Randomness thread, part two.

[philly and the phanatics]

idk some people on facebook were like ZOMG BANNED COMMERCIAL

so just clarifying for anyone who was unsure...

[Lukie]

warm-hot summer day(s):

what is a reasonable range to set the AC at?

what do you typically set it at?

[UG]

I want 72, wife wants 76, compromise at 74. Not ideal but it's a nice temperature. Every now and again she'll move it to 75 or 76 to mess with me, to see if I notice--I always do. We have a shitty/old AC that runs all the time so our bills usually run higher than most people's, but whatever. The wife complains about this and I respond with, "Look, we both work for a living and make enough money that I shouldn't have to SWEAT in my own GODDAMN HOUSE."

[bikes]

I keep my room in thailand at 74 and I'm constantly reminded it's the like the damn artic in here if airconditioning in this country wasn't so f shitty and expensive to run my room would be set at 70 and it would never leave this temp. some articles ive read suggest optimal room temp is between 69 and 72 but who knows if thats correct.

also lol @ how instantly every dad knows when the thermostat has been touched.

[BooG690]

69

[eugmac]

Just a random rant.

so my 2007 macbook started having screen problems due to a dying backlight (inverter problem?) and can't be bothered really to fix it, so bought an HP DM1Z from the HP website direct. Basically a higher-end netbook with the AMD Zacate APU. I luled at the thought of paying a thousand euros for another macbook to be honest - I discovered today that they axed the white Macbook a couple days ago, so that their "base" laptop is the Macbook Air 11 incher. My thing cost 379 Euros (less than an iPad), MBA costs 949 Euros.

The base model Air has maybe the following advantages:
-Probably better graphics due to a discrete graphics processor (I think?)
-Lighter, smaller, sexier (the HP weighs like 38% more)
-A Thunderbolt port
-Better trackpad

Disadvantages:
-Less RAM (2gb vs the 4gb i got on the HP)
-No built-in Ethernet (Adapter costs 30 bucks extra)
-Costs 150% more.

Neutral:
- 64GB SSD on Air, 500GB 7200RPM HDD on the DM1. Speed vs capacity.
- OS X vs Win7, who cares, OS X getting lamer, each update more boring
- Battery life comparable

Am I missing something in failing to comprehend the 150% price difference between the two devices which are designed to do the same sort of tasks?

[wufwugy]

[JL]

warm-hot summer day(s):

what is a reasonable range to set the AC at?

what do you typically set it at?

22

[a500lbgorilla]

The onion just doesn't know how to fail.

Last Male Heir To Bloodline Watches Movie Alone On Laptop | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

[Galapogos]

On the subject of a/c. What do you guys' electrical bills run up to when you start running it in the hot season?

I just got an insane bill of $200 for the past month and I run mine at 76 and it wasn't nearly that expensive last year. Plus I just installed a new one. I have tenants but they don't have a mini grow-op or anything. What else could cause that spike though?

[bode]

i run mine at 70. the downstairs stays cool, but even at that temp the upstairs is probably at like 74-75 most of the time.

[boost]

A/C is for the weak.

[Shotglass]

A/C is for the weak.

Move from that great frozen north city to down here (Houston) and tell me that again.

[Jack Sawyer]

WALL OF TEXT

Vitamin D, produced when skin is exposed to light, is essential for our bodies. Unfortunately, modern lifestyles have minimized our time we spend under the sun. The Sun's Heartbeat explains why a tan isn't as bad as previously thought.

The first scenes in one Sun-tragedy unfolded long before there were written records of any kind. Spurred by events we can only guess at, a human exodus began 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, when our ancestors migrated away from the tropics and the equatorial region's strong sunlight. Immediately, people developed vitamin D deficiencies.
Our bodies make vitamin D when our skin is struck by the Sun's ultraviolet rays. Because UV intensity declines dramatically with lower Sun angles, people in temperate regions, and especially those in even higher latitudes, receive as little as 10 percent of the UV experienced by those near the equator. As our ancestors migrating north developed vitamin D deficiencies, the results were swift and brutal. They were removed from the breeding pool by a cruel Darwinian process: the fetus inside a woman with rickets (a disease resulting from low vitamin D) is unable to emerge from her body, and both die in childbirth.

Within just a few thousand years, natural selection had turned some people's skin white, and they were now able to manufacture ample vitamin D even from the reduced Sun intensity of the higher latitudes. (Dark skin color, called melanin, is a sunblock, needed because naked bodies near the equator can suffer from too much ultraviolet exposure.) In North America and northern Europe, the climate is sufficiently warm that their skin was almost fully exposed for more than half the year, and their bodies stored vitamin D in the muscle and fat. A new balance had been restored.

But starting a century ago, everything changed. First, the United States and Europe went from a mostly outdoors agrarian society to a mostly indoors manufacturing one. Then people started driving around in vehicles surrounded by windows. Glass prevents any vitamin D production because it blocks the Sun's UV. When air-conditioning became widely available starting in the late 1950s and then got cheaper in the 1970s, people stopped keeping their windows open. Fixed- pane units became increasingly popular. The only sunlight that reached us in our homes and workplaces came through UV-stopping glass.

The last straw was sunblock. It did not even exist until thirty years ago. The initial UV- reducing creams, which cut exposure only in half, were marketed in the 1950s to promote tanning, not totally screen out ultraviolet rays. Then, in the 1980s, a new product came on the market: sunblock. With SPF (sun protection factor) numbers such as 30 and 45, sunblock essentially stops the body's vitamin D production cold. At the same time, people were advised to cover themselves with these lotions throughout the summer months. Even the medical establishment urged hiding from the Sun as a way to counter skin cancer.

The metamorphosis was complete: we had become like the Morlocks in H. G. Wells's book The Time Machine, shielded almost totally from sunlight's UV.

Enter modern vitamin D researchers such as John Cannell, MD, executive director of the Vitamin D Council, a nonprofit educational corporation that believes that "many humans are needlessly suffering and dying from Vitamin D Deficiency." Cannell is no ordinary medical doctor. He's no ordinary researcher either. He is a proselytizer, the first in the theater to shout "Fire!" when the smoke appears, while there's still time to get out. And these days, he's very, very passionate. He believes that human beings have unwittingly transformed themselves into something uniquely and self- destructively unnatural.

"We are the first society of cave people," he lamented to me in 2010. "In the development process of creating the skin, nature never dreamed that we'd deliberately avoid the Sun so thoroughly."

What Cannell and a growing legion of researchers are decrying are the past three decades of newspaper and TV scare stories that have made the public afraid of the Sun. The consequence, they believe, is that our blood's natural vitamin D levels are just a tiny fraction of what nature intended. And this is producing an avalanche of horrible consequences that include vastly increased rates of cancer.

That vitamin D is super-important is no longer in doubt. It has become the new needed supplement, recommended increasingly by family doctors and the popular media alike. The March 2010 Reader's Digest calls vitamins in general "a scam" and urges people to take no daily supplements whatsoever - with the single exception of 1,000 international units (IU) of vitamin D3, the form most recommended as a supplement.

This sudden interest has been sparked by a spate of studies strongly indicating that vitamin D is the most powerful anticancer agent ever known. Robert Heaney, MD, of Creighton University, a vitamin D researcher, points to thirty- two randomized trials, the majority of which were strongly positive. For example, in a big study of women whose average age was sixty-two, subjects who were given a large daily vitamin D supplement enjoyed a whopping 60 percent reduction in all kinds of cancers after just four years of treatment compared to a control group.

The skeptical might well wonder how, when cancer typically takes decades to develop, such a huge drop can be detected after just a few years. Heaney believes it's because vitamin D prevents tiny predetectable tumors from growing or spreading. "That's the kind of cancer I'd want to have - one that never grows," he told me in June 2010.

The Canadian Cancer Society raised its vitamin D intake recommendations to 1,000 IU daily in 2009. But Cannell, Heaney, and others think that even this is still way too low.

"I went to a conference and asked all the researchers what they themselves take daily and give to their families," Heaney said. "The average was 5,500 IU daily. There is certainly no danger in doing this, since toxicity cannot arise in under 30,000 IU a day."

Why is this vitamin D craze happening now? It sounds suspiciously familiar - like the antioxidant craze of the 1990s, when everyone was gobbling vitamin E to guard against "free radicals." Or the Linus Pauling– led vitamin C frenzy of the 1970s. Recent studies have shown that all those vitamins have no effect on mortality whatsoever. Indeed, a multivitamin a day now seems to be no better for your health than gobbling a daily Hostess Twinkie. Perhaps our bodies were not designed to get flooded with vitamins. Or maybe the couple of dozen known minerals and vitamins are only the tip of the health iceberg, and what's important are hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of trace substances of which we are not yet even aware.

Yet it is here, in a discussion of the natural environment in which our bodies were fashioned, that vitamin D makes so much sense. After all, our bodies create it naturally out of the Sun's ultraviolet rays.

Spending just ten minutes in strong sunlight - the kind you get from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM between April and August - will allow your body to make as much vitamin D as you would get from drinking two hundred glasses of milk. This is astonishing. Asks John Cannell rhetorically, "Why does nature do this so quickly? Nature normally doesn't do this kind of thing."

The implied answer, of course, is that we were designed to have a high and steady level of this vitamin in our bodies. Yet as more and more people are tested, researchers are finding serious vitamin D deficiencies in virtually all of the population of the United States, Canada, and northern Europe. The reason? According to Cannell and the other doctors on the Vitamin D Council, we have been hiding from the Sun for decades.

The results may be even worse than we realize. Many researchers now fear that the explosive increase in autism is a result of pregnant mothers having close to no vitamin D in their bodies and then young babies and infants being similarly shielded from the Sun. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says that virtually no infants are getting enough vitamin D. The inadequacy figures, even using the CDC's pre-2011 lower recommendations of what they thought the body should have, was that 90 percent of infants are deficient.

According to Cannell, the highest autism rates occur in areas that have the most clouds and rain, and hence the lowest blood levels of vitamin D. A Swedish study has strongly linked sunlight deprivation with autism. Moreover, blacks, whose vitamin D levels are half those found in whites living at the same latitudes, have twice the autism rates. Conversely, autism is virtually unknown in places such as sunny Somalia, where most people still spend most of their time outdoors. Yet another piece of anecdotal evidence is that autism is one of the very few afflictions that occur at higher rates among the wealthier and more educated - exactly the people most likely to be diligent about sunscreen and more inclined to keep their children indoors.

As we saw in assessing links between earthly events and sunspot fluctuations, it's perilous to assign connections too quickly, and autism in particular is a can of worms. Nonetheless, these early threads should set off alarms: it might be wise for pregnant women and mothers of small children to immediately start exposing themselves and their kids to more sunlight.

When Cannell was in medical school in 1973, he was taught that human breast milk contains little or no vitamin D. "This didn't make sense," he said during a phone conversation with me in 2011. "Why would nature ever deprive a nursing infant of this vital substance?" Then it came to him: "When pregnant women start taking 5,000 international units of vitamin D daily, their milk soon contains enough vitamin D for a breast-feeding baby. So there's the key to how much a woman should naturally be getting every day."

In contrast to all this, and to the great annoyance of physicians and researchers on the Vitamin D Council, the FDA continued to advise only 400 IU of D3 daily as of early 2011. The agency officially regards most vitamin D studies as "incomplete" or "contradictory" and clearly has taken a cautious, go-slow approach.

In November 2010, the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine issued its first new recommendations about the vitamin since 1997, and many people were disappointed. The institute did boost its recommended daily amounts to 400 IU for infants, 600 IU for most adults, and 800 IU for those over age seventy. It also said there was no harm in taking up to 10,000 IU daily, although it conservatively adopted 4,000 IU as the official recommended upper limit.

According to Cannell, the new recommendations are still "irrelevant dosages." Michael Holick, MD, of Boston University, another vitamin researcher, agreed, saying that he personally takes 3,000 IU daily.

Cannell told me that the National Academy of Sciences report was a "scandal" and that four physicians had disgustedly resigned from the committee that put out the paper. "Commonsense aspects are totally lacking," he said. "For example, they urge infants to get 400 IU daily, but adults just 600 IU. Yet this vitamin is distributed in muscle and fat. The more you weigh, the more you should be getting. It doesn't make sense."

"Listen," he added, "everyone knows that there is an explosion of childhood cases of autism, asthma, and autoimmune disease. It all began when we took our children out of the Sun. Starting twenty-five years ago, a perfect storm of three events has changed how much sunlight children get. First came the scare of childhood sexual predators in the early eighties, then the fear of skin cancer, and finally the Nintendo and video game craze. Nowadays, kids do not play outdoors. Playgrounds are empty. You're a bad mother if you let your child run around. And it's almost a social services offense if your kid gets a sunburn. Never before have children's brains had to develop in the absence of vitamin D."

Since this is not a medical book, I can only pass on the recommendations of those in the forefront of vitamin D research. Their best advice is to go in the Sun regularly without burning. Wear as little clothing as you can. You know how much Sun you can han-dle without turning red. Unless you have a very light complexion and blond or red hair, you should be able to expose yourself safely to ten to twenty minutes of strong sunlight at a time. Lie out in the Sun in shorts for five to ten minutes on each side. The key to UV intensity is Sun height. If your shadow is shorter than you are, your body will produce a good amount of vitamin D.

After experiencing twenty minutes of unprotected midday Sun from May to July, or a full hour or more during March, early April, and late August through October, you can certainly use sunblock. The experts say to buy the kind whose active ingredient is either zinc or titanium oxide. Most other kinds will be absorbed by the skin, then enter the bloodstream and circulate. "You might as well drink the stuff," Cannell says disdainfully.

During the low-Sun winter months, you need to spend much more time sunbathing and probably take a vitamin D supplement. The experts are currently urging 2,000 to 3,000 IU daily.

Why not skip the Sun altogether and just pop the pills year- round? Some doctors, including those responsible for the 2010 National Academy of Sciences report, suggest doing exactly that. They figure that you can have it all - nice, high vitamin D serum levels plus no UV exposure, with its skin cancer risk. But others believe that's a bad idea. "Some of my colleagues think D3 supplements are enough," Cannell says. "But that supposes we know everything. I suspect that we do not know everything. Natural sunlight has to be the preferred route whenever possible."

Everyone should use solar power wisely and not go totally bonkers. There's no need to fry. But whatever extra skin cancer risk we might assume certainly seems to me to be a reasonable price to pay, considering the benefits. It now appears that adequate sunlight- mediated vitamin D might prevent as many as 150,000 cancer deaths a year in the United States alone and also reduce infections, bone problems, and perhaps, though more science is needed, even autism and asthma rates. Of course, on the other side of the balance beam, melanoma causes 8,500 US deaths a year. Every activity from bicycle riding to barroom brawling involves some balancing of risks, and the decision of what trade- offs to make is, of course, yours alone.

Tomorrow is a new day. As the Sun rises, its orange beams will cast magical rays in the morning mist. Is the Sun our enemy or our friend? Will it take our life or save it?

TL;DR

Go outside more when the sun is up.

[wufwugy]

It's probably smarter to supplement because then you know exactly what you're getting without sides. I wouldn't be surprised if it would take black people hours of sunlight to get the vit D. The whole reason white people evolved to be white is because the north gets such little sun and they needed to be able to absorb the rays much more quickly than darker skin

[Jack Sawyer]

It's probably smarter to supplement because then you know exactly what you're getting without sides. I wouldn't be surprised if it would take black people hours of sunlight to get the vit D. The whole reason white people evolved to be white is because the north gets such little sun and they needed to be able to absorb the rays much more quickly than darker skin

I thought that would be obvious, but yes.


*edit* mentioned in 2nd paragraph

[wufwugy]

Anti-gay men want less gay men which means they want more straight men which means they want more competition for pussy among men which means they want less pussy for themselves which means they are in fact gay

Beat that bulletproof logic

[Luco]

Starting twenty-five years ago, a perfect storm of three events has changed how much sunlight children get. First came the scare of childhood sexual predators in the early eighties, then the fear of skin cancer, and finally the Nintendo and video game craze. Nowadays, kids do not play outdoors.

So now nintendo causes autism? Is there anything you can't blame video games for?

[bigred]

Found a new site for TEH funnies

XKCDB: The #xkcd Quote Database

Example:

Glench: as the temperature of lesbians approaches absolute zero, they cease to exist
Glench: let me demonstrate
Glench: here we have a google search for hot lesbians
Glench: "hot lesbians" - Google Search
Glench: ~1.4 million results
Glench: cool lesbians: "cool lesbians" - Google Search
Glench: 2,500 results
Glench: "cold lesbians" - Google Search
Kasu: Glench: It's scientific!
Glench: 321 results
Glench: for cold lesbians
lapilofu: did you try warm?
Glench: "absolute zero lesbians" - Google Search
Glench: 0 results
Glench: theory: PROVEN
TwoDaemon: ... that is simultaneously so logical and so awesomely retarded.

[Luco]

...bash.org resurrected?

[bigred]

Kinda sorta

[Luco]

Plenty of lulz there, nice find

[bode]

good article jack

[rong]

good article jack

+1

[Lukie]

+2

I've been telling friends/family for a while now that they need to get outside more and not be afraid of getting some sunlight and that sunblock is generally a waste at best. It typically falls on deaf ears.

Of course there is a limit there; for those with fair skin who are outside for extended periods of time it is useful. Sun burns can be serious.

[wufwugy]

+2

I've been telling friends/family for a while now that they need to get outside more and not be afraid of getting some sunlight and that sunblock is generally a waste at best. It typically falls on deaf ears.

Of course there is a limit there; for those with fair skin who are outside for extended periods of time it is useful. Sun burns can be serious.

Like me. My skin is so white it's actually been a big detriment to my enjoyment of life. Ever since a kid, I didn't spend much time outside in the sun because I would either get horrible buns with the quickness, or have to lather up with lotion beforehand. It became easier to just avoid going outside, but that's a pretty bad solution to the problem

[Lukie]

The sunlight/vitamin D thing kind of ties into a trend that I've noticed for a while as well.. that many people are so brainwashed into things as it relates to health and nutrition that many people try so hard to go out of their way to avoid doing perfectly normal things. Or, in other cases, force themselves to do completely unnatural things.

examples off the top of my head:

Forced 6 meals a day, often with a mathematical exacting approach to macronutrients. I wonder how Mr. and Mrs. Ancestor got along without timed feedings every 2.5 hours.

Excessive water consumption. Water is good; drinking so much that you're peeing every hour, throwing electrolyte balance completely out of whack, and waking up twice a night to take a piss isn't. Contrary to what has been put out there, thirst actually is a relatively good guide for water consumption. It's almost as if the body has a perfectly acceptable mechanism to tell you when it needs water that has been calibrated for x thousands of years. As well, the body has a reservoir of water (say half a gallon for men, give or take) just to get started with intraday swings.

Breakfast.. don't even get me started. A breakfast of toast, orange juice, milk, and 10 servings of cereal (the serving sizes on the box are ridiculous) probably would be considered healthy and perhaps ideal by most people. Yet outside of endurance athletes who really needs all those carbs? And don't take this as me being low-carb fanatic because I'm generally not.

etc etc. could come up with a dozen more similar examples..

[Lukie]

Like me. My skin is so white it's actually been a big detriment to my enjoyment of life. Ever since a kid, I didn't spend much time outside in the sun because I would either get horrible buns with the quickness, or have to lather up with lotion beforehand. It became easier to just avoid going outside, but that's a pretty bad solution to the problem

The current recommendations are probably about ideal for you. Sunblock, hat, sunglasses, light loose clothing and such

also 1 more:

Over the years when working out I've transitioned from a bodypart split, to slightly less offending bodypart splits, to lower/upper, and as of very recently, full body. I think you called this about 4 years ago

edit: to how it ties in, I think full body or at least close (e.g. lower/upper) is a much more natural (and effective) stress on the body.

[Lukie]

Hopefully this is the right one. It has been a while since I read it. Re: thirst:

http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB...ame=322697.pdf

[wufwugy]

That's cool. My personal favorite is one lift a day. This works well if you find yourself in the gym daily and you know what you're doing. It allows you pick which movement and intensity you feel your body most wants each day. Some days would be a big heavy movement, other days might just be rocking the curls. It's extra cool and more interesting when you implement as much variety as you can. I started doing that when I exercised and researched so much that I knew exactly what my body wanted, so I stopped even structuring programs because going on feel was optimal enough. It also allows you to fucking focus; when you know you're doing bench press and only bench press, you can give it exactly what it needs instead of dreading the next 45 minutes of several more lifts you have to get to

That's the final evolution of training IMO. An example: I claim that Charile Francis is one of the greatest athletic trainers in history, and he always said that his athlete's programs were entirely dependent on how their bodies felt. If they came in for a scheduled hard day, but weren't feeling or performing well, they changed it to a light day or a technique day or something

[boost]

Eric, I generally agree with the sentiment of your post, but I would just like to point out the flaw in the logic that "our ancestors X thousands of years ago didn't do Y." Well, the life expectancy of our ancestors born just a few centuries ago was dramatically lower than our current life expectancy, not to mention the life expectancy of those who lived thousands or tens of thousands of years ago.

Sure, less than a century ago, Americans consumed alarming qualities of bacon... but after their Grand Slam™ breakfast, they went out and worked in the fields or chopped trees for 12 hours. So it seems clear, as our society's advances and shifts happen at accelerating rates, we will find that dietary guidelines extrapolated from our ancestors lifestyles are less useful with each passing day.

[wufwugy]

The sunlight/vitamin D thing kind of ties into a trend that I've noticed for a while as well.. that many people are so brainwashed into things as it relates to health and nutrition that many people try so hard to go out of their way to avoid doing perfectly normal things. Or, in other cases, force themselves to do completely unnatural things.

examples off the top of my head:

Forced 6 meals a day, often with a mathematical exacting approach to macronutrients. I wonder how Mr. and Mrs. Ancestor got along without timed feedings every 2.5 hours.

Excessive water consumption. Water is good; drinking so much that you're peeing every hour, throwing electrolyte balance completely out of whack, and waking up twice a night to take a piss isn't. Contrary to what has been put out there, thirst actually is a relatively good guide for water consumption. It's almost as if the body has a perfectly acceptable mechanism to tell you when it needs water that has been calibrated for x thousands of years. As well, the body has a reservoir of water (say half a gallon for men, give or take) just to get started with intraday swings.

Breakfast.. don't even get me started. A breakfast of toast, orange juice, milk, and 10 servings of cereal (the serving sizes on the box are ridiculous) probably would be considered healthy and perhaps ideal by most people. Yet outside of endurance athletes who really needs all those carbs? And don't take this as me being low-carb fanatic because I'm generally not.

etc etc. could come up with a dozen more similar examples..

Yeah I think high carb diets are responsible for more problems than people think. Even myself, I think I've discovered that my back pain may be due to over consumption of grains. I know nothing of how it works, but malnutrition, hormonal spikes, diseases like diabetes, and possibly even many mental disorders can be attributed to overconsumption of carbs or perhaps certain carb sources like mass grains or sugars

It's very very tough in this nation though because you kinda gotta be made of money to eat healthy. A "cheap" meal of stir fried meat and veggies is quite a bit more expensive than say hotdogs.

Another thing is that vegetable oils could be a disaster. I haven't researched this in the slightest so I don't know, but I've heard tell from a source that *could* be reliable that exchanging animal fats for vegetable oils correlates with a host of health problems

[wufwugy]

Eric, I generally agree with the sentiment of your post, but I would just like to point out the flaw in the logic that "our ancestors X thousands of years ago didn't do Y." Well, the life expectancy of our ancestors born just a few centuries ago was dramatically lower than our current life expectancy, not to mention the life expectancy of those who lived thousands or tens of thousands of years ago.

Sure, less than a century ago, Americans consumed alarming qualities of bacon... but after their Grand Slam™ breakfast, they went out and worked in the fields or chopped trees for 12 hours. So it seems clear, as our society's advances and shifts happen at accelerating rates, we will find that dietary guidelines extrapolated from our ancestors lifestyles are less useful with each passing day.

The "less usefulness" is very small though. There's not much 30k years of post-grain agriculture can do to change human evolution. We're still like 99.999% biologically the same as hunter/gatherers

[Lukie]

Eric, I generally agree with the sentiment of your post, but I would just like to point out the flaw in the logic that "our ancestors X thousands of years ago didn't do Y." Well, the life expectancy of our ancestors born just a few centuries ago was dramatically lower than our current life expectancy, not to mention the life expectancy of those who lived thousands or tens of thousands of years ago.

Yes, I realize I'm walking a pretty fine line there and wasn't really directly addressing life expectancy but I'll add a couple things:

Increased life expectancy in recent years is mostly due to medical advancements and specifically a decrease in infant and child mortality.

What specifically in my posts would lead one to a lower life expectancy? If anything I would argue the opposite, e.g. intermittent fasting (think, reduced meal frequency) has been shown to have life extension properties. Massive carbohydrate overconsumption comes with a host of problems, as Wuf alluded to.

Sure, less than a century ago, Americans consumed alarming qualities of bacon... but after their Grand Slam™ breakfast, they went out and worked in the fields or chopped trees for 12 hours. So it seems clear, as our society's advances and shifts happen at accelerating rates, we will find that dietary guidelines extrapolated from our ancestors lifestyles are less useful with each passing day.

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say.

To add a few more things:

I'm not a strict paleo guy. I think some of the stuff is useful, some not, blah blah blah, but my overriding point was this:

Given the choice between a massively artificial construct of diet or health or whatever, or using the more natural/normal one, I'm typically siding with the 2nd choice.

Also, as activity levels drop (and they continue to drop), I'd argue that emphasis on proper nutrition becomes even more important. But again I'm not really sure what you are trying to say above.

[Lukie]

The "less usefulness" is very small though. There's not much 30k years of post-grain agriculture can do to change human evolution. We're still like 99.999% biologically the same as hunter/gatherers

maybe, maybe not

It's a pretty complex topic and one of the biggest issues is that nobody really knows who ate what, and when. As well there has been fossilized evidence of grain consumption going back something like 100k years, and even ~10k years is significant. That is hundreds of generations. Consider me on the fence I suppose

More relevantly, 30 years clearly isn't enough time for modern society to adapt to the myriad of processed garbage that most people live on.

[Lukie]

Yeah I think high carb diets are responsible for more problems than people think. Even myself, I think I've discovered that my back pain may be due to over consumption of grains. I know nothing of how it works, but malnutrition, hormonal spikes, diseases like diabetes, and possibly even many mental disorders can be attributed to overconsumption of carbs or perhaps certain carb sources like mass grains or sugars

Absolutely

And I think part of the problem is that people seem to gravitate to extremes and pointing out the folly in one approach doesn't necessarily mean you endorse the opposite extreme.

It's very very tough in this nation though because you kinda gotta be made of money to eat healthy. A "cheap" meal of stir fried meat and veggies is quite a bit more expensive than say hotdogs.

Another thing is that vegetable oils could be a disaster. I haven't researched this in the slightest so I don't know, but I've heard tell from a source that *could* be reliable that exchanging animal fats for vegetable oils correlates with a host of health problems

yes, it can be a big problem.

It's not so much the oils it's how they are processed and used (i.e. high heat). Which is why for cooking it's probably best to use butter or coconut oil (saturated fats being more stable) as opposed to stuff like canola oil or soybean oil. Olive oil is good but it must be COLD-PRESSED fresh virgin olive oil cooked under lower heat or used as a salad dressing.

that's the gist of it anyway.

[Lukie]

That's cool. My personal favorite is one lift a day. This works well if you find yourself in the gym daily and you know what you're doing. It allows you pick which movement and intensity you feel your body most wants each day. Some days would be a big heavy movement, other days might just be rocking the curls. It's extra cool and more interesting when you implement as much variety as you can. I started doing that when I exercised and researched so much that I knew exactly what my body wanted, so I stopped even structuring programs because going on feel was optimal enough. It also allows you to fucking focus; when you know you're doing bench press and only bench press, you can give it exactly what it needs instead of dreading the next 45 minutes of several more lifts you have to get to

That's the final evolution of training IMO. An example: I claim that Charile Francis is one of the greatest athletic trainers in history, and he always said that his athlete's programs were entirely dependent on how their bodies felt. If they came in for a scheduled hard day, but weren't feeling or performing well, they changed it to a light day or a technique day or something

Yeah I had read about one lift a day a while back. Some of Dan John's stuff ingrigues me.

And I would love to experiment with a routine like that but it's not practical for me right now due to logistical reasons. Maybe sometime in the future...

[boost]

Yes, I realize I'm walking a pretty fine line there and wasn't really directly addressing life expectancy but I'll add a couple things:

Increased life expectancy in recent years is mostly due to medical advancements and specifically a decrease in infant and child mortality.

What specifically in my posts would lead one to a lower life expectancy? If anything I would argue the opposite, e.g. intermittent fasting (think, reduced meal frequency) has been shown to have life extension properties. Massive carbohydrate overconsumption comes with a host of problems, as Wuf alluded to.

From what I understand infant mortality rates in ancient humans drop life expectancy rates down really low, however, even when you isolate those who have made it to adolescence, the life expectancy rates are still less than half that of modern man.

But ya, I mean, I wasn't really trying to discount what you had said, I just saw that you were using ancient man as a model, and while our genetics are nearly identical, our lifestyles are drastically different. So I just mean to offer a caveat, maybe not so much to you, but just a general "careful with that logic!" warning to everyone.

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say.

To add a few more things:

I'm not a strict paleo guy. I think some of the stuff is useful, some not, blah blah blah, but my overriding point was this:

Given the choice between a massively artificial construct of diet or health or whatever, or using the more natural/normal one, I'm typically siding with the 2nd choice.

Also, as activity levels drop (and they continue to drop), I'd argue that emphasis on proper nutrition becomes even more important. But again I'm not really sure what you are trying to say above.

qualities should have been quantities.. not sure if that helps clear up what I was trying to say...

And ya, I agree, the mystery prize behind door two is def what I'm going with as well. I think this extends into so much more than simple diet. Pretty much, chaos theory kicks our ass when it comes to trying to engineer "fixes" into complex natural systems. Factory farming is the first thing that comes to mind. The solutions applied to these systems so often cause several overt problems and countless immeasurable hidden complications. Then instead of reverting back to the way things were, we figure we can fix the overt problems, which of course has us tumbling into an endless loop of ever increasing problems. And eventually we have lost track of where we started-- lost track of what is natural. Then what are we to do?

[Lukie]

I pretty much agree with everything you wrote. Regarding the life expectancy thing, I'll just say that comparing that between different time periods becomes incredibly dicey because there are so many confounding variables (war, disease, famine, medical technology) at play.

Factory farming is awful, and that's not even getting into ethical considerations..

[bikes]

all this is null if you don't plan on living past 35, 40 at the nut latest.

[boost]

all this is null if you don't plan on living past 35, 40 at the nut latest.

notsureifsrs.jpg

if you are serious, why are you not doing all sorts of party drugs? I understand that there are philosophical arguments that would conclude that even without negative consequences sobriety is preferable to inebriation... but those arguments don't really seem to mesh with a plan of not living past 35.

sidenote: past vs passed is one of the more confounding homophones.

[Hawk]

I'm at work and just dealt with a user who is a programmer (java, python, maybe more) and didn't understand the difference between copying and moving her files. She then had to be instructed on how to move stuff to My Documents.

[wufwugy]

Not planning on living past 40 is sooooooooo doing it wrong. Something like 55-60 should be a man's best years, and it should get even later with new tech

[rong]

lol Bikes, all that grinding is grinding you down. Step away from the screen and find some sun light.

[bikes]

went into the sun today actually. needed to get my minutes on my phone. my transitions didn't kick in fast enough and i had my gollum moment.

IT BURNS US PRECIOUS IT BURNS US

[Luco]

On the subjects of diet and life expectancy, we find this:

Calorie restriction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

tl;dr - eat less, live longer

[kiwiMark]

Any good resources on how long we've been eating what? My vegetarian girlfriend is fairly convinced that meat is unhealthy, and I confess to being far more ignorant on all matters of nutrition than I'd like to be.

On that note, any good resources in general on nutrition and the like?

I find this kinda stuff really interesting.

[wufwugy]

Any good resources on how long we've been eating what? My vegetarian girlfriend is fairly convinced that meat is unhealthy, and I confess to being far more ignorant on all matters of nutrition than I'd like to be.

On that note, any good resources in general on nutrition and the like?

I find this kinda stuff really interesting.

Not only is meat not unhealthy, it's essential for optimal health. We've been eating meat so long it doesn't matter how long

A few things to think on

Meat being unhealthy is not something seen outside human abstract conception. In virtually every single example of life on this planet, if you're a meat-eater, you're at the top of the chain. Only the physically and intellectually superior eat meat. The notion that meat is unhealthy is demonstrably false

If you choose to not eat meat, you must choose meat substitutes. That's how important meat is. If you eliminated what meat represents in diet, you'd get weak, stupid, and die. If meat was bad, you'd have to demonstrate why meat-substitutes are not. There's a reason why animals that do not consume meat (and also cannot manufacture substitutes) are eating ALL day. So if your girlfriend wants to be legit about her vegetarianism, she has to basically eat vegetables for like six hours a day like a goat. If she chose to do something other than that, she would be defying her own logic by consuming meat-substitutes without understanding the false idea why that substitute would be any better than meat.

If she cares about healthy food choices, she should look to eliminating condensed grains and sugars. Those are the real plagues of modern societies. We evolved for naturally occurring foods in their whole forms, with some small exceptions. Some condensed grain is okay, and cooking is often essential.

Do this: tell your girlfriend to not worry about meat, and replace 80% of her breadstuff and sugar concentrates with vegetables. That sentence alone will do more for her than the entire shelf of "books" at the modernized hippie market. If she makes her favorite meats things like bison and salmon, goes out of her way to do vegetable variety, and adds regular exercise to boot, she'll be the healthiest person you know

[kiwiMark]

Thanks for reply <3

I mean she's one of the vegetarians who I believe came to it first because she doesn't like meat, and all subsequent reasons are just further justification. The one argument for vegetarianism that holds a little weight with me is the massive amounts of food that is produced for the massive amounts of animals to eat that we may then eat them, and that what with all the hungry people in the world this seems a bit uncool.

What you say about meat substitutes makes a lot of sense. One of the arguments that I throw at her is that her dislike for-- fuck what's the word here, things like taking vitamins in pill form instead of eating fruit, as you may well get what's in the pill but there's other good shit in the original product (some of which we may not have even discovered yet) that is thus being missed out on -- doesn't at all gel with cutting meat out of your diet and replacing it with whatever other stuff.

She does, of course, eat a bunch of vegetables, but I feel like she's often relying on too much bread/rice/pasta/polenta/millet whatever to fill her up which obv isn't super healthy.

(Disclaimer: I am in no way shape or form better, my nutrition is in ass, and especially since moving here to Europe I myself eat way too much bread and cheese type shit because dead animals here cost so much money)

[a500lbgorilla]

Tell her that herbavoirs have more massive guts to break down all that plant matter, while meat eaters have a slim, streamlined digestive tract because meat is already processed plant matter.

Does she want her decedents to be bloated, big-bellied herbivores or sleek, sexy meat eaters?

[bikes]

nom bread and cheese. but only certain types of cheese!

[Luco]

nom bread and cheese. but only certain types of cheese!

Bread and cheese is an institution.

However I doubt my ancestors ever experienced the delights of chilli cheddar on rye

[Lukie]

re: meat

consider that we evolved on what amounts really what would considered today to be something along the lines of lean, free range organic meat that's naturally high in omega 3s. which of course is awesome. yet the vast majority of stuff sold in supermarkets today are NOTHING like that. e.g. factory farmed chickens and all the horridness and hormones that go along with that, bacon with say 40% saturated fat and tagalong nitrites/nitrates, etc. it's another issue that has varying shades of gray but too many people think in terms of black or white.

[jyms]

Fuck vegans, don't listen to them. Literally. And "like" wufwugy's points.

[bikes]

Whats with the vegan hate itt? Some of their food is fantastic. This girl who lived next to me freshmen year of college made amazing food in exchange for a few lit papers.

[wufwugy]

If you wanna extrapolate diet based on human evolution, we evolved for a sort of nuclear family. Men hunt, women gather and cook, and there has been some level of small scale cultivation like vegetable gardens where the community is relatively stationary and a very rare wild grain cultivation.

We ate a lot of plants. Women liked vegetables for cooking, everybody loved fruit when they could get their hands on them, and you hoped that the men brought home kills for the night. The variety in diet was as wide as the environment provided. We have also evolved on incredibly dynamic environments. There's an enormous difference in plant consumption among some cultures, but not as much in meat. I'm not sure there exists any ancient human society that didn't eat meat. And the societies that deviate more from our tropical climate and fishing ancestry have to make up for the limitations in other amazing ways. For example: watch the documentary Human Planet and you'll find that Eskimos catch and eat Narwhal once a year because Narwhal skin has been their only source of Vitamin C for untold generations. Eskimos have deviated a lot from normal diets, but my point is made even more strongly when you see they increased healthy meat consumption in order to survive heartily instead of decreasing meat. I think it was Papua New Guinea where they spotted a bees nest like four hundred feet up in a tree, and the father of the family climbed that shits and stole the honey. They were supplied this candy like once a year though

Thanks for reply <3

I mean she's one of the vegetarians who I believe came to it first because she doesn't like meat, and all subsequent reasons are just further justification. The one argument for vegetarianism that holds a little weight with me is the massive amounts of food that is produced for the massive amounts of animals to eat that we may then eat them, and that what with all the hungry people in the world this seems a bit uncool.

People are starving due to the economics of power struggles between wealthy people using it to control the masses. It has nothing to do with total supply. Food rots in a back room before it gets put in the hands of starving children because the human gravitation towards empathy is nothing like our insistence on selfishness

What you say about meat substitutes makes a lot of sense. One of the arguments that I throw at her is that her dislike for-- fuck what's the word here, things like taking vitamins in pill form instead of eating fruit, as you may well get what's in the pill but there's other good shit in the original product (some of which we may not have even discovered yet) that is thus being missed out on -- doesn't at all gel with cutting meat out of your diet and replacing it with whatever other stuff.

It's even possible that vitamin supplements can be unhealthy. There's some newish research about that, but I don't follow it much. The truth of the matter is probably that if you're malnourished, a supplement will really help you, but if you got your diet straight, some supplements can hurt

She does, of course, eat a bunch of vegetables, but I feel like she's often relying on too much bread/rice/pasta/polenta/millet whatever to fill her up which obv isn't super healthy.

Yeah, that's the partial substitute, and it's mostly not healthy. I mean, dude, there's a reason why in cultures that rely on things like rice the people are shorter than everybody else. It's partially genetic, but partially nutrition. Whenever you feed a poor culture with stuff like meat, a few generations go by and they're taller. At the very least, your gf needs to drop some of the breadstuff and pick up beans/legumes/nuts. Newage hippie wannabe health nuts underrate protein like crazy. She'd still be getting too many carbs this way, but whatever

Also, we've talked on this before, and there are at least two known nutrients that are accessible only via animal. Essential fats and Vitamin B-12. There may be more knowns that I just haven't followed up on, but there are definitely more unknowns. All the new info on Vitamin D only hit the public in 2008. Before then, the only people who weren't deficient were unknowingly being more "natural humans" by having jobs like farming that forced them to work out in the sun. This should be a lesson that doing something like "vegetarian" is a much bigger deal than those who do so are qualified to give their opinions upon

(Disclaimer: I am in no way shape or form better, my nutrition is in ass, and especially since moving here to Europe I myself eat way too much bread and cheese type shit because dead animals here cost so much money)

Cheese isn't bad like they say. It's not the greatest, but its protein makes it much better than high carb shit as long you consume fiber and nutrients in other stuff

[wufwugy]

Whats with the vegan hate itt? Some of their food is fantastic. This girl who lived next to me freshmen year of college made amazing food in exchange for a few lit papers.

We're not hating on their cooking, nor some of them who nobley choose to not support tortured industrial livestock. We're hating on their claims of health. They're wrong, and they don't care to know it

[jyms]

I don't hate a vegan meal, nor vegetables and fruit. I hate on Vegans that think rice, pasta and bread is Vegan. It's not. It's just anti meat. If your against the humane conditions of livestock and animal killing then find a humane butcher or farmer that meets your standards, but don't ever preach health.

[Nekrogovner]

Yeh, noone hates their food. What I hate the most, not only at vegans but in general is any type of extremist point of view. And extremism often leads to idiocy and some sort of mass destruction. But more often just idiocy since most extremists have no access to weapons of mass destruction. I don't say we all have to be liberal and smoke weed every day and love our neighbor, there has to be some balance after all, but if some is already going to take an extreme point of view or living in general, at least do it for the solid reasons. And lots of them don't have it...only some flawed ideology and bunch of misconceptions about why is this right thing to do.

[wufwugy]

Yeh, noone hates their food. What I hate the most, not only at vegans but in general is any type of extremist point of view. And extremism often leads to idiocy and some sort of mass destruction. But more often just idiocy since most extremists have no access to weapons of mass destruction. I don't say we all have to be liberal and smoke weed every day and love our neighbor, there has to be some balance after all, but if some is already going to take an extreme point of view or living in general, at least do it for the solid reasons. And lots of them don't have it...only some flawed ideology and bunch of misconceptions about why is this right thing to do.

Just wanna point out that extremism is not itself wrong since extremism is labeled relative to the convention. What happens when the convention is wrong, would not something labeled extreme be right?

An example of extremism that is actually right is abolishing wealth. It sounds crazy, but it's true. It might not be practical given what we are, but in theory, eliminating wealth differentials would be one of the greatest things that could possibly happen

[wufwugy]

You can break down the experience of pain and suffering relative to humans in three categories

1. The sensation of pain. All mammals are the same here since we have the same nervous system

2. The expectation of pain. All mammals are the same here as well since we have similar kind of hormonal responses based on the signal/experience/result model

3. A deeply abstract expectation and psychological reaction to pain. This does exist in non-human animals, but seldom, as far as we know. We don't really know how animals experience this, but we do know the main ramifications of this are a psychological "cross-contamination" of sensation based in imposing abstractions on biological functions, not necessarily an increase of sensation.

So what this tells us is that the industrialized torture of livestock is not much different than if we were doing the same to humans. In fact, there is an argument that very young humans haven't developed part 3 of their brains, and so they aren't much different than other mammals in this regard. So it isn't much of an extrapolation at all to take all the milk cows chained to the floor and replace them with three-year old children. That suffering experience would probably be the same

Wonderful world innit

[Lukie]

Just wanna point out that extremism is not itself wrong since extremism is labeled relative to the convention. What happens when the convention is wrong, would not something labeled extreme be right?

An example of extremism that is actually right is abolishing wealth. It sounds crazy, but it's true. It might not be practical given what we are, but in theory, eliminating wealth differentials would be one of the greatest things that could possibly happen

Sometimes you post wonderful ideas and explanations and I think you are an extremely bright guy.

Other times you post stuff like this and I just really couldn't disagree more. I still think you're a bright guy though.

[bikes]

bah @ eliminating wealth deferential. there is always something to envy even if wealth was eliminated

[wufwugy]

Sometimes you post wonderful ideas and explanations and I think you are an extremely bright guy.

Other times you post stuff like this and I just really couldn't disagree more. I still think you're a bright guy though.

I disagreed the first time I heard it too. And the second

The reality is that human biology and sociology works just fine without abstract designations of wealth. In fact, we're so deeply evolved for community and family that wealth is actually a destructive concept. It is an unnecessary construct that forces a distorted incentive system. Wealth wasn't really a concept before money and trade, and those two things didn't improve social behavior or happiness

Look at it this way, humans are evolved for family society. We're supposed to not know anybody who isn't close or extended family. The people you live and die with, play with, and breed with are your closest friends who are also your family. "Tribe" is really just a different word for family. Do you need an arbitrary wealth system in order to operate and enjoy life and even improve life among your close friends and family? The answer is no. Wealth is a foreign concept to humanity, and most of the chronic suffering of civilization can be traced back to our abnormal value structure that cares not for human things, but for resource acquisition and control, which is even more distorted by our proxy resource known as money. If tribes used any concept of ownership and wealth even a fraction related to what we do today, their societies would break down and become extinct. Humans are one of the most social and community oriented animals in existence. In fact, we're easily the mammal most dependent on community egalitarianism and relationships on the planet. Not only do wealth systems not improve our lives, they destroy them

[wufwugy]

bah @ eliminating wealth deferential. there is always something to envy even if wealth was eliminated

That is simply not true. In such an egregiously dysfunctional world known as modern civilization, you are right. But in the world for which humans evolved, envy is a foreign concept since societies are structured around egalitarianism otherwise they would collapse and we wouldn't be here today

[supa]

Meh. You have something to eat, I don't, I'm gonna experience envy in some form no matter how many big words you use.

[wufwugy]

Meh. You have something to eat, I don't, I'm gonna experience envy in some form no matter how many big words you use.

When does your close friend/family have food and you don't? You unwittingly made my point by expressing behavior as normal that isn't what humans evolved for or spent the overwhelming majority of our history in

[rong]

Wuf, you seem very quick to dismiss the benefits that our current setup has produced, most easy to demonstrate and use in argument being health and medical advances.

Small tribal society would never have reached the levels we have now.

Also, suddenly placed on an equal footing and without wealth to chase, pretty much everyone on this forum dies. As all infrsastructure seases to operate as it only does so based on money, whihch means no internet, no electric, no police, so the geeks most certainly shall not rule the earth, which means the bad ass gangsters will.

[wufwugy]

Wuf, you seem very quick to dismiss the benefits that our current setup has produced, most easy to demonstrate and use in argument being health and medical advances.

They're not necessarily benefits though, and that which creates them doesn't come without costs. If there is no quality of life improvements, I wouldn't call a technological advancement a benefit. The costs of technology are unrecognized epidemics with things like depression, suicide, imprisonment, teenage rebellion, divorce, the list goes on forever. We consider these things normal, but they're not. They're not one bit of normal, they're a byproduct of a dysfunctional society

Small tribal society would never have reached the levels we have now.

Has quality of life improved? The answer is it hasn't. It's actually gone down. Civilization demands competition, which in turn demands more competition, which in turn demands more competition, the cycle goes on and on and on, and you end up with everybody working infinitely more difficult lives than we were biologically evolved for, yet we have little to show for it. We have so deeply forgotten who we are that we take dysfunction and chronic suffering for granted.

We use to spend most of the time playing. Now we spend most of our time working and worrying

Also, suddenly placed on an equal footing and without wealth to chase, pretty much everyone on this forum dies. As all infrsastructure seases to operate as it only does so based on money, whihch means no internet, no electric, no police, so the geeks most certainly shall not rule the earth, which means the bad ass gangsters will.

I did provide a disclaimer where certain things would have to be different for humans to successfully deny their natural selfishness. There would be an incredible readjustment period as we're so entrenched in our current society, but borne of it would be real egalitarianism and improvements in quality of life for those who survived. The context was meant in theory as a way to demonstrate how an extremist idea isn't necessarily wrong. I don't suggest we try to eliminate our world's structure, but if we could then I would, and it would be an extremist idea that was actually right.



On the bright side, technology will eventually optimally adapt humanity to modernism. In fact, it will far surpass what we're currently evolved for, but it will also involve biological change via that technology. On the scary side of that, technology is the driver of increased suffering, and the more advanced we get, the more the system will determine suffering increases

People don't understand how technology increases suffering for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that they don't understand death. We look at death as the ultimate wrong, but that couldn't be more incorrect. It is because of death that wrong things come to an end. Suffering is minimal in tribalism because the system can't support much misery. In the struggle for survival, the weak die. In modern civilization, the weak do not die because there is no more struggle for survival. Not only does this distort our lives by forcing us to struggle for such troublesome and elusive things as joy and meaning, but it means that the weak and miserable continue to be weak and miserable. Technology has done this, and advances in technology will make it worse since it further perpetuates a system that requires death even less

I'm sorry, but the ills of technology are an extremely disturbing topic, and I probably shouldn't get into it. We're unfathomably lucky that we're not ones the system has thrown into the furnace. There are alive today many millions of people who live in greater suffering than they could without technology, and it will get unfathomably worse as technology advances.

[rong]

Dying isn't necessarily a preferable option to suffering. I disagree with fact that proportionally more people suffer. We just have a different system for determining who suffers, it used to be weighted by strength and agility plus a small amount of intelligence, now its about wealth and to a lesser extent intelligence. But birth is and always has been a lottery with very few winning tickets.

[rong]

Also, you ask has quality of life improved? It has for anyone who had a serious accident or a serious illness. But on your theory they just die. Aren't we morally required to help the week? I know we don't really, but those people in modern countries are better off than they would have been.

The systems we have offer us lots of benefits that wouldn't otherwise exist. The problem is balance and government. The government controls the wrong things and allows money and wealth to control the important things. If we kept our current system and just adjusted distribution, control and values we'd live in a pretty fantastic society imo.

[wufwugy]

Dying isn't necessarily a preferable option to suffering. I disagree with fact that proportionally more people suffer. We just have a different system for determining who suffers, it used to be weighted by strength and agility plus a small amount of intelligence, now its about wealth and to a lesser extent intelligence. But birth is and always has been a lottery with very few winning tickets.

What about the extremes? Today, many people are born into and die in misery due to technological capacity to do so. Tribalism simply cannot support things like prison or slavery or chronic mental disorders, but a technologically advanced society can and does.

That's what I'm getting at. There's still pain in tribalism. Geological disasters, droughts, and warring between tribes still existed. But that shit is nothing compared to the incredible suffering of something like imprisonment

[wufwugy]

Also, you ask has quality of life improved? It has for anyone who had a serious accident or a serious illness. But on your theory they just die. Aren't we morally required to help the week? I know we don't really, but those people in modern countries are better off than they would have been.

I've had both a serious accident and serious illness, and I've suffered tremendously more having not been killed by them. Death is the last thing that comes naturally for the human mind to rationalize, but the fact is that in many cases it is actually a good thing.

Yes I think we are morally obligated to help the weak. That's kinda the point I'm making. That's an important point of egalitarianism. What I'm saying is that our value system actually isn't conducive to people helping the weak. Just look at the USA's recent battle over health care. That shit is all about wealth accumulation at the expense of the weak and suffering

As far as people being better off with medical technology. Some are, some aren't. Like I said, it's incredibly hard for an ego to rationalize to itself why death would be better for it, but there is ample evidence of a myriad of different conditions that people endure in which they wish they were dead

The systems we have offer us lots of benefits that wouldn't otherwise exist. The problem is balance and government. The government controls the wrong things and allows money and wealth to control the important things. If we kept our current system and just adjusted distribution, control and values we'd live in a pretty fantastic society imo.

We sure would, and you didn't say something much different than what I said. You say "adjust distribution", which means to adjust it away from widened wealth differentials, which is down the same path I mentioned in the first place

Humans are meant to put the utmost value in their society and their surrounding humans. Sadly, things like monetarism do everything they can to make sure that we instead value money and its wealth instead of human things

[rong]

But you don't need equal wealth for that. Just better values of those with power, for which you need better values in those who vote, which requires better education and more difficult to achieve, an unbiased moral compass which guides them.

[BooG690]

I thought this was the randomness thread?