wage where will young people get there first jobs? How will they learn?
They will learnon minimum wage jobs. At $15/hr. What's wrong with that? Do you think there's some kind of deep injustice being committed when teenagers can make $15/hr? Now, most likely, they won't be working full-time—after all, teenagers have school to go to. So they won't be making as much overall as the 50-year-old working the same job because the company he worked at for 20 years laid him off, so that they could pay their CxOs more.
You are pricing students and first job people out of the market.
But this still doesn't make much sense. If the cheapest you can possibly hire someone is $15/hr, how can anyone be priced out of that? If you need a worker, you will hire one at that wage, whether they're a teenager or not.
Every study done on past minimum wage raises will show you the number of jobs it costs.
Yeah, and it's not nearly as many as the jobs it creates.
Any change—any shock to the system—will cause some short-term pain. Raising the minimum wage could very well cause a fair number of job losses at minimum-wage employers over the first few months after it goes into effect.
But do you know what the best, most clearly proven way to stimulate the economy—and thus create jobs—is? Put more purchasing power in the hands of the poorest.
They will spend that extra ~$300/week immediately, on basic necessities. That money will push up the local economy, and make it that much easier for other business owners in their area to hire another minimum-wage worker. This is basic economics.
The rest of your post sounds, to me, basically like, "Things have always been this way, so I don't see why they should ever be any other way" and "It doesn't matter if people are made poorer, teh evul liberals will give them all my hard-earned money so they can loaf around doing nothing." (To be fair, it sounds like you're exaggerating the latter for effect as much as I am.) SoI'm not even going to bother to respond to it.
I don't think you actually want to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. I just think that, as the title suggests, you've drunk the Kool-aid, and have come to believe the lie that increasing the minimum wage will make the poor worse off. And it is a lie; a despicable one that has been sold to the American people in order to prevent anyone from actually improving the lot of the poor. Because that would mean that the super-rich would not be able to take quite as large a slice of the pie as they can now.
The really, really stupid part is that for a significant percentage of the rich, there's a high probability that they would actually make more money if the poor were doing better. They might have a smaller piece of the pie, but the pie would be enough bigger that it wouldn't matter.
Dan Aris
When you price people that are only worth $8/hr out of the market they do not suddenly just make more money. They loose their job to someone capable of working at $12 or $15/hr. Set the minimum wage to $30/hr. See what happens to the people who work at McDonalds. Most of them will be out of work.
I understand that you mean well and want people to be happy, but we have to think clearly before we put restrictions on a market based on what would make me feel like a better human being.
Yeah, except that no one I've ever heard is advocating setting the minimum wage to $30/hr. The proposal floated by the president says $10.10/hr. The most radical ones I've heard—the ones that would try to make the minimum wage a living wage, and in line, proportionally, with what the minimum wage was during the country's best times—say to push it up to around $18/hr.
And...I'm really not sure what you mean by "people capable of working at $12 or $15/hr". Do you really think that if the minimum wage was raised to a level that would allow anyone working full-time making it to actually feed, house, and clothe themselves, that suddenly the requirements of every minimum wage job would change to require a significantly higher level of service? That McDonald's and WalMart would suddenly start requiring their cashiers to also be their accountants?
I've heard a lot of arguments against the minimum wage, but this one is one of the more baffling to me, I must admit. It's possible that that's just because I don't quite understand what you're trying to say.
Dan Aris
You stated that like a minimum wage is good for the poor.
It is not.
Riiight, because it's great for the poor to be unable to find a job that makes more than $2/hour!
And it's really the super-wealthy who benefit when the people who work at the shops not they, but their maids and housekeepers get food and clothing at, start making enough that they can actually feed their families without government assistance
Dan Aris
I think that he doesn't actually exist.
But do you have any evidence that the fictional POTUFOP is completely democratically elected according to the true will of the people? Have you ever seen anyone on the show vote, discuss who they're going to vote for, etc? Do you see heated political debates in ten forward?
Glossing over the blatant and pointless ad hominem...
It's true, the show never really talks about politics. From my perspective, that's simply because that's not what the show is about. It can also be accounted for pretty much completely if we postulate that members of Starfleet—i.e., the serving military—are not allowed to participate in politics in any way. This is a relatively common restriction on the military (at least in other scifi I have read ^_~ ), and since 99%+ of the Federation members that appear on screen are serving members of Starfleet, it would pretty much preclude any significant role of politics in the show.
It's hard to overstate, however, the importance of the fact that it is Gene Roddenberry's Federation, since he was very clear that it was intended to be a truly Utopian society: no scarcity, no poverty, essentially no conflict within the crews of the ships we get to see, etc.
And, once again: Politics is simply never what the show was intended to be about. If you introduce politics, it's likely to change the show quite a bit. In fact, in the later seasons of Deep Space Nine (a few years after Roddenberry was dead), more politics and internal conflict did begin to crop up—and frankly, it made the shows more interesting. Utopia's nice to live in, but it makes lousy television.
In any case, to the best of my knowledge, there is no real canon about this. Given that absence, you are well within your rights to call into question the legitimacy of Jaresh-Inyo's election; however, I am just as well within my rights to refer to the stated intentions of the creator of the franchise to back up my claim that it is legitimate.
Dan Aris
Elected covers a wide range of things. Anglo-Saxon kings and Holy Roman emperors were elected.
Yeah, and you really think the President of Gene Roddenberry's United Federation of Planets is anything less than completely democratically elected according to the true will of the people?
Dan Aris
I can't say I've seen every episode, but do they ever discuss politics, elections and the like? If so I don't recall it.
I don't believe they ever make it a major focus, but there are enough episodes where things are mentioned that you can draw a pretty clear picture.
For instance, in the fourth-season Deep Space Nine two-parter "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost", we actually see the Federation president for the first time, and learn that he is, indeed, elected.
Dan Aris
Bruce Perens is talking about creating a Slashdot replacement, a resurrection of Technocrat.net.
If things keep going the way it looks like they will, that's where I'll be fleeing to.
Dan Aris
Hi!
I'd personally give it until after BETA is sorted out. If Dice somehow miraculously sorts out the commenting problem, Slashdot stands a chance as sticking around.
If they don't, then you'll definitely see an exodus.
I disagree. If Mr. Perens is going to set this up intending it to be a haven for refugees from a broken Slashdot, it needs to be up and running before the beta site goes live, then crashes and burns.
Otherwise, far too many people will just disappear, rather than migrating over.
Dan Aris
The biggest mistake MBAs make is thinking that management/administration is a plug-in skill - you can move to a different business and manage it without knowing the ins and outs of the business.
No, actually, there's a bigger mistake that they make.
They think that management/administration is a skill that having an MBA gives you. A formula, that once you take those classes and have those letters after your name, you can apply to manage businesses, and no one else has it.
I know a few people who are actually really good at management and administration. None of them are MBAs, or studied it in any formal capacity—they just have a natural talent for it, which they have honed by years of experience. And at least some of them have shown that if you do really know what you're doing with management, you can apply it to a different business and do quite well, after an initial period of learning the ins and outs of the new business.
Dan Aris