seekingtruth

Oh dear, private citizens carrying arms and protecting private property and life. Tut-tut!

If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty.

This is only true if it is reasonable to expect similar performance and outcomes between different population groups. Is it? Why should we expect blacks to perform as well academically as Ashkenazim and east asians, two population groups with notably high average IQ?

Are people who do not attend multicult schools really at a disadvantage in life? Who says Harvard and other elite schools have any interest in "diversity" in "many other ways" than racially? Do their admissions policies include quotas for different religions, political ideologies, professional interests, extracurricular interests, etc.? No, their interest in "diversity" ends at skin color.

Through four years and working for around thirty different families, I only met one that were just clearly in need of help. And they were a couple suffering from undiagnosed developmental disabilities. (The local social services took the opportunity of our construction project to gain access to the house and get them properly into the system.) Almost everyone else we worked for were just shiftless leechers prone to outbursts of violence.

It made me realize that most "humanitarian" outfits serving "the poor" are doing a great disservice to the elimination of human suffering. Subsidizing "the poor" just creates more poor people. If we really wanted to reduce human suffering, we would leave "the poor" to die off and subsidize the family formation and procreation of successful people.

What is challenging is dealing with the finiteness of time. Having to prioritize my list of what I want to do/learn and slowly progress through it. Sometimes new things suddenly come up and move their way to a high priority. Other things will, at times, be moved down the list according to changes in my interest level or circumstances. But what is an entirely foreign experience to me is having something I want to do, arriving at the time to do it, and just... not doing it.

I can only think that people who have this kind of experience must be suffering from self-deception or dissonance between what they believe they want and what they really do want. Like the student who tries his damnedest on exam day but has not spent any time familiarizing himself with the course material. What we want is revealed by our behavior, not what we think. What I actually am is what I do.

As to the particular topic at hand, it is a core value of mine to keep my body as able as possible for as long as possible. My body is the vessel that conveys my existence through time-space and getting the most out of that existence requires optimizing my fitness. If I were to wake up one day twenty pounds overweight and pre-hypertensive, remedying that situation would shoot up my priority list. It would become an emergency situation that would simply have to be dealt with as expeditiously as possible. So when I hear people talk about how much they "really want" to lose weight but then present no behavioral evidence to support that statement, I can only conclude they they are either simply lying for the sake of garnering social approval or are deluding themselves as to their true desires.

The most salient lesson I got out of spending my high school summers doing volunteer construction is that I hate poor people.

For the person who downvoted: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/COEDO2014.pdf

But this is a well-trod path. There is no need to reinvent or rediscover anything. In fact, belaboring the "how" is really just a diversion that prevents success. Anyone who is successful at body transformation does two things: 1) Permanently changes their diet 2) Permanently changes their activity level. The particulars vary in any number of ways but the one constant is that the person moves from thinking to action. The process becomes not something that they "try" or "work on" but an imperative.

A guy I went to high school with was an all-star center on our (American) football team at six feet tall and 294 lbs. He had always been "the fat guy" from the time we were children. Between the end of one football season and the start of the next school year, he dropped to 160 lbs. When he spoke on the topic of his change, he always first answered the "how" question with this response: "I just decided I was tired of being fat." For him, the particulars involved introducing heaping servings of fibrous vegetables (to help satiety) and running. But those things were of secondary importance.

Look at this guy: http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/2xczpt/6_month_prog...

45 years and old and resigned to being dumpy and hypertensive. Then he decided "fuck this" and changed his life. This is how it always works. You have to become sufficiently fed up to no longer accept the status quo. No one can do that for you nor will it appear in any study, book, or other "how-to-be-fit" advice.

This is why I no longer talk to people in real life about this topic. I can give them an endless supply of information on nutrition & programming but not the one thing without which they are doomed to failure.

I do as I please. Whether others consider the goals I set for myself sufficiently challenging or making the most of my "potential" does not concern me in the least.

Self-control is a skill, not an inherent trait. It can be mastered and become almost effortless.

Well, these things do vary over a lifetime but, in most cases, not by much: http://i.imgur.com/hRaXDDQ.jpg

Anyone who disputes this is scientifically illiterate.

Well, those who possess a lower IQ are more likely to become obese. So perhaps not understanding the way the universe works is how they wind up obese in the first place. Not too surprising, then, that they would be unable to comprehend how to get themselves out of that state. And there is certainly no shortage of charlatans and mountebanks out there all too ready to lead them astray.

Learning new things is fun. Lifting twice my bodyweight for reps is hard work. You sound like a typical fatty harboring the delusion that fit people are incapable of excelling at anything other than being fit. This is a particularly laughable notion given the clear evidence that low IQ is positively correlated with obesity [1] (and, likewise, physical fitness is positively correlated with higher IQ and cognitive function).

1. http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/COEDO2014.pdf

Deadlifts. That's why I do them.

Eating healthy is incredibly difficult in western society,

This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read on this site. Fresh, healthy, affordable food has never been more accessible to any society.

"Just eat less" is not a very helpful answer, it's incredibly frustrating to hear, believe me.

Eating less is the only thing that works. You only find this advice unhelpful because it's hard. But the reason it's hard is because you've trained yourself to overeat and now you have to break that habit, a habit that has its psychological and physiological meathooks in you. People who haven't lived their entire lives stuffing themselves to the bursting point have no problems autoregulating. I mean, shit, my cat can manage it.

It takes a lot of effort, lots of planning (preparing food, planning what, where and when to eat, snacks, etc) and a LOT of information (nutrition, insulin effects on the body, pros and cons of current 'fad' diets, etc) which takes a while to collect, also, lots of trial an error.

You sound like a pathetic whiny snot who has embraced a life of learned helplessness.

I was up working until 6:30AM today and will do the same tonight. What will you be doing then? Oh, sleeping? What a good-for-nothing lazy scoundrel you are!

Taking part in the things most inherent in your culture is arguably a good thing.

Like being overweight? Eating fast food? Watching the latest wastes of time on the tubes? Because fuck everything about that. I do as I damn well please and spend my time on things that interest me. If that "alienates" losers, who cares? I have more to offer the average portly dimwitted plebian than they do me.

Mechanicville, NY 3 Phase Hydroelectric Plant built in 1897 and still running the original generators: http://edisontechcenter.org/Mechanicville.html

Not "open" but a much better resource, at least for now: http://nutritiondata.self.com/

Maybe these guys can catch up.

I think this is the kind of guy who has better uses for his garage than vehicle storage.

That doesn't seem to be common.

How soon until botnets & malware routinely bypass DNS and instead use host files compiled from simple subdomain pings (and other vectors for IP address leaks) and passed about like password lists?

White & black parents do not produce "black" children, they produce non-white children. Eliminating white children is genocide.

Six doctor visits, stool and blood tests later, the doctors found what moved in.

Something other than C. Diff? Would you mind sharing what it was?

Stallman proven right again.

If every "white" person reproduced only with a "black" person, white people would cease to exist. That is genocide.

Show me a place on Earth where decreasing the ethnic/cultural homogeneity has improved community cohesion and rapport.

So, literally genocide.

The Harvard School of Public Health demurs: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesit...

And the argument that the longer lifespans of healthy people means they will consume more healthcare dollars sounds quite specious on the face of it. After all, healthy people do not have chronic conditions whereas the obese & smokers can spend 20-40 years being treated for hypertension, diabetes, heart failure, arthritis, emphysema, COPD, etc. How could people living, on average, an extra four to seven years without such chronic care possibly wind up costing more? As it turns out, the study you reference was not based on data from actual patient outcomes but is a mathematical model: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...

David Strip calls into question the validity of the model thusly:

"Much in line with the response by Mittendorf, the validity of the results lies very strongly on key assumptions that are not demonstrated. The analysis assumes that the cost of an incidence of the 22 key diseases is independent of the risk factors being tested. Likewise, remaining health care costs, which account for 85% of health-care spending in the Netherlands , are assumed to be uncorrelated to risk factors. Given that this latter class of spending dwarfs the former, the importance of demonstrating the lack of correlation is particularly important. The incidence of numerous co-morbidities with obesity argues, in fact, that one might reasonably expect to find that the annual health costs are higher in the obese and that the cost of treatment in the last months preceding death may be quite different from the non-obese.

Kim McPherson, emeritus professor of public health at Oxford, wrote in response to the van Baal study here: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...

In a sense, Van Baal and colleagues' study is a useful antidote to current concerns. But let us be clear: it does not attenuate them. Obese people cost less because individuals die younger and hence with less chronic morbidity associated with old age. This is a useful thing to know, but how might it affect public health strategies for obesity? In particular, does it mean that concerns about increasing population obesity are misplaced, as least as far as health-service costs are concerned?

Sadly not. Examine an obese population and a lean population of the same age and sex distribution, and the former will incur far greater health-care costs throughout the life course. Much more diabetes, and more cardiovascular disease and cancer will occur amongst the obese—even amongst the older obese [3]. Compare health-care costs now with those thirty years ago, and—holding everything but obesity constant—the current population costs much more to the health sector than it did then [4]. Moreover, quite apart from health-care costs, the other costs to society from obesity are also greater because of absences from work due to illness and employment difficulties; these costs amount to considerably more than health-care costs [5]. It is not clear that these extra costs are intrinsically related to health-care costs, but they are currently estimated to be around four times as great in obese than in lean people [5].

For anyone with the ability to govern what they eat, obesity is always a choice. Trying my damnedest on the day of an exam and really wanting to pass is not the measure of whether I chose to pass the exam but, rather, how I prepared myself in the time preceding.