MCRed

In both groups %50 of their calories came from carbohydrates. Carbs are quick sugar energy, and the resulting rise in blood sugar tells the body that it has plenty of energy.

This would have been much more interesting if one group had low to zero cards, and high fat and high protein.

Such a diet has worked well for me to lose a hundred pounds in 8 months... without any exercise. (and I don't think I'm losing muscle.)

The question is- can you cut carbs and become fat adapted (Which is what I have done, and the results are dramatic, my bodies response to fat is much different than before)... while still building muscle.

This is the next phase for me- the second hundred pounds I want to lose I will do while working out and building muscle.

In my case, this change in diet has become a change in lifestyle. I'm perfectly happy eating steak and BBQ and when I get a hankering for a pizza I make it with almond flour and have very little carbs. It's easy and fun and I'm eating better now (and saving money) while feeling much better.

Like the people in the study I've also recently started experimenting with a shake. It's called "Keto Chow" and you can find the recipe at diy.soylent.com. The nice thing about this is that I put my daily vitamins in the shake and some supplements so I'm getting better nutrition than I was before.

This is taking essentially no effort. Before when I dieted (low fat, high carb standard "diet") it was very difficult because it took a huge amount of willpower.

This takes almost none.

Of course, exercising will take willpower so I'm finding exercises that I like to do. Dancing is my aerobic approach. Not sure what I will do for muscle building yet, though, because lifting is kinda boring. (but I do have dumbbells next to my chair and I pick them up and exercise a bit when I'm thinking.)

I think the whole theory of "calories in < calories out" is BS-- people are different and some people are more sensitive to insulin the others.

Interestingly, Google, and the other companies, may be seeking out females in an effort to compensate for under representation among their ranks of current employees.

The reason the "stimulus" didn't work is that it costs more to the economy to produce the money that was spent to "stimulate" it than the economic benefits of that spending could produce.

And yes, 8 years ago people did predict what happened, exactly, namely look at the archives of http://mises.org and you will find articles predicting this result.

The problem is, it doesn't fit the political desires.

If you really want to stimulate the economy, by getting more money being spent, simply cut taxes and cut inflation. (Which means cutting government spending). You cut monetary inflation and taxation and individuals and businesses will have more money at the end of the day to spend on things.

Unfortunately, cutting government spending doesn't fit the "lets promise people free health care and education to get elected" agenda.

The Bush "stimulus" didn't work either. We had a housing bubble, but that wasn't exactly a net positive for the economy.

The problems is the "Science" of economics has been compromised to the point where people aren't even aware of the predictions that this would fail (you weren't for instance).... because what passes for economics is more akin to rationalizations for political policies, rather than a science. (outside of places like the Chicago and Austrian schools.)

Now do Amazon which is a retailer, often running at a loss on the retail side, with a nicely growing Hosting business... but even the margins on the hosting business don't justify Amazon's P/E ratio.

I don't think the market is efficient, it has a lot to do with perception. Amazon, for instance, is constantly doing press releases for products, even products that have no future (this is a deliberate strategy near as I can tell from my time when I worked at Amazon)... while Apple does 3 or 4 product introductions a year, and doesn't do a lot of PR stuff (Though Tim Cook is getting interviewed a lot more than Steve Jobs did.)

This is the distinction between a crime and something that is illegal. On HN people rarely make the distinction because they think something being illegal makes it a crime.

Illegal means it violates a law. A crime is something that actually harms someone.

Gay marriage may have been illegal, but it was never a crime, for example.

Alas, these days the USA is a very authoritarian culture and the idea that there might be US laws that are themselves crimes to enforce seems alien. But logically and morally it is the case.

US Law does not apply to Costa Rica-- it's outside their jurisdiction. That's one of the fundamental problems here.

The US could pass a law that Sainsburies (a UK grocery store, with no US locations) has to employ a jazz band at every one of their stores for 3 hours every friday afternoon... but it doesn't matter, because the US does not have jurisdiction over the UK. Even if a US citizen goes and visits and stops by a sainsbury and is upset at the lack of a jazz band.

I don't subscribe to the WSJ so I can't read the OP, but I thought the Yuan was wanting to rise, and that china was slowly letting it revalue. I thought all the economic pressure was aligned that way. Chinese have currency controls so they can't easily sell the yuan to buy other currencies (bitcoin is down for the past couple weeks- the one currency which chinese people love and which doesn't have any controls).

Elixir has pipes too. One of the great things about it.

Apple Watch is fantastic. It keeps introducing me to new features...like I got a phone call and took it from the watch. That was unexpected (I didn't bother to read up on it before buying-- I just wanted it for fitness tracking.)

Hell ,yesterday I wanted to take a picture of the underside of my car with my phone. Turns out the watch works as a remote camera display... very happy with that!

The watch is slowly taking over a big chunk of the stuff I used to use my iPhone for...

I didn't like having to take the sport band off every night, so I got one of those knockoff link bracelets from Amazon- it looks just like the one Apple sells at 1/5th the price.

I've decided that if they release a new watch this spring I will buy it. Even though I was late to get mine, It has more than paid for itself in 6 months. Whatever the new features of the new watch will likely make it worth the upgrade to me. (The workout app alone is worth $350 for me. I've already saved $30 in gas with the navigation reminders I expect... the watch just keeps paying dividends.)

IT's a nice change of pace from the crackpot economics posts that normally fill the homepage.

During WWII we produced guns en masse called "the liberator" which were air dropped behind Nazi lines. The Nazis ran out of ammo and so many of the jews in the concentration camps were guarded by empty rifles. If they had had basic firearms knowledge they would have known this, as the Nazis weren't even putting the magazines in the rifles. They could have over thrown their captors relatively easily, even being unarmed, because they outnumbered them many to one, and their captors were unarmed.

So not even having guns there, a gun culture would have likely saved lives.

(this is based on an account of an elderly man who was in the concentration camps and later came to learn about guns as part of his vow of "never again". There is an organization based on this principle called "Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership.")

With the federal reserve pumping out money like nobodies business, the resulting inflation is a major brake on the economy. It also results in less profits for companies, less income growth for employees etc.

The only people it really benefits are wall street and other politically well connected entities (solyndra et. al.)

The government is basically sucking up all of the value from advances in technology ,and redirecting it to the political class who then profit from the carry trade of investing it in the stock market and the like.

Ironically, of course, none of the mainstream candidates for president will fight this, though many of them are trying to get elected on the backs of the outrage over "income inequality"... and this comment is likely to be buried because it points out a crime committed under both Bush and Obama and nobody wants to admit their guy is a bad guy.

BY the way, they don't talk about it now, but originally in 2001 the media reported that "al queda" was a code name used by the CIA for their database of mujahideen fighters. Somehow the narrative later morphed into "al queda" being a massive global conspiracy of "cells" with a leader, and all that, a big old boogeyman. But they forgot that for this to be the case, we have to believe that Osama Bin Laden -- Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible One style-- stealth his way into CIA headquarters and found this top secret code name they used for the Mujahideen fighters they were funding in the 1980s, and decided to name his secret, global, hidden, evil genius organization after it.

It's kinda nonsensical. But fortunately for the government, most people don't pay much attention.

At any rate, the propaganda/misinformation efforts are very real and ongoing.

General advice for anyone young who is reading this-- if the person you're trying to learn from offers seminars, it's a good sign he's not worth your time, and seminars are rarely worth the money. "Free" ones are the worst.

Good books are the best educational value (though maybe some MooCs are a better value now.)

I read this book, was skeptical given the gungho attitude, so I did some due diligence: Roberty Kiyosaki claimed to have founded a company that went public. So I figured Kiyosaki was a rare enough name and searched the SEC records to find out if this was true. Was unable to find any evidence that he had taken a company public, and so he lost credibility with me.

You meet really entertaining characters in bars sometimes too. They are fine for entertainment but don't take them too seriously.

Putting money to work for you is wise, good advice and there are better books for it. Like "The millionaire next door" and "the wealthy barber" (a little lite but a good intro) and "Buffetology" and "The dummies guide to REITs" and the like.

Managing real estate yourself is no small task- you have tenants and a lot of work to do for them. Putting an agency in between you and the tenants means you may be giving up a lot of your profits to the agency.

The best thing that happened to me, though was I started reading http://mises.org. There in 2000ish I learned about how the fed and CRA were going to create a housing bubble. And the consequences of that. I invested along that thesis in the mid 2000s, getting out of the market in 2007 when things were too crazy to make sense (missed the top by a year, but still good timing.)

Macroeconomic understanding (And I don't mean what politicians talk about or the politically connected people like Paul "we need a housing bubble" Krugman) has been very profitable for me. More profitable than any stock tip.

Also gained a lot of insight from attending Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meetings, but now I just read the annual reports.

I walked in to the TV showing the launch. I hadn't known it had exploded. I didn't realize I was seeing a replay.

I spent my time as a kid living on Vandenberg Air Force base, and my father would drag me out to Minute Men missile launches early in the mornings. I saw several launches. Even two launched at once.

I had seen many launches before, so I had no expectation that they could go wrong.

Watching the shuttle explode like that was shocking.

These orgs (and all of us) should have legal teeth. We should be able to indict and subsequently prosecute those whose crimes have become obvious and for whome there is sufficient evidence.

Government prosecutors will never do it.

Absolutely, but also look at the higher level- The snowden revelations showed a treasonous level of criminal activity at the highest levels of government.

So, of course, Snowden is the bad guy and no charges have been filed against the perpetrators of the crimes.

Unfortunately, where to move? The situation is like that all over the USA. The increasing militarization of the police in the past 20 years (one thing about being "old" is you can see these things happen before your eyes) have produced a very bad scene.

I spent a couple years in Chile. They cops there walk around with machine guns (they're called "carabineros") but are professional, uncorrupt and trustworthy. The difference is palpable.

Also felt much safer around the Polezi in Germany.

But leaving the country has its own costs.

I'm thinking maybe remote work will become more of a thing and a small town somewhere relatively rural might be better... but then small town cops in Louisiana were pretty bad in my youth.

A big part of the problem is our system is set up to favor the governent-- when there's a trial, the judge, the prosecutor, the cops (who handle and control all the evidence) the lab (many scandals in the past 40 years about fraudulent lab work) all work for the government. Even your lawyer is compromised by not being allowed to make certain arguments and the risk of offending the judge (Who there will be future cases before.) The jury are given blatantly tampering instructions from the judge, eliminating much of the value of an independent jury system.

So, who is going to try cops when they are corrupt?

By what mechanism can we the people enforce the law on our own government?

It seems silly to go before our own government and beg for them to obey their own laws.

Sometimes we get lucky- like gay marriage- but how many decades did that take? It was 1980s when the supreme court ruled that sodomy could be criminalized on the basis of "a thousand years of christian tradition" (namely NOT on the basis of the constitution.)

So of course, we will continue to see more and more corruption until like AIDS is now, and the wars overseas -- the news simply stops reporting about it, because it has become the background noise of the society we live in.

That's going the wrong direction.

I'm far more afraid of being killed by a random cop than I am by Walmart or anything in walmart. They all have an incentive to keep me safe so I'll keep buying. They would face consequences (not even criminal, just market consequences) if they were killing people.

Cops on the other hand, they get away with it. And blatantly do day in and day out.

Look at real GDP growth from Chile and Cuba over the past 50 years. Chile is far outpacing Cuba. I bet adding venezuela would also be illuminating.

It's easy to do "pretty well" in the early years, the books can be cooked, the standards changed, etc. But over time you can't hide failure.

I have those kinds of meetings all the time on slack.

-- Lower office costs - which is really important for startups.

Ironically a lot of startups seem to be office focused, but if there's less than 8 people in the company, don't get an office. You don't need the expense and hassle of an office.

When you need to meet face to face to hash things out, you can go to someones house, or you can go to somewhere like Panera Bread which often has meeting rooms you can just use.

This has the benefit of making those meetings more focused, since the effort to have a meeting is higher than in an office.

I'm continually amazed by the companies that have a daily meeting wasting engineers time (never been to a good standup) and how attached they are to this-- it seem to be very management driven, much like the "need" for na office: "IF I can't see them and waste 30 minutes of their time each day, how will I know they are working?"

Apparently looking at issue tracking systems doesn't work for bosses.

In the USA, if Basic Income were to be implemented, where would the money come from? Currently the rate of monetary inflation is quite high- we've gone from $11T to $18T in the monetary system during the Obama administration. If we were to start printing even more money to pay people a basic income, this monetary inflation would cause prices to rise to wipe out the benefit of the program, most likely.

In fact, the reason people are suffering now is the level of monetary inflation (Which has been high going back to the Reagan era, so it's the fault of both parties. This is not a partisan issue- it's an economics one. And the problem is that politicians get elected by promising stuff, but to produce the stuff, they can't raise taxes, so they do the equivalent by printing money.)

For me, and I believe there are at least two different types of people in this regard, the key to losing weight was insulin levels. Namely, I went on a low carb diet and lost around 100 pounds.

Some people, I believe, are insulin resistant and some are insulin sensitive. The sensitive ones tend to be skinny and have to really overeat to gain weight, while the resistant ones find it easy to gain weight.

I have dieted for years attempting to lose weight, but cutting out carbs was a game changer. Suddenly losing weight became easy. And who doesn't like an all BBQ diet?? (ok, well, even BBQ gets tiring after awhile, but I eat a variety of stuff, and even have managed to work out how to make a low carb pizza (almond meal+cheese for the crust, tastes like whole wheat).)

I do not believe all calories are the same. I eat a high fat, high calorie diet, I never worry about calories. If I'm hungry I eat. I only ever budget for carbs. So long as I'm eating meat and cheese, say, for a snack, I can eat as much as I want- and I do. (Though one of the side effects of low carb / high fat, is as your body becomes fat adapted, you find yourself hungry less often. I have on occasions simply forgotten to eat for an entire 36 hour period.)

OF course this is anecdote, and I do think that in regards to insulin sensitivity there are at least two types of people.

And in fact, that's part of my point. The monotonous "just cut out fats and eat all the pasta you want and you'll lose weight" Official Government Propaganda Diet is not working- it presumes that everyone is the same too.

Low carb may not work for everybody, I dunno. But it worked for me, spectacularly.

For the first time in my life I'm confronting the prospect of being normal sized. Skinny even.

That's going to be weird!

Shouldn't those parameters then be well known to everybody? And subject to investigation?

Can you give more detail as to why this is a backdoor?

I think they are counting on Open Source being the protection. Any changes to the code can be scrutinized, and the code can be forked (already has).

The IIHS is a private organization motivated by "greed" and funded by the insurance industry. Yet it's not surprising to see people coming in here and jumping on the opportunity to credit government for their work. Why is that do you think? Nothing in the video brought up government, but multiple people have claimed that this is the work of government.

The reason this is the case, near as I can tell, is that for the modern leftist government is a god. Statism is a religion.

Even when government is the cause of the problems, people so often turn around and want more government to fix them.

In short this is a result of the principle-agent problem. Politicians can be influenced. The government has little time to get in, and when regulations are set they are rarely updated... meanwhile the IIHS helping insurers save money (by setting correct car insurance premiums) also sparked consumer demand for high safety ratings when shopping for cars.

This is very much the free market at work. Money (which people like to call "Greed") drives both consumers and insurers to find the scientifically best car. Insurers have more appropriate loses, and customers have fewer deaths (or a better safety level for their dollars spent).

The IIHS makes the knowledge about car safety much less asymmetric in the market.

The UL does a similar thing, and I think this is the model that is more effective.

It doesn't take an act of congress for the IIHS to come up with a new test and new standards as technology improves and new areas of risk are discovered!

Edit: I see my parent is being downvoted. He pointed out the basic facts of the situation, but since it was not sufficiently authoritarian he is being downvoted. I feel this site is anti-intellectual.

Except that the state doesn't take any sort of a long term view, unless you consider the next election a "long term". The state can't do anything to benefit the economy- by definition all the money spent by the state was taken via taxation or inflation, in both cases taken out of the private economy exactly at the point where they would otherwise be invested in economic growth... and the state is notoriously terrible at allocating that money (most of which is spent bombing people, or preparing to bomb people.)