Just to be totally clear, what I was suggesting was that there are (software) companies that are doing "software the (software) hiring way".

As in, "do we write our server in Scala or Node.js?" becomes: "We advertise to all prospective hires that they should come work for us, because you'll get experience with Node.js, so that by induction on the automated resume keyword scanner that lands you an interview for your next job 6 months later [when our iPhone app idea crashes and burns], you'll never be out of work".

Which would be quite an ironic proposition when you think about it.

Oh yeah, I got it. I was just driving home the point that the toxic **** software employers do has infected the rest of the economy too.

Manhole covers are round and not square so that the covers don't fall through the hole

Academia or bust

Just wait until we make academia great again.

What a bunch of pointy-headed so-called "scientists".

This is immediately obvious. I can't understand for the life of me why people are still stupid enough to try to hire this way. Hell, even at Boeing, the actual managers hated it, but it was imposed by HR. HR even got to decide the search terms, even though they knew jack all about the actual job requirements.

So the root of this problem is all the software developers who convinced the world we could automate away half of the jobs and save everyone money.

Depends how far you want to pass the buck. Software developers created the system. HR managers bought it. CEOs put HR in charge of candidate screening despite being unqualified to do the job. Business schools teach CEOs that expertise is unnecessary for managing processes. Corporate reticence prevents business schools from gathering high quality case studies about soft failures. Stock market speculators respond unpredictably to negative news. Government policies of the past 40 years stimulated mass expansion of stock market speculation. The financial sector lobbied for those policies. Finance dates back to prehistoric China and Babylon.

So the root of this problem is China and Iraq. OMG, the Republicans were right all along.

good thing we have bitcoin

****.

Hmm, I wonder when man-made continental drift will start heating up.

Breaking up Pangea was actually the original GOP platform.

The first apartheid.

It actually is though. Calories in < Calories burnt. There is no huge equation to weight loss, it really is as simple as eating less calories and burning more. Unless you have a thyroid or some other issue that can affect your weight gain, you literally just need to eat less calories than you expend per day/week whatever your plan is. There are literally no other factors in weight loss in the sense that eating a particular food group, or cutting one out, has any effect. You can eat McDonalds, you can eat fried food, you can eat whatever you want, as long as your overall calories for the day are in a deficit compared to what your body needs to either maintain your weight, gain weight, or lose it depending on your goals. Will your heart be healthy? Hell no. Your cholesterol may be through the roof, but yes, you will still lose weight.

All these "diets" out there are nothing but fads. They all literally do the same exact thing. It doesn't matter if you're eating Carbs or not, or all meat, or a vegetarian. They're all based around eating less calories than you burn throughout the day. Say you need 2500 calories to "maintain" your current weight. If you eat less calories than that, you'll lose weight, albeit a bit slower, plain and simple. If you work out and further burn off more calories, you'll have better results.

It quite literally is that simple. Eat less calories, lose weight. There is a myth however that you need to burn 3,500 calories to burn a pound of fat. Weight loss does go beyond simple mathematics, and everyone is different. The one fact however that rings true in every scenario is how many calories you eat vs how many you are expending. Simply put, if I am eating 3000 calories of food a day and only burning off 1000 calories, I am going to gain a **** ton of weight. Not to mention that losing weight does not mean you've magically lost fat.

Rosenbaum M, Hirsch J, Gallagher DA, and Leibel RL. Long-term persistence of adaptive thermogenesis in subjects who have maintained a reduced body weight. The American journal of clinical nutrition 88: 906-912, 2008. Web abstract: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18842775

Arguments based upon thermodynamics are trivially correct, but do not properly account for the fact that the human body is a dynamic system that evolved to deal with short-term surplus and long-term deficiency. Weight loss causes a decrease in resting energy expenditure far beyond what would be expected based on lean body mass, and this state persists until the weight is regained. Nobody knows why. The reason it's not as simple as ~eat less~ is because eating less isn't actionable and it doesn't solve the problem in the long run.

Ketogenic diets also probably aren't fads.

Eating less calories than you burn throughout the day or week causes you to lose weight, that will remain true for every single person that does this unless they have a medical condition that causes weight gain, water retention, etc. That's a simple fact. The intricacies of how much is lost, what other factors such as weight lifting or cardio and their impacts are, etc are more complicated. Some people can eat less and lose a ton of weight, while others can eat less and lose weight more gradually, and others lose it more slowly.

Your argument that eating less doesn't solve the problem in the long run only applies to people who eat less and do nothing else, possibly for the rest of their lives since age and metabolism will start to play a factor. Someone that continues to eat less and work out, get to their goal weight, then gradually put on muscle which helps burn more fat, they are then able to up their caloric intake, in fact it's required to do so to gain more muscle. If that's their goal. But if you want to lose weight, yes, all you need to do is eat less calories. I'm not exactly sure what your point is, since it's a pretty basic rule to personal training someone or being a dietician. "How much do you eat?" "oh I eat about 3000 calories a day and don't work out" yeah, that's why you're fat. If you did nothing all day and remained sedentary, but ate 1500-2000 calories a day (a 500 to 1000 calorie deficit to maintain your current weight for the average male), you would lose weight. Plain and simple. And it doesn't matter what foods you ate, so long as you kept at that number.

It's also not cut and dry in the sense that whatever calories are reported on the back of packages or nutritional packets are often estimates. Those 120 calorie cookies you eat? 1 of the cookies you just ate could have been more than the 120 printed on the box, and the next one could be less.

Ketogenic diets might not be fads, but they aren't without their complications. They help you burn fat and lose weight, but they also have a negative impact on high intensity workouts. So it's not advisable for someone that's looking to bulk up or perform an activity that is high intensity (think tour de france, high level hockey, football, etc) to be on the ketogenic diet due to its negative impact on intramuscular glycogen and muscle mass. Your body NEEDS carbohydrates to perform those tasks at maximum efficiency.

When an obese person loses weight due to a simple calorie deficit, their endocrine system throws an unholy **** fit. Their BMR is suppressed. They experience profound hunger and fatigue. These are known and studied physiological responses with an easily understood evolutionary basis. In most people, these symptoms do not go away until they have regained the weight they lost. Nobody exactly understands why it happens or how to fix it without regaining weight.

So yes, the thermodynamic explanation for weight loss is basically correct, in that if you eat fewer calories than you expend, you will lose weight. The problem is, that explanation does not help obese people make long-term sustainable lifestyle changes. It's flippant, actually.

Yeah, nutritional information on packaging is super bad. All based on outdated tables.

Yup, but it's pretty well understood how the diet works, so it's quickly becoming the go-to prescription for weight gain caused by a lot of disorders (e.g. PCOS).

You are right in that it doesn't help them make sustainable life choices and they may gain their weight back.. But that's the key word "choice". Calories in < Calories burnt works, and is the go-to general rule for losing weight. If a morbidly obese person loses a ton of weight, and then makes the choice to go back to their previous lifestyle, that doesn't negate the calories in < calories burnt fact.

It's like an alcoholic or drug addict - They can go through rehab and once they come out it's recommended they go through intense therapy and counseling afterwards to remain abstinent and live a sober life. If said alcoholic decides to forego all that and then make the choice to go back to drinking, that doesn't mean that Rehab doesn't work. It means they made the lifestyle choice to go back to their old routine.




I completely agree, it's definitely an amazing diet for losing weight. I was just addressing the point that it's good for just that, losing weight (yes I know that it helps with seizures/diabetes as well, but we're not talking about that). Once you've attained your goal you should focus on rebuilding the muscle mass the diet causes you to lose, which will help you in the future to keep that goal weight in check. And then make the lifestyle choice to continue living healthy. Too many people drop 100 lbs and think they can go nuts and the next thing they know they're back at their original weight or heavier.

The physiological changes of alcohol dependence eventually go away. The metabolic changes of weight loss don't. For the rest of your life, you have to eat much less food than someone who has never been obese, even at the same weight and level of activity, while experiencing hunger just as acutely as they would. The body literally responds as though it is starving to death, telling the brain that it is starving to death, because there is something wrong with it. That's what the latest research on the subject is saying, right now. Not just for obese people with underlying conditions, for all obese people.

Eating less is going to be a part of any cure for the obesity epidemic, but it won't work by itself. You can't expect 35% of the American public to voluntarily subject themselves to a very real, lifelong sensation of starvation. You just can't. You wouldn't want to live in that country. Fixing this problem is going to involve a lot of good-faith research and eventually either surgery or pharmaceuticals, in addition to healthy dietary choices.

That's all I meant when I said it's more complicated than ~eat less~.

(Edit: One of the most interesting recent realizations is that body fat is an endocrine organ in its own right, and plays a dynamic role in your metabolism just as important as your pancreas and liver. A lot of people intuitively think the body is well engineered, with a good separation of responsibilities - for example, like fat cells only exist to store fat - but that's not at all true. It's an overcomplicated patchwork of "good enough" parts that communicate mostly through dubious and easily interrupted chemical feedback loops. Modern life is running our bodies way out of spec, so of course **** breaks and we don't know how to fix it.)



People probably shouldn't try keto unless supervised by a doctor. It's a good way to cause organ damage if something goes wrong.

If weight loss is always just as simple as calories expended versus calories consumed how does one explain lazy sedentary skinny people that consume thousands of calories a day?

Because laws of physics like thermodynamics aren't violated just because there are other variables (for example, exactly what happens when you consume calories).

I have been cycling carbs in and out depending on if I am focusing on long distance stuff on my rowing machine (10k a day for two or three weeks and then a back off) or calisthenics.

EDIT: But lots of fat goes a long way to making up the difference, anyway.

If I continually add water to two buckets and one of them is leaky, one of them is going to empty faster. But if I stop re-filling them, eventually the water in both will completely evaporate.

The only study I can recall on this suggested it was because overweight people underestimate how much they eat.

This thread does not deliver.

That doesn't sound right. It sounds more like you are describing a stupid crash diet, which will do that, but I'm extremely skeptical that the human can't eventually adapt to different caloric intake rates. That would be a massive disadvantage in pretty much any society were food was never a scare resource.

Rosenbaum M, Hirsch J, Gallagher DA, and Leibel RL. Long-term persistence of adaptive thermogenesis in subjects who have maintained a reduced body weight. The American journal of clinical nutrition 88: 906-912, 2008. Web abstract: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18842775

Yeah, but I wonder to what extent that lack of exercise plays a roll. From what I've seen people are generally a lot more successful with long term weight loss if it's paired with an exercise program. If people have been overweight for a very long time, it might take a lot longer than a year to readjust.