I disagree. I really want a Lightning but live in a very rural place, weekend in an even more rural place, and need to pull a trailer pretty often.
I already have a plug-in hybrid that gets 40+ miles/charge and have opined all over the internet that the perfect car is one that gets 100+ miles/charge before firing any gas engine.
It sounds like the next Lightning will give me that though I don’t put much stock in their promises. Personally the Scout is too bougie but it does similarly.
Surprisingly to many, rural and very rural places are actually a great location for EVs - if they have enough range.
Because even very rural places have electricity - almost always. I can find quite nice homes that are 20 miles from a gas station, but have power and could easily charge a vehicle. If I lived there, a vehicle I could use without a gas station would be quite desirable.
Yup. We also overestimate how much range we need. Average American driver drives 60km a day. The average Tesla has >500km range, meaning you need to charge fewer than once every 8 days.
Rural tends to mean space, and space tends to mean you can charge your car at home (that's different for a New York apartment dweller), making a once-in-8-day charge absolutely trivial.
In terms of economics, electric fueling of your car wins per mile.
And rural homes tend to have easy access to home-solar (again, good luck installing solar in a New York apartment rental). Electric cars tie into solar really nicely with a basic smart system, as it lets you charge at off-peak rates at night, or dump excess solar during the day into your car.
And what you've said before, it creates energy-independence, great when remote. Not to mention modern EVs allow bi-directional use of the battery, meaning the car can power your home essentials during an outage.
I disagree along with you. EVs would work for 80% of the population, there is a long tail of people who an EV will never (well foreseeable future) work for.
Thankfully, the mass of humanity that should be transitioning lives in populated areas and never tows anything for more than 75 miles. There is no need to get bogged down in back and forths with the small subset of people who an EV will not work for.
I don’t get plug in hybrids. All other engine types save you more money compared to the next less efficient alternative the more you use them, but plugins get closer to the less efficient alternative (regular hybrid) the more you use them. Add in the approximately 25% price hike over the hybrid version when there is one and it makes no sense to me.
> but plugins get closer to the less efficient alternative (regular hybrid) the more you use them.
As long as most of your drive cycle fits within the EV range of the plugin hybrid, they are cheaper to operate than a regular hybrid. The crossover point depends on the drive cycle and the cost of electricity vs gasoline.
I had a plug-in hybrid SUV that got 2.2miles/kWh in EV mode, which covered 75% of the miles I drove. The net savings were significant vs an equivalent plain hybrid SUV in my area, which would get basically the same gasoline miles/gal.
Using a plug-in hybrid as an EV can and will wear out the drive battery over the lifetime of the car. It doesn't even matter if you don't intend to keep the car for very long as a rational market will price this in. The cost ($10k or more) goes a long way at the pump.
> Using a plug-in hybrid as an EV can and will wear out the drive battery over the lifetime of the car
PHEVs have battery management systems and buffer capacity to protect the battery just like pure EVs. For many, at extremely high power demand, they switch to the gass engine anyways, so if anything the batteries are less stressed.
But the problem is that means you drove a minuscule amount so if you’d bought a hybrid you would have still used very little gas and your car would have been much cheaper.
Generously, the full range of a plugin hybrid is equivalent to about a gallon of gas.
> But the problem is that means you drove a minuscule amount so if you’d bought a hybrid you would have still used very little gas and your car would have been much cheaper.
A 2023 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV (38 miles EV range) costs less than a 2023 Toyota Highlander Hybrid with the same mileage on the odometer, and far less than Land Rover or other luxury SUV brands.
I bought my Outlander used - also was a great deal.
The real way dumb money loses is by buying new cars, not by choosing an electric drivetrain.
Depends on the car and driving patterns. I've got a friend with the PHEV Escape that he charges in his garage. It's the cheapest hybrid Escape that Ford sells, and he does all his driving on EV mode unless he has to do a longer trip outside of the city.
I still don't think that perspective is rational. It saved at most 1 gallon of gas per day from being burned, and you still burn gas on longer trips.
I drive a plain ICE engine, but I plan for my next car to be a full EV for the reasons you state, plus the savings on gas for all miles driven (and I have driven 30k miles in the past year).
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US
The American diet is insane, full stop. However, I've just begun a GLP-1 regimen to address a willpower problem, not a nutritional problem. I'm not quite young anymore and have given lots of other approaches a shot over the years, but have persistently failed to achieve a weight that is not a threat to my health.
So far, what being on a GLP-1 gives me is a steady state that most people probably find quite unremarkable: I don't crave a snack, and I don't thirst for alcohol. Both of those desires have had real control over me for a very long time.
And crucially, many of those bad foods can be pretty addictive. They’re quite literally engineered so that you want to eat a lot of them and buy more. So it’s not surprising many people struggle to change that habit when the food ecosystem is working against you. Junk food both tastes better and is easier to eat than home-cooking a very healthy meal. You’re not exactly set up for success here.
I also think there is an education gap. People grow up eating processed food and don't learn to cook. People often try to cook, but online recipes are not really teaching you anything and are often far more work than they need to be or turn out bad, so people think or learn that cooking a meal takes a long time, is a lot of work, and doesn't taste as good. Cooking becomes the exception rather than the norm.
In reality you can have a piece of salmon, with a veggie and side in ~20m with 2m of prep and 2m of cleanup. An online recipe would have you cooking down a sauce, making a complicated side, and use some random ingredient that you need to buy for that one meal.
I guess most online recipes assume you're cooking for "special occasions".
I can buy a bag of frozen assorted veggies and a few pieces of frozen salmon in the store across the street, throw them 15 min into a pan and be done. It's mostly what I feed on.
I think the main problem with online recipes is that there's a lot of stuff that "cooks" and "people who cook" learn that carries over VERY STRONGLY from dish to dish that is just totally absent from online tutorials. Things like what done (but not dried out) chicken looks like, and how to position chicken in a pan so the thicker parts get more heat, and why your chicken went right from "looks plain" to burned with no maillard reaction.
I think foods/culinary courses should be mandatory in high school. I took one as an elective, expecting it to be a blow-off class, but I ended up being shocked by how much I - honor student and all that - didn't know about browning hamburger, much less actual cooking. I ended up taking the subsequent 3 classes in the "foods" line.
For all the effort we put into science education, cooking is applied science we do every day. We should start in elementary school and keep at it through high school, in my opinion.
Also, these ultra processed foods set up unrealistic expectations of what "good" food should taste like. years of eating UFP ruins the taste buds. So, once you start eating real foods like whole grains, beans, fruits and vegetables (especially if its cooked without truckloads of oil), you think it doesn't taste good when actually the problem is your ruined taste buds.
> They’re quite literally engineered so that you want to eat a lot of them and buy more.
Even if it's not intentional, I find that the enshittification seems to run along these lines.
The things that finally drove it home for me this year were "peppermint bark" and "ranch dip". I used to buy this stuff or use the premade. This year I worked out how to do them properly myself.
People raved about both. But I noticed that they ate far less of them (including myself!). My suspicion is that the difference was that I used actual chocolate and actual buttermilk. I suspect the extra fat made people sated and they quit eating afterward.
I'm finding this applicable to more and more foods. I'm no genius chef, but simply using standard ingredients causes people to eat very differently.
The enshittification has taken even the foods that were staples of the carb and sugar funnel. Many people aren't buying these foods not just because of GLP-1s, but because the quality of the food itself has gotten so bad. Doritos for example have almost no cheese dust on them, and the chips themselves are much thinner and now made with palm olive which makes them crumble rather than crunch. The satisfaction of both the flavour and the mechanics of eating Doritos is gone. Cheez-Its are more salt than cheese flavouring, and are overbaked until they're thin and crackly like flint flakes so as to maintain volume while using less dough. Faygo has reverted to using sucralose, which is mildly toxic and is a known carcinogen. Sucralose also tends to trigger sugar backlash, where the body mistakenly assumes it has taken in far less sugar and carbs than it actually did and then proceeds to rush and crash. Gushers come in packs of just four to seven now, and use far more xanthum gum as filler which makes them trend more towards chalky than gummy. Bagel Bites are now just bagels with cheese, as their is almost no sauce and hardly any toppings. Corn dogs are likely to be chicken or chicken and pork with soy fillers rather than beef or beef and pork. Little Debbie Swiss Rolls have a chocolate coating so thin that you're almost guaranteed to find holes on the top and sides where you can see the bare cake and have also switched to using palm oil.
I could go on and on. But the point is, these foods are no longer a source of contentment. I've spoken to a lot of people who stress eat who have told me that the terrible quality of their comfort foods has become a stressor in and of itself. They eat an entire box of Cheez-Its without noticing because the thinness of the cracker walls and the salt triggers them to eat more, they feel sick after eating frozen tacquitos because the tortillas have so many fillers, or they get anxiety that they've wasted their money because they get so little in a Payday bar. It's driving them away from these foods.
On the upside maybe it will drive them to cook for themselves like it has to you.
My local store the old standbys for sweets are getting less and less space. Half the cookie isle is store brand/off brand. The 'crunchy/granola' section has more candy selection than the traditional candy isle, and maybe half as much cookies as the traditional cookie isle. They really seem to be putting themselves out of business.
Perhaps. But my friends aren't ... ahem ... very polite. If it wasn't better, I'd hear about it.
However, now that you've mentioned it, Occam's Razor could also suggest that many of my friends are on semaglutide (we are of that group) and that would have a big impact.
So, I guess I only have my own personal anecdata to go on. Oh, well.
Well, I can't cook very well but I can assess if I like more what I cook, what I buy at the store, what I have at a restaurant. It's usually restaurant > me > supermarket. Packaged food is the worst.
> Yes because people are famously good a judging their own work accurately
Sorry, not going to let that slide. Just because Dunning–Kruger exists does NOT exclude the fact that people are good at judging some things.
This is especially true for something like food which people have lots of direct experience with. Now, someone may not have the skill to make something taste a certain way, but that does not mean that they cannot identify that something doesn't taste "good" or "right".
And, that, in fact, was what sent me down the ranch dip rabbit hole. Something tasted wrong the last time I used the pre-made packets. And no matter what I did, it kept coming up wrong. So, I sat down, interpolated a couple of recipes, and eventually settled on a flavor profile that seemed "correct" again.
Side note: the error I was tasting seems like they did something with the glutamate quantity (either via MSG or via ingredients like onions). There was a nasty aftertaste that I even got when I did it myself (although not as strong) originally. I had to replace onions with chives to avoid it.
> Just because Dunning–Kruger exists does NOT exclude the fact that people are good at judging some things.
I dont think this is about Dunning-Kruger, i think this is about the emotional attachment you build to something you created and how it clouds your judgement.
for example, if i recall correctly people liked their ikea furniture more, even tho its more work and of lesser quality, because they build it themselves and thus feel better about it.
Same thing probably extends to most things you can do yourself: Cooking, Growing plants, building a dirt hut in Minecraft
I'm beginning to strongly suspect that many foods are being engineered not to leave you satisfied but to leave you so close to satisfied. I never feel like I just got the perfect bite. My brain wants one more, chasing that perfect bite.
It's a worrisome addiction pattern. I'm still not sure if it indicates something that's been done to the food or a serious problem with my thought patterns.
The tobacco companies like RJR, packed with scientiests researching how to make cigarrettes more addictive, were trojaned into mass food companies like Nabisco [1]
It should not be a surprise that there's been a relentless pursuit of addictive food ever since.
also remember it's pretty much the only addiction you are compelled to partake in even when "cured". No other addiction are you biologically compelled to do it (that i can think of) but for those with addiction issues and food as one of them it's often the hardest to shake because shaking addiction is easiest done simply by never touching it. Don't have that option with food. Even healthy food can be eaten in excess.
I looked at a recent football (US) game, and I could not believe the pictures of the grease bombs they were pushing as 'food'. I literally felt ready to gag when I saw some 'chicken nuggets' or whatever was in the fried outer coating.
The American shopping experience is weird as well. There's a spectrum of supermarkets.
Versus the UK, any US supermarket I've ever visited (I lived there for a couple of years) seemed to have far less fresh food, especially vegetables and fruit, but stuff in boxes was piled high.
Then again, the UK vs. Spain or France is weird, by the same metric, they have even more fresh food than us in supermarkets, and much less boxed stuff.
Geography and having continent sized country probably doesn't help either.
What grocery store chain in the U.S. are you referring to? Every major chain grocery store generally stacks fresh food around the entire perimeter of the grocery store, reserving the aisles for boxed, canned, and frozen food.
You can find dozens of varieties of fruits and vegetables, tons of fresh beef, pork, chicken and fish, milk, cheeses, even bread, in every major chain grocery store in the U.S.
This. Sometimes I hear people saying random stuff about the US and I have no idea what they're talking about. I'm aware of food deserts, but that aside, I could find fresh food in most grocery stores in the many places I've lived in the US. When I say "most", I'm excluding places like Dollar General that explicitly aren't about fresh food.
Honestly I had the same experience, and I love exploring supermarkets in the US (I genuinely go there after work and spend hours just wandering around). I often found the variety of produce to be really limited, as in, half the kinds of fruit than you would find in a smaller supermarket in Europe. Jack's fresh market, Walmart, Hyvee and local chains.
Is that accounting for just how much bigger the US supermarkets are?
The ones by me, ranging from cheap grocery stores, Walmart/Costco, through premium grocery stores, all have plenty of fresh food available.
They absolutely have aisles and aisles of frozen, packaged, etc; but outside of like specialty tropical fruits, there's nothing reasonable you could walk in for and not find fresh or at least frozen w/ minimal processing.
Food quality and options vary significantly with location in the US. In my city I have a Gucci market that gets super fresh veggies and fruit, along with imported cheeses, fish, very fresh meats, and other low processed food, but at a premium price point. There are also 2 other supermarkets to choose from. If you go an hour away there is one supermarket for the area that is "okay." Go to the next State over and the towns have 1/4 the fruit/veggie options and very limited meat options, all at a premium. The veggies are not fresh, no exotic fruits, and you might not find the cut of meat you are looking for.
Less fresh food? Or a similar amount, in a larger building?
Fresh food spoils quickly and often goes around the perimeter as a draw to get people to navigate the whole store.
Shelf stable and frozen foods last much longer, and are what they try to fill the middle of the store with. This can be deceptive in terms of feeling equivalent - all stores are going to have ketchup, but one may have room for two kinds and another has room for 20.
I don't see this. The US markets have lots of fresh vegetables and fruits (though lots of processed foods too). There are also lots of healthy alternative supermarkets in most cities.
I live on the west coast in the US and the sheer variety of fresh produce would put any supermarket in the UK to shame, even Spain.
California produces 40% of the nation's veggies and fruits.
The difference can be explained in large part by urban design: many US shoppers need a car to drive to the supermarket and only go there once a week or less. In Europe you live much closer to a supermarket, so you go more often and get more fresh food and less frozen or canned.
Some Americans are surprised to learn that many supermarkets inside cities do not even provide parking, everyone walks or bikes there. People go to the supermarket every day.
Isn’t a monolithic place. I don’t think there is a non micro-state country in Europe where the absolute majority of people don’t commute by car.
Living outside of dense urban areas without a car is still generally tricky. In quite a few cities there are no large supermarkets in the densest parts and you have to drive further from the center to find one. So not having a car might be tricky
Eh, this is just not proven true by observing what people do though.
When I lived in Europe for a couple months, my first time there I grocery shopped like an American - filled up an entire cart with a week or two worth of groceries and then everyone stared at me when I checked out.
It's absolutely true that Europeans who live in walkable cities go to the market to pick up groceries a few times a week. Americans simply do not, with very few exceptions.
The grocery store density is much higher though. There were at least 2 grocery stores within a 5 minute walk from anywhere I've stayed in a city core in Europe. At least a dozen within 15 minutes.
It's simply a difference in culture. There are plenty of places in the US where you could drive to half a dozen grocery stores within 15 minutes but people simply don't do so. The store sizes reflect this cultural difference too. The average grocery store in the US seems to be 4-6x larger than those in Europe.
>I grocery shopped like an American - filled up an entire cart with a week or two worth of groceries
Is that really how the average American shops though? The majority of shoppers these days are in the self checkout or "15 items or less" lines with only a single basket of stuff, at least in the stores I frequent. Granted, I'm close to a city center but the store I go to is not very walkable
Your mileage varies, I guess. I used to live with easy walking distance of an upscale supermarket, but yet I did most of my shopping by driving to a different one farther away. Buying groceries with a car is simply more convenient.
Even after I moved out of that neighborhood, it wasn't unusual for me to stop at the grocery store every afternoon on my drive home.
I never got this, other than seeing it's hard for others. So in that sense I agree. I've seen the effects on others and how hard it is to quit. That's no joke indeed.
I just don't get why I find it quite easy to stop drinking for a year (or longer). While I haven't been able to stop for life, doing those yearly challenges is relatively easy, for me.
If I'd be a normal person then that's whatever. But I say this I say this as a person whose whole family consists of alcoholics. Genetically, I have to have an addictive personality. Yet, I find myself I can easily not be addicted by substances.
What I find harder:
* YouTube (I recently have been able to stave off a social media addiction but YouTube specifically is tougher)
* Coffee
Maybe I should make a blog post. Throw in my 2 cents. While anecdata is anecdata, if it helps one person it'd be a good thing.
I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’m almost positive that the effects of alcohol are wildly different between the two of us. When I drink my brain spits out more reward chemicals than I know what to do with. It makes me feel extremely energetic and creative. It inflates my sense of self-worth and gives me confidence. It’s genuinely more enjoyable than sex.
And that’s how it dug its claws in, because almost all of those go away after binge drinking for a while. Then you’re just left with the addiction. And getting sober means having to learn to want whatever is left of your life.
Definitely. Alcohol just makes me confused and sick, with no upsides to it.
I'be been told that I must be drinking incorrectly, and given advice how to drink correctly, but no, no positive experience with it for me.
The funny thing is, I actually like the taste of it (it tastes kind of minty to me, while most people claim it tastes bitter) but the effects are pure poison.
Funny, I could place myself directly in middle of you two. When I drink, I feel pretty great at the beginning and it gets progressively more tiring and confusing with more drinks (but you still crave it, it being effectively a drug). Then the next day is just wasted time because of the hangover.
So while I liked to drink more with friends in the past, now I do so less often. And when I do, I tend to overthink how much I should drink not to feel bad later. So usually I just don't drink much, with more time between days when I drink (currently I'd say it's weeks inbetween).
Same, it is the least feel-good drug of any I have tried. But I do love a good German beer with a steak or burger, amazing. Or a cold beer at a baseball game.
My experience is closer to yours, and I've had to learn to enjoy without alcohol, which has been a positive transformation. I still drink, but now I know when to stop. Some of my friends still drink too much and would probably benefit from GLP drugs even when they are not obese.
> I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’m almost positive that the effects of alcohol are wildly different between the two of us. When I drink my brain spits out more reward chemicals than I know what to do with. It makes me feel extremely energetic and creative. It inflates my sense of self-worth and gives me confidence. It’s genuinely more enjoyable than sex.
Yea, me too. Holy shit. I have this too on certain things but not on alcohol.
> And getting sober means having to learn to want whatever is left of your life.
That's a good/harsh lesson for any addiction I think. Thanks for formulating that so clearly.
A datapoint for you to consider. I recently started taking Naltrexone, which is an opioid antagonist used to treat alcohol abuse. It reduces your body's endorphin response, making alcohol less pleasant.
I wouldn't call myself alcoholic, but before Naltrexone I would have evenings where I would go out for drinks with friends and have trouble sticking to limits I set myself (I would set myself a limit of three drinks and end up having four or five).
Taking Naltrexone, I have no problem at all. It's trivially easy to regulate my drinking habits, it requires no effort whatsoever.
The experience has very much made me open to the idea that some people are biologically predisposed to alcoholism (even if, like you, it's not always inherited). Very easy to imagine that people with a heightened endorphin response might have more problems with alcoholism.
Interestingly I had an almost identical experience with smoking and Wellbutrin (different mechanism of action). I was smoking one cigarette a day and using willpower to keep myself from smoking more. Immediately after starting Wellbutrin: immediately lost all interest in smoking, haven't had one since.
People develop drinking problems for two reasons, they have a genetic predisposition to getting more reward from drinking and/or they have untreated trauma that they are medicating. In my family, my grandfathers war trauma was transferred to his kids, who then transferred it to their kids or dealt with the trauma and didn't.
For the genetic side, people often slide into it by culture/habit. For example, it starts with a drink with friends, then a few times a week with friends, then on your own and with friends, after a few years it turns into every night on your own, then a few each night, then you hide how much you are drinking from loved ones, until you (hopefully) realize that you might have a problem. Bill Barr talked about this last year in his standup, for a good example and an example of how you can get ahead of it if you are self-aware. Many people keep going and end up with the physical addiction.
The trauma side is why I think some people have a real hard time shaking the addiction, and tend to go back. The drinking can also cause you more trauma, making it harder.
It’s a fact that drugs affect people very differently. There’s a big difference between “I must drink” and “I want to drink more”. My affliction is the latter and a far, far lesser burden than the former. Though one that can still fuck you up.
There are people like you [and me] that have almost 0 addictive tendencies when it comes to food/drugs. Or we may become addicted for a short amount of time and just stop.
I've tried all sorts of rec drugs/food activities etc.. Some are amazing but eventually I get bored and stop.
Smoking was probably the hardest, but I just decided to stop one day and never did it again.
If I may ask, do you think you will be able to cope with the lack of willpower once you stop taking the drug?
I don't want to sound dismissive or argumentative, I'm asking out of pure curiosity, forgive me if I sound negative, I'm rooting for people who try to improve their health.
Time will tell. I have experience losing weight but could never lose 10lbs - my goal is at least 20. And I have experience taking and tapering off other medication.
I also play sports and work out and am making time for those pursuits - literally calendering workouts as opposed to maybe sometimes doing it.
In years prior the stakes were pretty low. My last bloodwork was a wake up call. I’m optimistic I can stay where I want to be once I get there.
I’m more concerned about alcohol, and falling back into the habit of saying yes to that weird desire to have a drink at 6pm on a Tuesday that turns into a few more.
that’s the dirty secret. once you start this drug you basically need to be on it for life.
I mean, you _can_ get off it, but studies show the effects reverse pretty quickly. Crucially, if you decide to get off of the drug, you’ll likely end up in a worse position than you started. Why? Many Ozempic patients lose some bone density. That can be an issue as you age. So if you get off the drug, your food habits revert to baseline, you gain the weight back, AND you have less bone density than when you started. Not a great plan.
If you need it, can tolerate the side affects, and can afford it, staying on ozempic for life makes the most sense. I believe the idea is that you can reduce the dose after you’re in a good weight range, and continue taking it as “maintenance”.
We should be clear here - bone density loss is not something intrinsic to ozempic, it has to do with your rate of weight loss, exercise and dietary habits, etc.
It is entirely possible for someone to modify their diet, lift weights, etc., while on ozempic and gain bone mineral density.
But if you don't do those things and just lose a bunch of weight really fast, you're going to lose density (and lean muscle mass)
I’ve been taking Zepbound for a year and a half now. I’m at 210lb/95kg, as a 6’2”/187cm man. A year and a half ago I weighed 318 pounds. Ozempic had substantial mental side effects, and was not great for me. Zepbound on the other hand has been a dream.
As I lost weight I discovered a love for bike riding, with a lot of E-Bike assist at first, then progressively less assistance, and took my wheelchair user daughter on several 20+ mile bike rides over the spring and summer. I’ve been going to the gym and building muscle mass. I have more muscle mass than the average man my age, and have about ten pounds of belly fat but I’m a normal healthy weight. My life is completely changed for the better. I feel as if I’ve been freed from a curse that’s been lifted due to a wonder drug.
I will say the muscle loss is real, I had to chug protein shakes and did some physical therapy to fix my hip, at only 39 I hurt my muscle and had to learn some exercises to ensure I could walk properly. Once I got down to my current weight, that problem has resolved itself with working out, and I’m in maintenance and working toward building muscle definition (although I could probably lose another ten pounds of belly fat, if I really wanted to, but important it isn’t visceral fat on my organs, so it isn’t negatively impacting my health). Amazingly my BMI isn’t an accurate indicator of health anymore because I’m more muscular than the average person, according to the body scanner at the gym (bikes in a hilly area really work the legs!)
It does give me pause, but I plan on taking this medication for the rest of my life, or at least until a better medication comes along. Weight loss is a skill, and one I’ve been good at for awhile, which is likely why my results have been so good and beyond the average. The hard part has always been keeping the weight off, weird metabolic effects or blood sugar crashes from eating sugar, and sleep apnea caused by obesity or food or something getting me into a vicious cycle where my life just falls apart. I’ve noticed I crave better foods, while still sometimes enjoying a small snack on occasion. I had a single yogurt cup today with some strawberry, some unsweet iced tea (I can’t stand sugary drinks anymore! They taste far too sweet), and two servings of homemade matzo ball soup I made for my family.
I’d much rather be thin now and not having the terrible side effects of being morbidly obese than worrying about some future problem I might have because of going off the medicine. My children are young and I want to be able to spend time with them and teach them better habits than what I learned from my parents, even if the key to that self control is through medication.
It sounds like you're making great changes to your health. Although BMI is a population metric and has its flaws it is accurate for the vast majority of people. The reason the weight component _seems_ low is that being overweight is so normalised. Most UFC fighters are in the normal weight range and are clearly more muscular than the average person. Society isn't suffering an over-abundance of buffness, it's just people are generally carrying lots of extra weight.
Processed food is easy, tasty (in a shallow way) and more available than the alternatives. I think the real problem is that it's hard to give up "easy" when so many things vie for time and attention in the US.
These really blew me away. I have a theory that he recorded the narration and dialogue of each character individually and then it was all edited together - it seems impossible to switch back and forth between such incredible character deliveries on the fly. Or perhaps this is just how that kind of work is done. Regardless, an amazing job.
They are also strangely generous. They fund a lot of good, as they know how to conceive of "good". They are more like mostly-benevolent-but-controlling royalty of sorts. Including the "everyone has an opinion" part of royalty. Whether they are good or bad for the region, there are polarizing views.
I understand the general vibe as a learned helplessness of sorts.
> Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are
To a degree, but there's a whole tranche of investment vehicles that accredited investors use to invest in single-family homes that is not securitized at all, and not on Wall Street. The whole fix-and-flip industry feeds into this now, loaning out money to turn houses into rentals that some LLC holds.
I don't believe the creators of this propaganda take this problem seriously at all. Their actions speak far louder than their words, even words on a page that scrolls weird like it's 2015.
As long as you're organized and quantify every line item and have proof of sign off on things that increase scope and have emails to back them up, you can usually established your ethos as someone that is honest and doesn't try to fleece them, then companies are fairly reasonable.... that is, unless they are in a bad situation where they probably can't pay their vendors or contractors.
And that is something that is a burden on the contractor. Don't agree to work for a company if there are red flags present from the get go. Even if the promise of pay looks good.
The best are boring large to mid size companies.
I tended to avoid start ups that just needed a specialist for a few days. The issue of money was always a sticking point. Let's just say if they could barely pay their own or themselves then how would that bode well for you?
> As long as you're organized and quantify every line item and have proof of sign off on things that increase scope and have emails to back them up
if you're doing this then you likely will never have a problem no matter how much the invoice is. Organization and authorization (sign-off) is the key, if there are no surprises then they'll pay every time.
> The best are boring large to mid size companies.
I agree, Accounts payable doesn't have any emotional attachment to any amount at these companies. If the invoice has the right approvals/criteria then a check is cut no matter what the amount is.
I never had any issue asking for a 5 figure sum. It was always the small payments I had to chase. I won't do small work as a result because it is barely worth the effort.
Yes of course. You can get paid anything from $5 to $1000 per hour depending on how good/lucky you are at sales and connections. Not through upwork. My current contract is a full time for over a year now so five figures is expected per month
Tennis is a great hub for connection when you're retired. I play a lot, and people are always meeting up after we play and forging all sorts of non-tennis relationships. Sadly for me, this is all during the day when I'm rushing back to work hoping my 90m absence didn't coincide with some emergency.
I already have a plug-in hybrid that gets 40+ miles/charge and have opined all over the internet that the perfect car is one that gets 100+ miles/charge before firing any gas engine.
It sounds like the next Lightning will give me that though I don’t put much stock in their promises. Personally the Scout is too bougie but it does similarly.
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