Yeah, but farmers have a powerful lobby and they produce our food. So they got some power behind their words.

What the hell is going on in your apartments, that an overflown tub destroys everything? Is the floor in your bathroom not waterproof? In Europe water damage typically happens with bursting tubes and that can happen in your own home as well. You are typically insured against this.

There is a sweet spot in population density for cities. I am not sure about the exact number, but you get it, when building houses, that have four or five stories.

But that’s only because other people live in apartments. If everyone gets the privilege of living in their own house, than it won’t be economical to have everything you need in walking distance. And you can have shitty house neighbors as well.

Probably an American, that hears 15min cities and runs away screaming.

I am trying, but it is just not well backed by data. The author goes on about diets all the time, grossly generalizing and totally ignoring, that it is also important how much you consume. They cite an example of France in the 1800s and say, that they ate more bread and butter (the link to the source not working). Okay, sure. And then they say, that they could still maintain their health easily, followed by the statement, that they exercised more, but this minor difference is not enough to explain it. Like, what are they going on about? In 1800 about two thirds of the population were working on farms, that’s not just “a bit more exercise”. And no word about food scarcity. People just couldn’t afford gluttony. Often enough they were just one bad harvest away from a famine. It’s ridiculous to assume, that they got to the same calorie intake on their bread, butter and dairy diet, that we have today with the amounts of sugar we eat and the affordability of food.

And while they probably exercised more on average than we do, the minor difference in exercise isn’t enough to explain the enormous difference in weight.

That statement is just plain wrong. Let’s say a minor difference in exercise is 50kcal a day. That’s about 6min running at 10km/h. This adds up to 18250kcal a year, which translates to over 2kg of body weight in ONE year. Multiply that by multiple years and it adds up quite fast. Keep that in mind for the following statement:

Many of them were farmers or laborers, of course, but plenty of people in 1900 had cushy desk jobs, and those people weren’t obese either.

Well, how did people get to these cushy desk jobs? By not available cars? How did they get their groceries? How did they clean their clothes? That’s all stuff, that takes a minimum of exercise nowadays. What did they do on their free time? It probably wasn’t sitting in front of the screen with minimal movement.

That’s just the first of these “mysteries” and the whole thing is written in this style. They take an observation and then give an explanation for it, that fits their narrative. Alternative explanations are either not acknowledged or ruled out on flimsy evidence.

Here, from the CICO part:

Sources have a surprisingly hard time agreeing on just how much more we eat than our grandparents did, but all of them agree that it’s not much. Pew says calorie intake in the US increased from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010. The USDA Economic Research Service estimates that calorie intake in the US increased from 2,016 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,390 calories per day in 2014. Neither of these are jaw-dropping increases.

How are these not giant increases in calorie intake? This metric is per DAY. It adds up fast over years. We are speaking about 16kg worth of body weight in calories per year. Okay, they addressed this in the interlude:

Studies show that people with obesity eat and expend more calories than lean people. From this study, for example, consider this sentence: “TDEE was 2404±95 kcal per day in lean and 3244±48 kcal per day in Class III obese individuals.” From this perspective, the average daily consumption per Pew being 2,481 calories per day doesn’t seem like much — that’s about what lean people expend daily.

TDEE includes exercise. Class 3 obese is a BMI of 40, so for a 1.8m tall male, that is 130kg, lean is probably at the lower end of normal, so 65kg. Then you can calculate the basal metabolic rate for both cases, leading to 1655kcal/day for the lean and 2300kcal/day for the obese. The difference is exercise. So lean people burn ~800kcal worth of exercise while obese people burn ~900kcal, but at double the weight. Since calorie burning during exercise goes linear with weight, you can conclude, that lean people workout more than obese people. So their argument does not work.

I never said, that it would be easy to lose weight. It definitely is hard. Your body is adapted to your lifestyle and breaking out of your habits and completely changing your lifestyle can be extremely hard. However, blaming some mysterious contaminant will not help people lose weight. Especially, when things like liquid calories tend to add a lot to your calorie intake, but your body does not really register them. Our body has evolved to control its body weight over thousands of years to a different type of diet. I do really not know, why the authors think, that subjecting it to the modern day achievements of high calorie foods and liquid calories will not affect this balance.

The body can influence how much energy to absorb and burn, within limits.

Yes and with that you have an upper limit of how much energy food can give to your body. If your body does take less than this energy, you will lose weight even faster. It can’t take more energy than is provided by the food. Raise your exercise level above your maximum intake and you will lose weight. It’s thermodynamics.

Nah, sorry, I was out, when they stated, that more exercise and eating less does not help (and then using an arbitrary time span of 12 months). If you violate the laws of physics in your analysis, it is definitely wrong.

I do not have time right now to read the whole thing, but what strikes me as odd, is that the author blames everything on contaminants, when a change in lifestyle could also be an option. They write about indigenous people moving to western societies and becoming fat, blaming it on industrial food contaminants, but ignore, that western people do not exercise enough. At least mention it and give a reason why you think, that this does not factor into it.

Then they also generalize about people in the western world getting obese at the same rate, which is not true at all. People in the US are more obese than in the Netherlands, for example. Japan has one of the lowest average BMIs in the world. It just doesn’t add up. Furthermore, there is a lot of talking about causation, when they only prove correlation.

The “switch” is most likely highly processed food and added sugar in everything you buy.

But that is only because of the current market landscape. Healthy food can also be packaged microwave ready and still be cheap. Most of the companies doing that just market it as healthy and charge a higher price for it (because people will still pay it).

Well, meditation can help you to get better at telling your brain to shut up. Imagine it like training a muscle: in the beginning you won’t be able to lift anything, but as you train it, it gets easier and easier to lift heavy weights.

I am not a big fan of this transactional interpretation. When I am friends with someone, I will help them, if necessary and within my ability and I expect the same of them. How often this is then used, does not matter.

MOND does not describe all observed phenomena, but neither does dark matter and dark energy. We simply don’t know the truth in this area. In my opinion too much money in physics is thrown on the needle in a haystack search for dark matter.

This and we are gonna have replaceable batteries in the future as well. Thanks EU!

The media campaign against working from home is definitely based on the falling value of commercial real estate.

That’s how you do science, you have an opinion on something and then you find the data, that proves your point and ignore everything else. No mention of why the hell the sun would completely change its impact on global temperatures in a matter of one century, when it had only a small impact for millenia.

Some of these points are not inherent properties of cryptos, like the environmental impact and the transaction overhead.

I think that’s also because a lot of the people fed up with reddit just left at this point. So, it’s only those left, that don’t care as long as they get their memes.