Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

All the different ways of solving the shelter problem. To be static or mobile? Roots, legs, or wheels?
Eureka
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by Eureka »

7Wannabe5 wrote: Depends on how you define "lean."
You are right; thanks for pointing it out. I didn't think of 'lean' in relation to weight and definitely not to BMI. Please bear over with a non-native English speaker. I should probably just ave written 'fit' as I meant something along the lines of a well-aligned body not suffering the effects of a modern sedentary lifestyle.

Waist to Height Ratio probably makes better sense than BMI if you need such a measurement. However, I just tried and got "ratio 0.38 - Take care". Eh, take care of what? Take care and loose some belly muscles so that my waist circumference gets bigger?

Dragline
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by Dragline »

If you do enough backpacking, you get pretty good at aiming the solids into small cat-holes (I don't know why they call them that). Most people spread their feet too wide and put them around the hole instead of in front of the hole, which works a lot better.

I know that's TMI, but hey, I've got hard-won skills to be proud of here, dammit.

As people age, one of the most important physical skills to maintain is the ability simply to squat or sit on the ground and be able to get up again with as little extra support as possible (i.e., using core muscles). A Brazilian doctor came up with this up/down test which pretty accurately correlates with your chances of dying in the next few years if you are over age 50:

http://aplus.com/a/sitting-rising-test- ... -mortality

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Ego
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by Ego »

There are plenty of photos of hunter-gatherer groups from South America, Southern and East Africa, Pacific Islanders and South Asia. They all look very similar to the man Eureka posted above. Their lifestyles represent how human beings lived for 90% of human history.

While the change from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist/farmer happened gradually over the past 10,000 years and occurred at different times in different places (it has yet to occur in a few places), most humans as late as the 1880s still looked similar to that squatting man. I've got photos of my ancestors from that time who look strikingly similar to him.

We humans are hard wired to judge how well we are doing by using social comparison. We look around at those in our immediate vicinity and use them to gauge how well we are doing ourselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory

Lately I find myself trying to expand my viewpoint. I try to look through the lens of 1) human history and 2) a variety of cultures. While we may look around ourselves and see that we are doing well compared to the people we see on the streets, we've got to remember that they (and perhaps we) are light-years different from our many homo-sapien ancestors and from most humans occupying earth today.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Ego: First I would note that most humans that were still engaged in hunter-gatherer lifestyle into the photographic era probably weren't doing all that well in terms of energy-output for energy-acquisition compared to the long history of hunter-gatherers. Also, many of our recent ancestors were living through some pretty rough times in the early industrial age. Lots of room for debate, but anatomically modern homo-sapiens-maybe 200,000 years, behaviorally modern homo-sapiens-maybe 50,000 years, adoption of practice of sedentary agriculture-maybe 10,000 years. Venus of Willendorf-maybe 24,000 years. Recent genetic research reveals that range of human genetic adaptation to available diet has been huge. Some of us can healthily digest foods that others of us can't with varying results in our phenotype. Image











Eureka said: However, I just tried and got "ratio 0.38 - Take care". Eh, take care of what?
Take care, or me and Meghan Trainor, Beyonce and the Venus of Willendorf are going to eat all the groceries before you get any.

BRUTE
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by BRUTE »

Ego wrote:We humans are hard wired to judge how well we are doing by using social comparison. We look around at those in our immediate vicinity and use them to gauge how well we are doing ourselves.
brute's trick is to move around a lot. immediate vicinity changes as a result.

Eureka
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by Eureka »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Eureka said: However, I just tried and got "ratio 0.38 - Take care". Eh, take care of what?
Take care, or me and Meghan Trainor, Beyonce and the Venus of Willendorf are going to eat all the groceries before you get any.
@7Wannabe5, thanks for the warning, I'll watch out :D

Eureka
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by Eureka »

Sedentary lifestyle is a very recent phenomenon, though, and did not arise together with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago.

Those early farmers - and all the following - worked their butts off basically all of their lives. A sedentary lifestyle contains very limited physical activity. Sedentary activities include sitting, car driving, watching television, computer use, lying on the couch, etc.

BRUTE
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by BRUTE »

scary af!

(af stands for "as fuck")

Dragline
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by Dragline »

Bombardier to co-pilot: Bombs away!

cmonkey
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by cmonkey »

Well that's one way to scare the shit out of yourself each morning.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Eureka said: Sedentary lifestyle is a very recent phenomenon, though, and did not arise together with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago.

Those early farmers - and all the following - worked their butts off basically all of their lives. A sedentary lifestyle contains very limited physical activity. Sedentary activities include sitting, car driving, watching television, computer use, lying on the couch, etc.
Right. I have always noticed that gardeners live longer, but are not particularly thin. This recent BBC documentary on aging shows evidence of why at 6:45. It's the stress of modern life that is killer, and running on a treadmill is not enough relief. It shows the sit-rise test Dragline posted at the beginning of the episode. My take-away from watching the whole episode is that I am already doing excellent because I avoid stress like the plague, eat less meat than most people, have (and plan to do my best to maintain) the hormonal profile that deposits fat subcutaneously rather than viscerally, and I do lots of low key mixed function activities throughout my day rather than high-speed repetitive activities at one juncture of the day. Also, I can easily get a 9 out of 10 on the sit-rise test , and I can also put my feet all the way behind my head, touch my toes to the ground and then roll forward and jump right to my feet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuwcGu59RwM

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Ego
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by Ego »

7Wannabe5 wrote:Right. I have always noticed that gardeners live longer, but are not particularly thin. This recent BBC documentary on aging shows evidence of why at 6:45. It's the stress of modern life that is killer, and running on a treadmill is not enough relief. ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuwcGu59RwM
Gardeners live longer than who? The general population? That's an awfully short yardstick to measure oneself against.

Gardening is like golf, better than nothing but certainly not ideal.

In the video they compared the DNA methylation of two sets of twins where one twin was high-stress and the other moderately overweight. False dilemma. Avoid both!

Epigenetics is a burgeoning field. A new study is published almost every day extolling the benefits of strenuous exercise on DNA methylation (the measure they used in the BBC video). Here is one from last Friday about what happens to the DNA of brain cells in mice that do strenuous exercise. There are many human studies as well.

http://www.business-standard.com/articl ... 720_1.html

7Wannabe5
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Ego said: Gardeners live longer than who? The general population? That's an awfully weak yardstick to measure oneself against.

Gardening is like golf, better than nothing but certainly not ideal.
The only 3 individuals I have personally met who were living happily and independently into their mid-90s were all avid gardeners. Unlike riding on an exercise bike, gardening (like dancing which they showed later in the documentary above to have better health results AND greater compliance than exercising on gym equipment) is not just a single activity, and it can be much more strenuous than golf. For instance, my gardening morning might consist of filling a 16 gallon tub with water, hauling it a mile in a cart to my vacant lot, repeatedly hopping up on a spade to break up hardcore soil. squatting to pull out very resistant weeds, reaching up to lop high vines, etc. etc. Also, I think your body knows when you are doing something real vs. something fake. The problem with exercising in a gym with yourself all hooked up to meters to track your metrics is that you are treating yourself like a laboratory rat. It's like having sex with a robot. It's better for individuals to engage themselves in the physical activities that they enjoy at any level because then they will do them more often. I don't like running. I don't like boring stinky gyms with no sunshine. I don't like team sports with ugly uniforms and stupid meaningless goals. I like gardening. I like dancing. I like taking a leisurely swim at sunset. I like hiking out-of-doors when it is snowing. I like bicycling for fun and transportation, wearing some chinos on a bike with a big straw basket on the front, not garishly colored stretchy shorts . I don't compare myself to the general population or any population. I compare myself to me being relatively healthy and happy vs. me being less healthy and happy.

Eureka
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by Eureka »

Venus of Willendorf's waist to height ratio was 1.6. (however she ever came into this thread).

FBeyer
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by FBeyer »

7Wannabe5 wrote: The only 3 individuals I have personally met who were living happily and independently into their mid-90s were all avid gardeners...
An observation that suffers from family wise error rate, confounding variables, and small-sample extremes.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Eureka said: Venus of Willendorf's waist to height ratio was 1.6. (however she ever came into this thread).
Shhhh...she might be pregnant. One theory is that she represents earliest known example of pornography. Therefore, she may be more the imaginatively "clay-shopped" erotic ideal of one individual, than realistic depiction of actual human female of that time and realm. The reason why she came into this thread is that Ego once stated that it was his position that anybody with a BMI over 25 should pay higher health insurance premiums, and since I am a very frugal person with a BMI of 27, a Waist-to-Height ratio of .47, a Waist-to-Hip ratio of .72, resting pulse of 58, consistently low normal blood pressure, very good blood sugar and cholesterol results, and ability to squat right down azz-to-grass no problem, this practice, if enacted would, IMHO, amount to financial discrimination against myself and all other heavy-hipped women. Not all of us were meant to run along side the antelope and then throw spear with enough power to pierce its hide. Some of us were meant to provide in utero nourishment to ridiculously large-brained species, and then squat down and somehow release that giant brain-case out of our body, then trudge along for miles every day with baby on hip or at breast, sack full of dried mulberries on back, and poking stick with which to stab some lizard meat. Because the antelope runners are no good if they can't run, the Goddess gave them a hormonal profile that causes their hearts to explode when they stop running. Since the heavy-hipped trudgers are still useful for a while longer into middle-age, the Goddess gave us a hormonal profile that keeps our hearts going as long as we keep trudging. Of course, it's a bit more complex than that, but another sign is that a few years before one of the antelope runners hearts is about to explode, the Goddess puts a curse on him that renders him pretty much incapable of fathering another child.
FBeyer said: An observation that suffers from family wise error rate, confounding variables, and small-sample extremes.
True-ish. I would agree that statistics should be limited to large populations, but that goes for both generation and application. Once you are faced with a given individual, inclusive of a variety of known facts about this individual, then application of any statistically generated metric may become more or less moot. AND, the main point I am trying to make, and actually in agreement with Ego's stance in his 1st World Problems thread, is that it is a ridiculous procedure to reduce a complex human problem down to a measurement that can be made a laboratory, and then offer the laboratory procedure as simplistic prescription for a complex problem. Why do people not enjoy running on a treadmill? Maybe for some or many, it is because it makes them uncomfortably aware of their physical limitations, but for many other people, including many of those who also experience pain from the activity, it is also dead boring activity. Maybe, just maybe, that message from your brain and body that an activity is boring is actually one that should be acknowledged as valid. Maybe people should be encouraged to engage in more complex activities even if they aren't as efficient at quickly raising heart and respiration rate to strenuous aerobic level because that would improve both compliance and complex development and co-ordination of various physiological factors.

BRUTE
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by BRUTE »

just for reference, brute finds running in nature just as boring as running on a treadmill.

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Ego
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by Ego »

7Wannabe5 wrote:The reason why she came into this thread is that Ego once stated that it was his position that anybody with a BMI over 25 should pay higher health insurance premiums.
You're just looking for someone to subsidize your pączki habit. :D

Image

7Wannabe5
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Ego: Thanks so much for the graph. I am clearly in the danger zone since my mean medical expenditures over the last 10 years would indicate that my BMI is around 2 or 3. I might disappear right off the chart if I don't go get some more preventative testing pretty soon. I wonder if my insurance covers DNA methylation analysis?

You're just looking for someone to subsidize your pączki habit. :D
Nah, paczki are pretty cheap, and there are 3 antelope runners keeping me pretty well fed in exchange for my hedonic inflationary contribution to their continuing heart health. In an equitable world with more complex actuarial charts, I should be getting sizable kickbacks all over the place from health insurance plans ;)

BRUTE
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Re: Hedonic Inflation in the Bathroom

Post by BRUTE »

7Wannabe5 wrote:my hedonic inflationary contribution to their continuing heart health
70% max heart rate or more the HIIT stuff? brute recommends going for rounds, or reverse stacked pyramid (15+13+11+9..)

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