Protein mania: the rich world’s new diet obsession.
You only need more protein if you are doing a lot of weight training. If you’re not, you almost certainly do not. I consume extra protein because I average about an hour a day of hard workout. Unless you’re doing that, it’s just wasting time and money.
Another bullshit trend to add to the list.
It doesn’t surprise me.
12 years ago, when I was in the best shape of my life, people told me I “looked to skinny” because of the muscle definition.
9 years ago when I was 80lbs overweight & in the worst health of my life people told me I looked “big and strong”
NONSENSE.
— Jimmy Lee (@InnerFirePod) December 31, 2018
We are normalizing eating disorders, and I am not referring to anorexia or bulimia. Those are only normalized in a relatively-small part of the fashion world.
No, now we’re choosing to normalize the eating disorders of obesity and overconsumption. And if you are obese, you are sick and getting worse — just slowly. This world of shaming the fit is not an improvement. It’s becoming verboten to even show a person who’s in shape in an ad or on a web page; another area the corporations and corporate propaganda have completely won. I still wish someone would do a thorough investigation of where the Fat Acceptance orgs get their funding. I’d bet my entire life savings that it’s largely food companies.
I've seen people being conflicted about works entering the public domain and I feel this is exactly what many of us feared, that this twenty-year stoppage would start to be considered the norm instead of a weird exception. Copyright is *supposed* to expire.
— Stacey Lantagne (@StaceyLantagne) January 2, 2019
Exactly. The purpose of the copyright law is to benefit the public (at least as the founders intended it), not to enrich corporations and creators. The temporary monopoly of copyright was in the service of the larger goal of benefiting the public and the nation, not the ultimate reason for copyright to exist.
Corporations want you to think about this exactly backwards: that copyright exists to benefit them, not the public. This has been an extremely successful propaganda effort to invert this meaning in the public mind. Copyright was always about striking a balance between the greatest number of works being created and the benefit to the public of those works being available in the public domain as soon as possible.
I think on balance it’d be better if copyright didn’t exist at all (along with other societal reforms), but an acceptable compromise would be 14 years with the possibility of a 14 year extension. (By the way, something like 99% of works earn just about all that they will ever earn in the first five years of their availability. Absurd 100+ year copyrights only benefit corporations, not creators or the public.)
Corporate propaganda is so pervasive that I am in awe of its power to control society.
I forgot a major tech that really changed the world for more people than just about any other recently:
Containerized shipping/containers.
(No, not the stupid Kubernetes stuff.)
It’s surprisingly hard finding videos of Taylor Swift’s prorgrammable LED costume(s) she wore on one of her tours, but here’s one. Damn that is cool.
The tech is from Adafruit, with custom programming. The source code for Swift’s outfit and all the others is available here.
I like Swift’s music a lot, obviously, and I don’t care much about moral purity and artist’s misdeeds but she seems like a genuinely decent person so I like her even better for that. Staying a decent person with all the bullshit and crazy she must experience is no small accomplishment.
Amazing performance. Just wait till a little over two minutes in. No, there are never two people singing.
I don't think younger generations care at all if stocks drop a lot.
At the same time, many would love real estate to drop a lot.
Boomers are in the opposite position. Many cannot handle expenses in retirement if stocks drop a lot.
These are overlooked dynamics.— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 3, 2019
Boomers pretty much ruined the world — made a lot of money, and enjoyed benefits they then worked exceptionally hard to take away from their children and grandchildren. Some comeuppance only seems appropriate.
DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH NETWORK PORTS? pic.twitter.com/3mLHRsZzmt
— foone (@Foone) January 3, 2019
This sort of device isn’t generally used for networking as most people would think of it, but is rather intended for testing labs and other venues such as that. For instance, if Google was designing some custom hardware that needed to do some specific network task, they’d plug 200+ of them into this and hammer them with some sort of load tester, reconfigure, then do it again.
The advantage of this device is that it’s possible to change the network configuration without any physical rewiring and it’s completely automatable.
Sure, you could (and some people do) use these for more, but the problem is that it’s expensive and if this one device fails, 288 ports go down at once. So it’s not really for production but makes a great testbed.
I ordered 900 plastic straws from Amazon just a few minutes ago. 500 are individually wrapped and 400 are loose.
Trying to work around the utterly moronic straw bans happening everywhere lately. I figure I use 3-4 plastic straws a week, and at that rate they should last a good while even if every restaurant bans them. The individually-wrapped ones are for keeping in the car or my bag so I can always have one. I would’ve ordered more but the plastic will start breaking down after about 10 years so it’s pointless.
What a waste of fucking time and money but I don’t like drinking without a straw, and any drink on the go really needs one.
Soon, I am going to take a week or so off from strength training. It’s necessary every few months to give your body time to completely recover and you’re usually stronger when you go back to it.
I’ll probably do one more hard deadlift session, one more vigorous chest/arms/back, and then take a week. It’ll be weird not working out but especially as one gets older that complete recovery time is important.
You know, supposedly market timing is impossible. But it’s so impossible that I do it all the time. I sold all sorts of stocks before the latest market calamity. Evidence is right here.
I’m also short for the first time in a long time, and have been for weeks. Normally, I do not recommend shorting but I wanted a hedge and now I have a hedge to trim one day. (I don’t do options, these days.)
I think in general people should not try to time the market. You have to be a pretty fucking cool cucumber to do it. Once your emotions are in the market, your money’s gone. That’s not a problem for me, though. For most people, panicking is the order of the day and they will emerge poorer at the end of it all.
No, I don’t know when the market is going to bottom nor do I care. No one can sell at the exact top (though I came pretty damn close with many stocks) or buy at precisely the bottom. The important thing is to have capital available to latch onto opportunities when they present themselves. And they have been, and will more so in the future.
My advice in general is not to do what I do, as it probably won’t work. But it works for me.
Remember, most financial advice wants you to be anxious and is designed to make you be poorer and to keep money in the hands of investment advisor and financial types so they can fritter it away. When you mentally move past this propaganda, thinking clearly becomes easier.
The “slow metabolism” excuse that Fat Acceptance people are always going on about annoys me. I have a slow metabolism, too! Still lost weight and kept it off.
For instance, I weigh almost 30% more than my partner and she consumes 20-30% more food than I do and continues to weigh much less than I do. So yep, I have a very slow metabolism indeed.
The optimum path in life is action rather than ceaseless carping. The complaining might be more fun but it don’t get a damn thing accomplished. (And I personally love complaining but I still get shit done.)
This is not a bad list. Some that I’d add to it:
Elizabeth Warren looks pretty solid on climate change — at least her past views. On that basis, she has my support.
I don’t think she has a chance in hell in winning under any circumstances, but climate change is my single issue vote and on that alone I will support her if her views remain roughly the same and she wins the nomination.
The reason I don’t think she has a chance? She’s too professorly and just plain misogyny. And the Dem establishment will not want her to win.
Shit fire, I hate these clueless numpties. It makes me angry that “education” so often produces negative value and spits out endless cavalcades of people who are dumber than rocks because rocks never do anything actively stupid.
Government should own all or nearly all housing, in cities especially. Why are we even letting private corporations seeking only profit make decisions about how we live, and who can even afford to live?
I’m not in favor of rent control, either, because I am in favor of NO FUCKING RENT.
This doesn’t mean that I am full-on communist. There is a place for a cash economy and some forms of capitalism, but housing definitely is not that place.