I did a 1000-calorie daily deficit for a few months, in order to lose two pounds a week. I got used to being hungry all the time after a couple of weeks, but having a lot less energy and being sleepy during the day were harder to deal with. My body was trying to conserve calories that way, but pushing through it was possible.

The hardest part was actually accurately counting the calories. It was relatively simple for off-the-shelf food, but a lot more annoying for things someone else home-cooked for me. I had to ask for the recipe every time, weigh how much I ate, and then track the calories per ingredient on a spreadsheet. Restaurant food was effectively impossible to count, but that didn’t matter much because I was so focused on filling food that I wouldn’t have eaten it anyway. I’m a vegetarian, so I ended up eating mostly beans, tofu (which is also beans, now that I think about it), and vegetables. Other things weren’t as filling per calorie as those foods.

They had to prove themselves worthy by fighting the oven with nothing but their bare hands, man to microwave.

If you’re a billionaire intent on becoming even wealthier, that usually implies that you really enjoy being a successful businessman. I don’t see why business success for its own sake would be inherently less satisfying than other sorts of accomplishment.

The answer does say

The reason isn’t some special string of A’s, G’s, T’s or C’s found in dad’s DNA.

It’s true that two same-sex parents of either sex have the basic genetic information to create a female child (a male child needs at least one male parent) but the natural process of embryo development is a big deal!

Don’t forget about device drivers. I can’t even install a newer version of Android on my Android phone because the community never managed to get the antenna to work after upgrading the OS.

You don’t have to go to a specialist to get antidepressants; many GPs will prescribe them if you ask. I also see a lot of online clinics offering prescriptions without an in-person appointment, but I don’t have personal experience with that. The standard antidepressants are fairly safe and I wouldn’t be too worried about side effects to take them without a psychiatrist’s supervision. Nothing except antidepressants worked to end my depressive episodes, as opposed to making them easier to bear.

Other than that, what helped me most was realizing that I couldn’t trust my own thoughts. It’s hard, because generally “X is true” and “I think X is true” are subjectively the same thing. When I went through periods of depression, I sincerely believed that I had never been happy and that my depression would never end, but as a matter of fact I had been happy (or at least reasonably content) for most of my life and prior episodes of depression had ended. Being able to realize that I had actually been happy and probably would be again, despite what felt true in that moment, made depression much more bearable.

Another key intervention for me was moving closer to my family. It felt like a huge defeat (here I was, an adult who couldn’t handle living on his own) but I told myself “plan based on who you are, not who you wish you were”. Having supportive people around helped a lot; when I’m depressed I don’t want to be around other people but that is actually the wrong strategy. “I just want to be alone” is one of those thoughts that I shouldn’t trust.

Finally, a really useful mental strategy is to consider what advice you would give to a good friend in a situation similar to your own, and then to act on that advice yourself. My depression was accompanied by a great deal of self-loathing but that loathing didn’t extend to my friends (even my imaginary friends). I found that I often knew exactly what advice I would give a friend, and it wasn’t to do what I had been planning to do.

Most financially secure people still work full time. I suppose that in theory, they’re able to quit their jobs without suffering immediate, catastrophic consequences but if they actually did that sort of thing, they wouldn’t be financially secure for long.

(In my experience, many financially secure people actually work much more than full time. I think they would be better off if they didn’t because at some point time becomes more valuable than money, but they have the sort of personality that compels them to. This is often related to starting out without financial security.)

The very rich can do crazy stuff without consequences but they’re such a small part of the population that I don’t think comparing oneself to them is useful.

There’s no logical contradiction between believing that some people should be killed and believing that other people shouldn’t be killed. You might as well ask why a soldier would shoot at his enemies but not his allies

(I’m not picking a side in the “Are fetuses people?” debate here. They are from the point of view of the people against abortion.)

Heh, I walk around naked with the blinds open because where I live, people would need binoculars to see me and if they choose to, their resulting suffering is their own fault. One advantage of being unattractive…

I think people value private outdoor space differently than public outdoor space. I don’t actually have a balcony but I think I would usually prefer a private space to a public one, even if the public one was much nicer.

That’s funny. I see all the skyscrapers around here with balconies and I get jealous, but I never thought about the fact that I almost never see people on those balconies until I read your question.

I wanted a balcony but the real estate agent politely implied that I couldn’t afford one in the area where I was looking for housing. With that said, I can see myself using it for just an hour or two a week while the weather is nice. I like the idea of sitting out on the balcony but I expect that in practice it would be noisy out there and boring on my own.

Googling this is unreliable because Microsoft keeps patching out ways to do it. I couldn’t get what I read online to work when I got my Windows 11 laptop back in May, but what did work was using the keyboard button that turns on airplane mode.

I get why Microsoft (acting in its own best interest) wants to discourage offline accounts but trying to ban them completely is ridiculous (especially since Windows 11 works just fine with the offline account). I think I would have returned the laptop out of spite if I couldn’t get an offline account to work, but I’m probably much more spiteful than most people.

I never feel inconvenienced by having to wear clothing. I suppose part of that is because as a man, I can go shirtless without getting stares and I wouldn’t want to be without underwear (for support) even if I were on a deserted island. I wonder what the circumstances you have in mind are in which you would like to have the option of being nude in public.

Edit: Now that I think about it, there have been a few times when I wanted to go swimming and just swimming in my underwear wasn’t an option because I would have to walk while wearing it later and that would be uncomfortable.

I remember when I was at school (this was 6th or 7th grade) and the teacher wrote y = x and drew a diagonal line on a Cartesian plane. At that moment, I realized that the world was made of math and I was enlightened. I’m not exaggerating - the experience revolutionized the way I could think.

The interesting thing to me is that I have worked with physicists who appear to be capable of even higher levels of abstraction than I am. If I read an equation, I need to think about its geometrical representation but they claim to think directly in terms of equations. (Pure mathematics, not the letters and numbers that make up the written equation.) I believe them because they can comprehend equations much faster than I can; they and I would go to talks where the presenter just put up slide after slide of equations and I would be lost almost immediately while they were able to follow along. I don’t think that’s simply because they’re much smarter than I am, because I am otherwise generally able to match them intellectually.

That’s how I did it too. There is a sphere on a plane. A force is applied to the sphere, parallel to the plane. Neither the sphere nor the plane have a defined color, size, material, etc. Nothing specific pushed the sphere.

My job is often to mathematically model the things people say to me, and in those circumstances thinking like this is correct.

I don’t think this way when I daydream, although the visual components of my daydreams are more like the feelings I get when I look at something than like concrete mental pictures.

The oldest person on record died at 122, and there’s reason to think that there was fraud involved and she wasn’t actually that old. By the time you were in your hundred-and-teens, you would have attention from scientists even if you looked your age. They wouldn’t be forcing you to undergo medical testing if you didn’t want to, but I think they would resort to force sometime in your hundred-and-twenties. If you didn’t look your age, you’d have attention much sooner than that but people would think you stole someone’s identity (that’s what they think the 122-year-old person might have done) and not that you were immortal.

fixing up cracks in their homes

They used to although they generally used animal dung.

the size/capability of violence

That’s, uh, not a small difference. Even if you’re saying that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, neither the terrorist nor the freedom fighter are comparable to a large, powerful country.

Edit: One more interesting difference is that because a country has a much greater capability to wage war, it also has much more to lose in war: it can lose that very capability. A small group of irregular fighters does not depend much on infrastructure, but a country has population centers, factories, military bases, the seat of government, etc. which are all vulnerable in a way that a hidden cave or tunnel isn’t. We’re seeing the effects of this distinction between Iran and its proxies play out right now.

Alanine. No baroque ornamentation, just the beauty of simplicity. A timeless classic.