Long ago, the UK courts ordered all the major consumer ISPs to block The Pirate Bay along with various other popular services. Ever since, we've had to keep up to date on what the latest proxy address might be.

Of course, thanks to the new censorship laws introduced more recently, we're all on VPNs now, so as to avoid having to hand our ID to the wallet inspector for every last website we ever use. And once that was set up, it was nice to discover that the original is still in play!

*head bangs in approval*

Oh, forgot to link the dry density for you: here you go. 341kcal/100g. Aka 3,41kcal/g.

Which, like I said, should be obvious, since they're almost entirely carbs (~4kcal/g) and protein (~4kcal/g), and they're, as noted, dry (12-16% moisture). It would be quite the trick indeed to get something that is dry and and is almost entirely comprised of things that are 4kcal/g to be 1,38kcal/g! ;)

Just in case you need help:

Your calculation: 195g (dry weight) × 1.38 kcal/g = 269 calories per pound of cooked beans.
Correction: Because you used 1.38 kcal/g (the cooked density) as if it were the dry density, you essentially diluted the calories twice.
The Actual Math: 195g of dry beans * 3.4 kcal/g (actual dry density) = 663 kcal.

When those 195g of dry beans absorb water to weigh 454g (1 pound), they still contain those same 663 calories (since water has zero calories).

Canned beans are ALREADY COOKED. *facepalm*. You can eat them straight out of the can.

which is waaaay more than I would want to eat at a sitting.

I can't think of a single ingredient - any ingredient - that I would want to eat exclusively as my diet, so this is a really stupid argument.

The jokes about Darth Jar Jar were everywhere of course, but it could have worked. Star Wars lifted a few ideas from classic SF sources including Asimov's Foundation series - in which, we might recall, the terrifying, unstoppable galactic warlord known as The Mule was hiding in plain sight as a clown, who seemed to be merely a harmless entertainer at court. His military success was chiefly thanks to his psychic ability to manipulate others' minds to his liking - Darth Jar Jar could have done very well that way!

I saw three Star Wars movies when I was young. They were great. Mainly because I was a child and this stuff was new and fresh and exciting to me. Even the Ewoks.

I saw three more when I was not quite so young. They were... poor.

I saw a couple more when I was older. One was great, the other was okay but a retread of one of the old ones, and I never got round to seeing the rest. Didn't care enough.

Now they've got more, and apparently they're based on a TV series they did, which I didn't watch because I wasn't subscribed to that streaming platform at the time. So I'm not going to see those either. Same reason I've not seen a Marvel superhero film since the first Avengers one - just too much homework required with all the backstory. Every scene is a shout out or reference that I won't get. Every character seems to be getting ever louder and angrier and more and more of them have access to time machines. I just don't have it in me to care anymore.

I like the sound of these horror films, though. They're going to tell a complete story? In one film? With a beginning, middle and end, that don't ask me to be up to date on an entire Cinematic Universe? Sounds great, time to check where they're showing!

In general, "damping pleasure" is not most people's experience with GLP-1 agonists. What it does is more like separate pleasurable experiences from having an urgent need to continue doing them.

I'd believe the Iceland numbers. I had a doctor once who wanted to get me on antidepressants, and got mad when I didn't want to, and completely ignored my pleadings of "But I'm not depressed", "I enjoy life", "I'm probably the least depressed person you'll meet", etc. He just really liked his patients to be on it. The Icelandic medical system is very into anything that "medicates symptoms" rather than treating diseases. For example, during COVID, it was essentially impossible to get drugs like paxlovid, but they made parkodín (tylenol with codeine) over-the-counter.

In most modern societies medication is usually a last resort.

I'm going to take a wager that if I were to open your medicine cabinet right now, there would be painkillers in it, which you take as will when you get headaches, body aches, etc.

Yes, different people have different baseline hunger levels. This is well accepted in the scientific community.

Please read: Cooked bean variety.

The "beans in your pantry" data you're looking at are probably per serving. Here, let me grab the beans in *my* pantry. Roland BLACK BEANS Habichuelas Negras Supreme Calidad. Net weight 15.5 OZ / 439g. Serving size: 130g. Calories per serving: 180.

There's 453,6 grams per pound, so that's 0,968 pounds. 439/130 = 3,15 servings, times 180 calories = 567. In 0,968 pounds, that's 586 calories.

Or look online. "172 grams of black beans (cooked, boiled, unsalted) contains 227 Calories." Do the math.

I'm not sure exactly how you expect something that is 70% carbs (of which are 36% fibre) and 26% protein to be low-cal. Do you think it has the moisture content of celery or something?

A modern version of GTA London would be the absolute dream. Been long enough now, you could set it in the nineties and have the same retro value to it!

... why unions aren't much more common among technology workers. Especially given what you hear about the videogame industry in particular, with that mad 'crunch time' culture in which workers are ruthlessly, well, crunched. I'd always ask, well, what does your union say about it? And what do you know, there isn't one, how about that.

Nice to hear of some progress being made, then. I suppose the risk with this for the rest of us is that GTA 6 might be late to release, but, uh, at this point I think we're over that

I'm sure you're familiar with the countdown protocol, all the pre-flight checks, etc. These power up a range of subsystems, motors, etc, so that everything can be verified prior to ignition itself. The complete sequence takes a very long time. Under normal flight conditions, you can't check for absolutely everything (instrumentation is mass, and mass is the enemy) but there's still a lot. However, during an engine test, you can pack a lot more sensors in.

This is where you'd want to be spotting loose connections, pumps that aren't quite even, pressures that aren't as steady as they should be, vibrations that shouldn't be there or do not match expectations, turbulent flows, and so on.

At ignition, it takes between 3-6 seconds to go from stopped to 90% thrust. For humans, that's near-instant. For a computer sensor that's operating a million samples per second, that's 3-6 million readings. A computer performing a billion calculations per second shouldn't have much difficulty in comparing 3 million readings against model predictions and determining if both the values themselves and the rate of change at each point such a sensor exists are all good. Emergency shutdowns during those first 3 seconds are perfectly viable.

Vibrations are the ones that are likely the most interesting, because those are likely to change before something breaks, not sure how fast you can make infrared sensors, but that's also an area where things are likely to alter before point of failure.

I'm thinking about starting a very low dose when the pills come out in Europe. That gives an extra year for more data.

For me it's purely about health (well, about 90% about healthj). I'm a marginal case weight-wise, but the overall health impact profile looks spectacular. If a pill seems likely to add a number of healthy years to my lifespan, yes please. But the more data the better.

One thing that held me back was, I'm very averse to addiction, to anything that might have withdrawal symptoms. People report being ravenous and needing to eat all the time when they quit. BUT - the data shows that after one year, people still retain about 25% of their weight loss, and at two years they're about baseline (some above baseline, some below - the "above" people may be due to sarcopenic obesity, in that you put fat back on faster than muscle, and so your metabolism is lower until the muscle comes back). This is very different from when you diet to lose weight and then stop dieting - you're not ravenous at all, you finally have satiation.

But given the weight regain stats, and the general way these work, what I think is going on is: when you lose weight, you've been training yourself for months on how to ignore or alleve your hunger pangs, so when you stop, you're well trained to it. Whereas GLP-1 agonists are just the opposite: you don't even need to think about resisting the temptation to eat, it just comes naturally; you can get pleasure from something, such as a tasty dessert, without feeling the need to eat everything on your plate; pleasure and craving get separated. So people who just suddenly cut off from GLP-1 agonists are "mentally unarmed" for the reversal. The weight-regain stats however suggest that it doesn't leave you long-term disabled in this regard; that you're just back to your old self once you readjust, whatever that old self may have been.