There certainly could be other issues with MSG aside from sodium. The extra sodium is just an obvious problem.

I suppose like Superman, although I'm not sure there are any organizations that actually use Superman as a mascot. King Ludd was a mascot to the Luddites. He may have been loosely based on a real person, or maybe not. It's hard to tell at this point. Maybe a better modern example would be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Not in so many words. Perhaps by inference. My point is that, for the typical person, moderation is extremely difficult to achieve. They go to the supermarket and buy a bunch of food items where every one of them has an acceptable amount of sodium (and other substances that should only be taken in moderation) as long as you consider it only by itself, but then they eat five items with "acceptable" levels and that pushes the daily level through the roof. Then they do it again the next day and the next and the next and so on. The end result is a measurable increase in chronic disease in the population.

It can be, but it usually isn't. It's generally used as a flavor enhancer on top of all the same junk they usually throw in. If MSG is being added, it's generally because food scientists were tasked with creating a food product that people will binge eat where they buy a package of something that should last weeks and they eat it all in one sitting. Then they go back for more.

The problem is that most people who are especially sensitive to high levels of just about anything in food don't know beforehand. They find out after symptoms appear and symptoms don't generally appear until damage has been done. Consider, for example, celiac disease. It's pretty rare, and most people don't find out they have it until they have been getting worsening abdominal pain for years and years without knowing the cause. In the meantime, their intestinal villi have been disintegrating away. By the time they find out, it may turn out that they have already critically damaged their intestines and can't properly digest food any more. I'm not suggesting everyone give up gluten. It's actually an excellent protein in many ways. It's just that most things are only diagnosed from the symptoms, and the diagnosis can come way too late.

It's not false in practical terms because, in practice, most prepared foods have way too much sodium proportional to the number of calories they provide. So if you eat your full daily allotment of calories using prepared foods, then you're guaranteed to get too much sodium. Now, this may not be too much sodium for everyone. Some people can handle it better than others. Some people will end up with hypertension, chronic kidney disease, vascular disease, heart disease, etc. though just from eating a diet of apparently normal food from the supermarket.

Obviously you can be very selective about what you eat and buy nothing but fresh meats and fruits and vegetables and avoid basically any prepared, packaged foods except in moderation. That's basically what I do. I tired operating from nutrition labels and tracking my intake of various things at one time and that led me to realize how impossible it is to do general food shopping outside produce and meats without getting too much of all kinds of substances that are fine in moderation, but not in excess.

I would like to believe that, but I've seen too many examples of evil rich investors who resemble cartoon supervillains. Take Elon Musk insisting that employees should sleep in the office. It's so incredibly twisted and yet people act like it's normal.

Anyway, my take is that we should definitely not try to stop the march of technology. Technology improving productivity and resource usage is something we vitally need. What we do need to do is make sure that the march of technology doesn't leave people behind. The whole point of that advancing technology should be to improve everyone's quality of life.

??? Ludd wasn't a wealthy tradesman. He was a fictional character like Mr. Peanut or Charlie Tuna.

Almonds? While those are a much touted example of a crop that requires a lot of water, the real water hog in California is Alfalfa hay grown to feed cattle.

Well, of course, COVID-19 is mostly responsible for the recent dramatic decline in life-expectancy in the US. Still the people hit hardest by COVID-19 are people with, diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease, etc. Things that, if not always caused by, are certainly exacerbated by diet issues. I am quite fond of point out that diet and exercise can do only so much to avoid health problems. It is still true though that food that is effectively poisoned does poison people. We have an absolute glut of unhealthy foods and it really is affecting public health.

It's true that you shouldn't drink too much water. Every now and then, you read a news story about children who have been forced to drink excessive amounts of drink by their parents as a punishment and consequently die. I remember one about a little girl who was sneaking soda from the fridge, so her parents forced her to drink a whole bottle. One of those old fashioned punishments meant to act as a form of aversion therapy. She died of edema.

I'm still not sure how that's somehow evidence that it's fine to overload everything with sodium. If anything, it would seem to prove that there are very good reasons to avoid overconsuming things that are safe in moderation. The whole point was that putting monosodium glutamate or any sodium-bearing compound in food as a flavor enhancer is problematic if it's overdone. If a food has 500 calories per serving, and 90% of the daily recommended quantity of sodium and basically every other food has similar proportions, then a person living off those foods will be getting numerous times the daily recommended quantity of sodium every single day. Over and over and over until something gives. There is a fair amount of phenotypic difference in tolerance but, in general, humans are not actually built to handle that much sodium and stay in good health.

It's not just sodium, it's anything that's safe, but only in moderation. If it gets added to virtually everything, then people are going to get too much of it. Just saying that it's on the nutritional label is a cop out. Most people just don't have the energy to watch their intake that carefully. Why do you think diets with one magic solution are so popular? People have a hard time eating a varied diet and considering all the nutritional implications.

Yes, and? Safe in moderation does not help when the overuse of something that's safe in moderation makes moderation practically impossible for the average person.

It's not about it hiding the sodium content. It's about the inclusion of excessive amounts of sodium in just about everything. All the food producers are happy to point out that, if you want to have healthy sodium levels, just eat their product in moderation. What do you do when it's in virtually every food product in the supermarket. I read nutrition labels and I eat healthy. As a consequence, the majority of things at the supermarket are things I won't buy for myself. People are obviously buying them though, and in great numbers. The average person is just not that selective about their food and just buys it on the hope that they won't be slowly poisoned by it.

I'm not quite sure how to respond to this. There are several things that are quite wrong here, not least of which is your lack of age cutoffs in your random man and woman mating thought experiment. Aside from that, you're basically saying that there's something like a 100% chance that any random male and female between puberty and menopause will have a baby from sex during one ovulation cycle. That is, statistically speaking, very incorrect.

You're trying to move the goalposts. I'm talking about a medical procedure to produce either ovaries or testes and then implant them. Something that, yes, will require a great amount of labor and effort to develop in the first place. Like most medical procedures though, once developed, it could become routine. Little different than the other 40+ million other surgeries performed in the US each year. It would become mostly a matter of whether or not the patient can afford it. Such a procedure would only need to be performed once and then the subject would be producing large numbers of egg cells or trillions of sperm throughout decades of their lifetime. It would, by the definitions you provided, be a switch from one biological sex to another. Your flimsy argument that it's somehow not valid because there would be some medical effort involved does not stand up. Remember, the argument was not that there is no difference between the sexes, it was that, at some point. If you recall, the argument was that you are probably incorrect that the existence of intersex conditions and chimeras doesn't mean that men can become women. Intersex conditions and chimeras can most likely be replicated in adults through genetic engineering, in vitro organogenesis, and surgery.

Once again, I'm talking about full on sex-reassignment. That would mean switching both primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Possibly even replacing sex chromosomes in every cell. You're trying to reduce my proposal to what? Just making a single egg? So, you don't want to argue the point I'm actually making because you wrote yourself into a corner with your initial claims, so you're trying to misrepresent what I'm suggesting? How about addressing my actual proposition?

Monosodium glutamate is not "completely safe as far as we know". What it is known to be be is safe in small amounts. The problem is, when it's added to a lot of foods, it raises the sodium content to levels that we know are unsafe. The same thing is true of plain old salt. Perfectly safe within certain limits. Beyond those limits, if you're just consuming and consuming and consuming it every day in just about everything you eat, then it's terrible for your long-term health.

You can, but it's definitely healthier made from fresh tomatoes. Less sodium.

For me, this article clearly does not say much about AI, but it does say something about human beings. A woman was trapped under a car and they had to wait for firefighters to use the jaws of life? No-one had a jack? Bystanders didn't get together to lift the car off her? I suppose people are always a little unsure what to do in an emergency like this. Plus, people might be worried that the pressure from the car might be the only thing preventing someone from dying of internal bleeding. Still, from the description, the cars weight was pressing on her leg, not her abdomen.