teslabox

That's a nice site... The author has some really good points about for-profit colleges too.

  The $20 Principle
  
  I have written before about how $20 can change a 
  student’s life.

  The $20 is slightly euphemistic but not entirely so.

  We talk a lot about big money in higher education but I 
  know for a fact that it’s small money that can derail 
  one’s educational ambitions.

  I was a student in a doctoral preparation program. I was 
  an older “non-traditional” student. I was independent. I 
  didn’t have children but neither was I still someone’s 
  child. To take advantage of this highly competitive 
  program, I had to submit a $100 reservation fee.

  I didn’t have it.

  I was $24 short.

- https://tressiemc.com/2016/08/30/the-20-principle/

> It is becoming increasingly obvious that androgen deprivation has massive neurological effects.

Progesterone USP is both a pro-hormone and a neurosteroid [1]. The science literature commonly confuses Progesterone USP with various "progestins" (xeno-hormones), so there is much confusion on the effects of this substance vs the fakes.

> I seriously think there should be some inquiry into whether it is a driver for the epidemic of post-transition MTF trans suicides

At one point I made a progesterone supplement, which I sold on Amazon - topical progesterone formulas are grandfathered as non-prescription because they are safe, and because the substance was available before the food & drug act was passed. My best customer was "Billie", whom I never met, but who I'm certain was MTF. SHe emailed me recently when she ran out of her last purchase - I told her what to buy instead.

MTF probably usually do poorly post-transition because they only supplement with "the heart attack hormone"/"The Cancer Hormone" - Estrogen. Progesterone USP is essential for balancing the toxic effects of any kind of estrogen/xeno-estrogen. Fertile women are protected from their estrogen load because their bodies produce large amounts of Progesterone during the second half of the cycle.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11108866

edit: gender pronouns

> US public schools actually get pretty damn good results by worldwide standards.

This is in spite of the system, instead of because of it. Some people were going to do well regardless - because they were well-nourished as children, grew up in stable homes, etc. Most the rest are good worker-bees, or good candidates for filling the prisons (a make-work program).

> I think the biggest problem with attempts to "revolutionize" US education is that nobody has identified an actual problem it has.

I think John Gatto [1] pointed out that "Nothing of value to the individual happens by force" - maybe the quote is in one of his books. Gatto's essay on retiring, "I Quit, I Think" [2], precisely describes professional teachers' dilemma.

[1] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20100309061700/http://www.johnta...

The World Health Organization has a report titled "Health risks from drinking demineralised water". The main problem is that water without minerals upsets the osmotic balance and leads to lysing (rupture) of the cells lining the stomach.

The WHO has moved stuff on their site, but I think this document is one source:

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/nutrientschap...

Coffee grounds are a good filter for removing heavy metal contaminants from water:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/24/science/coffee-grounds-fil...

> An animal is also terribly inefficient at converting water and feed into human-consumable nutrients,

I have an old book somewhere that says the milk cow is the most efficient means of converting a rocky hillside covered with grass into human-usable protein.

> Cost to print 5,000 B&W pages on my Brother laser: $25 ($12.50 per 2600-page generic toner).

I found an unused HP P2015dn at a family member's office. It came loaded with an aftermarket cartridge. I also found a new-in-box HP toner. Pages printed with the genuine HP part are much sharper. Maybe some generic cartridges are better than others... ?

The paper doesn't feed from the drawer anymore, but it feeds fine from the fold-down tray. It's got a wired network connection too, which works pretty well, except I can't print auto-duplex (manual-duplex only) over the network unless I'm printing from Chrome's printing dialogue (wth?).

  Total pages printed: 	60387
  Duplex pages printed: 	4279
  Pages mispicked in printer: 	783
  Pages jammed in printer: 	29
  PCL6 pages printed: 	48916
  PS pages printed: 	505
  PCL pages printed: 	12937

edit: rephrased my statement about generic cartridges

Rats consume a sizeable percentage of rice production. From an earlier story [1]:

  The next call came from Australia in 2006. Biologists there
  wanted an adaptation of Mouseopause for rats. Rats, they told 
  her, were eating 30% of the rice crop in Australia and 
  Indonesia. If she could reduce the rat population by even half, 
  they claimed, the crops that would be saved could feed millions 
  of people.

[1] Man v rat: could the long war soon be over? (theguardian.com), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12542718

Agricultural output is always variable. The world needs more storage capacity [2], and to better support small farmers. There's the ancient parable about "seven years of abundance" preceding "seven years of famine". Only "old" grain should be fed to animals.

For the most part, genetic engineering has been used to sell pesticides. While this C3->C4 innovation might not be as harmful as Monsanto's, it would be better to deal with our other agricultural problems too. Getting rats' numbers under control, and other low-tech investments (such as was undertaken in Thailand starting in the 1960's [3]), would be just as effective as throwing new seeds at farmers...

Haiti demonstrates that politics is the most important factor for determining agricultural output. [4]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_silo [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_production_in_Thailand [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12531999 - "Why Are Haiti's Coffee Trees So Tall?"

> You won't drink it and say "Hey, this tastes just like Coke!"

The Coca-Cola company has a monopoly on coca leaf extract [1], so nothing tastes 'just like a Coke'. ;)

[1] https://mises.org/blog/coca-cola-cronyism-and-war-drugs

I was convinced by the advocates for Omega 3's. Then my dogs destroyed my cofffee grinder (used to make flax seed meal), I realized that I'd never noticed a benefit, and stopped.

The modern diet is overloaded with Soybean Oil, an oil which should only be used as biodiesel. It takes years of a low-PUFA diet to obtain all the benefits. Some degree of temporary relief may be provided by Omega-3 supplementation, but this intervention doesn't address the cause of any condition.

A Wall Street Journal article [1] says that the active chemical is "4-vinylcyclohexene diepoxide" (probably a typo [2]).

My mom lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where this company is located. She and her husband had an opportunity to invest in this company, and are hoping the product takes off. They'd like a condo in Phoenix, to get away from the winter snow.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023045125045794940...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinylcyclohexene_dioxide

> Typing "?" randomly in gmail will let you know what shortcuts are there. It takes time for your fingers to learn them, but scanning email with j k [...]

really? Oh wow... I've used j and k for ages, but didn't know about this pop-up. Thanks!

> No one has yet shown that there is a better way of doing this than the current system, sadly, without expending a lot more focused resource than people are politically willing to exert.

John Holt wrote "how children fail" and "how children learn" at least 40 years ago. John Gatto wrote "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" 25 years ago.

The education problem is very well defined, but it can't be fixed or addressed because of inertia, and because of who benefits from the status quo.

The Freakout is engineered to get people to support taxes on "carbon". It would be much more effective to ignore the existing industries and work on making them obsolete.

Firefly Energy [1] came up with a good-enough Lead Acid battery - "the energy of NiMH, for the cost of lead", fully recyclable with existing infrastructure, etc. Their batteries would have been perfectly useful for low-range electric vehicles like Postal delivery trucks (20-miles/day) and home energy storage (solar panels, shifting power use to off-peak, etc).

But they ramped up for production in the midst of the housing collapse (2006-ish?), and ran out of money. The government only gave money to "advanced chemistry" battery technologies. Firefly Energy had to declare bankruptcy, last I read an Indian company bought the IP... and it's gone nowhere.

[1] http://fireflyenergy.com/

> CO2 is something we can control. If it isn't the whole answer, then we're screwed anyway.

A friend has told me of the 'Maunder minimum' [2] phenomenon, and that our Sun might be preparing to reduce its output for 30-45 years. If that happens, all efforts to suppress CO2 will be for naught.

It is better to focus on the desired outcome than on the present problem.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum

> [...] but if that's the case, what's the downside? We get clean air, more sustainable power sources, etc. There's very little reason not to push for better climate regulations.

Efforts should be entirely focused on making "carbon" energy sources obsolete. Making energy more expensive for poor people is a counter-productive endeavor, and doesn't fix the problem.

Improved super-capacitors and breakthrough cheap energy storage technologies would be good enough to begin to phase out the current energy status-quo. Eventually someone will certainly come up with a breakthrough technology that will destroy the current energy paradigm.

> If they were heating the oceans in a meaningful way compared to the sun, such a gradient would be apparent at tens and hundreds of kilometers.

I think the El Niño / La Niña oscillation is probably caused by cycles in underwater volcanic activity. Wikipedia says "Mechanisms that cause the oscillation remain under study."

The political machine has been working on The Great Climate Freakout for a while now. But there's a lot of missing data. For example, there is no data whatsoever about how much heat is poured out by most of the oceans' volcanic ridges, and only 1-2 years of data for the Juan de Fuca ridge. We also have no idea how the Sun's output cycles over thousands of years.

When a person has no data, they have to make assumptions. Good science is not based on assumptions.

The climate brouhaha is a good example of confirmation bias/echo chamber effects:

"But the problem with this, otherwise natural course of action, is that it ends up creating an echo chamber of like minds, and their zombies. It ends up killing, at least within that network, dissenting views. Ultimately, what will be accepted as truth within that small network may not necessarily be the plain truth, but a relative truth. For those living within the confines of the echo chamber however, this relative truth, which to some may even be a plain lie, will be the unvarnished truth. That, is called confirmation bias. And that, is what led to that fan protest, which made some Arsenal fans the laughing stock of the world on a frosty spring day in 2016."

- Echo chambers and confirmation bias, https://medium.com/@chxta/echo-chambers-and-confirmation-bia...

It's like how Ancel Keys engineered The Great Saturated Fat Freakout in the 1950's. There was no basis to his claims that dietary saturated fat was a great villain that needed to be avoided at all costs, but the Machine picked up his theory and ran with it. Saturated fats have now been vindicated of the charges leveled against them, but most of the 'experts' are still confused.

There is no holy grail, there is only basic physiology.

What metformin actually does is interfere with the liver's ability to make glucose from non-carbohydrate substrates ("hepatic gluconeogenesis"). Glucose is critically important for healthy people to have in circulation.

Instead of poisoning our liver's ability to make glucose between meals, it would be better to think about why the body has lost its ability to properly regulate blood glucose levels.

Get an inflatable ball chair; alternate with standing. Office chairs cultivate poor posture, and should be avoided.

There is less than a year of data about the amount of energy put into the ocean by the Juan de Fuca ridge [1], and only classified data about other oceanic volcanic hotspots (this was collected by the navy's submarines). I think the certainty expressed by advocates for anthropogenic climate change is not justified.

[1] http://nytimes.com/2016/01/12/science/midocean-ridges-volcan...

Cattle can be used to restore grasslands [1].

[1] https://psmag.com/conservation-in-the-age-of-climate-change-...

Milk cows are the most efficient means of converting a rocky hillside into human-consumable proteins.

> It would be so cool to have a high tax on sugar (and saturated fat).

... Except that saturated fat has been exonerated of the charges leveled against it by the charlatans. Now the experts acknowledge that hydrogenated vegetable oils (trans-fats) are different than naturally-saturated fats. It is convenient for their business models to allow people to continue thinking that the drying oils (which react spontaneously with oxygen to form a hard film) are safe to eat.

That's a good point, but it's probably the organic acids rather than the salt (which the media report you've linked to blames). Bacteria which produce lactic acid are primarily used for traditional fermentation, I think, whereas distilled vinegar is made from ethanol by bacteria that produce acetic acid...

Hmm:

"Compared to acetic acid, [lactic acid's] pKa is 1 unit less, meaning lactic acid deprotonates ten times more easily than acetic acid does. This higher acidity is the consequence of the intramolecular hydrogen bonding between the α-hydroxyl and the carboxylate group." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid (emphasis added)

My ex-wife noticed that lots of people search for "how do I get high", so she added the domain [1] to her portfolio. Years later I realized the answer to the question was fairly simple. People don't really care about getting high, they just want to feel better.

[1] http://howdoigethigh.com/

> I've heard recently that the causality for heart disease actually goes the opposite way than everyone assumed.

This "Assumption" would be a good case study of the infection of common knowledge with charlatanism.

Better scientists than Ancel Keys already knew that polyunsaturated oils were not appropriate for human consumption. Soybean oil and Linseed oil were used to make paint & stain, because they're good 'drying oils'.

But Dr. Key's theory was picked up by the mass media and used to demonize butter, and to promote garbage like "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter"...

People are easy to swindle.

> 2. Getting a hit product isn't easy. Mostly it seems to be luck.

One weekend I had a surge traffic to my website. Then the orders started coming in. Finally I emailed one of the new subscribers to my email list to ask why scores of people had suddenly started searching for that term. She said a radio show host had told his listeners to go to google and search for that term.

Agree with your points about working locally. Arizona Archery's main business is injection molding; they take care of most of the my machining. Maybe I'll come see you some time.

Johann Hari wrote an excellent book [1] about how the bad plants came to be demonized and persecuted. Yes, Cocaine and heroin cause problems for people, but does that justify turning addicts' supply chains over to organized crime? Would it not be better to make sure that people who've decided to use the bad plants at least get what they're paying for?

[1] http://www.chasingthescream.com/

I've read speculation that chickenpox is a seasonal disease, and that one difference between severe cases and mild cases is the child's vitamin D level.

It is unfortunate that children are now commonly vaccinated against chickenpox. This is a weakling virus that barely kills anyone, and more good could be done by figuring out factors that help children have a mild case.

> Banning or further restricting [...] the best solutions we have doesn't sound like something I would support.

The solutions offered by the medical profession are far from the best solutions we have, they're what are profitable for the medical-industrial establishment to offer.

When children are put in unnatural environments that are totally incompatible with the way children's minds actually work, they will not do well. Children should be actively learning, but school puts them in desks.

I could have been diagnosed as ADHD in college. This was not a biological problem, but that I didn't care about my classes. Stimulants might have helped me focus better, but ... why?

Robert Whitaker [1], author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, has looked into these matters, and concluded that the medications make people's conditions worse.

[1] http://www.madinamerica.com/

I wonder how humanity ever got anything done, before we had stimulants to treat our ADHD.