It doesn't help that coconut oil legitimately has anti-fungal and anti-microbial properties that probably make it a benefit to foods that its added to, despite its possibly harmful lipid profile.
Perhaps that's the nuance that is missing in this debate that's needed. The shocker that foods can be simultaneously good and bad for you...
It's very possible that coconut oil could have simultaneously good and bad effects on the body. E.g. it has known antibacterial and antifungal properties. Meanwhile, it's a saturated fat of the kind known to be bad for people's hearts.
So its very possible you could be realizing many short term health benefits from coconut oil, while not realizing it, setting yourself up for a heart attack later in life. Such are the things in life: I would assert most things we eat can be best thought of as a balance between good and bad forms of nutrition, both helping and hurting us. E.g. Salmon, lots of great nutrition there but eat too much seafood and you need to start thinking about your exposure to heavy metals and environmental pollutants...
It's what scientists have to say to get into the headlines these days. That doesn't mean his underlying point lacks merit. But it is absolutely frustrating how inconclusive and frequently contradictory science around food and health continue to be.
There are two possible conclusions from a study. First is "despite our best attempt our subjects did not follow the assigned diet". Second is has real conclusions, but the subjects are confined to either a prison cell or hospital bed and so the conclusion doesn't apply to you. This is a little cynical, but the point is valid.
The other problem is human lifespans are a long time. How does eating/skipping food X at 15 affect your lifespan - such a study would need millions of participants that are followed for as much as 80 years. It is very hard to run such a study, and the standards of science have been changing (for good reason!) over time such that it is unlikely any such study even if it completes would be publishable by whatever the current standard are.
To get around the second science studies markers. It is a statistical fact that people with high LDL tend to have heart attacks and die younger than people with normal LDL. However there are people with normal LDL who have heart attacks and die young; and also people with high LDL who live to an old age without ever having a heart attack - why we do not know. We know that saturated fat raises LDL, but we don't know if that is actually a factor in heart attacks - but lacking anything else to go on we assume saturated fat makes a heart attack more likely - this could be false but we have nothing better at this time, and are unlikely to find anything better.
> And perhaps a warning about shouting at the Universe. Although it's probably too late to fret too much about that.
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to threaten us already has the capability to see we exist. For those with a large enough telescope, we have been emitting signs of life to the rest of the galaxy for billions of years.
It's only more recently that we have been showing signs of intelligent life (through radio waves and changes to our environment). These signs have not yet propagated throughout much of the galaxy yet, and there is a good argument we ought to get as advanced as possible as quickly as possible, so we can defend ourselves before others become aware of our intelligent existence.
Very interesting. My only criticism? Perhaps too much of a focus on procedural justice.
Peter Thiel has a great talk on how one of the biggest problems in western societies is that we have moved away from having a determinate view of the future, to an indeterminate one. This has been driven in big part on the idea that process matter more than substance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZM_JmZdqCw
E.g. Lawyers are more concerned with society having a fair process or procedure for doing things, than its advancement.
"E.g. Lawyers are more concerned with society having a fair process or procedure for doing things, than its advancement."
And I allways thought most lawyers are more concerned with winning their case and making money than "fair process". I know exceptions though, but heard and read horrible things about the average.
But the future is undeterministic? Its a tree with lots of branches- of which one of those with variations will become reality.
To assume one knows the exact path, might be a helpfull tool for a small group working towards a goal, but from the eagle perspective, that is what all these companies are. Exploring branches of a tree of propabilites.
Thiel basically argues for not having his view as a large scale investor. But that is bogus, if you want to be a succesfull CEO you might have to pivot, pivoting essentially means giving up your branch- and navigate to another branch of the scenario tree, whos succes-propability is closely related to your tech. Which is why you should think about what is possible with the stuff you develop, not about one product.
This of course is demoralizing for the individual coder. If you write code that is product-bound, that code could go to the bin at any second. That is why they usually do not get told. At some level- there is only one product, on mission, one group against all others.
But at project management level, one should realize there might even within the same companys, several projects clustering around the same core-tech, trying to use what is possible for diffrent approaches.
The reasoning in that RAND article is pretty effing bad. North Korea could successfully invade South Korea?! Yeah right. That's not a credible scenario whatsoever, even if the U.S. withdrew.
The scandal led to the election of a different party in South Korea, replacing the conservative militant party with one that's more conciliatory to North Korea. So yes the recent Presidential scandal definitely had an effect.
It was a powerhouse before. From my memory the mood in the West got worse. There were tax raises and a lot of uncertainty when it became clear that it wasn't as easy as initially planned to get the East going economically. There was a substantial number of people on both sides who wanted the wall back.
I am not saying the reunification wasn't worth it but it was much more difficult than people may think.
For what it's worth, the West German government did honor East German marks 1-to-1, even though there was a gigantic disparity in value of both currencies. That alone was an enormous cost of the unification.
A lot of people thought that was a huge mistake. After the wall fell there was also a democratic East Germany for 2 years (?). I think a lot of people would have been OK with keeping them separate for a while but chancellor Kohl wanted to put his name on history and forced the reunification.
Perhaps that's the nuance that is missing in this debate that's needed. The shocker that foods can be simultaneously good and bad for you...