Capitol One offers savings accounts yielding 0.75% APY with no minimum deposit. I've used them for over 10 years with no hassles. Your general point about low yields still applies, though.
I would estimate an opportunity cost of 3 hours per year to set up the account, shuffle money around, periodically monitor the balance, and pay taxes on the interest. This opportunity cost will vary depending on how efficient one is with paperwork. Whether this is worthwhile depends on the size of the emergency fund and the alternative options for increasing marginal income via an equivalent time investment.
I would seriously not be surprised to find that fat people have starved to death without their fat cells releasing fat, and blinded by preconceptions, nobody managed to notice or note down when this occurred. But I would expect that to be rare - most people, if their body tells them they're starving to death, will eat. This gets cited as weakness of will.
What outcomes would this metabolic hypothesis predict for obese people who undergo gastric bypass surgeries which render them physically incapable of eating much? What percentage of these patients would...
Lots of people have system 1 processes governing calorie intake and expenditure that are maladaptive within their current environment. It's possible to overrule these maladaptive impulses with system 2, but that imposes lots of cognitive load so most people are only able to sustain such efforts for a short time before reverting.
The article describes the common experience of people who temporarily go on medically supervised diets. Once they are left to their own devices, bereft of the external support and close supervision, they rely entirely on ongoing eff...
I find this claim surprising. It is not obvious what evidence or line of reasoning would lead to this conclusion.
On the population level, it is my understanding that people today (in industrialized western nations) have much higher likelihood of being overweight or obese at a given age than their very recent ancestors from 2-3 generations ago. Given the short time frame, this is likely due to changes in diet or activity level rather than inescapable genetic destiny.
Individual metabolisms will certainly differ. However, I believe that having a body composition at least as good as one's great-grandparents should be possible for most people. Is there evidence against this?
By the time you're diagnosed with Y it's way too late to do anything.
OK, that's probably true. It is also true in the case of deficiencies arising from a more conventional diet however. How frequently do micronutrient deficiencies occur under regular diets? How is the chance of timely detection and intervention affected by controlled intake in conjunction with deliberate ongoing monitoring versus an unmonitored ad libitum diet?
Let's consider two contrasting propositions regarding diet and nutrition: A) Consuming a varied diet of naturally occurring, unp...
I suspect most people considering Soylent aren't exactly eating like Michael Pollan in the first place. Anecdotally, I know several people who subsist on diets of fast-food takeout washed down by multiple liters of soda. It seems credible that Soylent might at least provide better nutrition than that. The scorn directed at Soylent by many of the Hacker News commenters strikes me as misdirected given the relatively poor quality diet of many Americans.
I have used other commercially available meal replacement shakes in the past - most don't even attempt to de...
I also think that the variant of the problem featuring an actual mugger is about scam recognition.
Suppose you get an unsolicited email claiming that a Nigerian prince wants to send you a Very Large Reward worth $Y. All you have to do is send him a cash advance of $5 first ...
I analyze this as a straightforward two-player game tree via the usual minimax procedure. Player one goes first, and can either pay $5 or not. If player one chooses to pay, then player two goes second, and can either pay Very Large Reward $Y to player one, or he can run away with the c...
Friendly neighborhood Matrix Lord checking in!
I'd like to apologize for the behavior of my friend in the hypothetical. He likes to make illusory promises. You should realize that regardless of what he may tell you, his choice of whether to hit the green button is independent of your choice of what to do with your $5. He may hit the green button and save 3↑↑↑3 lives, or he may not, at his whim. Your $5 can not be reliably expected to influence his decision in any way you can predict.
You are no doubt accustomed to thinking about enforceable contracts between...
Your first link appears to be broken.
It seems possible that the OpenWorm project to emulate the brain of a C. Elegans flatworm on a classical computer may yield results prior to the advent of experimental techniques capable of " probing the CNS at ... sub-picosecond timescales." Would you consider a successful emulation of worm behavior evidence against the need for quantum effects in neuronal function, or would you declare it the worm equivalent of a P-Zombie?