Without redoing their work or finding a way to have deep trust (which is possible, but uncommon at a bigcorp) it's hard enough to tell who is earnest and who is faking it (or buying their own baloney) when it comes to propositions like "investing in this piece of tech debt will pay off big time"
As a result, if managers tend to believe such plans, bad ideas drive out good and you end up investing in a tech debt proposal that just wastes time. Burned managers therefore cope by undervaluing any such proposals and preferring the crappy car that at least you know is crappy over the car that allegedly has a brand new 0 mile motor on it but you have no way of distinguishing from a car with a rolled back odometer. They take the locally optimal path because it's the best they can do.
It's taken me 15 years of working in the field and thinking about this to figure it out.
The only way out is an organization where everyone is trusted and competent and is worthy of trust, which again, hard to do at most random bigcorps.
This is my current theory anyway. It's sad, but I think it kind of makes sense.
Soviet vs NATO. The Soviet management style is micromanaging exactly how to do everything from the rear. The NATO style is delegating to the front line ranks.
Being good at the NATO style of management means focusing on the big picture--what, when, why--and leaving how to the people actually doing it.
Maybe, but so what? Exercise has so many positive second order effects, and then those may help with weight loss indirectly.
- Improved mood, focus, calm, etc, make it easier and more pleasant to adhere to a better diet
- Can improve sleep quality. Low sleep quality is linked to overeating and obesity and other problems. In fact, poor diet, poor sleep, and poor exercise are all interlinked. So start anywhere and expect the others to get easier to deal with over time too.
- So what if weight doesn't change, but it's due to fat decreasing and muscle increasing? That's a good thing -- weight is an imperfect measure of obesity. Muscle, just by existing, burns more calories. And unlike abdominal fat, is not linked to organ problems.
- And on and on and on. Just do anything to get healthier. Every healthy action will synergestically reinforce every other healthy action. Don't be a narrow beancounter looking at just one component, because your body is not just a handful of components narrowly linked together via thin black box abstraction layers; it's a big spaghetti code system that cannot be seperated cleanly out into pieces. Not exercising is really, really unhealthy, contrary to modern customary belief, so you might as well, rather than fixating on fixing only some other component while keeping this important component broken.
- Moderate exercise seems to actually moderate appetite a little. And heavier exercise seems to make hunger less cravingy and more indiscriminate, making it easier to adhere to a diet (eg, a couch potato might really crave a specific candy or chips, but someone who just ran some miles will ecstatically and happily devour some beans and cabbage and oatmeal and whatever)
- Improves digestion quality and gut motility!
- Besides, isn't the goal of weight loss to get healthier in general, anyway? Focus on the overall goal and start anywhere, anywhere that is easiest. If getting better sleep is easier, do that. If cutting toxins like alcohol and nicotine is easier, start there. If improving diet is easier, start there. If improving positive human relationships and sense of purpose is easier, start there. If exercise is easier, start there. Start anywhere, and keep improving anywhere the wins are most easily found, and gradually everything else will become easier.
One more tip: It's easier to change what you eat than how much. Also, calories in calories out is bunk. It's true to some degree in that they are related, but ignores the fact that (1) how much your body is spending is highly variable, even somewhat independent of movement -- imagine how much energy your body has to spend to fight an infection for example (2) why would anyone imagine every calorie consumed will actually be absorbed? the gut is highly complex and depending on many factors calories could be absorbed or go right out the other end unused, and the gut flora interacts complexly with all this. Focus on eating healthy things first above healthy amounts. It's easier, and will have a positive impact all its own, creating another stepping stone towards other goals.
> Also, calories in calories out is bunk. It's true to some degree in that they are related, but ignores the fact that (1) how much your body is spending is highly variable, even somewhat independent of movement -- imagine how much energy your body has to spend to fight an infection for example
The human body is not that variant. Sure, during illness you may burn more calories from the illness and potential fever… but you’re also usually extremely low on movement since your body physically makes you exhausted. The rest of the time though? No way. Humans generally are not that variant in expenditure.
> (2) why would anyone imagine every calorie consumed will actually be absorbed? the gut is highly complex and depending on many factors calories could be absorbed or go right out the other end unused, and the gut flora interacts complexly with all this. Focus on eating healthy things first above healthy amounts. It's easier, and will have a positive impact all its own, creating another stepping stone towards other goals.
What evidence do you have to the contrary? The human body is extremely efficient at absorbing calories, and outside of extremes (eating 10kcal a day, or having some sort of deficiency such as celiacs that doesn’t let you digest certain things), I see no reason why you don’t absorb the vast, vast majority of all calories consumed.
Even something as commonplace as chewing more carelessly will result in finding seeds in your faeces.
But what's the point of giving you more specific examples? You seem to be eager to "no true scotsman" your way out of this by labelling every example of varying calorie consumption as an exception.
Even the top article referenced in this wikipedia article admits it's based on a study of bushmen who -- surprise surprise -- were in very healthy average weight and also did tremendous physical activity. What a coincidence. But sure, keep telling yourself exercise doesn't matter and it's all about Calories In Calories Out and that the body is as trivial and simple a machine as an internal combustion engine.
> Even something as commonplace as chewing more carelessly will result in finding seeds in your faeces.
Most people’s diets do not consist of fully intact seeds, or at very least it is not a large proportion of their calories. And any processing of said seeds would give you all the calories in them. This is a trivial example to discard, since most people do not have undigested food bits consistently in their stool (unless you constantly eat corn, then maybe).
To be clear, I never said exercise is not capable of burning calories. It clearly does, however the impact is pretty muted compared to the relatively easy task of adjusting one’s intake. For people that have to do enormous physical activity or just walk a ton, they are going to burn quite a bit more calories. But your natural expenditure individually doesn’t vary that much unless you wildly change your behavior around exercise.
And my point that I've repeated over and over, is that the benefit of exercise is far broader than just merely numerically burning calories. It is in all these other beneficial effects that it can indirectly help. Focusing solely on calories in calories out is a big mistake when improving health and/or tackling obesity.
> Focusing solely on calories in calories out is a big mistake when improving health and/or tackling obesity.
For improving health? Certainly I’d agree. You have to be quite overweight before the risk factors really catch up.
For tackling obesity? Absolutely disagree. You’re asking someone who is likely making poor choices with food and exercise to make multiple lifestyle changes. We want something that’s going to be able to adherent to the broader populous. Saying you need both exercise and dieting to lose weight is a setup for failure. The predominantly most important factor in losing weight is diet. Exercise helps you be more healthy, but doesn’t meaningfully help you lose weight.
> Besides, isn't the goal of weight loss to get healthier in general, anyway?
In my opinion, "get healthy" is more a moral judgement than it is an objective assessment. I've definitely seen fat women be shamed even while they're exercising as "not being healthy" or "glorifying being unhealthy" [yes, just for exercising in public, an objectively healthy behavior, except they're doing it while fat].
Wow. That is sad, and reflective of the world you live in and people you associate with I guess.
But healthiness can be measured pretty objectively through health outcomes, and high BMI and low exercise are both independently highly correlated with bad ones across the whole spectrum of health aspects. It's not just common sense, it's mountains of evidence over decades across every aspect of medicine.
The fact that some (in your community, many) people twist this around and make it about something else entirely is sad, but in no way affects the objective truths:
- it is objectively healthier to be active than inactive, regardless of obesity
- it is objectively healthier to have average weight than obese, regardless of activity level
I've lived in a few different places and found the culture around exercise and diet to be very different in different places, so I'm not surprised experiences can vary so much. I am curious where you see this bizarre culture of shaming people for exercising.
> I've lived in a few different places and found the culture around exercise and diet to be very different in different places, so I'm not surprised experiences can vary so much. I am curious where you see this bizarre culture of shaming people for exercising.
I mean it's super common on any social media where a non-skinny woman is exercising with any real following tbh. It's gone all the way back to covertly photographing fat people in the gym or in public back in the reddit days of r/fatpeoplehate and 4chan. I mean there was that viral picture of a fat guy dancing off 4chan.
Oh OK. So just the internet, not real life then. There's your problem. It is a medium primarily focused on entertainment and spectacle, not a scientific poll and reflection of deep truths.
If so, those people are foolish. Aesthetics and moral fashions (of this kind) come and go, but your body's health is for life.
BTW: The majority of people where? Where do you see this? The internet (which parts)? A middle class neighborhood in a small Midwestern town? An upper class neighborhood in a cosmopolitan European city? Culture varies tremendously so "where" matters if you make assertions like "the majority of people" think this or that.
Regardless of what you think people think, I'm telling you what they _should_ think which is more timeless and objective, since it's about medical facts that were true 2000 years ago as they are now.
Build times always were my biggest Scala complaint. Arguably code base specific, as I suspect it had a lot to do with all the macros and type level metaprogramming, but, if that kind of thing is possible and customary, an average working programmer who doesn't control the codebase they show up to is going to end up stuck dealing with it.
It's a lot easier to build a language that works great, but only in the hands of a single skilled careful owner, than a language that stands up to the abuse of many careless temporary users, and still gets from point A to point B reliably.
Like the difference between a sportscar and a rental company or police fleet sedan.
Maybe the fixed costs of a shoe factory production line, in 2024, with centuries of production experience, are lower than those of a top of the line smartphone.
> We have immigration (illegal or otherwise) to stave off demographic cliffs. As much as the right hates illegal immigration, it is mostly Christians and they integrate well.
Indeed, but, even Mexico and much of Latin America now has below replacement fertility too. So now what?
Democracies that entice immigration are also strategic weapons.
But to answer your question, that's their problem.
Countries and governments need to wake up and structure their societies towards liberal reforms to get encourage child rearing. That involves a host of things that the right won't like, but the side effects will be a society that people want to immigrate too.
It's a double demographic effect. Now, so far even Europe has not restructured its housing, work, subsidies, childcare, and the like to fully stimulate demographics.
The US would need huge reforms in healthcare, workers rights, and childcare, and the doom of an imbalanced demographics like we have with the boomers (ESPECIALLY the baby boomers) is that they vote only for their selfish needs and won't vote to invest in the younger generation
Ideally, yes, but there's a reason they're called staples. It's very easy to have a diet where most of the _calories_ if not actual volume nor mass of food comes from grain. Grains and fats are very calorie dense, but grains are far cheaper than butter or steak. Many civilizations have been based on a huge portion of food being tortillas, rice, bread, pasta. Grains are important. Whether they should be as big a part of your diet for health reasons is another question, but their historical importance due to calorie density is not in question and is self evident.
Willing to relocate: No, but can commute as far as NYC or DC (but further commutes should correlate with fewer days in office, e.g., NYC/DC = 1 day per week; Philadelphia Center City = 3-5 days per week; intermediate points = 2-3 days per week)
Technologies: Java and other JVM languages like Scala and Groovy; Javascript/Typescript/Node/HTML/CSS; Python; SQL; Linux/Solaris/bash/C/etc; HTTP and some TCP/IP, DNS, etc; Git; OpenGL/OpenAL; Perl; ColdFusion (really); Docker; Jenkins and so much more. Get me in a room and I can go deep on many of these and how they fit in together, or let me eat leetcode mediums for breakfast. Not scared of real math, real computing hardware, or real users. I've been around the block and can break out of whatever abstraction layer box I need to to make my software work correctly. Experienced and delight in working with people including mentoring juniors, working with users to determine requirements, or maneuvering internal employee and external vendor politics to make things actually happen. In other words, I can be a true senior developer that can do my own project management, product management, devops/SRE, production troubleshooting, and engineering management as needed.
My guess is that despite the strong long term overall link, it's too difficult to draw a meaingful link between any particular executive decision on this and any particular outcome, causing a tragedy of the commons. I think it's a good guess because it's a powerful explanation for many other such questions about "Why don't they just ____?"
Because microwaves don't heat matter. They heat* H2O molecules. This one weird fact is responsible for all of the weird differences between how they cook and how other more classic cooking methods work.
We're taught that heating has three styles: convection, conduction, radiation. But AFAIK, microwaving is a fourth and distinct style.
*: Even more specifically, they add rotational momentum to these molecules, which is not the same as heat, but gradually turns into heat (which is translational momentum) as they knock around. This, in addition to the fact that only the water is being heated, and that the microwave waves touch the food in an uneven pattern even if mitigated by a rotating platter, is why stirring or waiting or using "low power" (dithered) is an important part of microwave recipes, as well as why high moisture foods or intentional steaming works so much better in it
Microwaves also affect other polar molecules and ions in food, not just water.
This excitation leads to the generation of heat, which is then transferred through the food via conduction.
Microwaving is indeed considered a form of dielectric heating, which is a subtype of radiation. It’s distinct from conduction, convection, and traditional infrared radiation but still falls under the broader category of electromagnetic radiation-based heating.
Microwaves seem to prefer syrupy foods because syrup typically has a high sugar and water content. Both sugar and water molecules are efficient at absorbing microwave energy, so they heat up quickly. This is why syrupy parts of a dish often get much hotter than other parts when microwaved.
Microwave heating is not a fourth form of heat transfer as it name implies: microwave radiation. Yes, the heat is not being radiated by a thermal source of microwaves, but it is radiation being absorbed. Hence radiation is the mechanism.
Rotational momentum is also heat as it is kinect energy related to movement, linear or not.
I'm speaking from a practical cooking perspective, not a technical physics perspective. The radiation from flames or the sun affects food very differently than microwaves do.
For the same reason, I probably messed up other physics technicalities. It would have been nice if I added a caveat I guess, but so it goes. My mental model may be simpler than the truth, but it's a lot better for achieving practical results in the kitchen than nothing than "microwaves heat stuff up fast", which is what I had before and is a really shit model that fails to explain most of their odd behavior.
I suppose there's nothing stopping other forms of radiation like the visible spectrum. How about intense blue light? Could it penetrate better than microwaves?
> It is by the same people that believe whatever they're told by anyone in authority, and then feel the urge to pass it on to others without critical thought, also ignoring their personal real-life experience.
" by the same people that believe whatever they're told by anyone in authority, and then feel the urge to pass it on to others without critical thought."
respectfully, what the hell is this bit doing in your post?
Dishwasher detergent is probably the harshest chemical cocktails in most homes. Small consumer appliances are built to the cheapest minimum standard. Creating a risk of a fire and peacocking about how smart one is great material.
It could be emotional, but sometimes emotions are necessary to get the meta-point across. Without critical thought, the same people also pass on various other lies. For example:
1. Fluoride is safe in drinking water and is a good thing. It may be safe up to a point, a very conservative point, beyond which it definitely harms the brain development of kids, perhaps of adolescents too. Certain branches of the government are finally coming around to acknowledge it.
2. Chlorine is safe in drinking water. Chlorine is of course necessary to kill germs, but there can exist certain byproducts of excessive chlorination that are harmful to the stomach and the digestive system. These could form when chlorine reacts with organic matter in tap water. I'd like to see the government acknowledge it, resulting in a tighter range regulation of chlorination, its byproducts, and organic matter in water.
3. Handwashing prevents flu and colds. This lie was repeated over and over for at least a decade before Covid. Handwashing is no doubt important, but there is no way that it will block respiratory inputs like a good mask will. Both practices complement each other.
4. Combining vaccines is totally okay. Both children and seniors get affected by this lie. Logically, if each vaccine has certain temporary side effects, there is no way in which it's better to take two or more vaccines together, e.g. RSV + Covid (Moderna) or flu-shot + Covid (Moderna). Logic dictates that spreading out the risk over time will be easier for the body to handle, and it is so in practice.
5. Water ultimately heats to 100C (212F) in the microwave. In truth it's very easy for drinking water to superheat in the microwave to greater than its boiling point. The purer the drinking water, the more likely it is. This is a common occurrence with RO (reverse osmosis) water, even after it has been pH adjusted. Understanding this helps avoid burns to the hand and face from an explosion of the water.
6. It is safe to stand very close to a microwave while it is in use. In truth, if you measure with a microwave radiation meter, you will see that nearly all microwaves leak substantial radiation measurable in the first one-foot closest to the front of the microwave.
Without redoing their work or finding a way to have deep trust (which is possible, but uncommon at a bigcorp) it's hard enough to tell who is earnest and who is faking it (or buying their own baloney) when it comes to propositions like "investing in this piece of tech debt will pay off big time"
As a result, if managers tend to believe such plans, bad ideas drive out good and you end up investing in a tech debt proposal that just wastes time. Burned managers therefore cope by undervaluing any such proposals and preferring the crappy car that at least you know is crappy over the car that allegedly has a brand new 0 mile motor on it but you have no way of distinguishing from a car with a rolled back odometer. They take the locally optimal path because it's the best they can do.
It's taken me 15 years of working in the field and thinking about this to figure it out.
The only way out is an organization where everyone is trusted and competent and is worthy of trust, which again, hard to do at most random bigcorps.
This is my current theory anyway. It's sad, but I think it kind of makes sense.