The trick is to keep that going in the longterm. I did manage to lose that amount of weight in the same amount of time as well, but ended up gaining it back in under 5 years, which I hear is the fate of most people who lose weight.
There's a nice substack I found that is precisely about this problem and wider variations of it, that is, the problem of figuring out numbers that actually tell you something about the universe:
You think there are "vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation"?
> alt-right
Yeah. I think the woke are done. No one actually likes or agrees with them, it's all just preference falsification.
I don't think anyone is under the delusion that domestic terrorists in the US are being secretive any more. That ship somewhat sails after an attempted insurrection.
let's not move the goalposts, we aren't arguing whether this was a "peaceful protest", we are arguing whether it was an insurrection aka a violent attempted takeover. If all it takes to overthrow the capital is the same level of violence as a civil riot, I'd say there's something wrong.
> One of the cops died of injuries sustained on site
> On April 19, 2021, the office of the chief medical examiner of the District of Columbia, Francisco J. Diaz, reported that the manner of death was natural and the cause of death was "acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis" (two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by an artery clot).
> If all it takes to overthrow the capital is the same level of violence as a civil riot, I'd say there's something wrong.
You are trying to use body count to measure the seriousness of an attempt to take over the government? It’s starting to look like the Taliban took over Kabul with less violence than what happened in the US Capitol.
I disagree. Do you identify any mis-information article? Otherwise I don't share your distain.
EDIT: this is an ad-hom. Please respond to the point - I also linked to WP as evidence that your claim is shaky. Refusing to do so because I linked to a journalist you dislike is pure tribalism.
I'm not going to read anything written by Greenwald, he's completely gone off the deep end. He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage about the Biden rape accusation unless he could provide some sort of proof - he concluded that being asked to show proof of what he was accusing someone of counted as "being censored".
Anyway, I'll say that just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace. Even if his death was completely unrelated, it doesn't make Jan 6 any less of an insurrection.
Again, this is an ad-hom. I didn't claim something was true because Greenwald believes it - I linked to an article addressing the topic, so you can address the content of that article, rather than its author.
> He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage ... unless he could provide some sort of proof
doesn't seem to match up with
> just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace
where's the proof? various outlets already back-peddled on the claim he was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, they have yet to prove anything with regards to bear mace (other than two men carried it).
I don't actually believe technology can save us, don't find the techno-utopias concocted by sci-fi authors to actually be utopias, and don't accept the thesis that we have progressed because we're better at satisfying bodily appetites to be compelling.
I wonder how many people will actually attempt mind uploads, or believe that completely computer generated agents are sentient. Especially since it seems like a lot of these technologists are willing to use duck typing to determine sentience, which obviously isn't good enough.
Even a Moravec transfer boils down to taking a leap of faith on the ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer, not to mention the inherent creepiness of the proposition of slowly replacing your brain with some foreign substance.
I think it is entirely impossible for mind transfers to work differently from this*. I think most people who believe in this sort of technology accept this.
In fact, if you do not believe in transcendental souls of some kind, there should be no fear of this type of scenario. You anyway go to sleep each night and awaken after a discontinuity. Why would this be significantly different? Now, killing yourself after having your mind copied to the machine doesn't make any sense.
More interestingly though, if we had the necessary technology for this type of transfer, we should also be able to do mind/machine interfaces, such that either copy of you could directly experience what the other does, meaning that this could be experienced differently from a notion of either a single entity OR 2 separate entities. Of course, it would follow that in fact multiple people could share experiences in similar ways, with unclear effects on the very notion of identity.
If I could see, feel, hear, even think the same things as you, would the concept of me and you as separate identities actually mean anything to us anymore? I suspect that we can't really imagine what society and humanity would actually look like if/when such technology were widely available.
> would the concept of me and you as separate identities actually mean anything to us anymore?
Clearly yes. If your body is destroyed, I will stop experiencing your thoughts and your senses, and vice versa.
> You anyway go to sleep each night and awaken after a discontinuity. Why would this be significantly different?
I'm more interested in why it would be the same. As it stands, there is no account of what is the thing that persists through deep sleep, or more broadly, of why there is sentience to begin with. I'm perfectly ok with conjecturing that sentience is not physical, given that we can't observe it, like we can with the physical. And I don't expect we will find some physics redefining discovery in the brain that will allow us to see us. Some philosophers hold that the more interesting question is why do neuroscientific accounts of the brain seem insufficient to us, but at that point the jig's up, you're doing philosophy and not science. Which is the problem of mind uploading, there's no scientific surety to it, believing in it will be conditional on not thinking too much about it, or on taking the position that "the philosophy is settled!".
> Clearly yes. If your body is destroyed, I will stop experiencing your thoughts and your senses, and vice versa.
Well, assuming a copy of my mind was being perfectly executed by some machine, that would mean that even if my body is destroyed, along with the sensations and thoughts coming from the copy of my brain residing in my body, the machine copy will still continue to feel perceptions (through machine sensors or through your body) and think my thoughts. This would be roughly similar to losing a hand or an eye today - it is a loss, but it does not fundamentally affect your sense of you.
> As it stands, there is no account of what is the thing that persists through deep sleep, or more broadly, of why there is sentience to begin with.
Physics in general has no notion of anything persisting - as far as all our physics is concerned, there are just instants of time (and space) that influence each other (from past to future) but are otherwise separate. The same is true of course in space - there is no physical account for "an object". At the macroscopic level every "object" can be equivalently modeled by smaller pieces held together by various forces. At the quantum level, elementary particles are indivisible, but also indistinguishable: there is no distinction between saying "this electron moved from atom 1 to atom 2" and "the electron in atom 1 disappeared and a new electron appeared in atom 2".
Of course, this may mean that our account of nature is missing something much more basic than consciousness (persistence / the flow of time). Or, it may mean that identity is a fundamentally meaningless notion, an unnecessary (in the logical sense) heurisitc that evolution has bred into us because it is useful for predicting the behavior of the macro world.
This might not be relevant to you, but in case my braindump may spark a serious conversation: //mere// virtue signaling is closer (but still not quite right). Part of the problem is that signaling (and, the more I look at this word, the more problematic it becomes, as I'm not sure what doesn't count in at least one's lightcone), virtuous or otherwise, need not be intended; agents can accidentally give away information. The virtuous agent may signal, and their signals may be both virtuous and appear otherwise to the vicious and virtuous alike. Part of the problem with the phrase "virtue signaling" is that there's a positivistic definition of the concept, but there are also justified manners in which to engage in that practice. Virtue signaling need not be fake or reduced to appearance (assuming we set aside the problem of representing a thing-in-itself). The virtuous agent may also perform or signal knowing they are signaling, and they may do so in virtue of performance. Maybe "Vicious Virtue-Signaling" is more appropriate. There are likely many attempts to label this thing we're worried about. This strikes me as the closest answer: when one aims to signal one's goodness in a deceptive manner that treats the other (including one's future self) as mere means, one has engaged in immoral or vicious virtue-signaling.
This. Basically half of LinkedIn posts these days. "Here's this guy who spent 16 hours a day selling watermelon at a traffic light. I came in and helped him find a job and now he's a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and can feed his 12 kids. #bekind"
Location: San Juan, PR
Remote: Yes, preferred
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Angular, React, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, Dapper, SQL Server
Résumé/CV: https://mooseburger.github.io/files/carlos_ramirez.pdf
Email: carlosfabianramirez@gmail.com