Newmark's Door

Little Richard. (Of course.)

"Slick’s stories are often quite like the lyrics in White Rabbit – populated by all kinds of weird and wonderful characters and events."

The Babylon Bee, of course.

I was pleased to read this because the research summarized is consistent with my experience: if you want to lose weight, or maintain a desirable weight, you shouldn't pay attention to whether foods are "ultra-processed" or not. Focus your attention on calories. (That is assuming you don't want to use drugs or have surgery.)

When I decided I really had to lose weight, I read a fair amount about diet and weight loss. There was--and is--a large amount of questionable research and a large number of contradictions and disagreements. The one thing that commanded nearly universal agreement was simple: to lose weight you must consistently, over a fairly long amount of time, consume fewer calories than you burn. So my approach was to first, determine my goal weight. You could use the government's guidelines, the last weight you were happy with, or, maybe, your weight at 18. Then second, figure how many calories per day you will burn at that weight. That's in two parts. Determine your basal metabolic rate, roughly how many calories you'd burn if you slept 24 hours a day. There are formulas for this; a page showing one is here. Then you have to add in the calories you burn in your daily activities. There are some sites that will that estimate that crudely but I suggest using a site that gives you a finer breakdown of your day. (I thought even reading and watching TV while obviously not burning as much as exercise still had to burn more than sleeping and it could add up.) Some possibilities: this site in combination with this one; this site; or this site.

There are just three more steps. One is you have to disregard at least one study that I looked at that claimed if you've been fat for a while once you lose the weight your metabolism will still run slower than people who've been at that weight most of their adult lives. I don't know if that's true and if it is how much that would mess up the computation described above but I chose to simply ignore it. Second, you have to count your calories. (There is software and nowadays, web sites, that will make recording and computing calories consumed easier.) And last, as noted, you must keep the calories consumed below the amount you burn. Which of course is virtually the whole trick.

But I think I have an important observation about that: there are many approaches and absolutely no one knows which approach will be best for you to try. (Increase protein? Maybe. Substitute "good" fats for carbs? Maybe. Etc.) An example from my experience: a number of books and credentialed experts recommend replacing three meals a day with five or six mini-meals. One expert summed up this approach by stating "As long as you're awake it shouldn't be more than three hours since you last had something to eat." I tried that and gave it up after two weeks. It was a terrible fit for me. Just when I was really enjoying my food I had to stop eating. I've gone the opposite way: I typically eat all my day's food in the morning, usually in two or three hours. (AKA "intermittent fasting".) When I started I thought, "This is crazy. I'll be starving by late afternoon." But I wasn't.

A final thought. When I started, professionals in the weight-loss field declared attempted weight loss successful if a person lost 10% of his initial body weight and maintained that loss for five years. By that standard the overwhelming majority of attempts fail. I've seen estimates that the best weight loss programs in the world--Duke's, for example-- obtain a success rate of only about 10%. So while it may not be a lot of consolation, if you don't lose the weight you want you have lots of company. (Another thing that helped me: after I left my parents' house I went nearly 40 years avoiding vegetables. There is a lot of agreement that that is undesirable. But I read some famous cook who stated, "Show me somebody who says he doesn't like vegetables and I'll show you someone who hasn't them prepared well." Add heat--roast them--add fats--butter or olive oil, for examples--or add spices. Or more than one. I eat more vegetables now.)

". . . I'd argue that anyone who has ever been through an interview has probably been asked an illegal question at least once."

I don't know if this will help but it is a question I've occasionally had.

This study seems inconsistent with some prior research and with people on YouTube who seem convinced they know what their dogs are thinking. But it's difficult to argue with this:

Ms Molinaro concludes: 'We need to be humbler in our understanding of our dogs. Once we can start from a basis of understanding our biases, we can begin to look at our pups in a new light.

Brutal but 95% true:

Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the trajectory of academic hiring, especially in the humanities, should regard it as utterly insane that these programs were admitting this many students as a matter of course. . . .

What’s even more remarkable about elite universities using NIH grants to indirectly subsidize doctoral programs in fields where there are no academic jobs is that these are the same institutions that have reduced hiring of tenure-track faculty. By complaining that the cuts are forcing them to reduce graduate admissions, they are admitting that they used the money to keep oversized Ph.D. programs on life support while also not creating hiring lines that would give the resulting Ph.D. holders a crack at a job.

(I'd vote for keeping a dozen, maybe two dozen, departments in each of the humanities.)

I thought the inflation stuff seemed like a kludge to fix up the problems with the Big Bang, but theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel writes "Inflation isn’t some speculative idea that hasn’t been tested; it’s cleared all three of the major scientific hurdles that any new theory must clear to become accepted."

"After five years of intensive research and debate, the initial hopes that these off-the-shelf compounds might offer significant benefits for the treatment of COVID-19 were not fulfilled."

Well, good.

Saturn now is credited with having 274 moons. Jupiter has 95. I'm old enough to remember when Jupiter had 12 and Saturn had 9. 

Must be inflation.

"The common perception that little progress has been made in stemming the expected tsunami of dementia in the US may be incorrect."

Linking to a working paper by Richard Freeman and three co-authors the Financial Times is worried that and "elite closed shop of economists at US universities sparks concerns over groupthink".

Well, aside from the possibility that the "concentration" found in economics is the result of competition on the merits, a recent paper proposes another contributing factor: the "availability of funded graduate and postdoctoral labor at more prestigious institutions".

The newly included companies and hedge funds are the murderers.

I'd be surprised if this were a big reason, but a consultant states, "Property taxes are a huge expense, especially for retirees".

Some impact already, but if they fix the side effects it could be really huuuuuuge.

An important piece by Veronique de Rugy. She beautifully expresses a concern I share. 

That's in part—and this is my second point—because for those of us who care about permanently downsizing government and keeping it bound by constitutional rules to prevent the exercise of arbitrary power, DOGE is mixed. While there is a small probability the approach will succeed in reining in spending or the administrative state, it will be at the heavy cost of reinforcing the power of the executive branch and opening the door to the same abuse when the left is in power.

Congress must be heavily involved and sooner or later the reforms should be supported by some folks from both parties. My hope is that the president thinks that some trust and goodwill have to be built first. Americans must see their government concretely doing the Right Things especially on the so-called 80-20 issues. 

See also Arnold Kling's comment on this piece.

In the beginning, no. Now? Mostly yes. But there are a couple of differences and they're nicely stated by David Henderson:

There are two main differences between Ponzi’s original scam and the Social Security system. The first difference is that Social Security is run by government and, whatever its constitutionality and its questionable ethics, is legal. The second difference follows from the first: Whereas Ponzi had to rely on suckers, the government can and does use force.

The claim of "$1 trillion" is quite questionable. But I agree the scope is "staggering". (Here's a link to the report. Scroll down a bit.) 

RELATED. One of the faculty members at my former employer, NC State, is fighting back: "I've Declared War on DEI at NC State". 

They'll need to get this fixed before AI can run the world.

RELATED: "None of current LLMs can truly reason and cannot be used for any serious purposes without human expert supervision - a bitter truth pill for some people in this sub".

Nice piece at Econlib:

Commenting on a recent post by Scott Sumner, Mactoul argued “Authoritarianism is useful when you are trying to downsize the federal bureaucracy.”  This sort of love affair with arbitrary power is common when the authoritarian does what you want.  It’s why authoritarianism is so seductive, even to those who abhor power.  Many days and nights I have spent dreaming of the utopia that would exist if only I, and I alone, wielded absolute power. Even Adam Smith discusses how certain evils, like slavery, are more likely to be abolished or mitigated under an arbitrary government as opposed to a more limited government . . . 

But lest we be seduced by this ability for authoritarianism to do good, we must remember that it is arbitrary.

Another mess I hope the current administration can clean up.

The FBI doesn’t just have a transparency problem. They’re actually distorting data to skew important crime statistics.

Ibra, Beckham, Maradona, Roberto Carlos, and you know who is #1.

Liverpool fans are something else.

Them.

Live at Monterey Pop, Buffalo Springfield.