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There’s a lot of survivor bias at work there though. Most of the writing from those periods, you haven’t heard of. You’ve just named the cream of the crop.

was this:

Right, America???

Out of curiosity, which country is this?

I am responding rather late but the answer to this is no. In South Africa (where I am from), you pay quite a premium for unlimited voice plans, and there are no unlimited data plans for mobile that I am aware of. Most folks are on a prepaid plan. For some reason the backwards carriers here still charge fairly hefty fees per minute for calls (typically R1 per minute, about $0,08 at current exchange rates). Talk for a few hours a week and it gets expensive pretty quickly (especially considering our average wages). OTOH, an hour of WhatsApp calling uses less than 100MB of data, which costs between R5 and R10 typically, or about 5-10 minutes worth of voice. Or if you go to the local mall's wifi hotspot, then it's free.

Yeah good luck with that. As another poster pointed out, the network effect is pretty strong. In some places in the world WhatsApp is pretty dominant and you'd basically cut yourself off if you get off it.

It uses your data connection, so it's a heck of a lot cheaper. At least where I am from. I have relatives living in other cities who I call regularly and for lengthy periods of time. Using an app such as WhatsApp works out much cheaper than normal cellphone calls.

In one week:
1. I lost ten pounds.

This I highly doubt. There's about 3500 stored kcal per pound of fat*, so for ten pounds you'd have to have burned roughly 35,000 kcal, or 5,000 per day. A typical base rate for a male is roughly 2,500 kcal per day, and your half an hour of brisk walking may have added another three to five hundred kcal worth of consumption.

So realistically the soonest you could have lost ten pounds, even completely fasting, would be eleven or twelve days. I don't know about the BP, it may well have improved drastically after drastically reducing your salt intake, but that first week you'll feel like complete crap as your body adjusts to the new lifestyle that it isn't used to.

After about six weeks I could find a 10-pound weight loss believable. Maybe a month. You'd certainly feel much better after that length of time too. But one week? No ways.

* very rough numbers, I looked into this extensively when I was training for marathons but I'm too lazy to look up the precise numbers now. I might be out by 10% or so but not enough to substantially change my argument.

Patents are very seldom rejected on application. I don't imagine that the patent office does that much research. However, they can be invalidated afterwards if legally tested against some prior art.

I was just thinking this. Somewhere around 20% of kids seems enough to me.

Soylent News is pretty decent. A lot less going on there than on Slashdot though.

Could the converse not be true though? That popular, much-cited papers are more likely to be uploaded to (and downloaded from) Sci-hub? I tried looking at the paper but I couldn't understand it well enough to figure out whether the authors took this possibility into account.

Oh man if I had mod points now. This sir, is funny!

A third is kind of a lot though?

So maybe if a government started acting trustworthy... I dunno, maybe citizens would start trusting them?