If we get enough countries over time and the EU ends up encompassing the whole world it could become the Everybody Union and that would be cool.

What is crazy is this was actually a huge problem for frontier settlements. Tonnes of people would meet the indigenous population, be exposed to their society, learn enough of their language to communicate, and then go “fuck this” to all the European culture and just move in with the locals. They brought whatever skills they had including metalworking and so on and joined up and for the most part it went really really well for them, until the westerners came and killed everyone. Behind The Bastards had a great episode a few years ago about it, through the lens of one particular bastard, and yeah, faced with a culture where individuals were not exploited for every last shilling of value to the shareholders people wanted out.

First, the term hysteria is from a fairly mysoginist root, so maybe consider whether that is the best word here.

Second, for all the 8 million plus people killed by COVID it wasn’t hysteria, they died. They didn’t have the sniffles, they died. Dead. Not alive. There isn’t really a lot that is worse as an outcome from a respiratory infection, however we have that too! Tonnes of people who didn’t die have long covid symptoms, strokes, heart attacks, various thrombotic events, loss of function, and additional complications in the rest of their medical issues. On top of that plenty of people had parents, siblings, children, friends, or other people important to them die or become disabled.

Third, digital dependence? I mean, we were moving in this direction for decades before covid. It used to be nobody had phones at all. My partners grandparents remembered the house down the block getting a telephone and went over to see it. They didn’t have electricity. That was less than a century ago. The ramp up of technology over the last century has been insane and accelerating that whole time. In 2004 the coolest phone was a Motorola RAZR flip phone with a terrible 0.3 megapixel camera but a stunning 176x220 pixel display. In 2024 a Pixel 9 has a 1080x2424 display and a 50, 48, and 10.5 megapixel camera. The comparison of a rifle and a spear feels appropriate. We were already heading towards more technology in our lives, it just because super noticeable during lockdowns as it accelerated a little more for a couple of years and it was more obvious.

Fourth, why the quotes around expert? There is such a thing as an expert. Someone who knows more than me doesn’t have to know everything to keep knowing more than me. They can be wrong and learn new things and change their mind all while remaining more informed than I am. In fact, being an expert in a field means doing that constantly. Being at the frontier of knowledge means holding your beliefs more tentatively as you are more likely to change your understanding than an uninformed average person. The fact that they didn’t know how good masks would be at the start isn’t an indictment of their expert status, it is their first guess given previous knowledge. What they did after that is what makes them experts, namely changing their minds when new evidence came about.

Of course they do, especially when the number of people is ambiguous or when they are speaking about someone titled as a profession such as “I went to the doctor and they said…”

It is all a manufactured situation used to push hate and attack the marginalised. Singular they has been around for a very long time and there were options before they was they, not to mention in all the other myriad languages in the world.

I think they want it automated so it would need to be integrated to Sonar/Radarr etc rather than the machine you watch the media on.

Kind of yes, kind of no.

Short term there is not a huge difference between getting sugar from complex carbs or simple carbs and most vitamins and micro nutrients will be OK with a few weeks of worse absorption and slowly lowering levels.

Medium term this would be bad, but so is the standard western diet. Carbs are not a great source for energy for a number of reasons but one of the key ones can be seen with vitamin C. Why do we not have functional pathways for making vitamin C? Our closest relatives do, the other great apes, and almost all other mammals do too. In fact as far as I am aware one of the only other mammals missing the ability to make vitamin C is the guinea pig which is especially ironic considering it was the aminal selected to understand scurvy, an extreme form of vitamin C deficiency.

We don’t need anywhere near the same level of vitamin C if we are not eating sugars, complex or simple. Eating a very very low carb diet, deep into the ketogenic end, reduces the need for vitamin C. Taking someone who has symptoms of scurvy and switching them to a carnivore diet seems to reverse the symptoms fairly promptly and plenty of people eat just meat for decades at a time without developing scurvy, so it seems safe enough.

So if you look at a diet made of highly processed high carb foods like the current standard American diet you would see a measurable but not extreme change in the short to medium term, but in the medium to long term it would get worse. If you compare to a more reasonable diet which doesn’t have huge amounts of processed foods or carbs in it then it would be a bigger difference.

This annoys me. Many articles about ADHD refer only to children with ADHD, not adults. I’m nearly fourty and I still have ADHD now, if I make it to 80 I will still have ADHD, why is it always about kids? It is lifelong not just a childhood thing.

Calories in, calories out.

For years I believed that the only reason people got fat was because they ate more than they burned and ended up with an excess of energy. It was also the view pushed by the medical profession, by health education at school, and by society in general. I spent years trying to get my weight under control by eating less and moving more.

After a particularly strict period of literally weighing the margarine container before and after buttering toast so I knew how many calories of margarine I used I had gained weight rather than losing even with a 500kcal deficit. I listened to a podcast (Skeptics with a K) in which they interviewed Gary Taubes about the non-caloric hormonal model of obesity. It basically said that if your insulin level was up you couldn’t access body fat, so all the thoughts of that fat being available were flawed and you couldn’t really lose weight in that state. What ended up happening was a reduction in calorie burn and loss of muscle. Fixing the insulin is the first step to managing weight and if you do that you can access your body fat for energy.

It took another year before I actually tried keto and I lost 20kg in the first two months and another 10kg over the next few. It was a massive change but I didn’t sustain it given the environment I was in and ended up gaining a fair bit of the weight back (though not all).

Years later (over a decade, oh no, so old) and I have a much more comfortable body fat percentage and lots more muscle. I carry only a little more than I want and honestly it is too much effort to get down that last little bit, but I feel better now in my late 30s than I did in my early 20s in terms of movement, energy, and cognition. When i get injured I recover quickly, and when I get sick it is usually very short and then over. I used to get sick for weeks at a time and many times per year, now I have only been sick twice this year and both times in December (filthy children, gross but fun).

If you had asked me in 2010 how to manage weight I would have told you, nose firmly in the air, to eat less and move more. So glad to have been wrong.

Not necessarily. You don’t actually need the fluid to be perfectly sealed out, just slowed down a lot. This means that you could run it open but with very close tolerances and there would be almost no leakage. You just need to make the gap small enough for the leakage to be trivial.

As for magnetic alignment, that is all about maintaining smooth operation without losing efficiency to friction. Instead of a guide with friction you could use magnetic attraction to keep things aligned.

Yep, critical thinking enhances all other intellectual pursuits. It is so easy to fail at the critical thinking stage and go down a blind hole pursuing something absolutely nonsensical because you didn’t check your basic assumptions.

I would want kids to learn about the Monty Hall problem, do a little Bayesian analysis, etc. I think they could learn through trying to smuggle some lies into a paper and then peer reviewing each others papers and finding the flaws. Kids are way more creative than they are given credit for and they would find ways of sneaking things through we wouldn’t ever consider. Making it adversarial would prepare them for interacting with the huxters and frauds that make up a huge amount of modern life.

Yeah, but there are many good options. Magnetic alignment can keep things from touching most of the time, maintaining very good movement without friction. Graphite is a great lubricant and works even in very cold environments, not to mention it will not be all that cold given the heat passing through the system. Redundancy is also a big part of the design, making failures much less impactful. And using sterling engines for the highest draw part of the lifetime of a probe with peltier style generators there for later would allow a failover to a solid state system at lower efficiency.

Blackmail material is only powerful as a threat. Releasing material from it makes the remainder less powerful. If you raise the stakes a little by adding some small details, an association here, a plausibly deniable link there, you can enhance the fear of the person on the other end of the blackmail without ruining the value of what you have. So depending on what people want they can get better results by keeping that information hidden.

On top of that most people who get dirt on one person get dirt on many people. You may want to take down one person but by if you release some stuff from the files then someone on the other side can burn people on your side. Mutually assured destruction will paralyse everyone.

As an outside to everyone I want all of it released because in my mind anyone implicated is either an active predator or someone who tolerates predators. But if you have paid good money to have a specific member of congress get into office and they are able to act in your favour then it doesn’t matter if they have a D or an R, they are yours. It is very expensive to get someone who understands the game into office and under your thumb. Much better to prevent the whole system from becoming unpredictable due to lots of sudden new blood and to keep known actors in place. Members on both sides of the aisle want the files locked away forever, meaning they want to protect predators. The failure to act is a choice, not an accident.

To be clear, I am including foreign actors, massive companies, all sorts of people. If you have an asset that can protect another asset without knowing then you generally would do so.

This system is fundamentally broken. In Australia there is no path by which people on Centrelink would not have their payments processed for more than a few days. I remember a bank issue which caused a bunch of people to not get their payments on time and it was a major issue, people were absolutely livid. That was only a couple of days late and was resolved promptly with hardship temporary support available for those who really needed it.

For the system to be able to fail like this means those who designed the system want it to fail this way. They could change the funding mechanism to make sure SNAP is immune to government shutdowns if they wanted to. They have chosen not to so that they can use hurting poor people as a political weapon. Removing this weapon should be the goal of any reasonable party and it should be urgent. There are many similar funding holes that can be closed with reasonable legislation and would take away the impact of political dysfunction from the poorest and most vulnerable of society. Choosing to do otherwise is choosing that harm.

As a fellow Aussie I share your conclusion, though the Made in Australia plan from the Albanese government seems like it could change the game. Producing solar panels here would make purchasing them cheaper even if just from the shipping costs. Add the federal investment and the creation of demand and it should get cheaper again.

Now I do worry about things going the way of the NBN, starting with a goal of future proof fibre to the home being chipped away by the LNP until it was a small upgrade on internet service funded by the government but not anything like the goal. I want good green tech, not just barely solar sometimes.

Coal is dying as an investment but existing coal plants will likely run for a long while. Overall demand for energy is rising, the new demand is being met mostly with renewables, but there is a small amount of that increase that is being met by a small increase in coal usage. As renewable manufacture gets faster and more efficient I expect the coal growth will reverse, but it is all about when. If it happens quickly we have less apocalyptic damage. If it happens slowly then we will be more fucked.

Solar is far and say the cheapest form of new energy to roll out. Wind is a not so close second. Coal is getting more expensive by the day. The only reason to roll out coal is insufficient production of solar and wind. It takes time to increase manufacturing capacity but we are getting there and we can do this.

I am reminded of hospital acquired infections being treated like car crashes or plane crashes.

Car crashes kill massive numbers of people each year, just under 5 per 100,000 people per year here in Australia. That is way down and we are quite low globally, with the EU overall around 9 and 14 for the USA. We have taken fairly agressive steps to curb road deaths and made real progress, but a certain number of deaths is accepted as necessary. A crash is investigated for fault attribution and insurance but not for preventing a repeat.

Plane crashes are totally different. If something caused a plane crash we figure it out, make a mitigation, and make it never happen again. Flying is one of the safest modes of transport and it keeps getting safer.

In hospitals most of them had the car crash mentality for hospital acquired infections. A hospital putting in a plane crash mentality investigator for their Infection Prevention chair will have very different outcomes, especially over time. Someone got an infection from bad clean technique? Make it a checklist item. Someone still got another infection? Change gloving technique so that you wear two layers and only touch the outer gloves with clean inner gloves. Another case? Have a second staff member assist with your donning of PPE and going through the checklist. Each step reduces the risk, each mitigation makes everyone safer. Eventually you have so few infections it is hard to test new processes.

For anyone wondering edgydoc.com is the site for the aforementioned doctor and he is a blast. But yeah, if you treat a consequence as a cost of doing business nothing changes. If you make failure an existential risk you can eliminate problems. Corporations are run by people. Those people should be accountable for the crimes of the company.

Thanks for the concern, it came across as genuine in your previous replies. I think people tend to get really locked in to having the right answer and then start to identify with their conclusion, making it part of who they are. It makes it very difficult for them to consider if there is something they are wrong about without feeling threatened. Having a good conversation like this is fairly rare online, so it has been good fun and quite enjoyable.

The response was not unwarranted or redundant. The information I have today is just information I didn’t have in the past, so if I am correct I am just there a little earlier than you. If I am not correct then I am off the right path and need to correct. Either way talking about it is good and helps to find errors in logic and evidence.

I think that something as shitty as seizures can seem life ruining or horrible and sure, they suck, but I am very lucky to have a strong and capable partner who in the face of seizures looks for solutions and has hope for the future. My partner is the one who has to have the seizures, I just get to support them and learn what does or doesn’t work. Also, their pupils sometimes do a bit of a crazy dance when one will dilate and constrict rapidly while the other slowly dilates, it looks absolutely insanely cool and while it sucks it is also really interesting, so at least there is that.

The carbs - fibre = true carbs is accurate in some countries, not in others. If the fibre is listed at the same level of indentation as the carbs it is already removed. If the fibre is listed indented under the carbs it is included in the total fibre number and the subtraction is needed.

For example

Carbohydrate

• Fibre
  

Or

Carbohydrates

Fibre

Fibre being critical is not the most well supported thing. There are definitely ways it could be useful, mostly by having bacteria break down the fibre into ketones which are then absorbed by the gut. This is useful because some of the ketones are quite powerfully anti inflammatory. That said, some people have gut issues like Crohn’s disease which make them unable to have fibre safely pass through their gut.

Biology is complicated, we are all stuck doing an experiment of one, but hopefully we can figure something out. I find it all fascinating but the most important thing to me is my partner currently can go whole days without a seizure. If I never understand how and why but I get to have that be the case then I am content.

Yeah, we need fats for sure. Our thinking at this point is to aim for saturated fats as much as possible, less than 5% polyunsaturated and less than 30% mono. That said, pork belly has a tonne of fat but a surprisingly large amount of mono. Also, it is delicious.

The nuts and seeds are just not something we are doing at the moment. We will experiment with introducing small amounts of interest foods but I think seeds are largely out because of the various chemicals in the casing. Some beans may be OK after sprouting them because that takes the acid from the skin and recycles it into energy for the growing plant, but there is no similar disarming strategy for most seeds.

As for fibre, adding fibre led to a fairly serious gut issue, think blood and pain. For now fibre is banned, not allowed in the food club. Given some time it may be tested again, but the last time showed me unspeakable horrors.

I think the diet is currently robust enough for the next year. After that other things may be viable, but most likely it will be very small amounts and infrequently. If we do try fibre again it will probably be home ferments like pickles because the bacteria which break down the fibre are there in the food, so even if there is a problem with my partner digesting the fibre the bacteria there can help.

During the first day the rate dropped, halving by the end of the first day. On day 3 they dropped to a few per day. By the end of the week they were basically gone, though some are absent seizures and harder to catch without active monitoring.

As for ongoing it has been very stable. Adding in anything like milk or cheese caused as spike in seizures along with massive carb cravings. The few accidental carb exposures have been fairly obviously bad because of the seizure spikes following.

We don’t use a Continuous Glucose Monitor but honestly, no pattern this obvious requires such detailed measurements. Add carbs, get seizures. Add dairy, get seizures. Butter is dodgy, maybe an issue, but seems to be at least not obviously an issue, we will try without to be sure.

I joined in for solidarity at the start but honestly, it works for me too. I have pretty bad ADHD and cooking has always been really difficult to manage. So many different things happening at the same time with various timers, cutting foods, adding sauces, stirring, making sure it doesn’t burn, and then magically some people just deliver it all hot at the same time. Absolute madness. Instead I fire up the BBQ or air fryer and cook the meat.

I have noticed that my dandruff is way less, my skin doesn’t flake, I can focus better (not as good as meds but maybe 30% of the way there). I also dropped body fat a bit and gained some muscle, but I need to do that for other reasons too. Overall it is not an awful diet. Eat meat, add fat. The only problem is eating enough, I frequently miss my target of 3000 kcal, but I am simply not hungry much of the time.