It would be nice if those of us who handle WFH under a pandemic very well have some leverage after it's resolved to continue a WFH schedule. I really don't care for the long commute to an open office. The combination reduces both my quality of life and my quality of work.
Only a small amount of the population engages in any behavior that requires active lifestyle modification. Exercise and diet are hardly adhered to despite being relatively simple. Meditation has the added difficulty of being solitary, and, for most, boring and difficult (compared to the instant-feedback world surrounding them).
I think that fits into the wider goal of educating people to care for their health for their own good; clearly the methods we're using don't work, and haven't adapted to the world in which you could be doing a million other things. Besides, it doesn't have to be all or nothing, you can easily escalate how much time you spend and plan accordingly. The answer isn't to give up on them.
Most people won't live their lives intentionally no matter what you do. It's a noble goal to increase the number from, say, 10% to 20%. But getting even a majority of people are going to 'care for their health for their own good' is demonstrably impossible. At best you can turn self-care into a game or entertainment, but extrinsic motivation is kind of the exact opposite of the practice of meditation.
One of the groups that wash out of meditation immediately are those who it turns out are afraid of being alone with their own thoughts. These could be dark thoughts, or they could just be the sort of person who always fills the silence in a conversation (for that reason or a myriad of others).
I went on a long trip with someone who thought I wouldn't make it 3 days without the internet. Turned out they were the one who needed the fix on day 3. You can't really see what's going on in someone else's head so you don't know how they will react to having to entertain themselves without props, until they do it.
It's not just culturally routine, but culturally shamed for not adhering. Additionally, it does not take much time at all. Meditation requires more investment in time by a factor of 10 at least, and if you shame someone for not meditating, they'll probably laugh at you or give you a bewildered look.
Protein in terms of protein / calorie ratio of food tilts protein sources to meat and dairy. Easy way to compare foods and meals is to compare grams protein per 100cal of a given item. Things like meat, cottage cheese, yogurt, etc., top the charts.
So if you want to maximize for protein consumption without putting on fat mass, you tend to look for meat, dairy, and things derived from them (whey protein isolate).
The controversy is about whether humans need gargantuan amounts of protein.
Your post is assuming protein is very important, and thus it’s important to maximize protein per calorie.
The post you’re responding to is discussing the fact that any time vegetarian or vegan diets come up, people launch into criticisms that are based on the assumption that humans needs lots more protein than occurs in vegetables.
One issue I've seen when assessing some of the vegetarian or other plant-based diets proposed has been neglecting to account for protein. Most men at least don't enjoy the muscle loss associated with eating a low-protein diet, which is what the implementations I've seen often look like.
That said, Americans are predominantly overweight and obese. A diet high in protein but low enough in total overall energetic content is an excellent recipe, when paired with weightlifting and a few days of cardiovascular activity, for improving musculature and eliminating fat.
A scientific example demonstrating this point, entitled "Higher compared with lower dietary protein during an energy deficit combined with intense exercise promotes greater lean mass gain and fat mass loss: a randomized trial": https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/103/3/738/4564609
I learned how to turn a stream of nonsense (from my perspective) into words by listening to hundreds of hours of Spanish TV that I didn't understand. Spanish audio + Spanish subtitles (to figure out how to parse sound, and to map sound to writing), and then Spanish audio only (prevent reliance on reading). Surprisingly effective. Incomprehensible input appears to be quite valuable.
At some point I'll try applying my methods to learning a different language to see if I can generalize (for me and my ability to pick up a language, at least).
Just bear in mind that there's a huge difference between being able to get the gist of something spoken in a foreign language and being able to convey your thoughts effectively in that language. Even after man-years of study I still sound like an idiot when trying to speak English in conference calls, even though I can understand nearly 100% of written and spoken English.
I obviously can't judge your spoken English, but your written English is fine. If you hadn't stated otherwise, I would have assumed from your writing that English was your native language.
Idiomatic usage ("bear in mind") and register ("gist") even came off as native, without running into common give-aways like incorrect or technically-OK-but-not-quite-right prepositions. Nice.
You can't rely on it as the only means of learning, but it makes for the foundation. Conversation is hard to begin with, but conversation when you don't understand what is spoken quickly enough to begin to form a response is impossible.
Unless English is an easier language to understanding all broken up, nearly 100% of the time I can figure out what someone who claims to be "bad" at it is saying. English speakers, particularly in the US seem to be pretty tolerant of it. While other countries seem to be dismissive of anyone attempting their language, as if they can't POSSIBLY understand a single word you're saying.
tldr: I'm sure you sound fine, and we can all understand you.
English speakers have contact or familiarity with a huge variety of foreign speakers, enough that we can categorise French accents, Swedish accents, Hindi accents etc etc.
And we simply get heaps of practice with non-native English speakers. I don't think the same thing occurs so strongly in other languages.
English has a massive variety of vowel sounds within its different accents, as well as other variations in length, emphasis, consonants etc. Native English speakers have a subtle ear for a massive range of vowel sounds (and plenty of people can reproduce them when speaking in an accent). A Spanish person can be confused if you substitute or mispronounce a single vowel in my experience.
nah, the man is right. I learned english that way, it works surprisingly well, but only if paired to "use in context". Every time you learn something, you gotta use it, otherwise it won't stick. You gotta use that new word to get something done you actually need, because your brain is very reward oriented and it will fix the memory if it leads to a positive outcome.
Yeah, language is all about input. I'm learning Spanish now and it's going super fast. it's the second foreign language I've tried to learn (which I think helps, especially as they both have conjugated verbs, which is not really a thing in English), and it is much easier than the first (definitely helps).
Anyway, my method is:
0. Learn the grammar rules but don't fixate, just enough to get oriented. Occasionally review them.
1. I listened to this person who said something in Spanish then the same thing in (this case) the first foreign language I leanred, and does this over and over, occasionally adding new elements with an explanation, but mostly just brute-force repetition.
2. After a few hours of this (which is pretty boring), started watching 'Easy Spanish' videos on youtube, where they ask people questions on the street and have subs in Spanish and English. Watch these on repeat.
3. Start watching other Spanish youtubers who speak in that youtube manner (where everything is EXCITING!) - I have been watching Luisito Communica (or something like that, my Spanish is still bad).
4. (This is mostly how I learned my first language - Russian) - Listen to podcasts, but read the transcription first. For Spanish i am using radio Ambulente
5. Listen to full albums on youtube and follow along with the lyrics on genius.
I hope that soon I can just watch movies and stuff in Spanish without subs. Once you can get to the point where you can do that it's not even work to get better.
This is my experience in learning Japanese. At first, it was kind of an accident haha but you sort of link the general meaning of things after months worth of content. For me though, there was definitely an upper limit (not to mention this does very little for learning how to speak--at least in my experience) and because of that I've started on more concrete methods of learning.
I also feel the process has given me a kind of a boost in my studies as certain words and phrases have already been ingrained into memory.
I still do consume audio/video content primarily in Japanese (mainly because that's what I'm interested in--which definitely helps the learning process) and it's gotten easier and easier to listen/watch without subtitles lately.
Keep in mind the brain's disposition to learn changes depending on age. And as an adult your brain will struggle for many different reasons: stressful day, lots of other information streams, far less time for learning, decreased flexibility, etc.
As a kid I learned 3 languages (including the native one) with relative ease. As an adult I really struggled to learn the fourth using what I think are the same techniques. Given the factors above the reality may be that it's almost impossible to learn in the same conditions.
My technique was to pick a TV show that I basically knew all the lines to (Friends, in this case), and then watch it in Spanish with Spanish language subtitles.
This way I already know what the English meaning is, and I can also map the sounds to the written script.
We decided it was ridiculous to offer $1.5 billion in incentives when we would never recoup that, so we protested.
Amazon paid no federal taxes last year (https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/16/amazon-p...), and probably would have figured out how to pay little corporate state tax. At the promised level of 25,000 jobs with an average $150,000 salary, the city (but not the state) would have only seen an extra ~$150mil in income taxes.
There's lots of ways to run the projections and factor various costs/benefits, but few of them would have resulted in a 10x improvement in the offhand estimates.
It was a bad investment for the city the same way most sports stadiums are.
Backlash was certainly loud, but Amazon could have made things work even without all of the subsidies they received. This is entirely me speculating, but I wonder if Amazon feared that NYC workers might eventually organize or be organized, given the political rhetoric and the framing of the backlash. Amazon has a legendary fear of unionization.
> Backlash was certainly loud, but Amazon could have made things work even without all of the subsidies they received. This is entirely me speculating, but I wonder if Amazon feared that NYC workers might eventually organize or be organized, given the political rhetoric and the framing of the backlash. Amazon has a legendary fear of unionization.
Aren't the workers primarily knowledge workers? In a place like New York where developer jobs grow out of the concrete I don't think there could be legitimate fear of unionization.
Not really mentioned in the article. As someone who moved from NoVA to New York during the HQ2 search, these are my thoughts: New York's plan was more direct subsidies and tax breaks, less infrastructure and schools. Much more unpopular with the locals (who wouldn't benefit as much). And the locals let them know. Because Amazon made everyone operate under NDA they had no chance to build the public support that would be necessary to support such largesse.
> I mean the people who would have to pay the taxes to subsidize Amazon, so the city and state at large, yes.
Interesting that you characterize the entire state as "locals" given that some parts of New York can take several hours to get to by car from the city.
However, sometimes you want to maximize protein per a meal's calories. Some things may seem 'cheap' but to maximize protein with those items you will blow out the calories chart. For example, it's better to rely on cottage cheese for protein instead of flour, despite the monetary cost looking favorable for the latter -- because the former will have your protein needs met with a smaller number of total calories, preventing you from gaining fat mass, assuming the rest of your diet follows similar reasoning.
