iamshack

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 17, 2011 -> 07:32 AM) People would go weeks/months without using the workout forum. Rock and I used to use it quite often.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Feb 16, 2011 -> 07:38 PM) That looks awesome. Another pet peeve of mine is that we don't have the workout forum anymore. It's like, just when I start working out, it shuts down (and yes, I realize it's been shutdown for a while now). Yeah, that was one of the subforums that I feel legitimately should exist. I miss it too.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 16, 2011 -> 06:28 PM) There's a cute study about to be published looking at the effectively hidden costs of heavy U.S. coal consumption. Typical electricity rates are something like $.10-$.15/kWh, with obviously decent variation. So if you compare the full lifecycle cost of coal electricity, renewables are vastly cheaper, but if you consider only the on-site cost, the cost on your electric bill, coal looks cheaper, while people like me cough all the way to the health insurer. This is the fun game of dirty energy; you bear the costs out in health care and the climate, but your raw electricity bill stays down. As long as everyone plays the game, we get to pretend that coal is cheap. If one person switches to a renewable source, it doesn't make much of a difference, so there's no way for you to get that money back except to pretend that the indirect costs are a subsidy given to you to use coal as your main fuel. It takes a large number of people switching to have the economy start realizing those savings. I'll give you some figures for coal versus what we pay for renewables. Our different coal unit costs are basically between $.020 and .028 per kWh, depending on the price of coal and the O&M costs and age of the unit. Many of our renewable plants cost between $.13 to .20 per kWh. To say doubling or tripling the cost of coal would make renewables vastly cheaper right now is simply not true. Maybe at some point in the future, yes, but now, no.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 11, 2011 -> 09:02 AM) A good read on why Texas's energy de-regulation format played a role in driving the pre-Super-Bowl rolling blackouts last week. This is interesting, because New Mexico had a lot of blackouts as well, due to frozen pipes. As far as I understand, most of this was caused by these states being cheap and lazy in regards to their weatherization procedures.

QUOTE (maggsmaggs @ Feb 16, 2011 -> 05:29 PM) And pop. It's amazing how many calories you save not drinking pop and alcohol. Yeah, I gave up soda and fruit juices/AZ ice teas for the most part. I mostly just drink a few cups of coffee if I am working, and water. I might drink beer 2-3 times a month, otherwise, I lay off that too. As for cardio/resistance training, I try to do them on different days. Your muscles need to time repair and grow, so I try to use a few days a week for cardio and one for yoga. Then resistance training the other 3 days. I find it works well for me, but I also admit I have not really tried it any other way, either.

QUOTE (Rowand44 @ Feb 16, 2011 -> 01:49 PM) Hmm, looks interesting, think I'm going to start this up tonight. You try this yet? Nope, but I am intending to. Still messing around with P90X...

Google "Spartacus Workout PDF"

I find the constant status updates more pathetic. Pictures, I don't mind...at least there is a lot of interesting stuff to look through when you're bored. What I don't care about are the "...is at Dairy Queen with ..."

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Feb 16, 2011 -> 11:24 AM) Haha, thanks! But seriously, other people must have facebook friends who have albums of pictures of their pets. It's seriously pathetic. Well, I don't think it's pathetic, necessarily. I already have so many people bugging me to post pictures and videos... But yes, I agree there is definitely a line that is crossed between fun and just annoying, and this happens with peoples' kids too.

QUOTE (Controlled Chaos @ Feb 16, 2011 -> 11:20 AM) This is something I found online about this "fat-burning" zone. It makes sense to me. Let's do the math. Suppose on Monday, you use the elliptical trainer machine for 60 minutes. You stay within that target heart rate that correlates to the fat burning zone. You burn a total of, let's say, 200 calories. I choose 200 here arbitrarily, just for mathematical purposes. Everyone's metabolism is different, and calorie readouts on machines are based on an average-height, 150 pound male. You may be a 5-2, 170 pound female. So keep in mind the mathematical concept here, rather than how many calories your particular body might burn up in 60 minutes. So, you burn 200 calories in 60 minutes in the fat burning zone. Now, about 50 percent of those calories will be fat. 50 percent of 200 is 100. Remember that: You've burned 100 calories of fat. Now, let's say on Wednesday, you get on the same machine, but train in the cardio zone. You pedal faster at a higher pedal resistance. You drip sweat. You hear yourself breathing hard. You huff and puff. After 60 minutes, you've burned 300 calories. In cardio zone training, about 40 percent of the calories burned will be fat. Note: 40 percent is a smaller number than 50 percent. HOWEVER...what's 40 percent of the 300 calories that were burned? It's 120! Your total fat-calories burned were 120! This is 20 percent MORE fat burned, than what you did in your fat burning session on Monday! Yes, as I said, you will always burn more calories if you work harder. But the question is, why would you want to burn muscle under any circumstances, unless you were a wrestler or a fighter and needed to make weight or something?

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Feb 16, 2011 -> 08:54 AM) Burning calories = weight loss. However you burn more calories is best. As someone who's lost 20 lbs since January 10th, it's all about burning more calories and consuming less calories. Strict weight loss is one of the easiest things you can do... it's math really. This is not exactly accurate. Yes, the higher the heart rate, the more calories burned usually. However, your body calls on certain types of energy based upon what you are asking of it. Once you exceed your target heart rate, you start burning muscle, not fat, which is why you will see more weight loss there, since muscle weighs more than fat. You don't want to burn off muscle though, you want to burn off fat. As you get into better shape, your target heart rate will increase though, because your body will not be so overwhelmed by what you are asking of it, and you will be able to workout harder and burn off unwanted fat, rather than muscle. This is the entire purpose of heart rate monitors. Edit: Additionally, there is some thought that resistance training may burn off more calories than cardio training because of the metabolic processes which your body undergoes after the workout. Science is still not necessarily proving this, however, there is a body of anecdotal evidence which is.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Feb 16, 2011 -> 09:25 AM) Please, for the sake of everyone else, do not be one of those people who constantly posts pictures of your dog on facebook. It's annoying as hell and comes off as very pathetic and creepy. I'm going to get prints made and leave them on the windshield of your car.

Pup flies in Saturday afternoon....have ordered everything I can possibly think of, including food, toys, treats, bed, crate, grooming tools, etc. He's about 23 pounds already at 9 weeks. Ready to rock and roll...should be fun...and a challenge...oh my.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Feb 14, 2011 -> 02:43 PM) The draw there is once people's data are on your servers, they will stick around because of the hassle of moving it. They could literally increase brand loyalty to their "lite" phones just by making people reliant on their service. Its actually quite brilliant. Yeah, I know I would end up either staying around or abandoning it. Although I don't really collect too much important data or anything...I would think the phone would at least be capable of storing your contacts list.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Feb 14, 2011 -> 02:32 PM) And increase the adoption of MobileMe which hasnt been as big of a hit as they thought it was going to be. Right, they are talking about making MobileMe free if the design these devices around "cloud" storage.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 14, 2011 -> 12:24 PM) You know, if that's available on Verizon, I might jump at that. I read that the only way to reduce the price was to take the memory out of it, which also allows it to be cut down to about half the size. Sort of an iPhone nano, if you will. Interesting idea.

Don, go to the American Kennel Club website and look up each breed. That is a great place to start. It will tell you what the dog should look and act like, as well as what they were originally bred to do and what their strengths and weaknesses are, how they do as a pet, etc. www.akc.org I'm a big fan of blue heelers...really cool, smart dogs.

I dunno guys...drunk texts provide some of the best humor there is...there are already full books full of them out there

QUOTE (lostfan @ Feb 13, 2011 -> 11:50 AM) a) will be 5 years this spring B) because she is a walking financial disaster, everything she touches turns to s*** You must be one smooth mf'er, Keith

Lost, how long have you been married? And how on earth did you convince your wife that your monies should remain separate?

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Feb 12, 2011 -> 06:49 PM) You bring up an exellent point in regard to housing, I touched on it earlier and I believe housing, even at it's current levels, remains inflated. Houses, especially well kept houses, simply cost too much. I know how easy it is to fall into the debt trap, too as I've witnessed many people I know do it. All you have to do is look at their things and you can see why, too. Always seem to have a new snowblower, or lawnmower, or iPhone. Whatever the case may be, it the typical keep up with the Jonses mentality. And it's even a possible learned behavior from watching our government operate on a daily basis. Life can still be fun without a 300$ per month cable bill for 600 channels of movies you've already seen. While my father never lost the house, he also never made more than 42k, all the way up unt retirement. At times growing up it wasn't fun to watch everyone around me with the newest toys, nintendos or vcr's, which I would have died to have. But it was what it was. We got by. And now I have all these things, bit I also tend to understand when to say when. The one thing you guys aren't even mentioning though is that this kind of spending is required to keep our economy rolling along... While I agree that a lot of these purchases are unnecessary, and I make quite a few of them myself, I also choose to live this lifestyle instead of getting married, having children, and spending my earnings on that lifestyle. And I think there are a lot of people like that these days. Instead of people getting married at 22-27 years of age, there seem to be a lot more people in their twenties, living a single lifestyle, which allows them more disposable income to buy things like iPhones and plasma televisions, and BMWs. Not sure if there is real data to back that up, but those are what my observations are. Things like cable though, you're absolutely correct. I spend $130 on cable and $60 on internet, and you can throw an extra $50 on that for 10 months out of the year because I buy the NFL Sunday Ticket the the Extra Innings packages so I can watch the Sox and the Bears. I try to make up for this though by reducing my other utility costs...I am really anal about the lights and the thermostat, so I keep that really low except for the summer months, when it is so hot here it's just impossible not to have a really high electric bill. Interesting discussion and debate though.

QUOTE (SoxFan562004 @ Feb 12, 2011 -> 04:15 PM) he's had at least one relapse that we know of in the last year or so (I believe the deadspin pics were from last off-season), even without those, a known drug addict is a hard sell to me to give long term money to without appropriate safe-guards laid out in the contract. I was a public defender for 2 years, part of that was in abuse/neglect court, I saw people chose drugs over their own kids, even with decent periods of sobriety, it would not come as a major shock to me if Hamilton falls hard again... again, not hoping it happens or anything like that, but it is an extremely realistic possibility. Yeah, well, he was willing to basically throw away his future in the first place, so it's difficult to argue that the possibility isn't there for him to relapse. But do you really see him hitting the FA market and someone not going 4-5 years at $75-100 million? I would be shocked if there weren't multiple teams willing to take a chance on him. If you protect yourself via the contract against a relapse, I don't see how the risk is all that great though.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 12, 2011 -> 04:40 PM) I buy into the Sox theory of putting the team before the fans. It might lead to unpopular decisions, like letting Frank Thomas walk away, but in the long run if you want to be a viable (non-Yankees) franchise, you have to make them. Yeah, I can definitely understand that point, and I wholeheartedly agree with it. You can never fall in love with a player or allow the fans to dictate what you do as an organization. It has certainly happened here before though. That being said, there is a difference between signing Hamilton because the fans would get frustrated and signing Hamilton because there is a genuine market for him, despite your misgivings. Very few players are perfect or do not involve significant risk when signing them long-term. I think Josh has been professional enough, and has been consistent enough, that I would be willing to go long term with him. It's not ideal, but given that there will be other suitors willing to, I'd do it, as long as there was a clause which allowed me to void the contract, at my discretion, if testing showed he was using illegal drugs (and obviously you'd have to set up some sort of criteria for the testing in the first place).

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 11, 2011 -> 10:15 AM) I sure wouldn't go long term with him for all of the reasons you said, let alone the chance at relapse always being around the corner. The guy just put up an MVP-like season and has been very solid the last few years. Would you be willing to refuse to that if you were Texas, knowing full-well you just lost Cliff Lee for not ponying up enough money, and knowing that some other team is going to be willing to offer Hamilton a long-term contract? It's certainly a roll of the dice, but I think it's going to have to be one they take the risk on.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Feb 12, 2011 -> 12:22 PM) So let me put it this way Mark. I'm going to make up an index/scale that measures the impact a person has on the earth. It's more than just a carbon footprint snapshot because it also includes our impact on all sentient life, animals and humans alike (think child labor or impact of air and water quality to people and how it affects their health, etc). This index could probably have thousands of factors to contribute to your final score, 1 being a downright drag on the earth, someone who continually burns tires in the backyard of their 5000 sq ft McMansion utilizing enormous amounts of energy and eats McDonald's 5 times per day and owns stock in companies with human rights issues (yes I know it's a caricature) and 10 being as StrangeSox mentioned, a Jainist (someone with almost no harm or suffering impact to the earth and its inhabitants; i.e., the person living in a clay hunt only eating the apples that fall from the tree next to them.) I would venture to say, based on the multitude of articles and books I've read over the years, that the average American is probably a 3 or 4 on this scale. In my opinion I would probably be somewhere around a 6, perhaps even closer to a 7. So to concede your point, yes I am a hypocrite in some ways because I am not a 9 or 10 on this scale. But I am continually doing things in my life to get me closer to that number. I personally think the biggest step one can take to jump a full point or point and a half on this scale would be go completely vegan. By doing so you make a huge direct impact on the needless suffering of animals and humans. Animals because, as I've stated before, there are billions that are directly affected each year in the U.S. alone. Their entire existence is one of misery, suffering, and pain. I mention people because the slaughterhouse is continually a leader in the number of workplace accidents and deaths. Additionally, the vast amounts of resources used to maintain this system, i.e., land, food, and water as well as the enormous amounts of waste produced via methane gases and polluted runoff waters is a major factor. And I really can't think of any other step one can take in their life to make a bigger global impact on this index/scale. There are a multitude of things that my family have embraced in helping us to get that score I've assigned myself. I've mentioned a few before (use a local CSA, walk and bike more, etc) and here are some others that are so easy that most of us could implement them with ease: - recycle - bring your own bags to the grocery store - purchase organic and fair trade where possible - weatherize your home - install low flow shower heads and toilets - compost - stop buying bottled water (just use britta or pur filters if you're scared of tap, although you shouldn't be) - talk to your local politicians about planting more trees in the community There's probably a million more things you can do but those are just so damn easy. And again, yes I'm a hypocrite for not being the 9 or 10 on the scale but I know for a fact that the things I currently do have a very big impact, hence the 6 to 7 score as opposed to the 3 or 4. And when you mention things such as (1) owning a home displaces animals that were there beforehand or (2) using smart phones/computers use fossil fuels and also have impacts you are absolutely correct. However, I own a small condo that was a rehab of an older building. I didn't clear a forest to make my home. And yes, at some point in time someone must have done that here to put this building where it is. I'd say it's a better step than developing my home on some land that needed to be cleared. And I actually think some of the gadget negatives have a little cushion with their impact. How much I don't know but over the last 10-20 years, during this information age, the world has become more connected. Veganism has exploded in this time frame. So has the ability to contribute and participate in many charity organizations across the world that directly work with issues such as human and animal welfare as well as wildlife and resource preservation. Is it a wash? No, but I don't think these things would be as big as they are today...and growing. Heck, the Sea Shepherd organization has been around for a long time but I had never heard of them until they started airing a television show. Now I regularly donate to them whereas I might not have ever done so if I didn't have a TV or Internet. Marko, I think you are misinterpreting my criticism a bit. I'm not expecting you to live off the grid or like a monk to lower your carbon footprint. I know you do a lot of things that are not necessarily convenient or easy to do to try and make the world around you a better place, and that includes educating others. And I respect that mightily. But I think there is also a tendency with vegans, and I have seen you do this when you become agitated, to lash out against meat eaters by showing some animal in some state of suffering or near death, or proclaim us all to be the same person as Mike Vick. That is just not fair, and you darn well know it. Because I could post pictures of animals covered in oil, or that have become roadkill on the street because their habitat has been displaced, or of polar bears drowning because there is no ice for them to stand on. You engage in plenty of habits that indirectly lead to those conditions (as nearly all of us do), and yet, you make a value judgment of others, based upon their consumption of meat, but don't make much of one based on your own consumption of other goods that have the same or a similar indirect impact. That is where the hypocrisy lies, and that is where my criticism lies. As I said in the poll thread in the Fillibuster, I don't consumer much red meat. Maybe 10 pounds of it a year. The average American eats more than 10 times that. I do, however, consumer a lot of chicken, and so I am certainly not a vegetarian or vegan. I live in a small condo, 4 miles from my place of employment. I put about 7,000 miles on my car per year. I don't run my thermostat except in the summer months (yes, I know I live in Vegas), choosing instead to wear a sweater or sweatshirt when I get cold. I don't turn on my lights much, because it's just a waste of electricity and money. I buy as many organic foods as I can conveniently get to (is it really helping anything if people are making 3 trips of 15 miles each way to get to their Whole Foods?). I have all energy efficient appliances. I don't run water wastefully, such as when I am brushing my teeth or shaving or washing a dish. I take quick showers. I don't buy bottled water, I drink tap. I walk or ride my bike for exercise and for short trips, so I can avoid driving. And on and on and on. I don't know where I would fall on your scale, but I think I do more than most Americans. And yet, because I eat meat, you're going to make a value judgment of me based on that alone. You're going to blitz me with this picture of a dog, beaten and maimed, and tell me that I am somehow the same as the person who did that. Because I eat meat. Without knowing much else about me. That's where the hypocrisy lies, as well as my criticism.