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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Sorry, unfortunately nutrition is more complex than what you can sum up in a few sentences. To answer that though:

    • Chicken isn’t categorically “unhealthy” in the same way double stuf oreos cooked in lard are - I said in another comment that it’s the ultimate neutral food, and if you look at its profile I think that’s a fair statement. It’s not completely devoid of nutrients, it has a couple of things in significant quantities - phosphorus, selenium, and B3 for example - but overall it’s not very nutrient dense. It doesn’t have a ton of huge negatives either - a bit of saturated fat, but nothing to write home about. If you’re looking at a “Hitler-Hanks” spectrum where the lard oreos are on one end and a spinach chia seed broccoli whatever salad on the other, then chicken is probably right in the middle somewhere. Its D&D alignment is True Neutral. The point I was making in my earlier comment was that “protein” doesn’t make a food healthy, and that there’s a lot more to it than that, and if people use that mental shortcut they might end up making misinformed decisions.

    • The nutritional profile of chicken would be a lot to type out, but you can look at the NCCDB or Cronometer Gold (which uses NCCDB among others) for an elaborate breakdown. Just keep in mind that it doesn’t capture everything - it’s an amazing tool, but it won’t cover the catechins in your tea, for example.

    Ultimately though, if you’re reading this, let me take this opportunity to encourage you to GO SEE A REGISTERED DIETITIAN. Your insurance will often cover 80+% of your first appointment, but even if they don’t it’s an amazing investment. You’ll live longer, probably spend less on food, and spend a lot less on hospital bills after your first heart attack.


  • Lean protein =/= healthy. Like, at all. This is a myth from the freaking 1980s. Nutritional profile is a breakdown of the micronutrients that a food has, and it determines whether a food is “nutritious” and therefore, in general terms, “healthy”.

    Please, oh please, don’t go around telling people that food is healthy if it is a lean protein. I’m sure it’s well intended, but it’s also misinformed. If you want to learn about how to assess whether a food is healthy, go make an appointment with a dietitian - your insurance will often cover the first appointment.


  • Macronutrients are not what makes a food healthy. In particular, high-protein does not make a food healthy. By that reasoning a lot of fast food could be considered insanely healthy, but it’s not. That’s just our downright shitty levels of education surrounding nutrition.

    What actually makes a food healthy depends on a lot of different factors, but a common one and relatively reliable standard bearer is whether it is “nutritious”. When a food is nutritious or nutrient dense, it is micronutrient dense. This includes things like spinach and beans and seeds and broccoli and all of the other foods that your parents made you eat. Micronutrient poor foods are ones that have relatively few micronutrients, but usually are relatively calorie rich. This includes things like mozzarella sticks, wonderbread, fruit gushers, heavy cream, twinkies, and so on. We do need macronutrients, but virtually anyone who gets enough energy (calories) from food also gets enough of them, except in specific cases like being a professional athlete. The athlete wouldn’t die of protein deprivation if they didn’t pay attention to their intake, but it would make it harder for them to perform well.

    So no, chicken is not, by any standard, “really nutritious and healthy”. It’s not completely devoid of nutrients - it’s relatively rich in phosphorus and selenium if you eat it on its own, for example, but it’s far from what anyone would consider nutritious. It’s somewhere in between fried mars bars and spinach.





  • Lol, we aren’t able to do “extreme stuff” because of safety, we’re able to do it in spite of that. We would advance much faster if we didn’t value human life, full stop. It’s one of humanity’s biggest, albeit necessary inefficiencies. That value isn’t the norm either - throughout history we’ve generally been pretty comfortable with the expectation of death in exchange for advancement, and we owe a lot of our modern knowledge and technology to people who suffered for it. You’re taking a tiny sample size, i.e. the western world for the past 60ish years, and pretending that it reflects a precedent. To the extent that you need humans, safety and risk are always going to compete with one another, and human life is always going to be disposable to some actors.



  • What do you consider “not informed” vs. “willfully ignorant”? Personally, I think that a billionaire, who could have afforded any reputable service (which does exist), and who could have hired experts to go over every miniscule detail of the mission was willfully ignorant. The CEO of the company, who was personally warned and knew all of the internal issues, was also willfully ignorant. If either of them thought this was equivalent to skydiving, or just though “fuck it”, that’s on them. Of course, if the company actively lied to them or hid information then that’s obviously a huge issue, but if they just said “yeah like, this tube is made of stuff from the junkyard and literally no regulatory body has OKd us” and they agreed with the resources and knowledge available to them, then they carry some responsibility.

    I think the case of say, signing a waiver before you go ziplining is very different for a few reasons. Most people who go ziplining don’t have any expertise, and don’t have the financial resources to find out more about the activity or the company offering it. They’re essentially relying on what they’re being told, so it’s far more coercive to tell someone like that “yeah uhh, we’re mostly safe, here sign this”. Ziplining would also presumably have some regulation around it, so undisclosed risk would leave not only the provider, but also the regulatory body, and in a larger sense government and society morally culpable. Thirdly, I think in a legal sense you have to consider what an average reasonable citizen would have interpreted the risk to be, just like in other criminal cases. I think it’s fair to say that the average reasonable person would have understood the risk of a titanic mission to be far greater than that of ziplining, so the burden to convey risk is much higher in the ziplining case.



  • I mean everyone says “omg they’re crazy”, but it’s so easy to say that, and all of us have at least a few things that we’d be willing to do that an onlooker could point to and say “lol why do that when you might die”.

    There’s nothing wrong with taking an informed risk, and it’s really up to you what kind of risk you’re comfortable taking. Most of these people seem to have a consistently high risk tolerance, and three of them were very experienced, so I don’t think it’s fair to call them “stupid” or “idiots” just because your risk/reward assessment doesn’t line up with theirs. If that was their idea of living the best life possible, then that’s good for them.

    I’d also say that the majority of people in life aren’t as happy as they could be because they’re too scared to let go of convenience and familiarity. People turn down dream opportunities because it means moving to a different country, they stay in jobs they hate because they’re scared of what comes next, they don’t travel to places because five years ago someone died there, and they stay in unfulfilling relationships because they hate the thought of being alone or having to meet new people. So if you’re the kind of person who basically spends their life on the couch with the same old people in the same old place eating the same old food watching the same old shows and you dream about what could’ve been, I’m not sure you have the right to lob criticisms at people who chose to get up and do stuff.


  • I’m not familiar with the mechanics of this sub obviously, but I’m given to understand that an emergency ascent should have been initiated by this point if everything was fully functional. That probably points to a design flaw - you should always keep those systems as independent of each other as possible so that if one fails, you can fall back on the other. Of course it’s possible that they’ve since ascended and haven’t been found, or got stuck, but assuming they haven’t that could imply that the sub experienced an insurmountable failure and they’re looking for people who are either gone or near-unrescuable.


  • I would also say that I don’t think people SHOULD be risking their lives at this point. We’re looking at a case of people who took an informed risk and understood that there was danger associated with the recreational activity they were undertaking. These people either had vast monetary resources and could have consulted the best experts in the world, or had significant prior experience and knowledge. While obviously withholding information interferes with informed consent, and that may or may not have played a role, I don’t think this is morally equivalent to rescuing someone from a burning building. There’s also simple probability - the odds of rescuing them alive and well aren’t good, and to put someone else’s life at risk for the off chance that they succeed would be unethical in my opinion.