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Larry T. Spider

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Everything posted by Larry T. Spider

  1. As I’ve been reading through this thread I’ve been thinking about the simplest solution on a national scale. The best solution will never work because we are idiots, only the simplest has a chance. Getting people to count calories and stay under a specific number is the only idea I can really think of. I would guess the average 50 pound overweight person doesn’t know how many calories they should be consuming or how many are in their typical foods. What I see a lot of people ordering as a normal whataburger meal is 1,645 calories. If you are 200 pounds and want to maintain your weight, you have less than 1,000 remaining calories in the day. That’s fine if you are aware of it and make adjustments. But if you keep plowing through calories you are going to be a fat ass in short order.
  2. There may be more to it, but I just thought it was an easy way to make an extra 35k in interest per unit per year. They pay 50k a year in rent but you have to provide a lot of services. The investment income is a lot easier. Then they keep 10% of it at the end.
  3. My wife and I have started splitting meals when eating out. Usually a small app and 1/2 an entree is plenty. When I hit late 30s, the weight management got a lot harder.
  4. The answer will always be “both”. People with no personal responsibility or impulse control will always struggle with this. But we can create a macro environment that makes it easier for the middle of the road person to find some level of success. Portion sizes and processed garbage that is called food are things that can be manipulated. Does it stop somebody from going to Popeyes for the 4th time this week? No. Would it have some impact on the obesity levels across 330 million people? Probably. Treat it like a national security issue and get buyin from “both sides”.
  5. I started this thread in February and expected a little more consensus on a top few choices. Maybe there isn’t another Austin in the near future. There’s no economic law that says there has to be. It will be interesting to track the growth of some mid-sized cities over the next decade to see if anybody breaks out.
  6. He’s pretty normal in most ways but when it comes to food, his views are definitely crazy. And they will kill him. Damn near already did. Sadly I think he is closer to the norm than many would like to admit. It’s not the same issues with each person, but as a country we have an extremely unhealthy relationship with food.
  7. It’s mostly a meat and potatoes type diet. Almost no fruit and the vegetables are limited and the variety is without much nutrition such as corn. Big portions of meat are always the main component, sometimes ok and sometimes not. Lean grilled meat isn’t bad but the pork chops smothered in gravy…not so much. Anytime he eats out it’s BBQ, burgers, or Tex-Mex. Just about anything else and he will remark that “this doesn’t seem very traditional”. The standard portion size is probably double what it should be. I think it’s tied to his childhood but is also a cultural thing to him. Eating the way he does is how he connects to his masculinity. It’s somewhat tied to his politics as well.
  8. In his specific case, I do think that there are some mental health challenges. Every time he is forced to eat healthy for any extended period of time, he gets into a bad mental funk even as he is losing weight and seeming more healthy. Of course the same worldview that sees eating healthy as abandoning his roots/traditions also sees talking to a psychologist as blasphemous. I do think that we need to have a national conversation about what a healthy weight and typical portion size looks like. We have gotten so far removed from normal world standards that 20 pounds overweight now seems normal to us. One last observation. I used to work in poor schools and 80% of the kids were fat by 4th grade. I would say it’s 15-20% at the upperclass school I work at now. The difference isn’t money or time. It’s simply how they view food and nutrition. We would talk about cheap, healthy, and easy meals with the moms and the response was almost always “my kid doesn’t want to eat that”. They would roll in with a 2,200 calorie lunch the next day. But, all the kids were fat so there was no societal pressure to change.
  9. One interesting thing about a lot of overweight people is that no amount of painful consequences will change the behavior. My FIL has spent an extraordinary amount of time in the hospital and has had multiple heart procedures. The one thing every doctor has told him is that losing weight is the most important thing he can do. His relationship with food is completely messed up. He only likes what he refers to a traditional food and everything else is extremely suspect. He thinks I’m a new age psycho for putting avocado on some things. The food he eats is part of his world view as much as anything. When we make an occasional healthy meal, he is actually depressed by it. The disappointment is palpable. He also has a completely warped view of what a normal weight is or what a normal portion size is. I need to lose 10-15 pounds so I’ve been watching how much I eat. He is mystified because he thinks I am underweight. He also looks at a normal plate of food as something really depressing. I wish I could help the guy.
  10. Senior year of HS. If I die before I wake At least in heaven I can skate 'Cause right now on earth I can't do jack Without the man up on my back
  11. Students are keeping devices over the summer unless you leave the district. When we switched to virtual, we made the decision to get devices into student hands as quickly as possible. When we are talking about 80,000 students, it would have taken months of planning to do this in a completely organized way. These are PTA/school purchased devices pulled off campuses in addition to the newly purchased ones. That’s why some are bar coded and others aren’t. At the beginning of the pandemic we were having bus drivers go campus to campus finding any iPad or chromebook they could, loading them on busses and delivering them to houses. Speed was prioritized over accounting.
  12. 1. Fuck that. 2. Lol at the guy thinking his baby is going to “overheat” in 78 degrees.
  13. They will consistently make your quests worse over time. Especially if they are able to recruit more drivers. I lived on them in the beginning but they quickly became worthless.
  14. Friend went in for a procedure and tested positive. She’s been vaccinated, only around other vaccinated people, wears a mask, and has no symptoms. Went and got a second rapid test which was negative. She is waiting on the results of a pcr test that we also expect to be negative. I’m guessing she will still be reported as a Travis county positive case. Second and third tests were done by a different group.
  15. Same. Two worst companies I’ve ever dealt with as an employee/contractor. Uber didn’t even have a phone number drivers could call for support until the new CEO. It is still very limited in terms of function and almost everything has to be done through the app… Which they rarely respond to. Have never met a driver that has been doing it for more than a year that doesn’t think they are shady as fuck.
  16. I drove for uber part time for 4 years. I enjoyed it in the beginning but things went downhill and I quit. Rates for the customers stayed the same but the amount I got paid consistently decreased. It eventually wasn’t worth it anymore. Drivers used to make 80%, including on surge pricing. As of 15 months ago, they would give the driver a flat bonus amount such as $5 then destroy the customer on the mile/minute charges and keep the difference. Not a defense of cab companies at all. Just not sure that drivers are going to jump back in as quickly as people think. Passengers were always shocked at the difference between what they paid and what I made.
  17. The issue was the adults in the building. Offer them vaccines first, along with medical professionals, and it’s easy to get reopened with fewer precautions.
  18. https://www.pbs.org/black-culture/shows/list/austin-texas-civil-rights/ If you don’t think that systemic racism still has an impact on society today, please watch this 30 minute video on the history of Austin. It’s not designed to make you feel bad. It’s factual. It’s relevant to anybody that has any knowledge of Austin, past or present.
  19. A quick timeline: Slavery: 265 years Segregation: 99 years ”Freedom”: 55 years Most of the systems in this country were built in the first 364 of Europeans being here. This obviously predates America as a country. Our educational, housing, healthcare, transportation, monetary, and just about every other system was built for white people. It intentionally left others out and relegated most to abject poverty. When “freedom” finally arrived, there were no ladders out of the hole to go along with it. The idea that everything has been fixed in these last 55 years is laughable. We are operating the same systems with a few tweaks and wondering why not much has changed. None of this even addresses the mentality/culture of people who have experienced oppression. A great quote to sum it up:
  20. 1960 340,887 4.6% 1970 300,910 −11.7% 1980 284,413 −5.5% 1990 265,968 −6.5% 2000 242,840 −8.7% 2010 212,237 −12.6% 2019 (est.) 209,403 [3] −1.3% Birmingham has actually been shrinking.
  21. 1980 150,255 22.3% 1990 212,092 41.2% 2000 276,093 30.2% 2010 403,892 46.3% 2019 (est.) 474,069 [4] 17.4% These are the stats for Raleigh alone. I would say it’s taking off.
  22. Comes with a built in piss bottle for Amazon workers. You can buy it on Amazon.
  23. I wouldn’t worry too much about the diversity angle with a private school. Most public schools aren’t very diverse either, especially the ones where the parents could afford private schools. Last school that I worked at before my current school was only 5% non-Hispanic. There are diverse public schools out there but they are the exception not the rule.
  24. Just want to be clear about the context of my comment about white kids and public schools. I’m not saying that the majority of white people avoid public schools. I’m saying that the demographics of this board are very different than the parents of public schools kids on a broad level. This group is largely white, educated, and middle/upper class. Having conversations about the successes and failures of public schools is vastly different with this group than with the majority of public school parents. Not saying the people here are wrong about things, they are just coming at it from different place.
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