The majority of personal use sales are not conducted with a "gangster", true, but the small-time college ecstasy or coke dealer conducting those personal use sales IS making regular trips to the hood, purchasing from people who are hardened criminals. They expose themselves to a lot of risk in doing this.
You don't have to move far up the chain before you see some serious violence. Personal use weed dealer? Probably not going to get killed. But robbed? Yes, definitely, seen it happen many times. Personal use coke, ecstasy, heroin dealer? Much more likely to experience violence. The dealer one level above, supplying the personal use dealers? They get killed all the time, despite not being drug kingpins in any sense. It only costs 1000$-2000$ to have someone killed in many parts of the US, so that should say something about the chance of violence that small-time dealers face.
Silk Road was more than personal use sales, I'd bet the majority of its revenue came from pounds and half pounds of weed, sheets of LSD, and orders of 500+ ecstasy pills. Heroin and coke haven't caught on as much yet in the online scene, with prices still a little above what well-connected users can get on the streets, but give it time. Also keep in mind that the online drug scene is more than just SR/BMR/Sheep and that there are private forums that deal strictly in wholesale.
I disagree with the "electronic" part. That disqualifies Charles Babbage's early mechanical computers, not to mention all of biological/chemical computing.
Here this guy claims to have put on 20 pounds of muscle in 8 weeks, and in another article he claims 34 pounds in 4 weeks. Hmm... I wouldn't invest in anything he was associated with, he is clearly full of shit.
So what? The previous 34lb gain happened about 8 years ago and that was probably his main focus at the time. Then, he was in his late 20s. Now, he's in his late 30s and obviously spread thin.
I love HN, but damn the negativity and dismissal. The guy is opening up on some pretty personal stuff and I for one appreciate it.
[edit: I've explained why I think the original 34lb gain is possibly legitimate in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669680 (though you should note that wasn't the point of this comment.)]
Gaining 34 lbs of muscle in 4 weeks is impossible, even for a young man.
Even gaining 34 pounds of weight in 4 weeks (not just muscle, but fat as well) would be a serious challenge: 34 pounds of weight equates to about 119,000 kilocalories[1], meaning you would have to eat 119k/28=4,250 kcal a day in addition to your "maintenance" calorie level (i.e. the caloric energy that you burn with everyday activity -- usually 1500-2500 kcal). So he would have to eat about 7,000 kcal a day in order to gain weight at that rate.
Furthermore, gaining weight and gaining muscle are very different beasts. Muscle is only "built" when muscle fibers are broken down through strenuous activity and then rebuilt. This is not a rapid process. It's widely accepted in the weight training community that without steroids, muscle can be built at a rate of a pound or two a week at most.
So either the author is lying about his muscle gain, which throws his other statements into doubt, or more likely he's simply confused about how to actually measure weight vs. muscle gain, and reporting erroneous conclusions. There are many fitness-related misconceptions out there.
>Gaining 34 lbs of muscle in 4 weeks is impossible
I'm not so sure it's impossible. Claiming such seems like black swan fallacy. Lots of people were skeptical about it of course and I don't blame you for being skeptical. My original comment above was mainly in response to the divergent 2 numbers being clearly bullshit... they're not. I'll try to tackle what you said below:
The calorie part isn't much of an argument. With enough exertion and access to calorically dense, highly palatable foods, it's not that hard to eat several thousands calories in excess daily. A large pizza can easily be 2500 calories; a cheesecake can easily be 3000 calories.
But... your calculation is actually a straw man, since fat requires more calories than muscle. I can't find an exact number, but taking just knowing that caloric density of dietary protein is less than half that of dietary fat and that muscle mass is mostly water, I'm guessing at least half as much as fat, so closer to 1500 calories than 3500. Add a small detail to that in that he lost 3lb of fat during the same time period and the calculation is more like ((34 X 1500 kcal)-(3 X 3500 kcal))/28 = 1446 kcal a day in excess. So he'd be eating about 3500 calories per day. That's actually a fairly typical number for an American.
I really don't think he was confused about how to measure... he went to a human performance lab and used hydrostatic weighing, one of the most accurate methods.
Finally, call me naive, but I don't think he's lying either. I've read a lot of Ferriss's stuff and one theme that has come out is he's really good at finding loopholes that allow him to win by just barely staying within the rules. I'm no expert, but I've noticed that improvements in body composition are rapidly achievable for people who had a similar composition in the past and only temporarily deviated. I'm pretty sure Ferriss was jacked when younger (he used to wrestle).
Ferriss also references the Colorado experiment and the same point is brought up on the wikipedia page (the claim here by the way is a 63lb gain in one month... so you must really think that is BS):
>These claims are considered controversial because it was only performed with two subjects who were not "average," but regaining pre-existing muscle mass.
Good point about the caloric density of fat vs. muscle. It's kind of embarrassing to have forgotten about that point.
However, that still doesn't address the question of how someone could seriously put on 34 lb of muscle in one month... I think even if you're regaining "lost muscle," this still strikes me as implausible or at the very least unreproducible. I am not convinced that having some historical muscle suddenly entitles you to a ten-times-normal rate of muscle growth.
Also, I can tell you right away that the Colorado Experiment was BS. It would take a remarkably naive reader to think that the reported results of the "experiment" are legitimate.
I think you might be right about the "finding a loophole" type of thinking. In my mind, if someone uses a loophole to achieve a metric like "pounds of muscle gained," the accomplishment is nullified in the sense that it becomes useless as a learning tool, and as an anecdote it is downright dangerous... even if he actually gained 63 pounds of muscle by abusing "the rules," that's not useful (although it may still be rather impressive).
Well, I haven't read anything else Ferriss has written, so I don't have any background. But the claim itself is pretty outrageous.
Just because I find it interesting, let me just point out a couple examples Ferriss gives (and is up front about) to elaborate on "loopholes":
-Winning a kickboxing championship by 1) pretty drastic water loss to fit into a lower division and 2) TKO by repeatedly knocking his opponent out of the ring.
-Winning a world record in tango by getting the most consecutive spins in a minute.
You're really confusing yourself here trying to make these numbers work. Furthermore, it's not really proper to just pull some numbers out of the air with no basis (e.g., 1500 kcal/lb for muscle vs. 3500 kcal/lb for fat) and then use them as a basis to disprove someone else's calculations based on ACTUAL data.
It takes ~2000 kcal/day to maintain an average person's body weight. The only way to build muscle is through strenuous exercise which results in more kcals being burnt during exercise and muscle repair. These two facts alone should tell you that it would be physically impossible (as in, defies the laws of physics) to gain 34 lbs. of muscle in a month eating just 3500 kcal a day.
1500 kcal/lb is a conservative estimate, considering the caloric density of fat vs protein and that the vast majority of muscle mass is water. I've heard the number 600 kcal thrown around quite a bit on body building forums. I'm sorry I can't find the actual number anywhere (I've looked), but I think a conservative bound is perfectly valid for demonstrating a back of the napkin calculation in casual conversation.
It doesn't really matter because I've already stated that eating 7000 kcal is doable. And that (grossly exaggerated) number was based on false assumptions, something to which delluminatus has already agreed.
Ferriss claims to have spent only 4 hours in the gym throughout those 28 days, which amounts to approximately 2000 kcal in a month. Meaning he had to somehow find within himself the strength to eat one additional large pizza in a month. Even if he was in the gym for an hour a day, eating 500 extra calories per day is hardly difficult.
I'm not really sure you understand the things that you are saying. You're the one saying that it's feasible to gain 34 lbs. of muscle in one month eating only 3500 kcal/day. Then you said that this guy did it working out for four hours a day, and strenuous lifting burns only ~ 500 kcal/hour. Then you say that all he'd need to eat is one additional large pizza in a month. None of this adds up to a coherent point.
4 hours * 500 kcal/hr = 2000 kcal
This would be IN EXCESS of what he would have to eat to maintain homeostasis, which means that he'd need somewhere in the ballpark of 4000 kcal/day JUST TO MAINTAIN HIS WEIGHT. Then he would need an ADDITIONAL amount of calories to allow his body to repair muscles and form new muscle. I'm not even saying it's impossible to gain 34 lbs. of muscle in a month -- just that it would take at least 6000-7000 kcal/day to gain weight that rapidly, not one large pizza/month. Or 3500 kcal/day. It's all nonsense.
My original comment above was mainly in response to the divergent 2 numbers being clearly bullshit... they're not.
I didn't mean to imply any skepticism over the two numbers being different, though I can see how you got that from what I wrote. I brought up both because here he is making one impossible claim, and previously he made an even more impossible claim along the same lines.
Tim is an incredible marketer. If anyone believes he actually says anything on his blog that is a real reflection of the real him should really think twice.
I was surprised there were tips to begin with. After seeing the crap-ads on his site, I expected a sign-up form asking $100 for his productivity guru webinar (a $300 value!).
I came here to post the same links to the Minneapolis PD ShotSpotter page. What's more depressing is that nearly all the shootings are concentrated in a few North Minneapolis neighborhoods. I've hung out in those neighborhoods a lot and I would hear gunshots, see shot-out street lights, etc. especially at night.
Crime is way down in Minneapolis since the mid-1990s though, apparently in 1995 North Minneapolis blocks had the highest rate of violent crime per capita in the nation.
Looking at this table of murders by city internationally, it should be pretty obvious what all these locations have in common...
Their product had "value" in the sense that somebody was willing to pay for it, but clearly it's possible to become a billionaire while having a net negative effect on society.
្The /I/ in "hit" and the /i/ in "heat" are two different vowels.
When linguists say that a language has minimally contrastive vowel length, they mean that a single vowel can be pronounced with either a short or long duration, resulting in totally different words.
So in Khmer...
យឹត /jɨt/ means "to scold"
and
យឺត /jɨɨt/ means "slow"
A long vowel is indicated typically in the IPA either by doubling the vowel symbol as I did above or by placing a macron on the vowel (a line over the top, as in /ā/).
As was mentioned, the terms "long vowel" and "short vowel" learned in English class are misleading and bear no reality to the duration of English vowels.
As someone who is a music fanatic, but had never heard Velvet Underground until right now, I find "European Son" quite interesting, but "Heroin" didn't do anything for me.
I'll check out more VU, any suggestions for songs/albums in a similar vein (experimental, noisy, good guitar/bass interplay, heavily instrumental)?
As fun as "Metal Machine Music" is, it's a bit non-musical for my tastes -- you wont find interplay and solid musicianship, just noise. I suggest the next step you take is Velvet Underground's second album, "White Light / White Heat". It meets your feature requests fairly well, perhaps better than "Velvet Underground & Nico", the album "European Son" is from, would.
I'd loose more sleep over DMV employees having their benefits cut personally.