> I usually don’t care how much I weigh, as long as I look fit. Building muscle increases your weight, but makes you look better and be healthier. Also muscle burns more calories to maintain, so you can eat more.
I completely agree, but the ratio of overweight/obese to "I have a slightly high BMI because I lift 4x a week" has to be somewhere in the range of 100-1.
> but the ratio of overweight/obese to "I have a slightly high BMI because I lift 4x a week" has to be somewhere in the range of 100-1.
Way too many people try to discredit BMI by bringing up the hypothetical trained weightlifter example.
It is possible to have a moderately low body fat percentage (12-15%) and fall into the overweight BMI category if you're very trained and muscular, but the number of people in this situation is very small. Moreover, they're well aware that BMI is not a useful indicator for them.
A 6 foot tall person would have to weigh 221 pounds to get all the way into the "obese" range of the BMI scale. A 6' tall man weighing 221 pounds with low body fat percentage is a seriously fit individual, not someone who casually goes to the gym several times a week. I don't think people realize how hard it is to get to this level of fitness.
BMI really isn't a bad for the average person, even if they lift weights.
You seem to describe using BMI in casual conversation or as a personal goal but there are other issues.
Doctors use BMI as a filter for medications, surgery and such. With increasingly tele-medicine, I only get to fill my height/weight in a box and not treat a doctor to the gun show.
I don't know what other uses it has - insurance maybe, medical fitness standards for jobs etc.
Other criticism is about not capturing the variation between different ethnicities or builds so applying a numerical limit can be quite prejudicial.
On the otherhand, in some cases, weight is weight. There are some things where body-mass, muscle or fat, increases the relevant risk.
Its more about incentives. If I’m trying to chase the weight number obsessively, as is the case with my level of OCD, I’ll be prone to eat less, run more or do other things to loose weight. But I don’t want to loose weight, I want to look good and be healthy. And I don’t really like myself in that life - worrying about this almighty number, and measuring my actions to change it usually makes my life less worth living.
When I concentrate my efforts to general health/happiness - e.g. eat less carbs, move around more, stand in front of a screen instead of sit in front of one, go dancing … just try to increase “healthiness” level as I see it, I can actually enjoy life more.
I mean I love eating out, especially when I travel, and trying to eat less on a vacation is not fun at all.
But if I go hiking/social dancing/just walking about, suddenly I can do that and have more fun and am still be “fit” as per my personal definition.
I like to think about it in terms of system. I don’t want to loose weight now cause I know I’ll immediately gain it back the moment I get tired/bored/depressed. I want to build a habit (system) that would naturally bring me to my goal without exerting much willpower.
And chasing weight has never given me personally enough of a mental boost to keep at it in and off itself.
Live in Central Europe. Most of the people we know either own their cars outright or take public transportation.
Many companies north of the border (Germany) offer company cars as an incentive, which iirc are leased, but these eventually hit the resale market as one year or CPO vehicles.
Most cars also have a fairly long anti-corrosion warranty.
That said, reliability issues were more a matter of 1. US style cost cutting (remember Daimler Chrysler?) 2. getting caught by surprise by the horse power wars of the naughts and early teens. Engines and associated parts were rushed to market without proper testing.
These issues have largely been reversed. Modern BMWs are almost/as reliable as Japanese manufacturers while MB is starting to close the gap.
Chrysler knew they were toast. They either had to be bought out, mortgage everything for massive capital investment (which is what Ford did), or eventually go under.
Meanwhile, Daimler executives wanted a way to get American compensation. A ‘merger’ that would turn them into an ‘American’ company was their preferred option.
Of course, the Chrysler executive team was eventually shown the exit, the company was run from Germany, and it turned out that Daimler’s leadership was making a number of other major mistakes (this is around the time when reliability went down hill, and it had nothing to do with Chrysler).
Range anxiety and charging infrastructure are also major hurdles.
Around 50% of people in the EU live in apartments. Most apartments were built decades ago and lack EV chargers - and, in many cases, enough dedicated parking spots for each unit, but that's a different story.
If people in the states think that charging a Model 3 or Model Y is too time consuming, when close to 90% of Americans live in single family houses, why would the majority of European car buyers be willing to switch to EVs, when they don't even have the option to install an EV charger?
> If people in the states think that charging a Model 3 or Model Y is too time consuming
A lot of them are being told this, and they just believe it without running the numbers for their use case. For some it would be longer until infrastructure improves, but for others it would actually be less time “waiting” on their EV than their ICE car. I’m in the UK and I’ve spent 0 mins waiting on my EV charging in the last 4 months. Plug in at night and unplug in the morning. I’ve also spent 0 minutes visiting gas stations.
America has bigger distances and there are other factors of course.
And for almost everyone who doesn't live in an older apartment complex or or rely on street parking, they're fine.
This is like arguing that nobody anywhere can buy anything but a large 4WD SUV because some day somebody somewhere might want to take a dog to a beach.
I agree, but the issue is that, globally, ICE is still the best option for the majority of use cases.
EVs have a place. I'm a fan of them. However, until recharging an EV becomes as quick and convenient as filling up a fuel tank at a station, ICE will continue to be the preferred option.
That said, government incentives (China, northern EU states) and potential ICE bans (EU) may allow EVs to win out in some markets.
However, at least in the west, this depends on the EU going against the best interests of central European automakers and everyone else in the automotive supply chain. It's - very - hard to see this happening over the next decade or two.
Long term EV will likely win. We're still a ways away from this happening.
> There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat.
Agreed, but there's also an unaddressed issue of whether many (most?) positions at large tech companies provide an actual economic benefit to the company or whether they exist simply because of organizational inefficiencies (Parkinson's Law).
To put it another way, a hire may have been the best candidate out a very selective interview process, but if his position exists simply because of internal silo building, forced ranking - as bad of a system as it is - may work.
Is there any economically valid reason for Meta to have ~75K employees?
Forced ranking in your use case doesn't work because it's generally firm wide cascade. Is 6% of every team in every department in every org unnecessary?
No, in fact.. there's teams that should be 2x as big and teams that should be completely let go.
Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arbitrary %s everywhere.
Think - Google Bard vs Search vs Ads vs Youtube vs their 27 different chat/video apps vs .. etc.
> Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arbitrary %s everywhere.
The performance management process and 4-6% "unregretted attrition" (to use the technical term) target at Amazon is totally independent from figuring out project resourcing and headcounts. An employee who is fired for performance reasons doesn't change the headcount on your team.
Yes, that is my point. Past a few iterations, there is not a lot of value in doing this company wide over and over.. versus making hard big picture decisions on resourcing departments properly.
I don't understand what you mean. The 4-6% URA target is for continually managing out low performing employees. It may not be the most effective way, but that is the intent. It has nothing to do with resourcing departments properly; that's a totally different process and conversation.
Again, I think you are confusing layoffs, which are a reduction in headcount for a department/team, with attrition, where the people themselves are let go but the headcount remains so you can hire to replace them.
> The grid - will be updated. I know that, but it is, propaganda. We do not know how much of it will be upgraded and when. You write about Oslo. I write about Poland, where electric infrastructure is from 70s and 80s.
EVs aren't going to kill it. Mass A/C adoption in response to global warming is a different issue entirely.
> For most people, I suspect a plugin hybrid will be the right solution/tradeoff until the technology evolves, or charging infrastructure becomes more prevalent.
Mild hybrid is winning out.
> If we care about reducing carbon, we'll probably get more milage out of more walkable cities, expanded public transit, and e-bikes/scooters for local trips.
Completely agree. The best way to solve this issue is to fund or otherwise incentivize alternatives that get cars off of the road entirely.
The answer isn't an EV car, although these will help. It's reliable EV light rail/passenger trains.
> I don't know why people are saying this though - they are catching on massively.
Marketshare growth is excellent.
Car manufacturers and government regulators bet the farm on mass EV adoption.
Current EVs and EV infrastructure haven't solved the range anxiety/charging issue yet. Suburban US, where most people own a garage, is an outlier.
Waiting 10-15 years for prolific street-level infrastructure to be built out doesn't solve the fact that there are unsold EVs on dealer lots today.
Of course, there are plenty of use cases where range anxiety simply isn't relevant. Ditto why marketshare is still growing and will likely continue to grow.
> ...and you never have to worry about stopping at a gas station - the car is ready to go every morning and you don't even have to think about it!
If you have a home charging station. This immediately excludes a - very - large number of people in the EU and metropolitan US who live in multifamily housing or older towns and cities.
> an electric drivetrain is a way better driving experience than the miserable turbocharged 4-cylinder engines that everyone has been forced to use for fuel economy reasons today, even premium brands like Mercedes and BMW. These are nasty, underpowered, vibrating pieces of shit with no torque and no power unless you run them at thousands of RPM, where they're loud and buzzy. Just complete fucking garbage.
What are we comparing? A Tesla Model 3 against most non-premium cars? Of course. An MG5 EV/Roewe EI5 against a BMW B48 or a Honda K20C1? Questionable.
Let's not forget that there are plenty of fuel efficient 6 cylinder mild hybrid platforms that, quite frankly, compete very well with premium EVs. Range anxiety aside, are they necessarily better? Again, questionable, but the overall package that comes with an M340d or an A6 55TFSI is better than the equivalent Model 3/S (or even, imo, any of BMW or Audi's EVs).
> Climate change is a species-ending threat. Emissions caused by fossil fuels is a huge piece of that.
It's not a species-ending threat (at least, to humans). That said, the realistic outlook for global warming is bad enough.
EV is a technology in transition. It will get there. It's getting there. It's not "there" yet for every use case.
Why? A large part isn't because of the technology, it's about population density. The countries that pollute the most also happen to have sub-par public transportation networks. Range anxiety isn't an issue when the default option for most people is light rail.
The solution is likely going to come down to:
1. Urban planning. Car friendly zoning, building codes, minimum parking requirements, and other regulations are starting be reversed in the US. It's already happened across most of the EU.
2. Switch to low emissions electricity generation. Power plants are still the leading emitter, full stop.
3. EV adoption. My point above wasn't an argument against EVs as a technology, but a statement of fact that - as a technology in transition - it's not superior for all major use cases. This should change over the next couple of decades.
In Canada heating is the leading emitter. And even if power is the leading emitter in the OP's region, power plants are lowering their carbon output far faster than any other source.
Coal -> Natural Gas is still the leading source of emissions reduction, but that transition is nearing its completion. The shift to solar/wind is what will continue the transition.
It is species-ending, but not for humans. And human-made climate change is far behind direct over-exploitation and habitat destruction due to sprawl and agriculture in terms of what things are actually killing species.
Because of modern consumerism, something that convincing everyone to replace one working car for a newly constructed one doesn’t solve. Quite the opposite really.
From a CO2 standpoint, replacing an ICEV with an EV is a net positive. There are some super efficient ICEVs like a Prius where that might be a more equal trade but for most other ICEVs it really is worth doing.
I completely agree, but the ratio of overweight/obese to "I have a slightly high BMI because I lift 4x a week" has to be somewhere in the range of 100-1.