> One of the biggest health problems in America is lack of physical exercise.
I disagree. The biggest health problem is the abundance of high calorie foods that are designed to taste so good that it confuses are dumb monkey brains into eat more than we should. Limiting or eliminating the amounts of sugars and simple carbohydrates in our foods would go a long way at improving our overall health.
> I disagree. The biggest health problem is...
You aren't disagreeing, you're making a claim about _the biggest health problem_, while I'm making a claim about _one of the biggest health problems_.
I disagree pretty strongly and can provide as many examples as you would like:
- One of the biggest health problems in America is too much bicycling
- One of the biggest health problems in America is too little automobile travel
- One of the biggest health problems in America is too much space travel
- One of the most nutritious foods is rocks.
I think instead what you mean can be best explained by reading the wikipedia article on weasel words. [1]
Lots of skinny people in terrible shape out there.
BUT, you say, look at his gut. A fat slob, obviously. Can’t be healthy. Healthy is slim. I am 5’8” and weigh 225. At 5’8”, “normal” is considered to be – incredibly enough – 125-163 pounds. Overweight is 164-196, and I am “obese” at 225. In reality, my bodyfat percentage is about 24%, and a 60-year-old guy who deadlifts 500 is an anomaly in terms of muscle mass anyway. So I’m not worried about my body composition. [1]
[1] https://startingstrength.com/article/your-gut-your-health-an...
There's no amount of training that can fix a bad diet.
It all depends on your goals.
The dean of the EE faculty when I got my MSc liked to quip that the best engineers were the lazy ones - lazy, yet bright enough to realise that if they expended some effort today, they'd be able to slack off tomorrow...
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.3798403,-92.2227848,3a,75y,8...
Also, I am a huge fan of Wendell Berry and this topic has so many implications that are worth exploring IMO.
As a kid, eating at McDonald's was like a once-every-other-month treat.
Access to fast food, even for children, has never been easier.
I still can’t believe they limited salt for school lunches. If you want kids to eat the meals they need to taste good, and for 99.9% of kids and teenagers the amount of salt they eat has basically no effect on their health.
Never had it, maybe it does taste terrible.
No, the problem is and will remain dietary in nature. Americans could stop all exercise across the board, change their diets, and lose massive amounts of weight trivially, just by cutting out a few common items that nearly all obese Americans over-consume. I've yet to meet an obese American whose diet I couldn't trivially radically alter by just removing a few particularly horrible things (eg sugary drinks, ice cream, pasta/pizza, high sugar snack goods). People think they have to change everything about what they eat and go to the gym five times per week to drop weight, and that's entirely false, all they have to do is eliminate or dramatically reduce the couple worst items in their diet and that's usually enough (it's rare that there are dozens of villains in their diet that matter, it's almost always just a few items that are doing 3/4+ of the damage).
To be fair, the yanks don't even need to change their diets to loose weight .... they just need to eradicate those stupid portion sizes.
A steak doesn't mean half the cow on your plate, a sandwich doesn't mean putting everything you can find in the shop (including the kitchen sink, if you could !) in between two slices of bread ... etc..etc..etc
Its simply grotesque.
Also, soda servings in excess of 20oz (already huge!) to begin with, regardless of refills.
I agree that reducing bad food and portion control is the answer, but it's very hard to drive behavioral change in people. And the health industry has done a "good" job of creating medication to enable bad lifestyles i.e. metformin for Type2 Diabetes, other drugs to manage cholesterol, etc.
GP's point is that calories coming from a "healthy" source doesn't mean they don't count. Drenching one's salad in olive oil rather than canola oil won't help someone lose weight, nor will switching from soda to a fruit juice with the same amount of sugar in it (ancillary benefits of e.g. vitamins notwithstanding)
Not exactly, just because you've replaced those calories doesn't mean that your body didn't gain muscle mass which itself requires calories just for your body to maintain. This leads to a higher basal metabolic rate, which ends up burning calories even while you rest.
A 500 calorie workout might only be 400 extra over spending that time sitting on that couch. Similarly extra muscle on it’s own takes energy but fat also burns energy so even modest weight loss balances that out.
(Have a look at people who are 80+ and fit. Most of them are slim. You don't see a lot of bulked up old people)
Old people aren't super muscular because you need high levels of testosterone to support musculature, and it naturally declines with age and particularly tanks when you are elderly.
I've seen that myself, a long bike ride will often be followed by an evening on the sofa.
[EDIT] I don't mean to be dismissive of this pretty cool improvement on manual washing. It seems like it will be really helpful for a lot of people until their economic situation improves.
I can't find the reference but I did read it recently.
[1]https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mfr/4919087.0011.104/--deconstr...
> Although the physical labor of laundry was lessened somewhat by the machines, the actual time housewives allocated to their family laundry increased.
(This is claimed to be the result of housewives being responsible for the entirety of laundry, instead of employing help, however.)
Your cuts are less likely to get infected when your clothes don't have the manure you put on the field last week on them.
Cheaper washing machines mean more clothes, more laundry, more people washing more often.
Individuals may spend less time doing laundry. But more laundry is being done, above and beyond simply meeting previous latent demand.
One horsepower is .7 kW. A horse working for an hour nonstop would be .7kW hrs.
Now, how many men do you need working constantly before you have comparable strength to a 20kW generator sipping a little bit of gasoline?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ
Electricity is nice.
Clearly an Olympic-level athlete. That being said, I can't help but imagine that with some optimization, it could make the electricity generation a bit easier (maybe more RPM but less torque needed?). Clearly, the video shows him straining and pushing.
Power == RPM * Torque, converting to less torque but more RPM with gears probably would be easier.
More like 8.4kWh.
> data from the horse pulling contest at the 1925 Iowa State Fair showing that peak mechanical power output of a horse is 12-14.9 HP.
See also: the current argument raging around minimum wage in the US, and whether the the millions of grocery-bagging and burger-flipping gigs are supposed to be something you can actually survive on, or are they just meant to be short term jobs for middle class teenagers who have no dependents or living expenses to cover? Or maybe we don't love this reality but there's nothing anyone can do about it because The Market has declared that these jobs are worth less than a living wage so whatever (obligatory FDR meme: https://imgur.com/gallery/SvuwZrm).
I'd certainly agree that both coal miners and laundresses deserved better wages and working conditions.
In any case, it appears that the purpose of this human-powered laundry machine is not to put anyone doing laundry for pay out of work, but rather to allow some combination of doing laundry at home cheaper, faster, or with less physical strain (a crank may be more ergonomic than being bent over a tub, and your hands don't have to be in wet soapy water the whole time).
[1]: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com
[2]: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/05/could-we-run-modern-...
As tractors started to become common, the Horse and Mule Association, in conjunction with, I think, Iowa State University, did considerable work on optimizing plowing with horses. The optimal angle between horse and plow (17° below horizontal) was worked out experimentally. A clever set of standard harness parts was worked out, with equalizers so none of the horses in the hitch could slack off.
Didn't help much. Improved things maybe 20%, after which they'd hit an optimum. Those who farm with horses today do use those optimized techniques; they're in draft horse books. But tractors are just better.
Half the population alive would likely not been born or survived to adulthood if we had followed a steampunkish model of industrialization and progress.
We'd probably have more pollution as well.
The bicycle, I guess.
Thank god for bicycles. We could use more inventions like that.
https://www.ft.com/content/9084f6ad-6146-4b38-8e7c-faf850f90...
> The bicycle's invention has had an enormous effect on society, both in terms of culture and of advancing modern industrial methods. Several components that eventually played a key role in the development of the automobile were initially invented for use in the bicycle, including ball bearings, pneumatic tires, chain-driven sprockets and tension-spoked wheels.
"The bicycle is unique in that it's engine is also it's cargo."
I saw it on a TIL on reddit, so take it with a grain of salt. Trying to google it now, but all results for queries containing the word "scythe" seems to be related to a board game.
https://scytheworks.ca/scythe-works-without-borders/
They seem to be active in Nepal. There are other similar groups elsewhere.
This DDG search turns up several: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=introducing+scythe+village+-game&i...
Including a Reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/i14bak/oddly_mesmer...
I really enjoy questions like this! One area you can see this in practice is in the field of valve amplifiers, they're hideously inefficient and unreliable when compared to modern transistor amplifiers but there's huge numbers of guitarists and HiFi enthusiasts (myself included) who love the subjective qualities of the sound they make, so an effectively obsolete technology has been kept around and developed far longer than its "natural" lifespan and looks likely to be for a long while yet.
Radio is another example of subcultures further developing "obsolete" tech, things like Morse code have been kept in modern use and further developed by amateur radio enthusiasts long after its commercial demise as a tool for communication, and even after AM radio's heavy decline in Europe you can still hear hobbyist pirates on Sunday mornings (especially from the Netherlands) keeping the ionosophere warm on those frequencies.
"Improving on ... the plow". If I remember my history, there's a perplexing story around the asian (chinese?) plow and the highly inefficient (but necessary?) european plow that didnt improved for hundreds of years.
By using more efficient mechanical washing machines the effect wouldn't be more people with bulging biceps, they would just smell more. But slightly less than the victorians.
We'd still have slaves. That's where we'd be.
The development of steam, IC, and electric machinery is what actually put an end to slavery, by making it uneconomic.
Slavery (or near-equivalents, such as serfdom) was a constant of virtually all human societies above the hunter-gatherer band level, until the development of powered equipment.
So did the introduction of steam, IC, and electric machinery. Your quibble is with the OP.
Emancipation happened right around the time of the introduction of large-scale steam power.
This was not a coincidence.
Now, some might try to argue that the process of eliminating slavery/serfdom just happened to coincide with the development of non-human-powered machinery (like maybe humans just somehow became more moral and less-prone to exploiting their fellow-humans).
But you know what? That's basically just a load of crap.
It doesn't explain the near-perfect correlation between the development of powered equipment and the disappearance of slavery/serfdom, world-wide, carried out over the course of centuries, appearing first (again, apparently just by coincidence) in the more technologically-advanced countries (such as Western Europe), and later in the less-technologically-advanced countries (such as Russia, Asia, and (at that time) the United States)
Water, steam, internal combustion, and electricity is what ended slavery/serfdom. Get rid of those and slavery/serfdom will be back before you know it.
You are kind of inventing something that wasn't written. The OP wrote, "What if many of our machines used human power like they did 100 years ago, but were made far more efficient and effective than they were 100 years ago?"
I think that is relatively straightforward. We would have sharper, lighter plows - and they would be FAR LESS effective than modern farm equipment and food wold be more expensive.
This would be a bad thing and I'm glad we don't live in that world.
> In the 1920s, mass production led to falling prices for washing machines (Cowan, 1983, p. 94). As of 1926, 80% of affluent households studied by market researchers in 36 American cities had washing machines. Only 28% of homes in small town Zanesville, Ohio had electric washers. Most of those with washing machines were among the affluent homes (Cowan, 1983, p. 173). During the single year of 1936, over 1.4 million washing machines were sold in the U.S., and the average price had dropped by more than half. However, many could not afford washing machines during the Great Depression (Cohen, 1982, p. 95).
https://evolutionhomeappliances.weebly.com/washing-machines-...
Tractors on farms were already pretty common and became more so over that decade.
> In August, 1917, a small tent city was erected in Fremont, Nebraska. Under the canvas, 48 tractor companies exhibited their wares. There were over 300 tractor models on display worth over $1.5 million. But that was only a fraction of the tractors being offered to farmers in the 1920s. The number of tractor manufacturer peaked in 1921 when there were 186 different firms trying to entice farmers to buy their tractors. The next decade saw amazing changes in the technology, and more and more farmers moving from farming with horses to farming with tractors.
https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe20s/machines_08.ht...
While air travel wasn't something the common person would do, planes weren't rare and commercial air travel was in its infancy.
https://www.century-of-flight.net/commercial-aviation-indust...
The in-home electric refrigerator wouldn't appear until 1927, but in 1921 the technology was known and used in industry.
https://evolutionhomeappliances.weebly.com/refrigerators-190...
https://bigchill.com/us/blog/refrigerators-through-the-decad...
While I understand your sentiment, it's wrong to portray the early 20th century (or even the 19th century) as a technological backwater. We have certainly made advancements in material sciences and electronics (e.g. computers) in the past 100 years that have arguably changed many, many things; I don't think an engineer from 1921 would be lost in understanding the mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic, and non-computer electrical technology we have today.
For what it's worth, I do wish we, as a society, had chosen or will choose to move to less energy-intensive means of living. I try to do my part, for instance I live somewhere where I can walk to 80% of the places I want to go or could take public transit to about 90% and I use a reel mower when the grass isn't too high. Even as, maybe especially as, a software engineer I hate that more and more devices are becoming computerized, or worse "smart" or "connected". Computers are wonderful, but my toaster oven and refrigerator doesn't need one, thank you very much. I also try to avoid single-use plastics when possible an purchase better quality items to last longer when possible.
Don't get me wrong, there are many conveniences that I personally wouldn't give up (clothes washing machine), but in general I think we could stand to reëvaluate much of our culture and civilization in terms of energy and material usage.
What if many of our machines used human power like they did 100 years ago, but were made far more efficient and effective than they were 100 years ago? One of the biggest health problems in America is lack of physical exercise. Biking for transportation, having a manual washing machine, etc would go a long way towards fixing that problem, while also reducing our use of electricity, gasoline, etc.