mcfunk

>>Serious question, why do unhappy customers keep buying what bad companies sell?

Many good convos have happened on this -- Facebook is de facto required for participating in some levels of society. I've heard of people being required to use Facebook to get information as vital as announcements about school for their kids. For those of us with poorly understood chronic illnesses, Facebook is the only place we can find people who share our condition and can trade information with. Many community events are only announced through Facebook events. Essentially, it's infiltrated so many aspects of life that it's become very difficult for many people to fully walk away from.

They might find greater ease with learning both at this point in life. But unless you homeschool, the probability that your children will have to work on QWERTY computers they don't have the ability to change into Dvorak input mode at school approaches 1. They'll need it.

LOL ok, so "eat a diet and time your eating in a way that promotes healthy hormone balance and use of fat as energy" is a silver bullet but "use our magic equations based on state of the art info from 1958 to calculate your daily food needs and all your food and exercise as numbers and if your equation balances you'll lose weight" isn't. Sure.

Once the body gets habituated to using fat stores for energy rather than glucose or glycogen, there's no particular need or urge to eat after exercise.

There's also good evidence that people don't maintain that weight loss over time despite maintaining their lower calorie consumption. Because base metabolic rate is something that the body can adjust, just like if you had less money to pay for heat, you could just put less heat into the house.

The role of hormones (especially insulin) in regulating fat storage and whether stored fat is available to the body as energy is better understood now, and much has been documented about how high insulin combined with low calories over time results in a lowering of the metabolic rate (resulting in stalling weight loss and then weight gain) rather than sustainable weight loss.

Also "it's nice to believe you don't have to suffer to reach your goals" is a silly and moralistic thing to say. But it typifies the american "scientific understanding" of weight loss. Fat is immoral, suffering is virtue, therefore in order to lose your immoral fat you must suffer.

Just look at all the massive success of those in the IF and keto community in living joyful lives, not deprived, losing fat etc. etc. And then look at all the people for whom calorie counting has completely failed. The information is out there (shruggie)

This is a good place to start: https://idmprogram.com/how-do-we-gain-weight-calories-part-1...

I'll be interested to see where the scientific consensus is in 10 years. I think the evidence is very much on the side of the hormonal theory of obesity and fasting, especially given the monumental failure of the "calories in calories out" model.

The simple answer is that children's physical and hormonal makeup is different to that of adults. I've always seen it recommended that children should not fast.

Interesting that this is "news" when the medical understanding of fasting and ketosis is pretty far along.

Highly recommend the book "The Complete Guide to Fasting" by Dr. Jason Fung.

When you think about it, while the "naturalness" argument is always suspect, it's very odd that humans eat as often as we do in the US, and unsurprising that negative health consequences follow (and positive health consequences follow fasting).

Very disappointing, clearly they used the wrong deck back, it was all about that palm tree with the sun that had the easter egg smiley face. ;-)

Above commenters are correct, in the US you have to have a special designation to consider a values-based mission as more important than providing value to shareholders.

Right at the root of something very fundamentally wrong about our way of conceiving of/enforcing how business is done.

I clicked looking forward to a strong analysis of this, as is bound to happen in the coming days since there are tons of invested people ready to analyze the way the show has (at least ostensibly) failed to live up to even its own lore. But this opinion is kind of a mess and needs some copy editing at minimum.

For a better time via short questionnaire-style takes from members of The Ringer staff, try: https://www.theringer.com/game-of-thrones/2019/4/29/18522411...

Dr. Jason Fung and others have written some very compelling arguments for the idea that hormonal imbalance driven by both caloric makeup (too many refined carbs) and too frequent eating (market-driven obsession with snacking) are the underlying hormonal cause of obesity. And yes, we're not all simple machines, "calories in calories out" does not explain the problem.

It seems like research to show correlation between the two is a helpful step on the way to having such studies on intervention, though. I feel like the prevailing sentiment would be to consider the two separately.

It's almost like both mental health and weight gain have underlying relationships to hormones, inflammation, etc which, when out of balance, can cause issues with both-- and can mutually reinforce both for endogenous and exogenous (i.e. bullying, fatphobia, discrimination) reasons.

Hydrogenating lard is such a depressing concept-- the entire point would be as a more healthful alternative to hydrogenated and highly processed oils, but I guess processing is a hammer to which everything is a nail...

We are in a dismal state of medicine on many chronic illnesses, such as the emerging study of Mast Cell disorders which could be affecting upwards of 10% of people but aren't understood by most doctors and is rarely diagnosed (in fact diagnostic criteria for Mast Cell Activation Syndrome aren't even agreed upon yet).

Even to get to the point of treatment you have to be extremely scrappy, spend endless hours on research, have a lot of money available for non-insurance-covered doctors, and still expect to be treated like you are a hypochondriac.

It's a good point too that taking insulin is associated with greater risk of obesity and further worsening of T2D in the long term. So dietary interventions (which are experiencing great success -- both Virta and also the work of Dr. Jason Fung et co at Intensive Dietary Management) -- often produce much better outcomes for type two than insulin (naturally no one should go off insulin without being under the guidance of a doctor of course)

>“Single-handedly” may not be quite right, since the paper also finds that cheap gas prices and higher fares have a negative effect on ridership. And this analysis does not include other, more local factors that could be pushing riders off of buses and trains, such as the maintenance and reliability issues plaguing New York City and Washington, D.C. in particular. Nor does it look at safety perceptions among riders, a growing concern on Bay Area transit.

>“Perhaps the presence of innovative modes makes it a more compelling or sexier question to ask, but I think there are lots of reasons people aren’t taking these modes as much as before,” said Susan Shaheen, the co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley and an expert in shared mobility. “The question of causality is perplexing and hard, and it’s not necessarily one thing.”

So basically, shocker, correlation does not equal causation and there's a lot going on driving this change.

Also, it'd be interesting to see data that took into account different modes. Light rail ridership in the Twin Cities has soared because (unlike our bus system) it is reliable and predictable, plus easier to use multimodally etc. etc.

And I imagine that most places share the Twin Cities' struggles to combat lawmakers in greater MN who have decided that investing in metro transit is a certain evil.

It would be very instructive to see a studied comparison of what factory work looked like during its peak as a well-compensated profession in the US, and what is happening in software development now. Certainly there are meaningful differences, but I am pretty driven by a concern that we are the factory workers of the future -- people whose profession used to guarantee a comfortable wage, but no longer.

The framing of this is all wrong. The problem isn't that developers are overpaid, it's that other industries' laborers have had their work systematically undervalued, all the way down to people performing essential services who can't afford to feed their families on full-time work.

However you want to argue about payment/wealth being a problem, ultimately, the idea that workers being compensated "too much" (when definitionally they aren't making as much as their labor's value creates) is the productive thing to focus on is very unhelpful.

My friends and I keep talking about this. The quality of the interactions on LiveJournal were so much more substantial.

Fasting has been hugely beneficial to me in terms of endurance sports and keeping even blood sugar. Interestingly it has never had much of an impact one way or another on my weight (I'm a fat person) but it's a lifelong lifestyle for sure.

Jason Fung sounds very interesting, I'm looking at: https://idmprogram.com/the-failure-of-the-calorie-theory-of-... where he provides some advice very relevant to this thread... "The [calories in calories out] model very useful because it efficiently flags <strike>idiots</strike> people who are not all that knowledgable about obesity, and I can safely ignore them. There are many of these people out there, and not everybody is worth listening to."

This article is disturbingly enthusiastic about bariatric surgery, an extreme procedure with limited success and serious side-effects.

The long and short of it is that we understand far too little about the human body and what drives weight gain and difficulty losing.

For instance, there are complex health and immune issues (e.g., mast cell disorders) that can drive weight gain and difficulty losing in spite of healthy diets and high levels of activity (and researchers think mast cell disorders alone may affect 10% or more of the population, but was named only 5 years ago and is still poorly understood. What else could be similar that we just don't understand yet?)

Beyond this, what we put in our bodies (various medicines, antibiotics, ingredients in processed foods, various pesticides etc, even artificial light) may have effects on our physiology that we don't yet have a strong understanding of.

Our microbiomes are still a complete mystery to us, deeply impacting how and what we absorb from our food. The same food does not impact every body in the same way, period.

Bariatric surgery is a band-aid over a gaping wound. Until we understand the complexities of human physiology at a more sophisticated level than a high-schooler in physics class (calories in, calories out just doesn't cut it) -- we are going to continue seeing public health impacts in the form of fat and disease -- which may often have underlying causes that the fat is simply the most visible symptom of.

Edit: Seriously guys, is there any other area of science where people are so convinced that anecdotal and small-sample (both in terms of n and longitudinality) observations are valid? There's a huge market for delusion about fat, we're fighting that as much as we're fighting to learn more about the human body.

The respect for the user here is huge. Every time I would get to the bottom of an article I would think, you know, I read that whole article, you're right, I should consider donating. Am a monthly donor now. The lack of a paywall or obnoxious popup went a long way towards getting my loyalty even though I historically haven't read it particularly regularly.

It's almost as if evidence continues to mount that addiction is a health issue and should be treated as such, rather than as a matter of criminality.

For anyone interested in further reading on the topic I highly recommend information available from the Institute For Addiction Study (https://www.theinstituteforaddictionstudy.org/).

I'm all for having THAT discussion. Things that come to mind -

- treating PRs as communication and ensuring the person reviewing has the information they need to check for what you coded.

- Building a culture where discussion around alternate ways of doing things ('this doesn't block merge, but...') is accepted and expected (without becoming hostile/nit-picky or devolving into bikeshedding -- if it's not blocking, the submitter can always just merge)

- Have brown bags to talk about technology in freer, non-deadline-constrained setting (sparks ideas, gets people building tech communication skills)

Really interested to hear what thoughts others have on this.

I tried to move to Inbox but kept having to use the Gmail app after I would see alerts for mail and then was unable to find the message in question in Inbox without searching, which is tedious. The "missed messages" problem was one I couldn't ever get past (maybe my own settings were to blame -- but at the end of the day it wasn't worth the time to figure out).

I would recommend reading The New Jim Crow or watching 13th to better understand the argument and comparison being made.

I've had this conversation with friends, too, about missing LiveJournal. The interactions were much more organic and fully fleshed-out. It was about sharing our internal life in a more intentional way that wasn't corporatized (unless you wanted to pay a few bucks to be able to have custom emojis), wasn't related to ad content or data or profiling.

In these conversations it seems fairly unanimous that people miss it, but changing patterns is easier said than done, plus LJ itself has that whole "now hosted in Russia" thing that concerns people.