Posts by Stephen Judd
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Crikey, I think we're getting close to some sort of agreement!
To appeal to MY personal experience for a moment, weight loss is vastly easier if you regulate the proportions of different foods as well as count calories. Eg, calories from alcohol are special, I can tell you. I've never tried to lose very much, only 5-10kg for athletic reasons, so I haven't faced the challenges of a more overweight person, but what I find is that doing it with calorie counting alone - energy in vs energy out - is brain-dead. For that matter, the kind of activity you do matters. If you can handle short bouts of interval training, you get more weight loss than long bouts of less intense activity, even though the work done (in a physics sense) is the same.
(Also, and not that it matters, but I assumed dyan was a woman. Perhaps that means that dyan has developed a truly gender-neutral style...)
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Apropos convincing people - well, I think if you want to change behaviour, work with human nature by creating an environment that makes change easy. Merely informing them is unlikely to work.
(Why isn't advertising simply a matter of informing you about quality and price? Why do supermarkets put confectionery by the till? Because people are not purely rational actors, and are sufficiently predictable in their irrationality that one can exploit this for commercial gain.)
Apropos the immutable laws of physics, you seem very hung up on energy in vs energy out. Do you understand that how much your body consumes, or stores, depends on factors other than the notional energy value of the food? Eg, if you swap out 400kJ of energy from legumes and vegetables, and replace it with white sugar, you will get fatter. Same energy intake, same activity levels, different hormonal response. I am sure that is what Dyan is talking about.
So finally, getting back to the claim that sparked this whole debate, if cheap food has a lot of simple carbs and a lot of fat, poverty is going to make people fat, not just because of energy-density, but because the composition of the food changes metabolism in a way that make one store more fat.
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In my opinion, in the majority of cases, no, there is no difference. Quitting is as simple as stopping smoking. Anything less is not quitting
Agreed, but people's decision to stop (or to start) smoking is influenced by such diverse external factors as the price of tobacco, how easily they can purchase it, the amount of advertising they are exposed to, the attitude of their peers, the inconvenience of going outside to smoke (really!) and whatever public health messages they have internalised. Yeah, they decide, and no one else decides for them, but there are factors in the world around them that influence the decision and make acting on it harder or easier.
So if we think the health effects of obesity are a matter of public concern (and I accept that's a matter for debate in itself), then we can and should look at factors that influence decisions about how and what we eat and exercise. Some of these can be changed through policy. And then people will continue to make their own decisions, but some people will make different ones because the input into their personal calculus has changed.
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Does it use the same amount of power to charge a laptop battery as it does to run a laptop? Would it be more efficient to charge it overnight, then unplug it, and run it til the battery runs down or just leave it plugged in when I'm using it? Or is it pretty much the same?
When you charge and discharge the battery, some energy is lost as heat - batteries aren't 100% efficient. So it would be better to run it on the mains when you can.
On the other hand, your laptop is likely set up to be more energy efficient when running on battery (eg turning off the backlight sooner, reducing disk access, adjusting CPU speed). You could twiddle with the power management settings to make it as frugal when on mains power as on battery, depending on your operating system.
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Giovanni: I shouldn't have said "when it was explicitly socialist." I should have said "when it had a programme of radical reform."
Hence why it's a Labour party, and not a Communist/Marxist party.
Anyway, I'm fuzzy on Labour history, and don't want to pretend an expertise I don't have, but nonetheless I'm confident that by the time it was a popular party, most of its members would not have called themselves Marxists. Certainly when I was a little boy in the 70s, it had mass membership, but the Marxists had long left for their various splinter parties. Even in the 30s, nationalisation of the means of production and exchange was too far for Labour.
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the Labour party - which in the days of its mass membership was a Marxist organisation
I really don't think that's true for the NZ Labour Party. Even when it was explicitly a hard socialist party, the Marxists were a minority.
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'Nails it Again'
It is a sobriquet to which I aspire, except there are all the times when I whack my thumb instead.
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Ben, you keep using that word "duplicitous" as if it did not carry huge moral freight. I am beginning to wonder if you think it means something other than "deliberately deceptive".
The second can only be answered by the individual.
Really? Why is this any different from any other health issue - for example, smoking? Are decisions about how and what you eat uniquely immune to influence from external factors? I don't think so.
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Apropos Nanny State vs Boot Camp: the advocates of both expect that other people will be nannied/booted, while detractors fear the boot/nanny coming for them.
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"Eat less food" goes against every instinct for most people. Aversion to food is a pathological state. Not eating abundant calorie-rich food is a ticket to extinction. Not storing those spare calories against inevitable famine times is a ticket to extinction.
Which is why solutions to an "obesity problem" require more than finger-wagging at people who somehow fail to exercise willpower. The corollary of such an approach is the ridiculous idea that people are suddenly massively more weak-willed than they used to be.
Society doesn't have an obesity problem, it has a "heavily-marketed cheap crap food for people taught to sell their time in return for unnecessary goods and services" problem. Solutions to unhealthy overweight (and every other human problem) need to go with human nature, not against it.