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Networking.
On average I would expect that if my chicken consumption goes down by 1/year, the production of chickens for eating will go down by about 1/year, for the sorts of reasons that erratim gives.
My issue is that there's a fair amount of waste built in. The chicken you don't buy is probably just going straight to the rubbish heap. A large supermarket is already throwing away hundreds of pounds of meat each year. For example, British chain Tesco said that in the first six months of 2012, some 28,500 metric tons of their food was wasted. With just under 6,800 stores, that's over 8 metric tons per store, per year.
To get the retailer to buy less chicken, you'd have to cut consumption enough to exceed their threshold for allowable waste.
I think that "practically zero" means "practically zero as a fraction of the whole, which is true but not directly relevant. (In the same way, donating to a charity that feeds starving people has "practically zero" effect on the problem of starvation, curing someone of cancer has "practically zero" effect on the problem of cancer, etc.)
I meant in absolute terms. If you donate to a charity, that money's going to help someone. Curing someone of cancer drops the cancer population by one. With chickens, there's the aforementioned waste problem where you may have to meet certain thresholds before you see any change.
There is undoubtedly some slop built in to the system, both to cover ordinary fluctuations in demand (which is, after all, stochastic), and because inventory control is itself expensive and difficult and only worth doing up to a certain level of precision.
That said, there's a fallacy here, the same one as in this recent post (addressed here, e.g.). In brief, what matters is not whether you cause stores to waste measurably less food with certainly, but the expected amount of change in food waste due to your actions, especially over the long term.
In response to
Non-obvious skills with highly measurable progress?
Speedcubing. I don't recommend it, though—I started about a year ago and it sniped a significant amount of my free time in 2014, on the order of 400-500 hours. (I had a similar experience with Go in college.)
In response to
Lifehack Ideas December 2014
[not sure if this strictly qualifies as a lifehack, but it seems to be in the general ballpark]
I have been practising a slightly modified version of alternate-day intermittent fasting since mid-January this year. Basically, every second day, I eat a small breakfast and then nothing until midnight (or at least I try to, in practice I sometimes have a snack at 10-11 pm). There seems to be some evidence that this is good for human health, and I have found it to be rather low-cost - I am still able to do moderately strenuous physical activity on fasting days (namely cycling from university to my home, which is half an hour away and mostly uphill), and do not get particularly hungry either (although I sometimes desire certain foods, hence the snacking). All in all, this seems like the sort of thing that is worth trying.
I've been fasting one day a week since the beginning of May of this year. I usually start Sunday evening and fast through Monday evening or Tuesday morning, around 24 to 36 hours, and this fits my schedule pretty well—alternate-day would be considerably more difficult. The trickiest part is declining offers from coworkers to go to lunch and then having to explain why. Sleeping through the night on Monday can be a little uncomfortable if I'm doing a longer fast.
I've fasted erratically for years (when I felt like it, which turned out to be once every month or two), but started the weekly cadence because I found out I had very high total cholesterol (~280 mg/dL) when I went to the doctor in May. When I donated blood in October my total cholesterol was down to ~190 mg/dL.
It's hard to know how much of this effect to attribute to fasting, since I did make some other minor systematic changes to my diet (more fish, fewer pastries, a shift from butter to olive oil in cooking) and there might be other changes that I don't know about or haven't considered. Since I'm comfortable with this amount of fasting and since there are non-health-related benefits I suspect the VoI of a more careful experiment is low to negative. (I can imagine finding out there's no fasting -> cholesterol lowering effect, stopping the habit because of this, and losing out on the less tangible benefits.)
That is quite fast and I understand that it requires a lot of practice but it impresses me only moderately.
Thus I think on the failed simulation effect matrix it falls into the middle ground (moderately difficult and moderately impressive).
I like puzzles too and there was a time where I'd put enormous amounts of effort into solving them. But nowadays for me the more interesting puzzles is how to attack the problem. The algorithmic solvability. Could I write a program to solve this? Or is the problem hard just by the number of permutations/edge cases involved? In the latter case I quickly loose interest as the difficulty is accidental complexity added to make it look hard.
That's consistent with my experience. That is, most people aren't particularly impressed, or don't want to let on that they are, and I'm only moderately impressed with myself. And I'm fine with that, since these days I make an effort not to indulge the urge to optimize for impressiveness, except evidently in threads like these.
Contrast this with juggling 5 balls, which is for me about the same level of difficulty (both in terms of learning the skill and performing it once learned). People are much more likely to be visibly impressed, though the way they show it isn't always agreeable or complimentary.
In response to
December 2014 Bragging Thread
Solved a Rubik's cube in under 15 seconds. Still having trouble getting my averages below 25, though.
In response to
The Hostile Arguer
One thing it seems pretty important to establish is the difference between ① someone who will (predictably) have hostile-type arguments with you, and ② someone who will actually do you harm for disagreeing with them.
Or between hostile arguing and abusive conduct.
If your parent mocks your atheism or tries to guilt you into going to church, that is one thing. If they beat you up, lock you in the basement, steal your property, or kick you out of the house at age fifteen because you don't want to go to their church any more, that is quite another. The former may well be emotionally abusive, or it may just be an incompetent way of expressing their fear that you will go to hell. (Or both.) The latter are threats to your well-being as a living organism ... and, in quite a few places, also illegal.
Similarly, if someone on the Internet makes fun of your views, that's one thing; if they organize all their pals to stalk your children, slander you to your boss to get you fired, or call you on the phone and threaten to rape and murder you, that's quite another.
"Are we having an unpleasant disagreement, or are you threatening me?" seems like a pretty useful question in situations that involve both hostile argument and a substantial difference of physical, social, or economic power.
I generally agree, but I'd caution against raising threats to the level of mutual knowledge. Intuitively it feels dangerous to ask things like "are you threatening me?" Thinking about it for a few minutes, it seems that it's dangerous in part because once a threat has been made explicit, the threatening party can no longer back down without losing face and credibility. The question also feels like a power play and can be seen as disrespectful.
It's still good to know whether you're just dealing with a hostile argument vs. a real threat vs. intimidation without intent to follow through, but when there's a power differential it's probably bad for the knowledge to be out in the open.
Apples, oranges, etc. Vim and Emacs are supposed to (partially) replace the entire userspace of an OS, they're much more than just text editors/IDEs.
I consider myself a vim poweruser and this doesn't match my experience. Vim is a great tool and I use it for a lot of things, but it's absolutely not a replacement for bash, screen, Chrome, etc.
Not sure this counts as a math problem, but I've been inconsistently playing go for about four years, and my current rank is 13 kyu. In the KGS server I'm username Waleran.
I haven't been playing on KGS recently, but if you're interested in a teaching game send me a PM and we can schedule something. I'm around 4k.
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Learning about Simon Wordley's concept of Wordley mapping. Connected a ton of concepts like different management styles, Crossing the Chasm, the Gartner hype cycle, commoditization, and more.
This, I assume? (It took me a few tries to find it since first I typed in the name wrong and then it turns out it's "Wardley" with an 'a'.) Is the video on that page a good introduction?