pugets

When I turned on the music and chatter, the first audio that played was of a chimpanzee wildly shrieking for about 2 seconds. The song which played after was “Sonargaon” by Daniel Masson, which as far as I can tell does not include that audio. Maybe someone at the KSFO Tower was having a bad day. Very funny.

What’s odd is when you read popular Reddit comments, you find the userbase believes that the site is full of pro-Trump bots and shills.

My politics are to the left of the American left, but I’d be crazy to believe that the mountains of the anti-Trump posts are organic & the spoonfuls of pro-Trump posts are paid, especially after an election where Trump won the popular vote.

My experience with my ADHD diagnosis and the 25 years of Adderall that followed have left me jaded at the state of psychiatry.

The focus of my attention does indeed change at a rate which is faster than average. If something can distract me from a task, then it usually does, at least for a few moments. But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?

To me, it seems obvious. My attention is considered deficient because we have constructed a society in which we expect children as young as 8 (that was the age I was diagnosed) to focus in a classroom on highly abstract topics (history, language, math, etc.) for hours at a time without issue. If a child can’t meet that expectation, then they will be medicated until they do.

But if we lived in a different society, especially one set in pre-modern times, then my kind of attention might not be considered a disorder. It could even be advantageous. How many early humans suffered a premature death because their hyper-focus on gathering berries left them oblivious to the rustling of leaves?

What I do is use RateYourMusic.com and find people who rate albums similar to the way I do. The site even lets you build music charts and filter albums by how highly they’re rated by the users you follow.

“We toss the coin, but it is the Lord who controls its decision.” - Proverbs 16:33 (TLB)

The second graph in that article ("The Partisan Gap on Economy Ratings") is alarming. In mid-2016, ~30% of Republicans said the economy was doing good. By mid-2017, that figure passed ~80%. By comparison, optimism among Democrats fell from ~70% to ~55% over that same time period.

I wonder if we'll make it to March 2025 before half of Republicans once again say that the economy is doing quite well.

> No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.

What am I missing here? Is it possible to make the workplace injury rate among linemen comparable to the rate among social workers?

Why restrict the definition to political censorship? Surely there are such things as academic censorship, religious censorship, etc.

I once moved towns and needed to cancel my LA Fitness gym membership. I found that they wanted me to go to their website, find the Cancellation Form, print it out, fill it out with my account details, and mail or fax it to their corporate office. I don’t believe there is any way of cancelling it online or over the phone.

So instead of doing that all of that, I called my credit card company and asked them to block all future charges from the company. It worked like a charm.

Why assume people will do what’s in their own long-term best interests, especially after being presented with a short-term thrill?

Pizza tastes better than granola. Grand Theft Auto is more fun than math homework. Having a Dodge Charger is cooler than having a Hyundai Elantra. Who cares about the costs? I can always fix my bad habits tomorrow.

What word would be better than “choose” in this context? For the majority of people who aren’t prisoners or toddlers, there is a good deal of personal choice that determines what foods we eat and how much.

Even if fate has it that I must end up at a Wendy’s drive thru tomorrow night, couldn’t it be true that I could choose to eat the 400 calorie meal instead of the 800 calorie meal, or order water instead of Sprite?

It does work. It couldn't not work. Each day of your life, you choose to do one of three things:

1. Consume more calories than your body will need to function

2. Consume as many calories as your body will need to function

3. Consume fewer calories than your body will need to function

When you consume more energy than you require, your body stores the remainder as fat. When you consume less energy than is required, your body converts your fat into usable energy.

Now obviously, this is an over-simplified explanation of nutrition. What you eat, when you eat it, how efficiently your body converts food to energy, and other factors will determine the little details. But the explanation I've provided is not nearly as over-simplified as "it just doesn't work."

To make a comparison, it would be like suggesting that the financial advice "earn more money than you spend" just doesn't work as a method of saving money, on the grounds that some % of Americans who try to save money end up in credit card debt.

That’s also how I lost most of my weight. Sure, you could spend 25-45 minutes on the treadmill… or you could just not eat 5 Oreo cookies, and you would achieve the same result (from a caloric perspective).

My best tip for not eating junk food: Don’t buy it. It’s so much easier to eat chicken and rice when you don’t have a bag of Doritos on standby.

If I did a push-up for every product that has “revolutionized” the fitness world in the last several decades, you would see my body and probably assume that I had used those products.

If you have a floor, a wall, and autonomy over what enters into your mouth, then you already have everything you need to gain muscle and lose fat.

Nobody needs a $1400 bike with a $40 monthly subscription to maintain a calorie deficit. It’s absurd. Peloton preys on their customers’ fear of sunk-cost by selling common exercise equipment at exorbitant prices. They want you to fear that if you don’t use the equipment, then you’re wasting your money.