What game is this? Dungeon crawl stone soup?

Also you will usually find 950 (aspartame) along with 951 (acesulfame K) because the two have slightly different profiles and work very well together. If we do a study on humans I would want it to include the common and also some uncommon combinations. A lot of people are switching over to erythritol and stevia but I don’t know how safe they are. We make erythritol internally but the dose may be quite different, and coming in through the gut could be quite different to internal production, not to mention with the stevia as actually prepared not lab purified.

This. I’ve helped a few people over the years and I’ve been helped too and with experience on both sides nothing is as impactful as the recognition of how much the help has improved life. A card which says something about the difficulties and how the help felt to receive can be a massive positive, more than any potted plant or simple gift. It lasts forever and is something they can come back to time and again.

Before you take this to mean anything about why you should do, you are not a mouse. This is a study in mice and the differences between what impacts it will have in mice and humans may be very large. Mice are not good human analogues, but they are very cheap and good model organisms.

The findings they report include weight loss and cardiac/neurological impacts. This appears to compound over time with worse impacts as the study continued. This would make sense if the impact of aspartame was a slow chronic toxin or inhibited some normal pathway. If it is the former then avoiding aspartame for mice is important at all times. If it is the latter then having a break every so often should ameliorate the damage, though how much and what time ratio is not tested here.

That said, this is in mice. In my experience human brains a fairly different from mouse brains and the metabolic context is also quite different. I doubt the applicability of this to humans will be replicated well any time soon. If they do find an issue it is likely to be different to what happened to the mice, and though it is possible this will carry over to humans it is unlikely.

I like when they have both, like the roller thing you can click to input a number, best of both worlds.

Yeah, it is like saying “Recessions are caused by GDP reducing for at least two consecutive quarters”. I mean, yes, that does describe what a recession is, but it says little about what the cause of a recession is. In the same way, having less fat in storage is the way you lose body fat, but the mechanisms of actually making that happen are way more complex and trying to reduce it to eat less move more is unhelpful.

I disagree, but I think we agree on a lot here.

Colorimetry measures calories in food by burning the food and measuring the amount of heat generated. This is different to what happens in cells for a huge number of reasons, so it isn’t really reasonable to think of it as a good starting point for nutrition. If you take a substrate, say for example a fat, and you use it to make a hormone it is not being burned for energy and thus breaks the calorie in calorie out model. That is a simple way it fails.

I am not saying the disconnect is 100%, I am saying it is not 100% accurate and depending on how disregulated your system is it may be more or less accurate. Someone who is super healthy and of a low body fat percentage with a reasonable amount of muscle mass would probably end up fairly close to CICO for the first few weeks of a dietary change. This is not really in dispute.

The dispute comes from the rest of the population. We have more deranged systems which are less in line with CICO due to metabolic issues like insulin resistance, gut damage, gluten issues like celiac disease, and so on. The more deranged the body the more CICO loses its predictive value and becomes a bludgeon.

When I went to the doctor about my weight they told me to eat less and move more. My insulin resistance was not measured and the dietary recommendations led to more muscle loss and body fat gain. I had tonnes of issues with acne, dandruff, terrible body odor, mild scurvy, and overall ill health. Adding more food that I could actually digest and switching from my broken glucose metabolism to a ketogenic metabolism allowed me to repair damage, absorb vitamins more effectively, and fix all sorts of seemingly minor but overall stressful issues. My caloric intake was higher but I lost excess weight first by dropping glycogen and associated water but then by dropping fat while also gaining muscle. I felt like moving, I wanted to move, so I moved, but it wasn’t willpower driving that like on CICO, it was hormones driving the change in output.

The calories being low led to conserving energy and being depressed and inactive. Adding good calories I could actually use led to more activity along with better mood and brain function. CICO is not a good model for making changes, it is just accounting. If you want to say “this many carbons came in, this many left” that is fine, but there is no why in that and no guidance on what to do from there. If you try changing how many calories go in or go out you shouldn’t be surprised when the self regulating system regulates itself and changes something else, such as making you burn less energy or eat more food.

I’m not saying all men are abusers or harmful and therefore need to be separated, not at all. If my partner and I were to utilise a service it would not offend me to have a short conversation with her, away from me, to ensure she could say things without me hearing them. Having a safe way out of abusive relationships is the key predictor of whether women will stay or leave. In the 70s women couldn’t get a credit card or bank account in their name so couldn’t leave, but once that changed a whole bunch of women left their husbands and escaped to improve their lives. In a situation like a temporary housing shelter it would be ideal to have that conversation and offer a way out. Is sex segregation the best way of doing this? No. Is it better than nothing? Depending on the rate of intimate partner violence, maybe? I don’t know for sure, but I am open to the possibility that it is better to have that be a space without men.

And yes, most of the harms of alcohol are socially accepted to some degree and thus hidden, so it isn’t well studied and understood. I think we agree that most of the harm comes from the legal context of drug use, not from the drugs themselves as such. I mean paracetamol can cause some harms but it is balanced by the benefit and we make a rational decision to use it. I think the same applies to weed and MDMA, but all of the social and legal things around those two generate tonnes of harm and obfuscate the actual issue.

I want a government to run a test of many different approaches in different areas, matched to reduce confounding, so we can see what actually works. Should weed be legalised or decriminalised? What works better? Which measures do we care most about? Same for all the other issues. Run the studies with agreement in the legislation that if the study shows X works we will do X. It would mean we decide in advance our response to the outcomes of the studies and then work from that basis going forward without regard to current party in office or political pressures.

Sure, for donation, but the original context we are talking about disability services which are government funded through taxation. You don’t get to object to the military budget because you are a pacifist, you have to pay regardless. In that context the person receiving the service is entitled to that service by law. They access the service and the service providers are supposed to do their jobs without personal judgement getting in the way. My issue is with providers not doing their jobs because of this type of judgement. I am not donating my time when working with a client, they (or their allocation) are paying me to work.

This assumes a whole bunch of things. First, do you actually absorb all of the calories through your gut? Does your body maintain the same base rate of expenditure (BMR) in both the short and long term of restriction?

When you look at people who did The Biggest Loser they did the exact thing you are talking about. They had a significant caloric deficit through eating restricting and massive amounts of exercise. In the short term they did lose weight but it also ruined their BMR. Years later they had mostly put the weight back on and had a lower BMR than at the start. It damaged them.

If you lose weight through caloric deficit you may not notice any change but your body will stop prioritising things like your hair and skin, muscle growth, and bone maintenance. All of those are low priority for an organism in caloric deficit. Instead your body will focus on the most important thing, getting more food. You become food obsessed, thinking about it all day, and you will eat almost anything you can access. You also end up with a lower body temperature, less immune activity, and lower drive for exercise and sex. It is an absolute nightmare.

The end result is that calories in calories out assumes a perfect and simple system. It does not take into account things like proton uncoupling in brown fat, differing levels of absorption through digestion, body temperature, hair growth, cell turnover, and tonnes of other things. It can appear to work for a short time but long term it breaks down and deviates more and more from the data.

Calories in, calories out.

For years I believed that the only reason people got fat was because they ate more than they burned and ended up with an excess of energy. It was also the view pushed by the medical profession, by health education at school, and by society in general. I spent years trying to get my weight under control by eating less and moving more.

After a particularly strict period of literally weighing the margarine container before and after buttering toast so I knew how many calories of margarine I used I had gained weight rather than losing even with a 500kcal deficit. I listened to a podcast (Skeptics with a K) in which they interviewed Gary Taubes about the non-caloric hormonal model of obesity. It basically said that if your insulin level was up you couldn’t access body fat, so all the thoughts of that fat being available were flawed and you couldn’t really lose weight in that state. What ended up happening was a reduction in calorie burn and loss of muscle. Fixing the insulin is the first step to managing weight and if you do that you can access your body fat for energy.

It took another year before I actually tried keto and I lost 20kg in the first two months and another 10kg over the next few. It was a massive change but I didn’t sustain it given the environment I was in and ended up gaining a fair bit of the weight back (though not all).

Years later (over a decade, oh no, so old) and I have a much more comfortable body fat percentage and lots more muscle. I carry only a little more than I want and honestly it is too much effort to get down that last little bit, but I feel better now in my late 30s than I did in my early 20s in terms of movement, energy, and cognition. When i get injured I recover quickly, and when I get sick it is usually very short and then over. I used to get sick for weeks at a time and many times per year, now I have only been sick twice this year and both times in December (filthy children, gross but fun).

If you had asked me in 2010 how to manage weight I would have told you, nose firmly in the air, to eat less and move more. So glad to have been wrong.

000 here is Australia. First time was a school friend came off his bike and dislocated his kneecap. Second was when I flayed my left arm. Third was when my cousin got home drunk as a skunk after rolling out of a moving taxi and getting pretty banged up. Fourth was to report a fire on the side of the highway during bushfire season.

In Australia we don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for an ambulance or for medical care. My friend who dislocated his kneecap was taken to hospital free of charge and had a quick surgery and immobilisation of the knee.

When I flayed my arm it was a fairly gory laceration down to the bone and required surgery to fix.

Overall the staff were extremely professional and understood what was happening quickly. They provided great advice and organised for help to arrive promptly. My experience with the ambulance was great, same with the whole hospital system, and I am happy to pay taxes for it.

In Australia, the country I live in, roughly 1 in 4 women have experienced intimate partner violence since age 15. For men this is 1 in 14. 23% compared to 7.3% to be clear. That means that about 3 times as many women have experienced IPV than men. This includes LGBT relationships, so abusive men who abuse other men would show up as part of the men being abused statistic, as with women abusing women.

As for the harm from drug addicts and alcohol use/abuse, where does the harm come from? Surely if I am in my own home and I take a drug and while high I stay at home I am not harming anyone? If I were to hurt my partner or other people in my house that would be a possible route for harm to occur. But if I don’t drive drunk or high and I don’t hurt those immediately around me how does harm happen?

I would suggest that much of the harm around drugs comes from the criminal enterprises involved with production and supply, crime committed to fund addictive drug use, and over policing coming from having already had one interaction with police leading to petty things becoming criminal due to that interaction. Surely there are other harms, but think about how much of this would be alleviated by legalising the less harmful drugs and decriminalising the rest. The legalised ones can be produced under regulation and made safer to consume as well as being made affordable. This would kill the criminal systems around drug production and supply. For the decriminalised ones it would shift the lower towards the user, allowing users to have power over dealers and have a way out of those fairly toxic relationships.

But again, we can always talk about some other harm out there and ignore the case at hand. I would rather close the conversation with a simple statement. We do have a problem with men abusing women which is larger than all other forms of abuse. We would all benefit from this being reduced. And lastly when managing something like a shelter it is reasonable to take a few extra steps to provide a way out for women who are particularly vulnerable at that time. Should we offer that for men? Of course. But is it going to be used far more by women? Yes.

And who decides what is or is not a necessity? Is entertainment necessary? How much? Are certain shows OK but others not? Should they be restricted to the shows that you like? What about choice? Dignity? Autonomy?

When we lessen others we inherently lessen ourselves. We have a moral duty to consider the harm from both our actions and our inactions. If you choose to not restrict someone else self determine and live their own life it is no less morally wrong than if you took that person and imprisoned them. From a position of power it is tempting to think “I don’t like this thing therefore others should not have it” but follow it through to the logical conclusion. You are binding your neighbour with the very same chains that will land upon you given time.

**It is better to be an enemy of chains than judicious in their use. **

Statistically speaking the rate of abuse from men to their partners is extremely high. I don’t know how to manage this best but it seems likely that at least some of the situations of abuse would be helped by having spaces without men in them. Does that mean we should force men and women apart? No. But how to manage that I will concede is a difficult problem.

In many cases of abuse the abuser keeps the victim close and prevents any outside contact as much as possible. Having the moment without the abuser nearby can provide an opportunity to escape which seems to provide some significant utility. On the other hand someone who is supported by their partner and actually does derive benefit from that would suffer from the separation, not to mention the suffering of the men who would theoretically be separated from their partners and kids.

I don’t have the answer, but I do see it as fundamentally different from the self destructive behaviour situation. Someone who is disabled is no less able to make bad choices. If I could be a tradie, say an electrician, and I can go to the pub after work and smoke a pack of cigarettes then the same should apply to a disabled person. Is it the best decision? No. But it is theirs.

In the same way an abused partner should be able to make the decision to stay in the abusive relationship, whether that be a good or had choice. That said, paths out from abusive relationships and from smoking should both be made available as much as is reasonably possible.

I disagree with restricting alcohol for food stamps. In fact, it shouldn’t be food stamps, it should be cash. When you attach all these requirements and drug testing and restrictions you are destroying the autonomy of the person you are claiming to help.

It is like with housing. Many of the housing programs available require drug tests, job seeking documentation, separating men and women, and so on. In some cases this can make a little sense, given that men are much more likely than women to be domestic abusers, but other cases make less sense. If someone uses drugs to cope with their life and then you offer housing only if they stop the thing that is helping them cope they will not be helped, they will be harmed. They will not be able to take the housing and end up off the street in a secure place building a life, they will be still on the street and still on the drugs.

If I go and work a job and get paid should my employer be able to say “I’m fine with paying you so you can have housing and food, but alcohol? No, I don’t want to pay for alcohol”? This would be insane. Your employer choosing what you can do with your money outside of work hours is authoritarian nonsense and yet when it comes to welfare or charity people think it is fine. I disagree vehemently.

If I give you money to alleviate your suffering who am I to decide how you employ that? I want you to have more money because it is fungible, you can do almost anything with money, so you can make choices. I want you to have more power to effect your life, not less.

I assume you are an American given your reference to food stamps. Where is the American spirit of independence? Of self determination? Of rugged individualism? It seems quite dead in the modern era of state capture and authoritarian oligarchy. It is a loss and a tragedy.

I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else’s life and shit your own values all over them.

I don’t drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.

My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.

The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.

Not the entirety of F-Droid being suspect, but the package available in the default repo on F-Droid is being updated by this dodgy person while the other versions are not. If they are uploading malware or making dodgy changes anyone who previously installed Syncthing-Fork could get this new version from the dodgy dev without notification.

This is why free software is so important. The company can just lie to you about their product and for some reason it isn’t illegal. I really want to have a dishwasher and washing machine with an ESP32 controller and free software to control it, ideally with Home Assistant integration, but at this point I can’t find anything.

I just bought a few bulbs from Aliexpress which came preloaded with ESPHome and got set up in about 2 minutes per device. They cost about $15-20 per bulb (AUD) and I am very happy with them.