rubashov

The debate around the original asian exclusion acts is kind of interesting to read. A lot of articles from the time are reproduced online. The common sentiment was that white americans didn't want to compete with people willing to work 16 hour days. The fear was a generally compromised quality of life. Of course all this nuance gets boiled down to mere "toxic racism" by the NYT. I mean it's not like large numbers of asians willing to study huge numbers of hours a week have had any affect on quality of life or opportunities for today's students...

I wish someone like Bill Gates would stop doing sisyphean third world do-gooder junk and fund some long term, large controlled studies on humans instead. It seems to me that to do actual science on human health you need space program like money. So instead we get all this observational garbage.

> anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity

I've seen claims that having few friends shows up in mortality worse than than a pack-a-day smoking habit. Of course that's all hand-wavy statistical controls, but then again so is the stuff on exercise and calories.

A digital electric pressure cooker is a better option than a slow cooker in my experience. I use one. Pretty much everything cooks inside 20 minutes, even a whole frozen chicken. I cook tons of stuff straight from frozen.

But still, preparing the food once or twice a day is a distracting pain. It would be great if I could just stop off at street vendors or fast food stores and eat well, but as it is that stuff will kill you.

Food prep is by far the most time consuming and drudge heavy daily task, but it remains pretty much impossible to eat healthily if you don't cook daily. Short of paying a personal chef or landing a full time housewife there doesn't seem to be a solution. Restaurants and prepared food just don't have the economic incentive to use high quality ingredients.

I've had the experience of trying to read Nabakov and Nietzsche and in both cases being sure most of it was sailing way over my head. I kind of enjoyed the stuff anyway, but as a working adult I don't have time to screw around with secret decoder rings. Wish I did.

I tried to do a couple coursera courses and found the video lectures highly inefficient; very needlessly time consuming, even watching them sped up. All I really want is a glorified text book with quiz grading and a final.

Isn't this to some degree a matter of fixating on consumer brands? To my understanding Japan still runs a massive trade surplus in high tech equipment and parts and has many super profitable firms making that stuff. The parts that go into or make your phone or TV comes from Japan. This is just what I hear.

You explain the memory locality issue well but the question is how is the situation better in any other language.

How is your example a language thing? Would a JITed language improve the locality of the m_numLoadedAssets variable? I'm not quite sure I get it.

> the biggest gains are made on an algorithmic level

I have had a few experiences of simply porting something rather directly to C++ and seeing 10X speed and memory improvements. The 'hidden costs' in other languages are loads of unavoidable heap allocations and pointer indirection that really don't happen with C++. And C++ compilers do a ton of very smart optimization these days.

With the generic programming constructs and static polymorphism approaches in C++ you can often get really big performance increases over what's practical in C or Java. std::sort in C++, for example, has often been found a few times faster than stdlib.h qsort. It's because of compile time optimizations that languages like C and Java can't do.

I thought I was depressed and anxious for almost two years. It turned out I just had a chronic sinus infection.

I'm suspicious that a lot of what gets considered as psychiatric problems are really physical health problems. Anecdotally, a lot of people switch to a nutrient dense diet and cut out potential allergens and wind up feeling all better.

The article says hadza walk many miles per day but burn the same calories as sedentary westerners. How is this possible? Well you go look at the table in the study and the hadza are all 30kg lighter than westerners. The men are all apparently 5'4 and 115lb, if you look at the BMI. That's probably 115lb at sub 5% bodyfat, too.

The study claims to control for body size. I didn't read it. But I still suspect we're looking at an apples to oranges situation here. A little dude of pure muscle who has been walking 10 miles a day his whole life is essentially incomparable to a fat sedentary Westerner.

I don't think the data presented predicts that if you had 6' fat sedentary people walk three miles a day they wouldn't lose weight, but that's almost claimed in the article.

As I read your post I realized app.net is probably for me.

It's like lower Manhattan or parts of San Francisco. People who think the rents are ridiculous shouldn't live there anyway; it's not for them.

Are you serious? Look at any inflation adjusted chart of the US equities market and there are obviously multiple such periods.

http://www.angelfire.com/or/truthfinder/index14.html

http://www.dogsofthedow.com/dow1925cpilog.htm

Furthermore, market history did not begin in 1910 in the United States. Stock markets go back hundreds of years in many countries. A global long-view perspective is worth a lot more than 90 years of US data. And from that perspective "stocks for the long haul" have very often been a bad idea.

The idea that people should have to speculate in stocks to tread water, index fund or not, is absurd and historically abnormal. I also happen think that dumping money into a stock index fund will be a good way to lose over the next 10 years. It's been a really bad idea for many long historical periods.

It should be possible to buy CDs at a few points above inflation. This was the historical norm. People shouldn't have to "invest" at all to preserve and modestly grow the value of their earnings. The vast majority of people have no business owning stocks or bonds. The only reason you can't get a decent interest rate is the crazy monetary policy of the last 40 years.

He claims it's "ridiculous" to expect people to save responsibly. Yet it happens in east asia, and it happened historically in the west.

The story is another demo of this curiously common mentality where nobody can be held to account for their choices. You can't say that people are fat because they're slobs with no self control, no, it's fructose, fast food ads, or whatever. The education test results aren't lousy because the kids are dumb and lazy, it's the teachers.

People aren't saving enough or taking enough responsibility in general because we're seeing the end-game result of four generations with a generous public social safety net. I could fix the retirement savings problem right quick: Bring back the poor house. If you want any sort of public assistance you have to live in a big concrete dorm with rows of bunk beds and do menial labor. Make some TV shows about living in one.

> Cholesterol isn't bad, saturated fat isn't bad

The issue gets super complicated once you add chronic emotional stress. A huge problem with all these dietary disease models is they ignore cortisol and stress levels, which may ultimately turn out to be the single-most important variable.

In short, the original findings to do with fat intake -> cholesterol -> atherosclerosis weren't outright invalid. It's just that in healthy, unstressed people the final link to atherosclerosis doesn't actually happen, even in old age. But the situation in the industrialized world is massive numbers of people living in chronic stress, so who knows. Turns out chronically elevated cortisol levels produces the arterial damage that make "bad" cholesterol a problem at all.

Absolutely. Fat white people in desk jobs eat handfuls of soy loaded trail mix in the afternoon, and an apple an hour before lunch. It's SWPL emotional eating.

> people who favor fruits and vegetables, grains and legumes over beef, pork and fatty foods are healthier

I have two eyes and that doesn't square at all. The fat people eat packaged food and restaurant food, which are very skimpy on meat and real animal fat.

The main thing I notice about fat people is they eat very often. Thin people eat moderate meals and don't snack. Fat people continuously have handfuls of crap like nuts and fruit and soy and soda.

Yeah, I wasn't contradicting you, dude. Maybe you'd make more friends if you chilled out.

Beyond the juvenile stage men can't bond through "play time". Men bond through shared struggle and purpose. You aren't going to make close lifetime male friends at some stupid beer centric sports league.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-Men-Jack-Donovan/dp/0985452307

I think it's an interesting distinction that this is not really true of women. Women can get close over various shared interests and activities.

OK, so some colleges in the 20s and 30s discriminated against Jews and others (vast majority?) didn't. Your link goes on about Feynman and Salk going to NYU and MIT instead of their first choices. These men both easily found their way to the elite.

On black and Jewish I'm not going to take your point as granted. I'd need an unbiased analysis.

Fair point on the disastrous social engineering and urban redevelopment schemes of the 20th century. But, what about sending men to the moon or designing and building the sr-71 in a few years? Or for that matter conquering Japan and Germany in the space of a few years.

I argue these are all things our society today would simply not be able to do if placed in the same circumstances. We are less effective.

The assertion that "elite" status is more meritocratic today than in the past (in America) is highly questionable. Go look at 100 year old university admissions tests. Note that they didn't care what "clubs" you were in.

Brooks goes on about diversity and the decline of WASP dominance as an obvious sign of the shift to meritocracy. This out of hand dismisses the possibility the WASPs just actually were/are elite. Why is this a fair assumption?

http://blog.jim.com/culture/not-the-cognitive-elite-3.html

Regulation. The kind of people who build a successful software startup don't want to deal with OSHA, the EPA, and local zoning boards.

If you're freewheeling and you want to build something physical you have to go to China.

So why do bastardy, bad taste in fashion, and obesity all track so closely? You see this all over the world. Where people are well dressed and there is little bastardy, they are thin, regardless of the affluence level.

> Eat the same diet as you are now, but less of it

Considering vitamins and minerals most people eat crap. Deficiencies are fairly rampant. The problem is that grains/beans, dairy, potato, and oils are good for energy but have very lousy nutrient profiles. People are eating an energy dense but nutrient light diet that is a vestige of times of hard manual labor.

I don't know why it's out of consideration that people are just shameless slobs now and that's a major component of the obesity epidemic. Bastardy, tattoos, and dressing like a sloppy clown in public were inconceivable 40 years ago when everyone was thin. Anything goes now (no one will call your bastard a bastard), and so does being a gluttonous fat ass, really. The social consequences are minimal.

I'm around a fair number of fat people and I don't need any nutritional science background to notice they eat very often and they eat a lot. I suppose there's clinical evidence that low carb diets work, but it pretty much seems to me the main factor is these people just don't care about being fat slobs.