micheljones
Much better than the usual crowd I get in these kind of discussions, the 'sensitive vegan' type who pushes false statistics to try to hide being emotionally invested behind the authority of science (two of their favorite falsehoods are to push all people who consume meat into the same group for comparison vs vegans - bad science, because majority of omnivores have very bad diets incomparable to my efforts at keeping on keto, and arguing that 'cows emit methane, so we need to eat less meat', never 'cows emit methane, so let's eat other meat more'). And then when I display patience and deconstruct their arguments, the mask of reason falls off and they just start calling me Hitler, murderer etc. lol.
For the first part of your argument, the issues I mention do not affect the security of the product (signal) itself, they would just enable spooks to more easily sidestep the whole product.
I also do not have anything against using the phone number as uid, it's 'good enough' for most people, and it greatly simplifies things. It is a very sensible default. What I'm questioning is the hardline stance of not allowing anything else at all - while 90% of people would be fine with signal as is, why not give the remaining 10% of us kookoos a bit more freedom?
As for the Sybil attack, does signal allow users not in your 'buddy list' to send you messages?
The summary doesn't mention 'grass-fed', only 'wagyu'; wagyu is intensively grain-fed in the last year of their life or so.
To quote from a quickly-googled article:
"What many people overlook is that farmers make Wagyu as fatty as possible by feeding their cows huge amounts of grain for the last 300-500 days of their lives. Some farmers even add wine and beer to further increase fat content. The result is that a wagyu cow’s muscle tissue is thoroughly marbled with fat. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of fat that is not good for you. The mold toxins in all that grain are bad for the cow and end up in its fat, and then in you, which would mean wagyu beef has a disproportionately high toxin load."
> you can run your own private Signal network and rewrite the authentication if you wanted or remove the sms verification.
You can. What's your point? Most important thing with IM is network effect, i.e. how many people can you contact with it.
You propose putting effort into rewriting the code, then running your own server, then only talking to people who you get to install your modified version of signal on their devices. This is not a solution to the problem, because if you're gonna put all that effort in, there already are viable alternatives.
My main point with my 'conspiracy theory' was that spooks would want to control the scene by being in control of the most popular IM networks. I do not see how you disprove that.
All bad things related to meat consumption are result of intensive and unhealthy farming practices, and combining increased fat intake with increased carb intake (especially fructose). Correlation, not causation.
That being said, there are two issues with meat: in the West, we pretty much only consider muscle as meat, and dislike the internal organs, when it should be the other way around. Even obligate carnivores prefer internal organs because they are richer with fat, and often leave a lot of muscle meat on carcasses.
Second, and related, issue is that muscle meat based diet is a high-protein diet, not high-fat diet, so it's more akin to Atkins than to keto diet. High protein diet comes with its own set of issues: it places significantly higher load on liver, which causes increase in liver size; obligate carnivores have extremely large livers compared to their body size (just google for an image of shark's liver compared to its body, it's almost 1/3 of the volume). This also applies to humans, for example Inuit have enlarged livers as well.
This is the result of increased need for protein-processing capacity. Liver can only process so much protein into fuel per unit of its volume per unit of time. And to use Inuit as example again, because of this, they keep snacking every couple of hours, more often when exerting themselves physically.
A related concept is 'rabbit starvation': eating lean meat (rabbit in winter) is not enough to keep a human being alive - while you're in theory ingesting enough calories to survive, your liver's capacity to process pure protein into fuel is less than your body's need for fuel.
I refused, did some research on my own, and went on keto. My thyroid bloodwork is back to normal and I have no symptoms. And I feel much 'healthier' and more 'energetic' than before all this as well.
I am not proposing keto diet as a magical cure-for-all, but as a possible venue that should be tried before being forced to undergo irreversible surgical procedures for example.
P.S. body does not 'switch' the energy source to fat, it increases the production of ketones as result of interrupted Krebs cycle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle ) because oxaloacetate gets rerouted for use in gluconeogenesis (creating glucose for brain's needs), because there's not enough glucose in diet. This interruption causes the buildup of the main source for Kreb's cycle, acetyl-COA, which is then converted to acetoacetate (a ketone), which is then also partially converted to acetone and beta-hydroxybutyrate (also ketones). Of these, body uses acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate as fuel. Body is always able to use them, it's just that there's not enough of them to use if you're not on carb-restricted diet, so body defaults to using glucose as fuel.
Like you say, long-term effects of keto are poorly studied, mostly because of two reasons: early keto hype as an effective seizure treatment died out once we got good enough chemical seizure treatments, and there was a lot of money poured into blaming fat intake for negative health effects of increased carb intake from the 50ies (starting with Ancel Keys), and picking up significantly in 70ies.
There are animal studies that demonstrate increased longevity of animals on keto diet, similar to calorie restriction and strict veganism. While the calorie restriction and strict veganism most likely work through lowered intake of methionine (an essential aminoacid which functions as START coding block for protein synthesis, meaning that with lowered methionine intake your body creates protein at lowered rate and renews itself more slowly), keto achieves that through effectively tricking the body to go into 'starvation mode' i.e. the mode of using own fat reserves while the actual fat source is the diet.
Conspiracy-theorist mode: spooks wanted to control the scene once it was obvious that it will be impossible to stop the proliferation of the idea of 'e2e encrypted secure messaging'. For this, they had to have an actually secure product without obvious backdoors (to gain and keep marketshare), but also some way to sidestep it. As long as they have the necessary metadata (who is contacting who, and the phone numbers they use), they can just sidestep the end-to-end encryption and hack the endpoints to access data. And moxie is insisting pretty hard on the 2 aspects of Signal that are unnecessary for the stated goal of the project, but are necessary for this purpose: 1) single central server, 2) having to share your phone number to communicate
P.S. the 'oldest art is 30 thousand years old' bit is in the context of 'behavioral modernity' theory at the time it was posited, based on European cave art; in the meantime, we've found even older art in a cave in Indonesia (40 thousand years old).
But like I said, that's ok.
The article I linked clearly states that it was a fertile land basin until 8kya. I decided to ignore kbenson's lack of reading comprehension hiding behind an attempt to insert himself as an arbiter through nitpicking about a thing he obviously knows nothing about, but I see he's not the only one refusing to read the article, so I'll restate my point:
My point of contention is the 15kya date. By 15kya the receding of ice age ice caps has barely started, so 15kya the ocean levels were not affected in any major way. The major geography-changing ocean level rise came a few thousand years later.
The linked article clearly states the following: "Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said." and "The Gulf Oasis would have been a shallow inland basin exposed from about 75,000 years ago until 8,000 years ago, forming the southern tip of the Fertile Crescent, according to historical sea-level records."
Most of middle east cultures draw the myth from Mesopotamian cultures, whose flood myth most likely refers to the flooding of the Persian gulf (which Eufrat and Tigris drain to currently, but used to be a fertile lowland with multiple rivers) cca 8kya.
https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-...
Considering the map in this article, with abundance of rivers across the whole Persian gulf plain, I would suggest that the myth of exile from Eden is also related to it - after the flooding and subsequent move of people upriver between the Eufrat and Tigris there was a need to create irrigation channels to keep the agricultural production up at necessary levels. Creating and maintaining these channels is hard, back-breaking work, and it might have inspired the famous 'By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food' line.