Credit cards are an excellent tool as long as you don't accrue debt with them.
I get 1.5%-2% cash back with everything purchased with it. I'd be losing money by using a debit card instead. Not to mention the $500 they gave me just for signing up for it.
I also don't to worry about when I get paid. I might only have $100 left in my checking account when I need to buy groceries if the day I get paid falls at a weird time. I don't have to worry about that sort of thing with a credit card, although it is much less of an issue now that I actually have savings than it was when I was in college.
If someone steals my debit card or my cash and uses it, my money is gone. My bank would probably refund me the stolen money if my debit card was used fraudulently, but until that happens I'm still out however much of my own money.
If they steal my credit card, who cares? I'll call the bank and cancel it and in the mean time, none of my actual money has been touched.
> If I need more I go to the Bank's ATM and get more. Easy.
Not having to go to an ATM is even easier than having to go to an ATM.
You basically count up reasons why I don't use credit cards.
Cashback almost always is connected with some form of datamining. The 500$ bonus is usually paid back in form of hidden fees somewhere. No money is free.
I don't want to spend money I don't have, ever. And regarding if my card gets stolen, European EC cards are very safe. They aren't CCs where you can just start grabbing cash, you need the pin too and the banks are very aggressive on putting temporary blocks on any transactions (as part of EC, any totally blocked transactions are billed instead and fully transparent for you).
Going to the ATM is easy and it means I have a very good feeling of my weekly and monthly spendings just by looking at how often and how much I use the ATM.
> Getting off this rock is the first step towards getting all of our eggs out of one basket.
Yes it is, but why should I care whether all of our eggs are in one basket, or two baskets, or a million baskets? The survival of the human race as a whole is not a concern of mine.
Because I care to what happens about all living humans today. I simply don't care about the long term survival of our species.
Spreading across the galaxy or the universe so that there can be more humans alive or to ensure that if one planet gets wiped out, some humans live on are placing value on the existence of humans as a species in the universe. That's what I don't care about. I don't think we have intrinsic value that needs to be preserved.
It's hard to pinpoint an exact generation where I stop caring. Here's how I like to think of it.
If every human alive today died instantly and painlessly, ending the human species and potentially eliminating all sentient life in the universe, I wouldn't care. The people felt no pain, experienced no dread.
The only reason to care in that instance is if you believe that the human race has inherent value just be being alive. That's what I don't have.
Now, the interaction of this philosophy and the real world isn't always clean but in general, it leads me to prioritize current human life over future human life especially over the long term.
So, for example, a dollar spent feeding a hungry child today takes precedence over a dollar spent exploring the universe even if that exploration lays the groundwork for humans being a multi planetary species 500 years from now.
It's a strange position. There will always be hungry children until we fundamentally change human nature.
I'd argue we're more likely to change human nature through space colonization than here on Earth, but that's a debate I don't expect to see much value from.
<i>> I care to what happens about all living humans today. I simply don't care about the long term survival of our species.</i>
<i>> why should I care whether all of our eggs are in one basket, or two baskets, or a million baskets? The survival of the human race as a whole is not a concern of mine.</i>
In short, because others care.
You cannot reach your goals alone. You need a cooperation from others. But if you didn't care what they care, there would be no cooperation, or cooperation would be not so good as it might be.
Cooperation needs shared values, and the more values are shared, the more effective cooperation would be. If you care only about your goals and not about goals of others, than others would not play with you. If you share some goals (I believe that those who care about long term benefits value short term also) then they accept your cooperation when working on short term goals, but you will not have any influence over them, when they work on long term goals. The only lever on them you would have is a force. Military, political, financial or any other. They would not cooperate willingly.
You can choose war and force those who have other values to work on your values. Or you can respect their values and cooperate with others on them. It is your choice.
The real question here is why bother spending 1% of our GDP on space exploration? What tangible benefits is it going to bring, and why are those benefits worth more than the benefit that will come from spending 1% of our GDP on something else?
The real question here is why bother spending 1% of our GDP on anything?
It's the same argument as to why we shouldn't invest in infrastructure "don't build those high speed train routes, we'll only see the benefit in 30 years" - space exploration is an investment in the future, and like a lot of investments, the potential payoff is variable but we can never know without trying.
If we take a VC analogy (being here on HN and all), then you might as well utilise some of your fund on a literal moonshot - if it fails, you scrub it off, take the learnings (and employ, I suspect, a tonne of people in jobs trying to make it happen). If it wins, you get your outsized outcome to 10x.
Sometimes we need state actors to make big bets - like investing in CERN (which has given us the WWW, the LHC, etc...).
True - it was probably a stretch to include it alongside the VC analogy, but CERN's also delivering projects with unsure outcomes a la most investments [0]. If they turned the LHC on for example and found precisely nothing of note, it'd have been a failed investment, but was certainly worth the punt.
I think one of the issues with space exploration for people is that it just feels so pointless and intangible - its perception so locked into the realms of sci fi that the act of trying feels more of an indulgent nod to starship fantasies and "space race" dick-waving than to realistic scientific progress.
[0] money the "whatabout" brigade say should go to cancer research, which too, is also an investment with unsure outcomes (and which usually helpfully ignore things like CERN's impact on cancer research with second order applications of other discoveries...)
Failed in terms of science spending maybe, but even if they found everything they wanted the intrinsic value of this new knowledge to society is not really valuable in the same sense that the steel needed for the construction is valued.
It is now more than 20 years since the top quark was discovered, has society profited enought from knowing the mass of the top quark that the Tevatron is paid off?
Or is this way of thinking of science funding just destructive?
You can't just point to a list of inventions that came from research in space exploration - you also have to make a case that these inventions would have otherwise not come about, or at least would have come about much later.
I disagree. You would have to make the case that these inventions would come about without space travel - that there were alternative commercial interests and government incentives that would finance the necessary research.
But you're the one using these inventions as justification for future space exploration - shouldn't the burden of proof fall on the one making the claim?
Those inventions provide justification for space exploration - they establish this field as a tried-and-true way of generating very useful spinoff tech.
To counter this argument, the other side needs to justify that either those same inventions can be achieved in a different and more cost-effective way, or that we don't really need new tech (relative to its costs).
Well, unless we outlaw reproduction without government approval we will hit the limit of what the planet can support as far as human life.
Unless we start recylcing 100% of our materials we will run out of various elements we use for production of effectively everything.
Commercially available sea salt has been found contaminated with microplastics, that means are oceans are already screwed so envetually it would be nice to have a new world to do things right on.
Opening up space opens up more physical space for humans and other life, it opens up more resources for construction (asteroids contain unfathomable amounts of rare and common elements that will be easy to exploit once the appropriate technologies are developed).
Space exploration will continue to add more and more technological and general scientific breakthroughs as it has been now for several decades. Look how GPS has changed the world, it's used in everything from tracking wildlife to your watch to moving goods around the world. Literally impossible if we'd not developed a space program.
> Well, unless we outlaw reproduction without government approval we will hit the limit of what the planet can support as far as human life.
The birth rates of richer nations are significantly lower than the birth rates of poorer nations. I'm not convinced that overpopulation will be an issue as long as we can provide cheap and easy access to birth control to the entire population.
> asteroids contain unfathomable amounts of rare and common elements that will be easy to exploit once the appropriate technologies are developed
This is actually my favorite justification for space exploration, but if this is our goal, we should be focused on asteroid mining and not moon bases or manned mars missions.
> Space exploration will continue to add more and more technological and general scientific breakthroughs
You don't know this. It's just a guess. No one can know if the side effects from space research will prove to be more or less useful than the side effects from cancer research or any other kind of research. It's not something that can be known.
It's also entirely possible that the cure for all forms of cancer is a diet consisting entirely of frosted flakes, and that spending $400B researching the effects of all-cereal diets would also discover the cure for cancer.
However, it's far more likely that $400B in cancer research will do more for curing cancer than hoping for side effects from $400B in other research.
We have already spent $500B on cancer research[1] and it hasn't cured. This also isn't an "either/or" proposition. As I mentioned, people travelling in space are subject to a lot of radiation which is known to cause cancer, so part of the research is going to be figuring out how to fix cells that are cancerous.
Cancer is a systemic problem, it isn't measles or polio or TB. You have to understand the system in order to fix it and pushing humans into new environments will give us better insights into the system we call human life.
> We have already spent $500B on cancer research[1] and it hasn't cured
That's a pretty absolutist statement. We've spent more preventing murder, but murder still happens. We have developed many treatments for cancer that have added many quality life years for millions of people.
I agree, both that it is absolutist and that we've spent more on preventing murder. What is the common thread to both of these absolutist comments? Both cancer and murder are systems in crisis, not 'things' in their own right. They have the same questions
1a) What causes a cell to decide live forever (metastasize)?
1b) What causes a person to decide that killing another person is the solution to some problem?
2a) How can we detect a cell that is about to metastasize? How can we stop it?
2b) How can we detect a person that is about to murder? How can we stop them?
3a) What would have to be true for cancer to never be the cause of death ever again?
3b) What would have to be true for murder to never be the cause of death ever again?
See? Both are systems where individual elements within the system have decided to work against the system rather than within its constructs.
There is no drug, no treatment, that will 'cure' cancer until we understand exactly what is going on in a cell that knocks it out of line. And there will be no end to murder until we understand exactly what is going on inside a person's head when they decide that is the correct course of action. Everything we do on these two fronts (cancer, and murder) are delaying actions to minimize their impact on the greater whole.
The other part that some people have assumed (but the GP did not) is that spending this money on Mars exploration would reduce the amount of money that is currently allocated to cancer research. It wouldn't, it was specified as 'new funds'.
> There is no drug, no treatment, that will 'cure' cancer until we understand exactly what is going on in a cell that knocks it out of line. ... Everything we do on these two fronts (cancer, and murder) are delaying actions to minimize their impact on the greater whole.
So what? Even if everything you say is true, the outcome of the research is possibly hundreds of millions of additional quality life years.
And there are many treatments that 'cure' cancer. Many people have cancer, are treated, and never have it again. Many have it, are treated, and live much longer than they otherwise would have. I'm not sure what you are saying, or why research that saves and prolongs lives has to meet some other standard (and what is that standard?).
Imagine giving someone 200 years ago $400B for cancer research; what do you think it would have happen? Do you think they would have found the cure? No. The same thing happens today, $400B may do nothing big for cancer research and what's needed to advance in that area its time; decades (maybe centuries) of advancements in many fields that are not directly related to cancer research but given enough time those advancements will be used together to find a cure (e.g. map the entire DNA; nanorobots, etc)
There are about a thousand things you use and benefit from everyday that were side effects of other research and spending (primarily military). But you take them for granted and so it is easy for you to make value judgments regarding how money is spent.
Eh, the military invents very few things, they mostly spend money on custom development of existing tech to make it better at killing things or facilitating the killing of things.
The car, the calculating machine, the photograph, the steam engine, the radar: none where invented by military men or even those funded by the military.
I might be very wrong (as I don’t have right now time to research more) but I think _the calculating machine_ and _the radar_ are things actually created as usable products because the military needed them in the first place.
I am not in favor of spending (more) money on military.
Not really, their further development certainly benefitted from military money, but the basics came from civilian need for navigation, in general and in mist.
I'm fairly certain this is not true. Marconi and Hülsmeyer had some early ideas about using radar to find ships, but they weren't really developed and didn't use the pulsed approach that subsequent systems used.
If you count nothing but the earliest version of military radars, then of course nothing but the military has funded it.
I will, however, not count pulsing as more than an improvement to the basic invention of distant object detection with radio waves.
As you can read on the page you linked Hülsmeyer made a working system, clunky as it was, for detecting ships in mist. Taking a system from prototype to mass produced, worthy as this investment might be, is not inventing it.
> But you take them for granted and so it is easy for you to make value judgments regarding how money is spent.
It's rude to make such assumptions about me. I do not take the positive side effects from research for granted.
You simply haven't made a case showing why $400B in space research will generate more or better positive side effects than $400B in cancer research.
All research will have side effects that can't be anticipated. It's stupid to perform research with "random, unknowable" side positive side effects as a primary justification.
Eventually the Earth is going to be hit by an asteroid or cooked by the sun. It's an eventuality that on cosmic timescales is going to happen sooner rather than later.
Getting mankind off of Earth and spread across multiple planets and solar system will yield untold positive side effects, and one or more of those may impact cancer research.
More cancer research is not going to stop an asteroid.
> Getting mankind off of Earth and spread across multiple planets and solar system will yield untold positive side effects, and one or more of those may impact cancer research.
And yet perhaps one of the blocks with modern science is people hitting the grave before they can finish innovative research. It takes at least 26 years to train a human from scratch to advance to basic research level in a field. You can add another 10, 20 years before proficiency. At least half the human life until total proficiency (as it stands) is reached and perhaps a quarter of the human life for which researchers can make meaningful contributions.
Arguably, focusing on problems on Earth - like eliminating mortality, solving longevity, curing cancer and dealing with death - will do more for our species long-term than exploring space right now. When your scientists live longer, more discoveries, contributions, and innovations can be made.
Spending $400B on dealing with the greatest tragedies and sources of sorrow known to mankind today - death, disease, illness - would be far preferable to most people than investing in space.
So far our legacy as a species on earth is one of destruction. Only by taking on the challenge a place that is already dead can we be certain of creating something new. Maybe we will learn some perspective in the process.
Going to Mars will have myriad discoveries & side effects, if we knew what they were what would be the point of going?
Also, what if curing cancer is harder than going to mars? One is by now a fairly quantifiable objective, the other is debugging a mind bogglingly complex system with no version control.
I think it is the other way around. Somewhere up the thread someone made the that instead of spending 400B on space travel we should have spent it on cancer research.
There was little, if any, explanation of why this should be done; and the posters arguing the opposite are, in my view, suggesting some of the "why not" arguments. The burden of proof is still on the fellow who made that "we should" claim. My 2c.
Cancer isn't one disease, it's dozens, each with different causes.
For example, almost all cases of cervical cancer are traced to HPV infections...so the research into the HPV vaccine arguably did more to reduce future cancer cases than research into cancer has. Further research showed that HPV can also cause a number of cancers in men (though at lower rates), which is part of the justification for offering the HPV vaccine to boys.
Cancer is often caused when tissue is damaged and needs to heal or try to heal itself repeatedly (inflammation).
Sunburn, smoking, chewing tobacco, HPV, acid reflux, can all cause cancer. Saying those are all different cancers that require different cures is a good way to waste a lot of effort and money. It is more accurate to say that inflammation is a cause for cancer, and focus on that.
Point is, this is one of but many causes of diseases jointly classified as "cancer". Cancers share similarities in their (visible) method of action, but they have very different causes. There isn't going to be a single cure for "cancer".
Yes, there are many causes. We are in violent agreement. If you focus on the causes, you are preventing cancer, not curing it. You are playing whack-a-mole.
The reality is there's no escaping the causes for cancer, many of which are environmental and increasing. No amount of lifestyle change is going to eliminate the growing number of carcinogens present throughout our air, food, and water.
OK. You tell your mom that, after she's gotten cancer, asshole. How did her lifestyle cause her cancer in her ovaries (another inflammation caused cancer), I wonder?
While you're chastising your mom for her lifestyle, the rest of us will be looking/hoping for a cure.
You should know that even you will experience increased and chronic inflammation as you age, no matter how much better than your mom, your lifestyle is. Increased chronic inflammation and aging are linked and we're still trying to understand why.
> You tell your mom that, after she's gotten cancer, asshole.
Posting like this is a bannable offense. I'm not going to ban you for this because it's clearly a personal topic, but if you post like this again, we will. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on.
My mother did get breast cancer and it went into remission partially by increasing the quality of her lifestyle during and after treatment, as mandated by a pilot study she went through to help assess such an intervention. The lifestyle change was more extreme than what we would have considered necessary before her cancer, but doing cardiovascular exercise every day is already known as having an influence on bodily inflammation. Yes chemotherapy was involved but we are speaking of where the next span of marginal investment would have to go to make the highest impact.
At the individual level finding a cure would be great, and during late-stage we would definitely want to understand how to have more successful treatments, but to remove the long-term load of the cancer problem on the medical system would mean better environmental and lifestyle interventions which act at a level of root cause instead of proximal treatment. If anything maybe we would find common ground have having cheaper diagnostics so that we could find more motivation to engage in preventative measures concretely rather than as a catch all.
Nice that your mom got better with her breast cancer. I'm sure you know that a lot of breast cancer "survivors" are victims of an over hyped mammogram screening that calls any lump, no matter how slow growing, "cancer". Whether that's what your mom had or not, it's still scary though. [1]
My mom died of ovarian cancer after living a lifestyle that even you would approve of. Victim shaming pisses me off.
Shaming the victim with this lifestyle bullshit is not productive, and neither is minimizing people who actually search for cures rather than preaching lifestyle.
Yet you’re going right ahead and assuming that someone else’s experience is not _real_ cancer because they survived it and your mom didn’t? You really don’t have the right to be calling anyone else an asshole.
> and neither is minimizing people who actually search for cures rather than preaching lifestyle.
It seems like your feelings about your mom
are preventing you from thinking objectively about this. Lifestyle can be a cure as well as a preventative, an extremely effective one, but that’s often overlooked because it’s easier and more profitable to get someone to take pills than it is for them to change all their dietary and exercise habits. Attitudes like yours, that say it’s wrong to call it anyone’s fault, really don’t help.
> If liberals want to do anything about it they need to start actually giving a damn about America's poor and rapidly shrinking middle class in spite of the fact that they hold "backward and primitive" religious beliefs and are behind the times on social issues.
Hillary focused so much on the shrinking middle class and the poor during the 2016 election - I can't believe that anyone who has actually read her policy suggestions (or the policy suggestions of most other Democrats) can say that liberals don't give a damn about America's poor and shrinking middle class with a straight face.
Here's a selection of Hillary Clinton's policy positions from the 2016 election that would help the poor or the shrinking middle class. I understand that most of them aren't actual policy - however, if you go to the website where I pulled this from [1] you can find information about specific policy as well. I just went for the quotes here to make my point while keeping the comment brief.
> "Provide tax relief to working families from the rising costs they face"
> "Simplify and cut taxes for small businesses so they can hire and grow."
> "Make debt free college available to all Americans."
> "Hillary Clinton has announced a $275 billion, five-year plan to rebuild our infrastructure—and put Americans to work in the process."
> "Bring down out-of-pocket costs like copays and deductibles"
> "Reduce the cost of prescription drugs."
> "Fight for health insurance for the lowest-income Americans in every state by incentivizing states to expand Medicaid"
> "Expand access to rural Americans, who often have difficulty finding quality, affordable health care"
> "Remove barriers to sustainable homeownership."
> "Help responsible homeowners save for a down payment."
> "Defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau"
> "Strengthen American manufacturing with a $10 billion “Make it in America” plan."
> "Restore collective bargaining rights for unions and defend against partisan attacks on workers’ rights."
> "calling for a tax credit for businesses that hire apprentices, providing much needed on-the-job training—especially for young Americans."
Before diving into into policy details, you need to consider the bigger picture. Hillary was promising, generally speaking, third term of Obama.
He actually endorsed her, and there was little disagreement between the two.
If people were unhappy about two Obama terms (and it seems they were, in large enough numbers), it was a losing proposition from the start, and details about prescription drugs and tax cuts for small businesses just didn't mattered.
He got elected & re-elected by more votes than any other president in history; his popularity at the end of his tenure was very high. Hillary was unpopular, but not because of her similarity to Obama.
Obama's approval rating was above 50% for his last year in office, so I wouldn't say that people were particularly unhappy with him. Honestly, I think he could have won a 3rd term had he been legally allowed to run.
Hillary was unpopular in the voter's eyes for reasons that had little to do with Obama, although their association didn't really help her.
The fact that she was a woman, the fact that she was seen as a member of a political family (despite not coming from a multi-generation political family like the Kennedy or Bush families), the fact that the conservatives of this country had been running propaganda against her for almost 25 years, and the fact that she isn't particularly charismatic all hurt her in the public eye far more than her association with and similarity to Obama.
Which is deeply unfortunate, because none of those things have anything to do with what makes a good President. Perhaps someday we will realize that what makes a good candidate and what makes a good President are not the same.
I have an extremely different impression of her campaign. If you look, not at the words on the platform, but at her campaign, it seemed very clear to me that she didn't care about working class people in flyover country. And I thought that was very strange, because that used to be the Democratic Party's core constituency.
I can't at the moment point you to documentation to back up my impression, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone in reaching that conclusion...
> And I thought that was very strange, because that used to be the Democratic Party's core constituency.
Abandoning the working class and going all-in for neoliberal economics while retaining center-left social policies was the defining feature of Bill Clinton’s campaign and Presidency; that faction of the party was dominant from then on, though there have been signs of that dominance weakening over the last several years; it would be poetic if it's dominance (in Presidential terms) within the party began and ended with a Clinton.
> If you look, not at the words on the platform, but at her campaign, it seemed very clear to me that she didn't care about working class people in flyover country
Interesting. What about her campaign gave you that impression?
It may be the media's fault, but it seems like every time I heard her say something, it was about abortion, or LGBTQ issues, or race. It wasn't about the economy or jobs or even unions. So I concluded that the social issues were what she cared about, and the economy and workers were not.
An important point that I made above is that the time to do something about these issues was in the early 2000s. At this point the issue has been ignored for so long that people have lost all trust in the current establishment. They assume any promises from the current establishment are BS to get them to vote and will be forgotten right after the election.
If your house has been on fire forever and is burned down to cinders and the fire department finally shows up you're not going to thank them. You're going to yell at them and tear them a new one. You're probably so mad that you're going to tear the hose out of the hydrant and scream "let it f'ing burn you !#$!#$!#"
The house has been on fire since the mid-1970s. The roof collapsed in 2008.
I think it might aid understanding to look only at the Republican primary. Jeb Bush was the favorite, and Trump destroyed him. Jeb like Hillary was seen as establishment, a relative of two former presidents who also had an opportunity to put out the fire but did nothing.
Hillary Clinton is a part of the establishment. Her husband is a former president who presided over a booming decade when these problems could have been fixed but weren't.
Trump rightly or wrongly was perceived as being an outsider hostile to that establishment. Personally I see him as an opportunistic con man who saw a chance and took it, but it doesn't matter. The chance was there to be taken.
Edit: continuing with the fire metaphor: the roof collapsed in 2008 at the tail end of the Bush II administration. Obama sort of noticed and walked up and peed on it. The pee sizzled and steamed for a second and the flames shot higher.
> An important point that I made above is that the time to do something about these issues was in the early 2000s.
You do say that this. But, you also say that liberals "need to start actually giving a damn" about the poor and working class. I am refuting that point by showing that the liberal agenda is actually aimed at helping the middle class and the poor.
> What are the victims of these policies going to do? Nobody listens to them. Nobody cares. So in the end all they're left with is political revolts that most of them from what I've read understand are likely impotent, but at least somebody is discussing it. I'm a coastal "tech elite" and I'm writing this post and I wouldn't be if Hillary had won and Brexit hadn't passed. That's democracy I guess.
The problem with your assessment is not that the Trump situation could have been avoided by changing policy between the early 2000's and the 2016 election. I agree with that.
You assert that nobody is listening to or caring about these people, though, which is what I am refuting. The Democratic party is in favor of helping the poor and the middle class, and it has been for a long time.
> Obama sort of noticed and walked up and peed on it. The pee sizzled and steamed for a second and the flames shot higher.
Obama could have (and would have) done a lot more than "pee" on the flames, as you put it, had he not had to contend with an obstructionist Congress. There is only so much blame you can put on any President due to the limitations on their powers, and very little blame that can be put on Obama in my opinion.
Nobody should trust the will of the people. That's why we have representative democracies and not direct democracies.
The Brexit referendum shouldn't get a special "do-over". Instead, the result should be ignored because leaving the EU is a bad idea regardless of the people's will.
I'm sure a majority of the people have many other terrible ideas that they agree with, especially when you only need 51% of those who care enough to vote to constitute a "majority".
Trusting the will of the people is the philosophy of a lynch mob, not a government.
I agree completely w.r.t. representative democracy vs. mob rule... yet, "the result should be ignored because leaving the EU is a bad idea regardless of the people's will" makes zero sense to me. I have seen arguments for and against Brexit, so where does this authoritative "Brexit would definitely be bad and any result other than Remain should be ignored" come from?
The authoritative view that Brexit is a bad idea comes from the fact that is was sold almost entirely with lies and xenophobia, and even then barely got a majority.
I would not consider Brexit an authoritatively bad idea if
the leave campaign had been more scrupulous and the vote had a larger margin of victory.
"We pay £350 million per week to the EU"
"We will be able to stay in the single market"
"Migrants are overrunning the country"
"We are not a sovereign state as long as we are a member of the EU".
Yes. A referendum on restoring the death penalty in the UK would likely get a strong yes vote. In that case the people's will would be wrong. The most important feature of democracy is that it gives enables people to remove governments without violence. The ability to choose or influence what govts do is secondary.
I'd be curious to know why the many online advocates of intermittent fasting (and other time restricted diets) think it's any different than the many other fad diets that have come, gone, and come again.
Diets in general seem to bring out the obsessive optimization that many (especially on this website) are prone too and the "one quick trick" mentality.
I'll be surprised if there is ever any better advice than "eat food. not too much. mostly plants".
Because unlike other fad diets I've actually experienced weight loss, less hunger, better focus, more stable energy levels, lower blood pressure, better sleep, not to mention cost savings on food, since starting a 16/8 intermittent fast. YMMV, but for many people the benefits are quite stark and palpable beyond possible placebo effect.
Sure it's annecdotal, but there's serious science behind some of the benefits (see this article among other studies). To flip your question around, why are you skeptics so certain that it's just another fad diet that will come and go? IF can actually be a useful enforcement mechanism for the first two parts of "eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables"
> why are you skeptics so certain that it's just another fad diet that will come and go?
Because, like most skeptics, we have seen this pattern before. Supposed scientific support and loads of anecdotal evidence are common to all popular fad diets. The scientific support of IF is also much less solid than it's advocates would have you believe.
> IF can actually be a useful enforcement mechanism for the first two parts of "eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables"
I agree with this - so can basically any other fad diet. People that recognize IF as a method of enforcing a basic CICO diet, I agree with. There are plenty of people that, like any other fad diet, think that IF is somehow special in ways unrelated to it's restriction of calories. That's what makes it the same as any other fad diet to me.
> I've actually experienced weight loss, less hunger, better focus, more stable energy levels, lower blood pressure, better sleep
People report this from atkins, vegan, paleo, keto, juice cleanse, weight watchers, south beach, etc. I am happy that you've found a diet that works for you. I hope that everyone finds a healthy diet that works for them.
I just want people to realize that CICO will always be the key to weight loss regardless of how it is achieved, and "eat food. not too much. mostly plants" will (probably) always be the key to a health diet.
And I long for the day when fan-boys in both camps can admit that all current phones are actually quite good. If smartphone development stopped here and we never got a new smartphone, I don't think it would matter much overall.
It probably could have stopped a few years ago, actually. Perhaps in the iPhone 6/Galaxy S6 generation.
"Amateur runners" is an extremely broad collection of people. Everyone from someone training for their first charity 5K to those who run multiple marathons a year can fall into this category.
Some amateur runners definitely spend $250 on shoes, either because they have so much money that $250 is basically the same as $70 to them or because they are very serious amateurs.
I get 1.5%-2% cash back with everything purchased with it. I'd be losing money by using a debit card instead. Not to mention the $500 they gave me just for signing up for it.
I also don't to worry about when I get paid. I might only have $100 left in my checking account when I need to buy groceries if the day I get paid falls at a weird time. I don't have to worry about that sort of thing with a credit card, although it is much less of an issue now that I actually have savings than it was when I was in college.
If someone steals my debit card or my cash and uses it, my money is gone. My bank would probably refund me the stolen money if my debit card was used fraudulently, but until that happens I'm still out however much of my own money.
If they steal my credit card, who cares? I'll call the bank and cancel it and in the mean time, none of my actual money has been touched.
> If I need more I go to the Bank's ATM and get more. Easy.
Not having to go to an ATM is even easier than having to go to an ATM.