If I offer you a product, And we exchange money based on my offer of a product for a specific amount of time (In this case lifetime) and I change the deal afterwards, it is dishonest and unethical.
> If you've been using mIRC since 1995 and the developer has been keeping it up to date, perhaps you should be supporting them.
Why? It was part of the financial transaction at the time to have a lifetime license for the agreed amount of money provided at the time. It doesn't matter if it was $1 or $1,000,000. Changing the terms after the fact is dishonest. Full stop.
Seems to me it's fully honest if the original offer was made without any deceit. In fact, acknowledging that the original offer turned out to be impractical is also honest. However, that does not mean that some other criticism or pejorative cannot be leveraged against this action.
All the reasons you listed are not related to your charity at all. Basically is 1-3 and you just accidentally hit your #4 point. If it wasn't a color you liked, or you didn't need a phone, or it was more expensive, you would have not done it EVEN if it was to help.
Well, you just described the point of product red and why it is not irrelevant just because there are "proper" charities.
1 they manage to collaborate with big names like Apple that create products in demand, 2 they make sure the color is not ugly, 3 they make sure you don't pay more.
If not for product red Y-bar may not have donated to HIV/AIDS cause at all. Same for me, I always buy product red if device is available because why not, I don't care about the color much.
You’re actually reinforcing the idea: YES, it /isn’t/ charity. It’s a tiny modification to an existing behavior which individually might produce a negligible positive outcome, but cumulatively might produce a large(r) positive outcome.
I think prev post is saying: /some/ people making a trivial individual choice to produce /some/ cumulative benefit is preferable to /zero/ people making that same trivial choice to produce /zero/ cumulative benefit.
The way I see it, most people will not go out of their way to donate to HIV/AIDS in Africa. What RED has done is bake giving into getting a product, one you would have gotten anyways. Donating could certainly be more efficient but way more people are going to buy iPhones, and be tempted to buy the RED iPhone. Less efficent but at the end of the day there is going to be more money in the pot.
Bro wat? This comment is basically "I'm too smart to work for this company".
Your ego will be your downfall.
There is so much I can learn from a developer, junior OR senior by just seeing how they implement something simple like that. I feel like you have a full fledged case of Dunning Kruger effect. Since you don't know what exactly they were looking for, you brush it off to "LeL, LaST pAsS so DuM aSsEsMeNt".
They can rot in hell. I ordered a pizza the other day, and it went from a $15 pizza, to a $40 + tip endeavor. Fuck that. First and last time I used their service.
I just don't understand a comment like this. They show prices up front. The way to combat this business model is to not use these services, but you still paid $40 for a pizza.
I was sick, couldn't leave my room, all the deliveries in my area were pointing to use the doordash app since now they were a "Proud Partner of doordash". A normally $15 pizza ended up being $40 (More than double). I paid for it because I HAD NO OTHER OPTION.
Just because the price was upfront, doesn't mean they are not terrible practices that fuck their consumers.
If dieting doesn't work, how come the procedure he's talking about is basically reducing the volume of his stomach? Sort of a "Forced" dieting if you will?
Dieting and exercise ABSOLUTELY work. Calorie deficit will make you lose weight. You can't create/add matter to your body from nothing. Every atom that your body gained in order to gain weight, came from somewhere, namely, food.
99% of the time when people say the diet didn't work, they were doing a half assed diet with "cheat" days every couple days where they down a 2,000 calorie milkshake.
Source: I used to be that guy making excuses and blaming genetics for being overweight.
It's not that dieting doesn't work. It's that telling people to diet, as a medical intervention, doesn't work. The science of dieting is refined. The science of getting people to diet however has not been very fruitful. It's probably one of the least successful interventions in all of modern medicine, so we obviously need to do better.
I’ll preface my comment with the acknowledgment that there will always be medical and non-medical cases preventing dieting from working.
I think on the whole it’s a good thing to have psychological and physiological solutions to obesity. But I don’t think that changes anything. Ultimately the medical advice has remained consistent: the best way to lose and maintain weight is a healthy diet and/or physical activity. Calories in must be less than calories out to lose.
Unless someone has a truly impactful psychological or physiological obstacle to implementing that advice, what is gained pursuing any other end?
I agree with you but theoretically isn’t this kind of like “take your medicine” advice? If you don’t take the medicine, you don’t get better. To what end should we invest society’s resources into ever cleverer ways to get people to “take their medicine”?
Why is this "better" than GLP-1 agonists or bariatric surgery or non-surgical procedures? All of these are accepted procedures approved for use by medical board around the world.
> Unless someone has a truly impactful psychological or physiological obstacle to implementing that advice
As someone who lost about half their body weight, I feel very much that just about everybody who has a problem with weight loss meets this criteria.
The question is: why is it so easy for so many people to stay a healthy weight without even paying attention to it, and for others it require constant attention and suffering?
Until we can answer and that, weight loss is most definitely not a solved problem.
> why is it so easy for so many people to stay a healthy weight without even paying attention to it, and for others it require constant attention and suffering?
Society and the easy access to indulging high caloric and straight up unhealthy food. You don't see a lot (if any) fat people in certain parts of the world where access to cheap, unhealthy, highly caloric food is not as readily available as it is in the US. The literal problem around here is "I have too much access to food, and I'm unable to stop myself from eating it".
Some people get addicted to cocaine, others to meth, heroine, others to alcohol, and others, to food (Sugar has been found to be MORE addicting than cocaine BTW). So it is an addiction problem, but because it is tabboo to tell someone they should eat that much, it becomes a hard problem to address.
They appeal to emotion, i.e. "I will be hungry, do you know how hard is to go hungry?", yeah, thats your body craving its addiction, you know how hard is to quit alcohol cold turkey? It literally can kill you, so its almost the same with food.
Someone else commented that some people lose a lot of weight, and then they gain it again 5 years down the road. Thats because the adiction won, at that point you gotta treat your food habits like an addiction. At least with alcohol and drugs, you can literally avoid it and not go near it, and still live fine. You cannot live without food so it makes the tempation of overindulging even higher.
> You don't see a lot (if any) fat people in certain parts of the world where access to cheap, unhealthy, highly caloric food is not as readily available as it is in the US
The word "unhealthy" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. For instance, there's the Kitvian people, who have no food scarcity whatsoever and a diet that consists of 70% carbohydrates, which a lot of nutrition "science" tells us is bad, yet obesity is completely unknown to them.
Or the Maasai diet, which is about 66% fat, yet they also don't have an obesity problem.
Sugar consumption in Austrailia between 1980 and 2003 dropped 23% but obesity nearly trippled.
The idea that this is merely due to food addiction caused by some "unhealthy" quality of what we're eating is not well supported by the data. Or at least we haven't isolated what exactly the "unhealthy" part of that is yet.
How hard is it to gather self discipline stats for those groups you mentioned? Not all populations put the same pressure on themselves to stay healthy. There is a massive safety net in Australia that doesnt exist in most of the world.
You are correct, this is not purely due to self discipline.
It seems to me that traditional diets with long observed health outcome histories paired with self discipline lead to better results than the constantly reinvented hyper-processed fad food products (aka fiat foods) consumed in large health safety net environments.
This is sort of what I was getting at with my original comment. I also don’t give credence to the idea that this is primarily about will power, although I see how my original comment could be construed that way.
The US is dumpster fire, and I say that as a US citizen. We have so much high-calorie, low quality food, and so many obstacles to healthful food security in some places, that it borders on the intuitive that these would be significant contributing factors.
I think our issues with homelessness and obesity are pretty similar -- targeting the late state symptoms is not effective. Dealing with the root causes will yield the actions for improvement. But both are creeping issues -- they've been going the wrong way for a long time and at least in our American society, we haven't seen any significant improvements. Our structural society doesn't value or recognize well-being.
This is similar to condoms -- condoms are nearly 100% effective in preventing pregnancy. But as a method of birth control (that is, as a medical intervention), they are only 80% effective in preventing pregnancy because people don't always comply.
But how can we do better? At the end of the day, dieting is just hard. Unhealthy food is delicious, and choosing healthier options and eating less in general requires a good bit of willpower.
But I don't see what else can be done. Ultimately, dieting is an individual effort, because only you control what you eat. You can be given all the advice and meal plans and other information in the world, but the hardest part is choosing a side salad over fries, or not buying the snacks you love but know aren't good for you. If a doctor said "take this medicine because you have condition X" and the patient doesn't do it, is it the doctor's fault?
> If a doctor said "take this medicine because you have condition X" and the patient doesn't do it, is it the doctor's fault?
Think about it from the doctor's perspective.
The doctor prescribes medicine X as a first line intervention and it doesn't work. The patient is unable to tolerate it.
After multiple failed attempts trying medicine X, the doctor opts to recommend that the patient consider medicine Y as a second line intervention, which has a much higher success rate but significant additional risks.
Makes sense, right? Doctor wants to help the patient.
Now swap "medicine X" for "dietary counseling" and "medicine Y" for say "bariatric surgery". That's not really unreasonable.
Treat it like the addiction it is, and you said it yourself.
Here's a copypasta from another comment I made.
Society and the easy access to indulging high caloric and straight up unhealthy food. You don't see a lot (if any) fat people in certain parts of the world where access to cheap, unhealthy, highly caloric food is not as readily available as it is in the US. The literal problem around here is "I have too much access to food, and I'm unable to stop myself from eating it".
Some people get addicted to cocaine, others to meth, heroine, others to alcohol, and others, to food (Sugar has been found to be MORE addicting than cocaine BTW). So it is an addiction problem, but because it is tabboo to tell someone they should eat that much, it becomes a hard problem to address.
They appeal to emotion, i.e. "I will be hungry, do you know how hard is to go hungry?", yeah, thats your body craving its addiction, you know how hard is to quit alcohol cold turkey? It literally can kill you, so its almost the same with food.
Someone else commented that some people lose a lot of weight, and then they gain it again 5 years down the road. Thats because the adiction won, at that point you gotta treat your food habits like an addiction. At least with alcohol and drugs, you can literally avoid it and not go near it, and still live fine. You cannot live without food so it makes the tempation of overindulging even higher.
>But how can we do better? At the end of the day, dieting is just hard. Unhealthy food is delicious, and choosing healthier options and eating less in general requires a good bit of willpower.
Healthy food also tastes delicious. And while changing one's diet - or any habit - requires willpower, if one has healthy standards set early in life it is not that difficult to continue with them or pick them back up.
One commonality between diets as different as a vegan one or all beef one is the emphasis on eating real food rather than processed garbage.
However I think the idea that there is something present environmentally that is causing a systemic issue should not be discounted. People in the 70s did not eat particularly healthy. They liked to watch tv, had Doritos and snack cakes, were just as lazy, and did not have any more willpower, discipline, or education than people do now.
> Unhealthy food is delicious, and choosing healthier options and eating less in general requires a good bit of willpower
Just want to say that, in my experience, this is only if you're in the habit of regularly eating unhealthy food. Once you break that habit and your body adjusts to eating healthier food, eating unhealthy food regularly becomes too rich/heavy/sweet.
For example: I used to eat a ton of Reese's pieces when I was younger. This weekend over Thanksgiving, I had a few pieces and came to find that they were now WAY too sweet. Same goes for soda, once water is your baseline drink soda becomes far too syrupy and sweet.
And even when dieting is done successfully, most people regain the majority of weight lost within 5 years. It takes permanent lifestyle changes to make weight loss persist over time which is not a simple thing to do.
I've recently wondered if more strict food regulation would help. Maybe heavily tax sugars (a nuance-lacking example, of course). I mean, we effectively regulate tobacco and alcohol to some degree and limit consumption thus. I wonder if regulation that encourages strict whole food consumption is possible. Of course, even the thought excersise is probably wasteful because it will never happen. Too much money in cheesecake and chips
The procedures and drugs the author discusses affect the regulatory mechanisms at the heart of the drive to eat. People on GLP-1 agonists eat less because they don't want to eat. People with bariatric surgery eat less because they don't want to eat. These procedures are effectively diets.
>You can't create/add matter to your body from nothing
Sure you can, imagine two scenarios:
1. You eat 100 calories, and you have a 70 calorie deficit in your cells. 70 calories go to your cells to make ADP (this makes you feel full) and the extra 30 goes to fat.
2. You eat 100 calories of HFCS, it spikes your insulin and your body take 90 calories into fat FIRST and 10 calories into your cells to make ADP. You are still hungry because you have a 60 calorie deficit because your cells still lack ADP, you still feel tired and you got fatter.
It is fully possible to eat nothing but trash food that freaks your body out. The problem is for a lot of people we were though the wrong facts about nutrition, like "Fat is bad and (highly processed) carbs are good".
This ultimately does violate physics if your caloric output is the same in both scenarios. Maybe the HFCS makes you more tired/lazy like you said and that causes your output to drop dramatically, but then it's no longer the same comparison.
100% agree, however I do think we have to apply way more empathy cause losing weight is extremely hard and there are bigger factors that make it harder even if your fully educated and have good will power. Like time and money
I went from 250 to 200 then 200 to 170 pounds, first run I could afford the healthy alternative foods the second time I couldn't. It was 10x harder to lose the 30 pounds than the 50, not just cause higher body fat caused it to be easier to lose but cause the food filled me up. I couldn't afford to get the ideal ratio of protien or even really get about 90g of protein a day on my budget. I then had to be making all this food myself in order to have any filling meals, which took up the last bits of my free time as I was struggling to find contract work.
Of course you can make it yourself, but now you have to learn a bunch about nutrition and cooking, then also have the time to cook it. The super high calorie foods are exponentially cheaper, when you factor your time into it. Mcdoubles have a similar macro density if not better than a protein bar and are more filling. Before a price raise I could eat for 5 bucks in 10 minutes or eat for 1.5-2.5 be filled but lose 1-2hours research, gorceries, prep, and cooking. all of which is cheaper than giving up time you could be working or resting to work better.
I think the time and money to put to dieting is a luxury. I do agree we need to cut the BS excuses, but I do think that someone has a choice to be over weight if they only have a few hours to themselves opt to not spend those hours working but for their health and accept the consiquences. I think we need to focus on finding solutions for that person not the person with no drive to figure it out
This simplistic model sounds nice but (and he notes this in the article) doesn't pass the test of explaining the dynamics of weight/gain loss in live humans. Lots of people have pet theories ("just eat meat" or whatever) but researchers who work on this stuff don't seem to think it's such a simple or settled question. I'm an unexceptional counterexample: Despite substantial variation in how I eat and exercise over the last 20 years or so, not disciplined at all, my weight has varied by less than 10%. Is there some secret thing I'm doing that protects me? I doubt it, I think there's just a lot of variation in how different people's bodies run that means some people's lives are a lot harder and there's no silver bullet.
> If dieting doesn't work, how come the procedure he's talking about is basically reducing the volume of his stomach? Sort of a "Forced" dieting if you will?
It's pretty simple actually. The forced reduction of stomach volume results in a different physiological response to eating moderate amounts.
You are mixing diet effectiveness (physics) and adherence. Let me give you an example.
I just had a giant mound of quinoa with a mix of sauteed vegetables and a little more raw olive oil. It met my calorie requirements, but was slightly low in ideal protein. (I've had the same meal with a chicken breast, with the same effect.) I've hit my calorie limit and I'm still hungry.
Sure, it's as simple of CICO, but if CICO with a high vegetable diet leaves me hungry for 14 hours a day to maintain my current weight, it's going to be incredibly hard to maintain adherence. (Let me tell you, it's awesome to wake up at 3AM and so hungry you can't get back to sleep. I will choose sleep over my calorie deficit every time.)
Diets don't work because they are hard to adhere to, even if you are not eating junk food.
In theory. The censorship i've noticed on the fediverse is INSANE. Entire instances (Usually conservative ones) getting banned just because they get the automatic label of "Racist, Homophobe, etc" even though that is not what happening in most of them. (There are some horrible instances, not denying they don't exist).
TLDR: I disliked tailwind even though I never used it, so I used it to confirm my bias, criticize it based on edge cases, so I could continue my hate towards tailwind.
Someone attempted to argue with me that vanilla ice cream is "spicy" because vanilla is a spice. While pedantically true, that's not a person I'd ever want to eat dinner with.
But it is an annoying ambiguity in English. You would probably say that curry paste is spicy even it had no capsaicin, which does happen. People also mean "has spices" when they say "spicy". I have heard Russians use the word Russian word "bitter" to describe the pain sensation of capsaicin too.
I prefer the Spanish word "picante" - stingy. It stings, it causes pain. It's not a flavour like a spice would be.
The problem is that there just isn't a good English word to distinguish it, I have to explain every time that I don't mean flavour, I mean pain. (Russian also has this problem, ambiguity is in every natural language.)
I have heard older Soviet Russians use the word горко, but this was about ten years ago. They were trying to express that the food tasted bad and they really just called it bitter when they meant it had capsaicin.
I've found this distinction to be dialect-dependent. That is Indians tend to make a sharp distinction between spicy and hot, and Americans tend to treat spicy and hot as synonyms.
Spicy, as in "using chili peppers," meaning it has capsaicin gives a bit of a lie to this. You literally just add capsaicin to food to make it spicy in many places. Is how they can give a number score to how spicy to make it. Leaving out the capsaicin does not change the base flavor profile at all.
Now, it is confusing, as spiced food is typically not spiced with capsaicin. Rather, spiced food has traditional spices and is often not spicy. (Think spiced rum. Not "hot" at all.)
> If you've been using mIRC since 1995 and the developer has been keeping it up to date, perhaps you should be supporting them.
Why? It was part of the financial transaction at the time to have a lifetime license for the agreed amount of money provided at the time. It doesn't matter if it was $1 or $1,000,000. Changing the terms after the fact is dishonest. Full stop.