Phi for All

First, we need to change the way we vote. The winner-take-all system of voting practically guarantees there will eventually become two dominant parties that are nearly the same. We desperately need the representational power to vote for our favorite candidates instead of trying to keep our least favorite out of office, since that's a really stupid way to run a democracy.

Something like this might be part of the solution, but what's to stop them from working those cushy jobs supplied by special interest groups in the four years they're waiting to get back into office? Unfortunately, people fear big changes but right now we're equally afraid of NOT making the big changes we know we need. The solution will not be something simple like only term limits. It's going to have to be several major changes to the way we do everything. I keep wondering why we don't look at what is working elsewhere (yes, foreign countries! *gasp*) and tweak it to work here. That seems like such a rational thing to do. Copy the methodology of the country with the best education, and the one with the lowest crime rates, and the other one that has the most fair voting system. If we want to be the best, shouldn't we actually be walking instead of talking?

It would be great if people wanted to be good because it was right instead of because they'll be punished. I don't think that will ever happen with everyone, but it would also be great if morality wasn't based on a faith that can waver and change as its source gets squeezed out of the gaps in our knowledge.

Something tells me that two larger than normal meals would increase the likelihood of higher caloric intake. It seems most of the recent studies support eating smaller more frequent meals to avoid glucose intolerance. There is also some evidence to support alternate day fasting, where you eat normally one day and then eat nothing the next. This seems to increase fat oxidization but may not be a great sustainable diet due to hunger, irritability and energy requirements on the fasting days.

I don't think there has been enough time since we were hunter/gatherers to have evolved very much in that regard. Large meals, on the whole, tend to have more sugars and complex carbs that can spike insulin production, causing us to retain fat, salt and water, and also increase blood pressure and cholesterol levels. That study confirms that the stomach can't hold as much food in one sitting as it does over three meals a day, so you will consume less calories, but that isn't beneficial enough to offset all the other effects of one large meal. You're probably right about a single meal giving the body more time to digest and process the food, but that could also lead to lethargy. Especially once your body gets used to processing the heavier meal, I would imagine it would want you to stop exerting yourself in preference to food processing. Eating a single large meal before bedtime might sound like a good solution, but I think digestion works best if you're not lying down (I've heard this all my life but have no real evidence). At the very least you risk messing up your sleep cycle. I've heard great things about eating very small meals six times a day, but I've never been able to get the hang of it. Three meals a day is probably more of a marketing economy thing than an ideal diet thing, but it does seem easier to schedule in our current society.

Here's one study that claims one big meal is conducive to Type II diabetes: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2121099/ I also remember hearing that bigger meals raise blood pressure, and that's why the multiple small meals diet has become popular.

*giggle snort* +1

Depends on the context. If I'm snacking, opening the pistachio shells slows me down on calories. If I'm supplementing a low-carb cold meal with some nuts, shelled peanuts are my choice. I like the tastes of both, too close to call. And I agree with Klaynos. Totally different results if you'd have included cashews. Edit: Oh, well then, changed my vote. Gesundheit!

OK, well, now we're talking real censorship. Our ability to reach through your computer to lethally stop you from trolling us is not a matter for public discussion. You must STOP NOW or suffer the consequences.

Yeah, that's not even very clever, you're right. More dishonesty than mere trickery, since he claims it's a scientific experiment.

No, I mean I can't find a home page that has ESP Experiment on it to choose. Not very well arranged.

I've only had one cup of coffee today, so I still can't find it.

Your link takes me to a page with a test that looks like someone else already took it ("I have already removed your card", it says), and I can't get it to reset. There are also no instructions, except the link on the word "try", which takes me to his book page. What am I doing wrong?

Hey, watch it. If you're not careful, you might stall a perfectly good rant with all that reasonableness. Next thing you know, folks might start talking about benevolent dictatorships. There aren't enough swastikas on the internet to protect us from THAT.

The government is a tool. Don't blame the hammer for smashing your finger. Make sure you mean the people who are wielding the tool badly, because there are an awful lot of people out there who want to distrust "the government" no matter who is swinging the hammer. We don't want that, in case we actually do find some trustworthy carpenters who want to build something better. I still say our current corporate models are forcing very savvy people to do harmful things to satisfy their stockholders. When there's more return on investing in lobbying that robs the public trust through subsidies, contracts that bypass fair market practices, legislation that favors only the American mega-corporations that aren't interested in creating American jobs, and re-writing corporate charters to defeat the spirit of prosperity for the US as a whole, then it's clear we've let them go too far. We're letting the mega-corporations take the safety bars and the speed governors off the roller coaster, and we've put them in charge of informing the people of how dangerous the ride has become. And I think Romney/Ryan are more like silicone lubricant on the tracks, and while I wish there was someone to vote for who would at least demand that they uninstall the middle-class ejector seats, at least Obama is trying to make it easier to see the doctor when we hit the pavement. I think the world of Dennis Kucinich for his stand against the Cleveland utilities privatization, his unswerving stance against the war in Iraq and his smart defense of environmental policy. He's actually the farthest left candidate I've ever supported, and I was very disheartened to learn he'd lost his seat through cowardly gerrymandering by the Republican-held Ohio state legislature.

I'm sorry you feel the need to reduce things to good vs bad. It's not how I feel. I feel Warren Buffet's views on the progressive tax are in line with mine. And he certainly made a decent living under Clinton's tax structure while the middle and lower classes prospered better than under Reagan or either Bush as well. So I'm not sure what you should do with your concept of "wealth prevention taxes". You seem to be saying progressive taxes keep people from getting richer, except they do no matter what the tax code. Sounds a bit contradictory to me. Yeah, jokes always work out better for you when you get to write the straight lines AND the punch lines.

I'm also not comfortable with the 1% definition, since it includes some folks like Warren Buffet who think they should be paying a progressive tax, but it's a dumbed-down definition the dumbed-down electorate can understand. To me, it's simply those corporations following a business model that demands higher and higher profits for their shareholders. It should be no surprise that enough years of following a model like that will lead to changing the laws to squeeze out more and more. The market will only allow so much corner-cutting, that part still works fairly well, but when the number crunchers can show that changing regulations and increasing subsidies is a low-risk, big return investment, it's become a practice that leads to inevitable catastrophe since this kind of prosperity doesn't help the GDP and harms the country in lost revenue, low wages and high unemployment. The two major parties have been seduced, as has the Tea Party. I was going to say suborned, but that's a big part of the problem here, when they change the laws to make the evil they do legal, you can't come at them with due process. We can only try to remember that we control who gets in office and only if we're much more vigilant about it than we ever have been before. It only helps the 1% if we believe we're really split 50-50.

You said the stencil was too small and detailed to be cut the normal way, so I just assumed you didn't have an X-ACTO knife. The only way I know how to make a stamp is with a very sharp knife, sort of like, well, an X-ACTO. You take your printed stencil and go over it with a very soft pencil (#1) ON THE BACK SIDE (a light box would make this easier) to leave a graphite residue in a reverse image. Then you get a hard, flat, pink eraser and press the stencil graphite side down onto the eraser. This should transfer the image to the eraser. Then you use your X-ACTO knife to carefully cut away the excess eraser, and the parts on the interior of the stencil so that what you want to be printed is raised and flat. You can then use an ink stamp pad in whatever color you want.

Clinton could easily have used those surplus funds for other things, being a "tax and spend liberal" as the conservatives often portray the Dems (and not without reason at times). Instead, he taxed those that had been given a 12-year break in the Reagan-Bush years and chose to balance the budget and reduce the deficit in every way he could. I really dislike some of the stuff Clinton let slip through, like allowing our news outlets to be owned by the very people we should be kept informed about, setting the stage for financial shenanigans by the repeal of Glass-Steagall, but I do give him credit where it's due. And Bush's tax policies took effect in 2002, before the Iraq war, and quickly sunk the deficit to almost $400B.

Eight years of Democratic Clinton and a balanced budget, budget surpluses and some of the best prosperity to happen in my lifetime, then eight years of Bush wiping out those surpluses, putting us in the deepest debt we've ever been in, setting us up for the worst Depression since the Great One, and now four years of Obama trying to dig us out makes you yearn for Bush's party to take the reins again? I think your evil glasses are broken.

If the stencil is too detailed to be cut out with an X-ACTO, then Appolinaria's first suggestion is best. You'd basically be making a stamp you could coat with ink for your transfer.

Can you say this a different way? I'm having some trouble understanding what you're trying to ask.

The Dems have their own faults, and I really don't think duplicity is one of them. They have many different ideologies to represent, much like the Reps, but I don't think those perspectives are nearly as mutually exclusive as the Reps have to deal with. Anti-big-government platformists and Big Brother Homelanders, pro-individual liberty supporters and anti-abortionists, national defenders and neocon World Police, I mean it's really difficult to see how these people can all be honestly represented by the Republican party. The Dems don't have the balls to back what they know needs to be done, and I think it's partly because they know that their intellectual reasoning will be overwhelmed by very visceral and massively organized arguments that appeal to the majority for their brevity and lack of serious thought processing. They're also very bad at picking their battles and fighting them cohesively. They do a great job balancing the budget and then allow things like the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Way too short-sighted when it really counts. But duplicity doesn't work as well for Dems, imo, since it's patently obvious that what they do wrong can't as easily be pinned on Republicans.

Don't forget he's an intellectual, too. Almost as bad as that Rhodes scholar Clinton!