Yeah muscle loss hasn't been a problem for me. I can do more pull-ups, push-ups and hike longer and faster than when I started. Progress was really slow with a significant calorie deficit.
I'm trying a much lower dose now to see if I can build muscle without rapidly regaining the weight.
Separately, I'm just really bad at dealing with the complexity of weights. I'm going to see if Crossfit helps this week.
I got to approximately my goal weight (18% body fat) and wanted to start gaining muscle[1] instead, so I stopped taking retatrutide to see what would happen. Nothing changed for about two weeks and then suddenly I was completely ravenous and ended up just wanting snack food. It's weird because I definitely used to always feel that way, and it was just "normal". I mostly kept the weight gain at bay with constant willpower.
I'm going to try taking around a quarter of my previous dose and see if it makes it easier to stay at approximately this weight and not constantly think about rice crispies.
- ^
I didn't notice any muscle loss with retatrutide, I just started out less strong than I want to be and find it hard to gain muscle on a calorie deficit.
The Phoenix by Julia Ecklar is also really good. It makes me sad that there's no good recordings of it and I can't find any covers.
I'm skeptical that this would be good with tallow. Last time I tried it, it smelled bad, tasted bad, and had the texture of a slightly melted candle. I'd imagine bear fat would have a much better texture and plausibly a better taste. Or did I just try a particularly gross brand of tallow and it's normally good?
I've volunteered during an election before and some of the things they do with ballots are:
- Never interact with ballots without the presence of a member of both parties.
- Transport ballots in locked boxes where the transporters don't have keys (and it would be obvious if the lock was cut).
- Record everything on video.
- Keep track of every ballot given out and every ballot that didn't come back.
- Hand-count some or all of the machine-counted ballots to make sure the results match.
- Notify everyone whose vote was counted (in case they didn't actually vote).
For voting machines, I think there are audits involving paper print outs + chain of custody rules, but I don't know the details. I've only ever lived in states with paper ballots.
I think the load-bearing part is "always have a member of both parties present", which is sort-of similar to what I'm suggesting in the post. If you don't have a single party you trust to count ballots, then make both of them do it (and record everything so you can prove it if one of them complains).
Thanks for reminding me that I actually need to read this. It's frustrating that there's no audio version though. I like to switch back and forth so I can listen to books while I do chores. I wonder if AI-read audiobooks still aren't good enough?
1Yeah, the problem is that we don't have a (provably) fair source of randomness.
I guess I only really touch on this in the intro, but the context was for elections where there's high stakes and potentially state-level hacking. How certain are you that the RNG you're using wasn't tampered with in the factory by the Chinese government, and that no one has tampered with it since then?
There's similar problems with voting machines, where even though there's intense chain-of-custody rules (and I think voting machines in the US are fair), a lot of people don't trust them and think the manufacturers and/or political parties are tampering with them.
Thanks! I think it's correct now.
The risk I'm worried about isn't insufficient randomness (I think this is what's alleged in the lottery story). I'm worried that the hat-picker could collude with one of the candidates to increase their chance of winning.
This is sort-of a "the AI is smarter than you" situation where I don't know exactly how they'd do it, but I imagine if you gave Penn & Teller a hat, a pen, and a stack of paper, they could convincingly select the same "random" piece of paper over and over again. And even if they couldn't actually do it, if some voters are convinced that they did, then your election still has a legitimacy problem.
You ask "Are FICO scores effective?" but to answer that you need to ask a further question, "Effective at what?".
The purpose of a FICO score is not to tell you something about a person. The purpose of a FICO score is to not lose money.
If I'm considering lending you $100 for 1 year at 10% interest, the (simplified) outcomes are:
An important consequence of this is that I care a lot about the case where you don't pay me back, even if it's rare. If you pay me back 85% of the time, I still lose money.
So, I might use credit scores for less important things like determining interest rates, but the most improtant decision to make is "Do I offer you a loan at all?".
With credit cards this is even harder since a typical customer doesn't use their full balance (and may not pay interest at all), while nearly bankrupt customers will use as much of their balance as they can. If your average customer pays you 2% in interchange fees and uses 10% of their balance and your worst customers cost you 100% of their balance, even 1/500 customers not paying you back is a problem.
So, keeping that in mind, we can look at the pieces again:
Payment history is obvious. If you don't pay other people, you probably won't pay me. Yes, this is "only" 35% of the score, but 850 x (1 - 35%) = 550. No one will give you a credit card with a FICO score of 550.
Amount owed and new credit is a signal that you're about to go bankrupt. Yes, this doesn't tell me much about the person and whether they're the kind of person who usually pays people back, but it does tell me that I shouldn't lend them money right now.
Length of credit history matters because a short credit history prevents lenders from using any other metric to determine risk. Losing money is the default, so you're guilty until proven innocent.
I'm not really sure on credit mix, but the fact that it's only 10% means it will basically never be the reason you do or don't get a loan (unless you're already borderline for some other reason) but it might effect rates. I assume part of this is reducing fraud risk: If you've successfully convinced someone to give you a mortgage, you're probably a real person).
One other part of this is that while the factors are weighted in the way you mention, the factors are not calculated in a straightforward way. For example, amount owed is 30% of your score, but that doesn't mean that reducing the amount you owe from 50% to 0% improves your credit score by 15%. Each factor is calculated as "Looking at your X, how risky does that make you?"
For length of history, that means a history of <1 year is insanely risky[1], while any history above 5 years is basically the same. Or for amounts owed, anything under 30% is low risk, 80% is getting up there, and 99% is insanely risky.
Even for something that sounds straightforward like credit mix, it's not necessarily the case that only having one credit account means you get a zero on that factor.
So all of that together:
Source: I made it up.