Declanomous

I read everything put in front of me when I bought my car. Boy was the finance guy pissed, cause it took me like an hour, and he makes his living upselling add-ons and stuff.

I'm also a pretty fast reader, so it is pretty obvious that they absolutely expect you to not read whatever it is you are signing, because I assume that it would take most other people well over an hour to read.

Well recent studies have actually found that women have a different catabolism than men. Women also switch to catabolism while they still have glycogen remaining in their muscles, meaning they don't build up as much lactic acid.

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom because all of the original studies were only done on men.

Off the top of my head, I'm not sure if women do have a harder time losing weight than men, but I know that a woman's body reacts to starvation differently. That may play a role.

There is a massive need for "foundational" studies to be redone with women. The assumption that men and women have the same metabolism has been shown to be wrong, and it has a lot of broad and overarching implications, especially in the field of medicine.

Men generally have the potential to be stronger than women, yes, but in general men are only stronger than women and larger than women, neither of which is particularly meaningful in endurance racing.

I replied to the comment above you in greater depth, but basically endurance appears to be something that women have the potential to be better at than men. If this strikes you as wrong, well, it's probably because it challenges your conception of male superiority rather than because of any innate advantage that men actually have.

I'm sorry you feel that way. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, the claim that women beat men occasionally because of a small sample size is chauvinistic, regardless of whether or not it was intended to be.

Unlike other events, where strength is a limiting factor (for instance, sprint speed is limited by muscle mass), there isn't much of a reason to believe that women would be worse at distance running.

For instance, the same line of logic would be 100% chauvinistic if someone said "The best engineer in this field is a woman, but it's a narrow field, I assume the sample size is very small."

People used to make very similar claims about the inferior mental capacity of women as they do about physical performance now. Yes, men outperform women in feats of strength, however, in many sporting disciplines the fact that men continue to outperform women is most likely due to the fact that men are generally encouraged to participate in sport to a greater degree than women, and sporting communities are more welcoming to men.

The author of the comment I replied to has no basis for his claim that the sample size accounts for the women winning beyond a feeling that men are superior athletes in all ways. That is chauvinism, and if that claim makes you feel uncomfortable or angry, perhaps you should reflect on why that is.

There's actually very substantial differences in the metabolism inside of muscles for men and women. Nobody realized this because literally every study that created baselines for what was going on inside the muscles in relation to the metabolites that ended up in the blood was done with men. So when women were later included in studies they just used the blood workup or VO2 to estimate energy expenditure and the like, and it turns out those are nearly completely wrong.

Long story short, women switch to catabolism way earlier than men, while they still have glycogen inside their muscles. Men don't switch to catabolism until after they are completely out of glycogen and are creating fucktons of lactic acid. Since your muscles run on glycogen, and lactic acid is not a great thing to have kicking around, women actually appear to have a better metabolism for endurance.

Unfortunately a lot of doctors and researchers are men, and are extremely dismissive of the idea that there is any reason to actually study women, instead inventing behavioral reasons for why you don't always get the same results for men and women in studies.

I think the fact that you are willing to chalk up the fact that women are winning these races on occasion to there not being enough elite runners has signs of a similar chauvanism.

(This is mostly off the top of my head, but I have a degree in biology and I have studied metabolism fairly extensively)

Yeah, exactly. I like to have it relatively cold at night, so with forced air I set the heat to come on about 15-20 minutes before I want to get out of bed, and turn off 15 minutes after I leave for the day.

With radiant heat, if I want it to be 55 while I'm sleeping, and 70 when I leave my bed, my heat will come on 2 hours before I'm going to get up, and the temperature will slowly increase over that time, leading to it being far too warm about an hour before I intend to get up. The heater turns off as the house gets up to temp, but the radiators thermal mass is such that they are still quite hot when I leave for the day, in effect heating the house long after I've left.

Furthermore, it's basically impossible to have zone heat with one-pipe systems, and it's much more difficult with two pipe systems. (This is less of a problem with hot water though).

With forced air, you can install active vents fairly easily, and while you still can't cut off TOO many of the vents at once, lest you cause too much back-pressure in the system, it is fairly easy to heat one side of your house or one floor of your house.

On top of all that, steam doesn't handle short-cycling well, so you have to accept a wider swing in temp than you do with forced air.

Based on the views you have espoused here, I would not call you a leftist commie. It sounds like freedom of speech is your number 1 concern, which would be in character for someone with views that could be considered alt-right. Maybe you are a libertarian, which could otherwise be referred to as an anarch-capatalist, but libertarianism is in no way a leftist movement.

While South Park and Eminem both 'triggered' a lot of people because of their use of obscenity, neither is leftist in any way, shape or form. South Park regularly attacks anyone who tries to change society, which is in no way a leftist mindset. As for Eminem, I can't think of a single example of left-leaning thought in any of them outside of freedom of speech.

In general I think you'd have a very hard time making the claim that the overton window is sliding to the left. Maybe the overton window is moving to the left for gender identity and sexual expression, but that is about it. The right has succeeded in moving the overton window substantially in their favor in most social and economic programs.

I live in a house with steam heat. Steam systems often get converted to hot water, but in general I have a few observations related to radiated heat.

1) Steam and other radiant systems don't deal with temperature setbacks well. They take FOREVER to warm up a house after a set back, so don't bother with a deep setback overnight, and if you are gonna turn down the heat because you are going to be gone for a while, expect your house to be cold for a couple of hours while it warms back up, or expect your heat to overshoot by 5-10 degrees.

2) Radiant heat seems to work well in the temperature range it is designed for, but outside of that range you get strong temperature gradients in rooms. Unless you have a fan in each room, expect the ceiling to be substantially warmer than the floor. I have 12 foot ceilings, and the ceiling can be 15 - 20 degrees warmer.

3) I personally prefer forced air with my allergies than radiant heat, because you can upgrade a forced-air system to use better filters, which basically gives you a filter for your entire house. Radiators are a pain in the ass to keep clean, and the air often seems to go stale over time. I have fairly bad indoor allergies and it just feels like over winter the house just fills with allergens.

4) On the same note, you can't get whole-house humidifiers with steam heat, nor can you easily add air conditioning.

5) Steam isn't THAT quiet. An improperly tuned system will bang (which shouldn't count against steam, because that's the fault of whoever is maintaining the system), one-pipe systems (which are common in Chicago) hiss when they are heating up, the valves sputter as they die, and when the system cools back down there is a loud inrush of air. Two pipe systems make noise as they heat up and joints flex, and the valves also make little clicking sounds.

Hot water can get bubbles in it and make wooshing sounds, but that's generally a sign of bad maintenance.

The sound of air blowing bothers me less in general than one off sounds that occur with steam and hot water though, and unless you don't mind the aforementioned temperature gradients you'll need to have a fan running anyways.

6) It's much much easier to find people who know how to work on forced air in the US. Replacement parts are easier to find, and forced air is usually more efficient.

One big benefit to steam is that old systems were massively oversized for the houses they are in. My house had absolutely NO problem getting up to temp during the week we had below zero temps. It was running a lot though, and the leaking shutoff valves and blurbling air vents were starting to drive me nuts, so I shut off the heat for a couple of hours on the coldest day (which got down to -40 or so) to do repairs. It got down to about 40 degrees inside before I turned the heat back on, and once it was back on it got up to 70 or so no problem. I know a lot of people who had more modern systems that struggled to maintain 40 or 50 degrees.

Side note: If anyone has a steam heat system in their home, I would highly recommend picking up The Lost Art of Steam Heating by Dan Holohan. As I mentioned, it's hard to find a real steam heating expert nowadays, most of the time you'll just get plumbers who are moonlighting. While steam heat involves plugging pipes together, there are a lot more things to take into account other than whether pipe A and pipe B are connected.

I used to be annoyed by red light cameras because they triggered on "safe" infractions, like right turns on red. Over the past few years I've changed my mind, because I've almost been hit as a pedestrian and on my bike by people sliding through intersections, to the point where I've physically prevented myself from being hit by pushing off the car a couple times.

Right on red is awesome as a driver, but it makes roads really dangerous for other road users. I think bad intersection design is partly to blame for perceived "frivolous" red light tickets, but at the same time I think that drivers really should come to a complete stop before the line (and before the crosswalk if there is one) before deciding if a right turn on red is safe or practicable. If people can't even be bothered to stop for a right turn on red then it's probably better to ban them outright.

Also, I've seen enough people run red lights 2-3 seconds after the light changes that I want red light cameras at every intersection anyways. It might be 1 in every 250 people who gets dinged for the right turn on red ticket, but that's stupidly dangerous.

If a fix is needed, increase the fine for blowing the light, scale it based on the time the light had been red (so you don't excessively punish people who got caught in the zone of indecision), and reduce the fine for rolling through a right on red.

I wouldn't be surprised if the actual reason was they are capturing extra sales from people who bought something, liked it a lot, and then bought another to give to their kids or for their second home. My mom buys me random chotchkies all the time after she bought them and liked them, and if my parents were well off I could easily see her buying me a vacuum or a new mattress after she got herself one.

For 99% of people that probably doesn't happen, but the people with the money to do that probably spend a TON of money, so they are worth targeting with ads.

Pass them on to their employees, and also society as a whole.

The new engine is more powerful, and at high angles of attack the nacelles also generate lift. The added power, along with the greater displacement from the center of lift/drag causes the plane to pitch up more easily, and the lift from the nacelle causes the controls to get lighter as you approach stall speed.

The FAA requires the controls to get heavier as you approach a stall. MCAS was primarily designed to address this flaw, which is why the added lift from the nacelles is an issue.

I think that the author is mistaking the fact that trimming the plane forward means that more force is required to pull back on the yoke for the plane actively pushing the yoke forward.

On top of that, it's absurd that someone can add my phone number to their advertising platform to get my name. Unlike email addresses, phone numbers are rather finite, and the number itself is tied to a particular geographical area (for the most part).

On a related note, Facebook makes it so difficult to unlike things, unfriend people, and opt-out of information from individual advertisers. It's obviously hostile design aimed at making it as hard as possible to reduce your advertising value to them.

What Facebook is doing might not be illegal, but I think what they are doing is more unethical than many felonies. The people in charge of these decisions are getting wealthy from them, and they are never going to face consequences for their actions, which is a real shame.

I've never been hit, but I also always have lights on my bike, I've completely covered my bike with retroreflective tape, and I live on the West Side.

I used to ride my bike to my job in East Lakeview every day, which was about about 9 miles each way, and the last mile of my commute was always the worst. Lincoln Park and Lakeview are full of the most entitled drivers on the planet.

I once saved a kid from getting hit by a left turning driver by picking him up just before a driver hit him. The guy was taking a left hand turn while looking at his cell phone. The mom had bent down for half a second to pick up a bottle that her kid in a stroller had dropped.

On another note, rideshare drivers are the worst drivers in the city. They are unpredictable, they have no idea where they are going, they don't have experience driving in the city, and they are always looking at their cell phones.

Chicago needs to crack down on ridesharing. I've almost been hit by rideshare drivers who aren't looking where they are going 3 times in the past month. Each time they were driving in the bike lane looking to drop someone off or pick someone up.

Plus, ride shares absolutely murder traffic. I initially started riding my bike because all the ride shares pulling over made my commute go from 20 minutes each way to 30 minutes in the mornings and 40 in the evening. Any arguments that ride shares somehow are more efficient than actual driving ignore the fact that most drivers don't pull over in the middle of a busy street for 30 seconds to 2 minutes at the beginning and end of their trip.

Edit: I should also mention that I credit disc brakes for part of the reason I've never been hit. I can stop so much faster with then than with rim brakes, partly because I can modulate braking force better, and partly because it always bites right away, rather than needing a revolution to clean road grime or water off that rim brakes sometimes need. I swapped after I almost got right hooked going under the Cortland bridge. There's always water pooled there, and I honestly thought I was going to slide under a car for a few seconds.

The fact that you'd need to even own a car to get to your job is a massive barrier for people with low incomes. The fact that we are spending money building roads that we could be spending on other social programs is way more harmful to the poor than any congestion tax could be.

If this congestion charge reduces traffic and makes buses run faster, it's possible that it would actually massively benefit poorer individuals.

I assumed the failure in the simulator was an MCAS failure, but I'm not sure. I think that the MCAS system pauses for 5 seconds every time you hit the trim button, so it kinda seems like it might be MCAS but I have no idea.

The checklist to fix MCAS and runaway trim is supposed to be the same, so I guess the question is whether the trim wheels move in a substantially less noticeable way with an MCAS failure. I certainly can't say.

I could totally see someone hearing the trim wheels running when they are trying to trim out the MCAS adjustments and assuming that the wheel is moving in the opposite direction that it actually is. In a high-stress situation a mistake like that seems incredibly plausible.

The thing that was the most chilling to me was the fact that the last item on the memory checklist is to try and prevent the trim wheel from moving using physical force. At that point it almost seems like "well, you are probably going to die, but you might as well keep yourself busy in the process."

I thought the communication was really interesting. Air France Flight 447[1] crashed due to the pilot flying pulling back on the stick for over a minute while in a stall, overriding the command inputs of the pilot monitoring. The other pilots realized that the pilot flying had been pulling the stick back the entire time only a few seconds before impact, and at that point it was too late to recover. The transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder are pretty chilling.

That exact situation isn't exactly possible in a Boeing because the sticks are linked, but there were a several crashes in the modern era that occurred because of communication issues in the cockpit. Of course, in addition to better communication, we have systems like MCAS which are designed to prevent pilots from repeating the mistakes of AF447. In this case it obviously didn't work out that well.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

I'd highly recommend anyone who wants to see what an MCAS runaway looks like and the steps needed to correct it watch the following video by Mentour Pilot.[1] He's a 737 pilot for a European budget carrier, and I believe he is qualified to certify other pilots.

In the video he goes over what an MCAS failure/runaway stabilizer would feel like to the pilots, the troubleshooting steps, and at the end of the video he shows a simulated runaway MCAS failure in a sim.

He also has a few other videos on the MCAS accidents. I'd highly recommend watching all of them; he does a very good job at putting everything into perspective in a way that the news does not.

[1] https://youtu.be/xixM_cwSLcQ

I think a year is usually a cutoff for sentencing rules.

For instance, in many places if you serve less than a year you are places in jail, rather than prison. (It is distinctly better to be in prison rather than jail in most cases.) I know in my State there are a lot of other rules that are different if your sentence is over a year or not, but I don't know what rules would be applicable in this case.

Still does. I grew up near Oak Brook, IL, which used to have the corporate hq of McDonalds, and still has Hamburger University.

I believe every franchisee is required to attend Hamburger U. There are a number of corporate-owned stores in the area where the a lot of the staff is white-collar professionals in training. Those stores are always amazing.

In general stores in the Chicagoland region are way better than stores elsewhere, and I think part of this is due to the fact that corporate sends managers around for training here. I didn't understand the "mcflurry machine is broken" meme until I took a road trip. I had a number of horrible experiences, including a 20 minute wait for a mcflurry that ended up having more ice cream on the outside of the cup than the inside.

The nice thing about outdoor gear is that the repairs don't have to be very aesthetic. I repair my own camping gear using my grandmother's old signer sewing machine. It's maybe 100 years old, but unlike modern sewing machines, the frame is cast iron and it can push a thick needle through almost anything.

It can't do the fancy embroidery stitches, but with some chalk, a seam ripper, and some thread you can repair almost anything. I had an old jacket where the outer shell was more empty space than fabric, and I was able to disassemble the coat, trace the pieces that needed to be assembled onto new fabric, and reassemble it again.

The argument that "it isn't worth my time to repair stuff" always grates on me. It makes sense to a certain extent, but there is a lot more to life than pure economic efficiency.

Publishing total income is way different than publishing all your financial information.

There is information in people's finances that should be 100% private. What if an employer looks at the financials of someone applying for a job and sees they claimed $100k in medical expenses last year because they had cancer? Companies will do that if they have the ability, and people will lose jobs because of it.

It doesn't matter if you make it illegal. I worked a recruiting agency for a while, and illegal hiring practices are incredibly common.

That article misrepresents what the Illinois tax credit is. It only applies to the portion of the income tax that the employer pays.

Basically the state law allows employers who create new jobs to not have to pay their portion of the employment tax for a few years, and that tax credit applies to every company.

I'm pretty happy with the way Illinois and Chicago played their cards with Amazon, we were basically like "We've got a lot of great shit, and if you come here you can take advantage of this tax credit." We didn't offer Amazon any special treatment.

Meaning donations, who gave them, etc?

I'm a nonprofit fundraising professional, and I could probably talk about all the reasons why that is a horrible idea for 2-3 hours straight without repeating myself. I mean, at the very least, it's a bad idea for the same reason that exposing all the financials of every individual, or all other organizations, with the added benefit that you'd be opening people up to harassment for supporting certain social causes or belonging to certain religious groups. You might as well start a government mailing list called "hate crime targets."

If you think there are a lot of non-charitable transactions occurring using charities as a front, it would be a way better idea to just have the IRS audit more 501c3 orgs.

If you are trying to decrease fraud, it would almost certainly make more sense to audit wealthy individuals and for-profit corporations far more often.

BRT would actually be amazingly useful in Chicago because a massive number of people commute to central business district (The Loop).

Chicago owned all of the land used for the Loop link and it still cost $41 million, and has little of the benefits of actual BRT.

People here get incredibly upset when any road diet is discussed. Our politicians rarely ride public transit, and laws and engineering guidelines prevent projects which would reduce the volume of traffic carried. It's absurd.

This is really cool, and I wish we had more traffic-segregated bus services in the US.

I found this paper from the university of Washington which has a bit more information (DOC warning) https://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/adelaide-o-bahn-pa...

The 12 km busway cost $97 million in 1999 AUD, which is ~$119 million USD 2018. I have a feeling that a similar project would end up costing something like $75-80 million per mile, just based on transit projects in the US.

Chicago spent $41 million building 8 bus stations and painting a mile of street red. [2] It was billed as BRT, but plans for multi-door boarding, and off-bus fare collection were scrapped.

Projects like this aren't happening in the US because there is no political will. If you are going to have bus lanes you need to have enforcement. Buses should have cameras ticketing other vehicles in the bus lanes. Turn lanes should not merge into bus lanes, drivers should be forced to wait for a green arrow to make a turn across the bus lane.

There is definitely a need for service like this in the US, but we seem to think that the best option is to have people like Elon Musk build private tunnels that wealthy individuals can bring their private cars in. No matter how you design that system there is no way it can provide the same capacity as BRT. It's just another road with low-occupancy vehicles.

[2] https://chi.streetsblog.org/2018/10/17/foia-ed-documents-sho...

Even coming from the Midwest SF feels like a midsize city. I've visited SF, I considered doing the SF software dev thing, but SF just feels like if Cincinnati developed a tech sector.

Chicago's urban population is 8.66m, and the urban area is 2,200 sq miles. I feel like I'm in a city here. When I go to West Coast cities I feel like I'm in a giant (sometimes quaint and charming) suburb. There's no density.

My dad was an All-American swimmer competing mainly in the butterfly, and is the second-youngest person to earn a varsity letter at Notre Dame, and he accomplished this while smoking more than a pack of cigarettes a day.

Of course he nearly died of a heart attack at the age of 47, despite having seen several cardiologists complaining of heart pain. As it turns out, his heart and lung function masked the fact that his left descending aorta (aka The Widowmaker) was 98% blocked.

I wouldn't be surprised if the new system has some features billed as saving tens of thousand dollars a year. That's entirely possible. My tiny little college made winter break 2 weeks longer and saved 200k a year.