Messages

typo, fixed it for you.

Would it be too childish to find out the number of the other board member who keeps harping about the hoses and send her a picture of a clean properly wound hose after every job i do? Just every time i'm in there sending pic after identical pic of a clean, wound up hose?

Yep.
Don't send, but do save pictures. Ask permission to take these pictures first so they know that you took the accusation serious.
Send at next allegation.

yea, and i've been training in martial arts for a bit. Not to brag, but i could probably survive a few drunken hecklers.

I always had you figured for a guy who is nice because he knows he doesn't have to be.

Stand-up definitely looks like a better option; though a bad crowd is more likely to attack you than to trash your car so . . . 

People heal, cars don't.

That is genius!

"No one could deny that there is open warfare on men all throughout western society. Whether or not it is deserved is somewhat irrelevant (you'll see why in a second). There's a minority of men who are alarmed but the vast majority just doesn't have this on their radar...yet. This is mostly because it doesn't affect them directly."

How can there be "open warfare" on men if most men haven't even noticed it? Has there ever been a war in which the majority of those ostensibly affected by it don't even know that it exists?

just got an email from Nancy, one of the board members at the community garden saying that i've been getting complaints about the watering services I've been providing. The main complaint seems to be that i'm leaving the hoses dirty when i'm done with them. Nancy says she wants to talk to me when she gets back on Monday, hopefully its a warning, because even tho the pay is shit and the work is irregular, i actually enjoy doing the work and hanging out in the garden. Its a shit gig, but its a shit gig i will really miss if i get canned. 

That sucks, I hope you get to keep the gig. They can't fire you over something this small if this is the first time the complaints were brought to your attention, right?

Working in a garden for money is a great gig, if only it payed enough to cover the cost of living.

This is dumber than homeopathy.
Wait:
first hit on a reputable source, namely pubmed: "Histamine intolerance results from a disequilibrium of accumulated histamine and the capacity for histamine degradation. Histamine is a biogenic amine that occurs to various degrees in many foods. In healthy persons, dietary histamine can be rapidly detoxified by amine oxidases, whereas persons with low amine oxidase activity are at risk of histamine toxicity."

Wait some more:
more than 500 hits on google scholar not counting citations and patents.
First one from 1983.

True, it is not a lot, but it seems to be taken seriously by people who are very good at the biochem techno-babble.

Example:

Histamine can be metabolized by two pathways:
- oxidative deamination via diamino oxidase (DAO) (formerly known as histaminease)
- ring methylation via histamine-N-methyl transferase (HNMT)

DAO is a secretory protein responsible for the breakdown of extra cellular histamine,
whereas HNMT, a cytosolic protein, inactivates histamine only intracellularly, for example
in the liver (2). The enzyme DAO therefore plays a key role in the breakdown of dietary
histamine. Insufficient DAO activity can thus lead to the symptoms described, e.g., after
ingestion of histamine rich foods, (5), alcohol (6) or histamine liberating or DAO blocking
medications (7).
Various possible mechanisms have been discussed as the cause of histamine intolerance
(1). The production of DAO may for example be reduced by damage to enterocytes in
gastrointestinal disease (11, 21). Other biogenic amines, alcohol (18) and medications
(7, 19) can also competitively inhibit the breakdown of histamine by DAO. Acquired
histamine intolerance may be reversible where the cause if removed, such as the dis-
continuation of DAO blocking medications.

Note: minor editing in quote because copypasta didn't work properly.

Yes, deficiencies in breaking down histamine is a real, biological occurrence. Just like deficiencies in breaking down gluten and deficiencies in breaking down lactose. That means there's just enough science behind a very rare enzyme pathway deficiency to make the health quack crowd BILLIONS when they convince millions of Americans that they, too, have a histamine intolerance.

Yep, but learning that did change my mind about one thing: Now I think homeopathy is dumber.

  This is dumber than homeopathy.
Wait:
first hit on a reputable source, namely pubmed: "Histamine intolerance results from a disequilibrium of accumulated histamine and the capacity for histamine degradation. Histamine is a biogenic amine that occurs to various degrees in many foods. In healthy persons, dietary histamine can be rapidly detoxified by amine oxidases, whereas persons with low amine oxidase activity are at risk of histamine toxicity."

Wait some more:
more than 500 hits on google scholar not counting citations and patents.
First one from 1983.

True, it is not a lot, but it seems to be taken seriously by people who are very good at the biochem techno-babble.

Example:

Histamine can be metabolized by two pathways:
- oxidative deamination via diamino oxidase (DAO) (formerly known as histaminease)
- ring methylation via histamine-N-methyl transferase (HNMT)

DAO is a secretory protein responsible for the breakdown of extra cellular histamine,
whereas HNMT, a cytosolic protein, inactivates histamine only intracellularly, for example
in the liver (2). The enzyme DAO therefore plays a key role in the breakdown of dietary
histamine. Insufficient DAO activity can thus lead to the symptoms described, e.g., after
ingestion of histamine rich foods, (5), alcohol (6) or histamine liberating or DAO blocking
medications (7).
Various possible mechanisms have been discussed as the cause of histamine intolerance
(1). The production of DAO may for example be reduced by damage to enterocytes in
gastrointestinal disease (11, 21). Other biogenic amines, alcohol (18) and medications
(7, 19) can also competitively inhibit the breakdown of histamine by DAO. Acquired
histamine intolerance may be reversible where the cause if removed, such as the dis-
continuation of DAO blocking medications.

Note: minor editing in quote because copypasta didn't work properly.

Portland: Today someone said "I know people who can't do bone broth because they have histamine intolerance".

Did you slap them?
Fuck it, just tell them that boiling it destroys the histanime so they can safely drink bone broth.
Yes, that spelling was intentional.

Nigel, thanks for those two links.
The Baloney one isn't economics related but I filed it under the same bookmarkfolder anyway so it won't disappear in the Swamp of Forgotten Bookmarks.

Pickety's 'Capital in the 21st Century' is a good example of economics as social science in my opinion.

Nifty, added to reading list.

Hasn't the GOP since the start of Reagan proven that there's no need to look at your predictions to see if they came true as long as you can pretend they did, or blame the other guy when you can't even pretend?

Are you positing that economists = GOP?

I am starting to wonder if you fuckers even know what economists are.

No, just saying that actually showing predictions to be true or false is something that is ignored in politics today, and most of what you hear regarding economist is political in nature unless you're in the financial industry yourself.

That's also true of ecology, but that has nothing to do with the validity of the field, it has to do with the fact that most people are exposed to science and the world around them only through a 42" 16:9 ratio.

Blaming YOU being a sheltered, uninquisitive dumbfuck on the information available through major media makes as much sense as declaring that the field of economics is represented by the GOP.

Considering that I don't rely on the media for my information on economics, I find your view on me and my stance to be as uninformed as you accuse me of being.



If economics does follow the full scientific method, why do we still have experts in the field advocating viewpoints that have been shown false according to the data provided by real world experimentation?

For the same reason homeopaths and mediums advocate viewpoints that have been shown to be false according to the data provided by real world experimentation.

Exactly what I was thinking!

I'll get back to researching I mean, insulting economic theory.
Dammit it is really hard to learn more about something and stay biased. Focused.
I have this annoying tendency to like things more the more I learn about them.

Anyway, my reading materials for the foreseeable future are:
Meta-Analysis in Economics
An Introduction

The inexact and seperate science of economics
both found through googling 'science of economics'.

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen, A book by a winner of the Nobel prize in Economics that I recently bought for the sole purpose of exposing myself to something that makes me uncomfortable (i.e. economic theory). The blurb says "This is a paradigm-altering foundation for understanding the demands of economic development-for both rich and poor-in the twenty-first century." So that could be anything between hilarious and fascinating.

Pickety's 'Capital in the 21st Century' as mentioned by Demolition Squid. This one will have to wait until I am willing to spend money on it. It does sound interesting though.

Other than that I will skim The Black Swan by N.N. Taleb and 3 freakonomics books because I strongly suspect they may have fed my strong dislike of economists.

Thoughts will be posted, feel free to keep arguing in this thread though.

what do you mean by does not reflect on past predictions?

step 1: predict something.
step 2: wait until your prediction should have come true.
step 3: check if your prediction came true.
Go back to step 1 with new knowledge.

My claim is that economists skip step 3 making it impossible for them to improve their step 1.

This thread is for my exploration of the field of Economics.
My big mouth opened and here I will find out if my foot is in it again.

Hypothesis: Economics does not get to call itself a science because it does not reflect on the results of past predictions.
Null hypothesis: Shut up dumbass, it so does.

Meta-Analysis in Economics
An Introduction

Not read completely yet.
Page 12 has a good graph that shows the number of meta-analyses is increasing. Since 2000 it has an Average of about 30 papers a year.
So if i want to be right about this I need to move fast, the fuckers are getting smarter.

More later.

Starting a thread for my exploration of economics in Techmology and Scientism.

I will post there every once in a while but not much now since i should be working.