rowinxavier

OK, so good, a clear starting point.

First, adding muscle is a fantastic way to go. Muscle burns energy and new muscle is not insulin resistant, so it lowers your overall insulin resistance. This is key to liberating fat and burning it for energy.

The other big key is diet. Your current diet is overwhelming your body's ability to burn without storing as fat. This means you are gaining body fat and this will get worse over time. Gaining muscle can help a fair bit but your existing muscle tissue along with other things like fat cells and other organs are all at the point of damage from high sugar levels in your diet. The fact that you can make yourself go to the gym is great, it means you have caught this before it has gotten too bad.

So to make progress on your diet you probably need to do a couple of things. First is check for other symptoms like swelling around the jawline, fat build up over the spine between your shoulders, rash and skin discolouration, pale gums and lips, and any sort of weakness in nails and hair. These are all potential indicators of an acute deficiency and may need medical support. That said, all of these are generally helped by dietary work, so if nothing massive is presenting like a goiter or anaemic gums you should probably just move forward with diet and reevaluate later.

So what to eat. The biggest problem seems to be sugar, followed by the sugar/fat/salt hyper palatable mix, then hyper processed, and lastly problematic plants. If you eat meat, which I would strongly recommend, then paring everything down to very simple meals is the best option. A kilogram of meat per day is a reasonable base for basically everyone. If you start there and can make it a week without anything else you will have a good starting point for completing an exclusion diet. If you can't jump directly to that then dropping out the worst items is a good step.

Dropping the worst means getting rid of the most packaged and insane foods, like cakes that last 6 months on the shelf or items with ingredients lists longer than The Art of War. If you keep eating sugars but they are in simple forms, for example honey or while fruit, you will avoid most of the worst stuff. It would also be good to learn more about cooking meat properly, so learn how to fry steak, cook chicken wings, and maybe roast a leg of pork. Learn to make basic stuff that tastes good and you will find reducing other crap easier.

Ultimately trying to hit numbers of grams of fat, protein, and carbs is a losing game. You don't know all the internal systems you have and how they allocate energy, but you do have a handy system they operate with, hunger. We should fix your hunger to make it work properly and that is what the above is for. You have simple foods, your body learns what they provide, your hunger becomes more accurate for what you need.

Once your hunger works properly you will do something like work out and you will feel more hungry in the day or two following it. Then chasing numbers won't be needed at all and you can relax.

You'll get a lot of contradictory answers with this question because of two major issues.

1. There is more than one way to make your scale number go down.

2. Your scale number going down can be for multiple reasons.

For example, dropping a bunch of body fat is a way of posing weight, but it does not look any different on the scale than losing muscle mass or losing a leg. You can have more healthy recomposition where you drop a bunch of fat slowly over time and gain some muscle but overall lose absolutely no weight on the scale, and you can also gain weight without changing fat but be in a better position.

So what would you aim for? It depends on your goals. Do you want to be jacked? Maybe you have early signs of type 2 diabetes and want to stop it there. Or maybe you just really want to get rid of your skin issues like acne and dermititis.

Nobody benefits from being insulin resistant. That is the state that pushes you towards weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and many other issues including dementia. Fixing that is a central goal for a lot of people and it actually helps with most other health related goals. If I were starting somewhere that is where I would probably try to start.

That said, if you have very little muscle that may be better to work on.

Can you give more detail about your goals?

I meant to say language in the linguistics sense, a series of abstract items which can be arranged to convey arbitrary meaning. For example, a dog barking can be a threat display, a warning, playful, sad, afraid, and so on. But can you use barking to create grammar? With grammar you could have labels for items in the world and use various barks to refer to them, make requests, ask questions, and so on. Some types of animals have warning calls that are specific to types of predators, for example an eagle call or a leopard call. Leopards require different responses than eagles so the distinction is very useful and helps others to respond. This is not quite language but is definitely a step in the right direction.

So yes, you are correct, lots of animals can communicate things to each other, but it is not the same as language like what humans have. Could we find an animal that does have language? Or something very close? Sure, but we haven't shown that yet. Maybe we should focus on giving other animals a chance to develop before we wipe them all out.

No, but that is because they don't have language.

That said, plenty of humans do not have a voiced internal experience. The lack of language does not imply a lack of cognition. I would expect that the brain of a closely related organism, say a chimp, would have many similar experiences generated by the same stimuli. Would they experience green like I experience green? I can't even say that about a person sitting next to me, but they probably have an equivalent experience.

That said, if we had a way of communicating could we reach agreed terms? I can do that with my cat, so I would think he has an understanding of me and my behaviours along with what tends to happen when I do certain things like clap then shake my hands at the end of a treat session. He knows there are no more treats, he associates that with my hands clapping and shaking, so we communicate. Does he have a voice in his head describing it? Probably not. Does he have Meows? Again, probably not, but he would have a sense and memories of previous times.

Also scooby based leather is a newer vegan option making progress. It is the bacterial mat from the top of kombucha and is able to be dried, tanned, and oiled until it is a very nice alternative leather, no plastics in sight. Also, my spelling may suck on scooby, maybe scoby or something else.

I did in the first 3 or so years, but now I don't have any cravings at all. I'm now 17 years on from quitting and it has gotten better over time.

I found spite a great tool for keeping emotional investment. The tobacco companies are all steeped in slavery, abuse, scientific fraud, and general indifference to the suffering of others. Those companies are trying very hard to get kids addicted, to insulate themselves from legal accountability, and to stop governments from phasing smoking out. They are evil if that word is going to mean anything and if I am going to be able to do anything about them it is withholding my business.

In Australia we have a robust and fast paper voting system administered by the Australian Electoral Commission. We get most results in the evening of election day with only really close races being a couple of days out. There is solid chain of custody on paper ballots and having been used for over a century we have all the kinks worked out.

The USA has about 330 million people, we have about 25 million. The voting population of each is smaller, but it is a much larger percetage of our population due to compulsory voting. If we can do it with less than 10% of the population it could be done there with the same ratio no worries, just assume out country was a state and you can see it can work.

Paper is safe and secure. It is well understood and all the hack and hijinks have been worked out. If you ask experts in IT if they think voting should be dine electronically they answer hell no without much debate.

Yes, it is possible, though fairly prohibitive. You can get modules for connecting a Sim card to your laptop to make and receive calls and SMS, so all the third party authentication messages and calls can be done. Apps can often be run through an emulation layer for Android, not so much for iOS, but yeah, it can mostly be done.

That said, there are devices like the Pinephone which run a mainline Linux distribution like Arch or Alpine and can also do calls, SMS, and if you are brave use some android apps. If you can use a Pinephone for it then you can use another Linux laptop with a phone module to handle everything else.

I am much more worried about things like banking now. A bank that allows use of an app on your phone with NFC is great but when they take away using anything else I would become a little more worried. If they can keep an option open, say having standard cards along side phone NFC, then the lock in is much less profound. If we get to a point where they cannot operate without Google or Apple giving the go ahead then they cannot move away if things get bad, so those monopolistic companies can extract more value from those banks and that gets passed down. This applies to tonnes of other services like taxis, food delivery, booking doctors appointments, and so on.

Option 1, the vast majority of STI transmission is between m/f sexual partners.

Option 2, plenty of m/f couples have anal sex so it is either immoral for both or for neither.

Option 3, not all gay couples have anal sex, plenty just do oral and some don't even have sex, plenty of ace people out there.

Option 4, condoms work well and really do prevent the spread of STIs.

Option 5, what about lesbian sex? They are also homosexual but don't have penises, so is anal sex not an option for them?

Option 6, what right do we have to judge other people's sexual preferences and activities? You are allowed to drink, smoke, and eat unhealthy foods, not to mention people refusing the vaccines for covid and influenza, so even with things that kill a lot of people every year we let you do it, so what makes anal sex for men different?

Option 7, what about pegging? Can anal in an m/f relationship involve penetration of the male? Is that the same or different to the gay men situation?

And lastly, option 8, if they get to say gay anal sex is immoral then what stops gay men from saying exercising power over a community based on unsupported claims is immoral? If their specific religion is correct then all others must be someone scamming or lying, so that must be immoral, right? If not, how and why?

Actual direct conspiracy is usually not necessary to achieve the outcomes of most nefarious things people worry about. Two rich people which both want to protect their own wealth can look at each other and their respective actions and then take next steps working to protect their wealth without ever talking to each other and get basically the same outcomes as if they had coordinated. Shared interests and a reasonable understanding of the likely outcomes of choices can be almost as good as direct conspiracy.

If you flip the mouse over you should see a circular piece of plastic. Rotate this and it should be able to pop out, at which point the ball will also fall out. Inside you will see a pair of rollers and a wheel, all of which may have gunk on them. Clean off the gunk and make sure they spin properly. Replace the ball, the circular plastic, and then rotate the plastic to lock the mechanism.

They have a device which progressively shines a light on a piece of paper while moving across the page and converts the brightness of the reflected light into an audio signal. Once it reaches the edge the paper is incremented and the process repeats. Each of these segments of sound are sent via a standard telephone connection to a similar device on the other end which uses the sounds to reproduce the image on the original paper on a new sheet of paper. This can be used to send forms, letters, black and white pictures, and even chain letters. It also forms the basic underpinning of a significant fraction of formal communications with landlords, employers, medical systems, government offices, and so on.