"BITNET was a co-operative university computer network in the United States founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman at Yale University."
BITNET connected mainframes, had gateways to the Unix world and was still active in the 90s. And limited line lengths … some may remember SYSIN DD DATA … oh my goodness …
"That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."
The idea behind that phrase is not that is necessarily easy... but to decomplicate the other extreme where you are choosing this superfood and avoiding that other veg because it is "bad for you". It gives a simple heuristic for healthy living. It helps make it less daunting.
For example what do I have for breakfast? Oh let's boil and egg amd grab a carrot and corn on the cob. Or whatever.
What do I do in the supermarket? Meats, veg, bit of fruit maybe bit of dairy. Am I obessing over avacado vs. pear. Nope. Chicken vs. beef? No. Chocolate bar vs carrot? easy choice.
Now probably once you get thay square you can do harder stuff like food reaction / allergy testing and so on.
Premature optimization is a thing in life AND in programming. Many folks make it far more complicated than it needs to be.
I regularly see folks agonizing about every decision and new study, but the thing is.... the tips on OP's very basic list are responsible for like 80% of the value one gets from "living healthy".
All the rest of the organic whole grain horseshit and panicking about microplastics MIGHT net you another 10%, but at double the cost to your happiness.
The last 10% is basically impossible to achieve without completely sacrificing your quality of life.
Anecdiatelly I have heard one about some veggies are worse than others for being hard to get pesticide off if not organic. Also too many bananas. Too many eggs etc.
But then why work? Lets assume everyone will follow your advice, then we all could work less, may be just 4 a day. If so, then why do not we change the work day to 4 h? It is not like all bad food, tobacco, etc will be gone, but we will not produce all that in such huge quantities.
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?" - Douglas Adams
Folks on HN are very much in the "Where" stage of life. No one here works 4 out of 8 hours just to pay for their food. Nobody should.
That said, you very much seem to be missing the point. Ultra processed food is far, far cheaper than whole foods. That is one reason they are more popular.
For example, it would cost me more just to buy the ingredients to make tacos at home than it does to go through a Taco Bell drive through and buy enough for the family already prepared.
We're not going to be moving to four hour workdays by feeding people food that costs twice as much and takes longer to prepare.
My brother and his wife began cooking pretty much every meal at home a couple years ago. Prior to that they ate out very regularly, especially once they had kids.
They started cooking because feeding the family of 5 at McDonalds cost close to $80.
There may have been a time where fast food was cheaper, but it seems we're past that.
As far as Taco Bell goes, a single crunchy taco is $2.19 and their fancier ones are closer to $5. When I used to eat there I'd usually get 3 tacos and a drink, so I'd be into that today for something like $10-$11. I cook tacos at home regularly for cheaper, and with homemade tortillas and grass fed beef no less.
> They started cooking because feeding the family of 5 at McDonalds cost close to $80.
How much would they eat from McDonald’s? And what size appetite are the kids?
Fast food has definitely gone up in price, but if you’re spending $80 at McDonalds you’re either a glutton or you don’t know what to order.
A “Big Mac Bundle Box” is $15-20 depending on region. It has two Big Macs, two Cheeseburgers, two fries, and a 10-piece nuggets.
If three of the five are kids (vs say 16+ boys lifting weights), I’d be curious how two of those wouldn’t feed the entire family for $30-40.
I’m not suggesting cooking at home is a bad thing nor that eating McD is a good one. But the details matter when you’re spending 2x more than it could be.
Oh I'm sure some of the cost is because both my brother and their teenage son can eat some food. They're both in good shape, they just exercise quite a bit and have always had an appetite.
I also thought $80 for 5 was high, but that was his anecdotal number. I would have expected $50-60 pretty reasonably, and still st that point a family of 5 could eat for a good bit cheaper at home.
You are right, I stand corrected. It's been about 10 years since I last did the math and it's changed dramatically since then.
I'm sure it varies by region, but my grubhub app and the 12 pack of tacos (hard or soft) is $24.99 here so about the same as the $2.19 you found.
I had perplexity pro figure out the cost of purchasing the ingredients for comparable homemade tacos. With great value (Walmart store brand) ingredients it came to $20.04. $6.49 of that would be "left over" ingredients you don't use (mostly half a pound of beef you could use for something else later).
So you save $0.96 cents per taco by doing all the work yourself and using generic ingredients. Plus you get an extra half pound of beef for later.
So if your time is worth less than $12/hr it's a net gain.
I'm assuming it takes you only half an hour to travel, shop, and bring home the ingredients then half an hour to cook. If you live further away, factor in gas etc, the time it takes to do dishes, or are a slower cook then the break-even might come out closer to $6-$7/hr.
When we make tacos it takes around 30-45 minutes, including making fresh flour tortillas.
Tortillas themselves use very little, a cup of flour and a couple tablespoons of butter so maybe $1-$2? The beef we use is around $12/lb and we use 1/2lb to feed two of us. I don't have a cost on the seasoning, we mix it fresh as well so its negligible.
I'd assume we end up around $10 to feed two adults and spend around 45 minutes on the high end. We'd spend about that long to get to taco bell, though we live in a more rural area so that may be an over estimate for most.
> Ultra processed food is far, far cheaper than whole foods.
I think this is mostly true in the US and a cultural thing.
In EU and SA for example I can buy “whole” food - just called food here - for a fraction of the price it would cost me to buy a bunch of cheeseburgers or some other junk food every day.
Anyone who believes something like this you can be 100% sure doesn't know how to cook even the most basic of staple foods. Cooking your own food is nearly an order of magnitude cheaper and, with a few cheap spices and seasonings, almost always tastier. The only valid argument is prep time here, and that too even only applies to certain kinds of foods.
But but but the influencers are telling me to put nothing but cheeseburgers and testosterone in my body and that just coincidentally reinforces with what I want to do anyway!
I love how this gets presented as obvious advice, yet explains nothing and introduces an even less well defined thing it will do: "be maximally healthy".
It's just a dietary heuristic, why would it have to explain everything? If you want that, just go and look at the literature on overweight and obesity or, say, substitution of animal protein for plant protein. It's all there.
It isn't a dietary heuristic, because there's little advice provided. The extreme is that it is advising people to seek treatment if they suffer from pica or bulimia.
By heuristic, I just mean “a rule used in decision making”.
Under that usage, the fact that the rule doesn’t provide fine-grained advice doesn’t disqualify it from being a heuristic. Eating mostly plants is a rule used in decision making when considering what to eat.
> The extreme is that it is advising people to seek treatment if they suffer from pica or bulimia.
The whole article, if actually read, explains a lot. Not the least how we came from talking about "food" to talk about single ingredients instead. Which then are hailed as the "solution" for all of today's problems with nutrition. Until the next big thing comes along.
What country are you reporting from? It seems to be absolutely booming in the UK. A brief internet search suggests it's growing and predicted to boom in the US as well.
That could be due to increasing competition? They had high brand awareness during the 2010s but (in the UK at least) we're seeing competitors like This and Alt, as well as cheap own-brand versions, coming onto the shelves in a big way.
I think people really underestimate how bad meat is for you.
It's extremely high in saturated fat and lots of meat is carcinogenic. We classify bacon in the same category of carcinogen as alcohol and tobacco. Meaning, we know, for sure, it causes cancer.
Yeah, IMO there’s a continuum between lean meats that I’d classify as relatively middle-of-the-road healthwise (like chicken), and processed red meat (pretty adverse health outcomes even from small amounts), and the fact that there’s a “butter and bacon are health foods” movement seems insane to me.
Unfortunately trends towards plant-based food seem to have taken a step backwards in recent years and I suspect the current moral panic around UPFs hasn’t helped. But the evidence on UPFs as harmful is pretty tenuous at the moment, while the evidence on meat and adverse health effects is considerably more comprehensive.
I take monthly notes with the excellent app Markor, keep my daily diary with the nice app Diary and share lists, notes, todos with family members via Joplin (stores data on my own WebDAV server).
So almost everything is text (with markup/markdown) and can thus easily be synced and merged between devices via rsync, ssh and perl or shell scripts.
Example: when I want to look up notes in either markor's or diary's files, that's easily accomplished with a shell script, e.g.
cd ~/storage/shared/Documents/markor
if [[ $# == 0 ]] ; then
exec zsh
else
grep -i "$@" **/*(.) | less
fi
Instead of grep I could even use agrep to handle typos. I can start a simple web server on the phone or tablet, if needed:
python -m http.server $PORT --bind 0.0.0.0
and view media files from another device (mobile, desktop, laptop, … whatever.
And there's exiftool, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, scripting languages, all in reach, wherever I go.
First of all, typing shell commands isn't that annoying on the tiny touchscreen. Caveat: heavy terminal users here ;-)
Then you can attach a Bluetooth keyboard. And you can import scripts (Perl, Python, Shell, ...) via ssh from other devices. Last but not least, you can start an ssh server on the device and use Termux from your desktop or laptop. And you can start a web server, to access your device's media files, etc.
With Termux I have rsync at hand, which can compute checksums, delete files after the transfer, etc. That's why I do my complete backup with Termux. And I sort the images on the phone into dated subfolders before syncing them.
And having tools like exiftool, ffmpeg, and ImageMagick among others available in Termux is wonderful.
Yeah same in fact that's how I discovered Termux. I had an rsync.net account and thought that since rsync and ssh are so ubiquitous it should be simple to set up back-ups from my android phone. Boy was I wrong. The android apps that support rsync were all janky or suspiciously closed. Termux + rsync + Termux API's job scheduler does the trick. I think it's a bit of a drain on my phone battery but I won't complain given I own my photo back-ups from top to bottom (though I rent from rsync.net)
You could create a timestamp file on your Mac, where your Mac adds a timestamp per day or hour and have a script check that the timestamps appear in your backup.
Google recorded wifi names and locations as a "bycatch" when taking streetview pictures from 2007 upto 2010. They still collect such data on Android devices if the user consents or ignores the option to say "no" … :-0
Certain devices (especially tablets) don't have GPS or various sensors integrated and still can tell you your approximate location, if WiFi is enabled.
No, the FAA recommends against creating a foam path. It reduces braking effectiveness and uses up supplies that might be needed to actually fight a fire
[You Need A Kitchen Slide Rule](https://entropicthoughts.com/kitchen-slide-rule)
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