You're more likely to die in a traffic accident or from insufficient sun exposure than to ever develop skin cancer.

“Skin cancer causes more deaths than transport accidents every year in Australia.”

I can’t leave the house for more than like five minutes for big chunks for at least half the year without having to smother myself in sunscreen so for large parts of the year I just don’t go outside during like 9AM-6PM.

I fell asleep once in the car with the window open by mistake, I was out for like 45 minutes. A decade later that arm is still an entirely different color to my other one. Wild, one of the worst burns I’ve ever had.

edit

And to think, that’s die from a skin cancer, not merely develop it. So it actually blows that claim out of the water for Australia by a way larger margin than I initially thought.

2 out of 3 Australians will develop skin cancer in their lifetime.

And also ones saying food high in cholesterol was bad. Then ones saying food high in ‘bad’ cholesterol were bad, and one’s high in ‘good’ cholesterol were good.

Then eventually we figured out that dietary cholesterol has almost no impact on blood cholesterol levels except in a tiny portion of the population.

Fun times eh?

Vitamin A in eggs is 75iu, 23ug RAE. RDA is 700ug for this person. 30 eggs. The tolerable upper limit is 3000ug. 130 eggs.

Macros: 126g of both fat and protein. Carbs in eggs are negligible at maybe .5g each, totaling 9g or 36 cal. Harvard recommends .36g/lb for protein, which is about 40g. They also set the theoretical upper limit at 2g/kg ; .91g/lb, which is 102g. So this is 24g excessive (3.4 eggs). The quantity of too much protein is debatable, though in the absence of heavy weight lifting, this is at least excessive for most people. Harmful depends on context.

126g of fat is 1134cal. This is below what they need to maintain weight (calorie deficit) and the biggest problem with this diet so far. If this person are more than 150g of carbs per day, I would be concerned because with circulating glucose, body fat is not used readily to supply caloric need. The body may want to use protein as a calorie source, which is where the danger of eating too much protein comes from.

After being on this diet for several weeks, they will be in ketosis, which will actually make it much safer. Body fat is used more readily in ketosis to fill energy needs and could make up the 600 calorie per day deficit, totaling to a little over the safe 1lb per week recommendation for weight loss.

I would advise adding more fat and reducing protein a bit (80g should be plenty though potentially excessive still), not because this is dangerous but because it is excessive and the body will need to remove the excess protein as waste. This isn't really harmful in smaller quantities but does put more strain on the kidneys.

Maybe 12 eggs a day and another 50 of mostly fat to get 500 calories, 500 deficit. If trying to maintain weight, increase fat by another 50g. Mix carbs if you want under 300 calories (75g) with that amount removed from fat intake and preferably in one meal with protein.

Doesn't consider vitamins other than A.

The Covid debactle could be a more recent experience. Guesses was reported as facts. Then the flipfloping made peoples heads hurt and the consensus on what to do ended in a mess and a heated political point.

* The New Yorker * Harper's * The Atlantic * and, believe it or not, Playboy

In re: the latter, see https://ew.com/books/playboy-hugh-hefner-famous-authors/

Seems like a bit of confirmation bias here - tons of things that people were told would kill them, did in fact end up killing them. Science is wrong sometimes, of course, and science journalism even more often.

This is where I am for sure. I don't trust any trends as to what people figure will kill you any more, because they're almost always wrong in the end. In 20 years if it turns out to not be recanted, then I'll pay attention I guess.

https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Popey...

The meme version of it does, and their official website gets pretty close - fat is unrestricted, it's fine to eat as much fat as you have an appetite for, it's fine if a large proportion of your calorie intake is saturated fat. I guess "to excess" is subjective, but Atkins certainly says that fat consumption levels that respected medical authorities say are dangerous are fine.

There used to be (not sure if it’s still there) a newsstand near one of the “L” stations in downtown Chicago that sold primarily porno mags, but it’s been a long time since I’ve boarded by that station and whenever I’m near there, I always forget to check to see if it’s still there. It was the subject of the first poem I wrote in my Chicago sonnets sequence¹ although that one remains unpublished.

⸻

1. Most of these are in print only, but links to those that are online can be found at https://dahosek.com/publications/

I like eggs a lot better now that I’ve learned to make them myself.

These days we realize that two unhappily-married parents can often be worse for the children than if they get divorced and continue to be active parents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/business/egg-prices-bird-...

He was a practicing GP and whenever asked to give some advice himself he said that people and lifestyles were too varied to give any advice more specific than "Eat mostly fresh fruit and vegetables, cut down on cigarettes and alcohol, and do some exercise".

In many cases I feel the problem could have fundamentally been solved by being better at dividing household work such that someone can rest one or two days and then switch.

For many divorce seems to be a way to divide labour, which they could have done without one.

People often arrive at the scene when most of the options are gone years back, and they wish they bought at the price that existed back then. Get disappointed and lawyer through the arguments to justify renting a home.

Exactly, and so is a mortgage to home equity belief system. That's the point. Be objective.

To some extent the apartment board might be to optimistic on future maintenance costs too.

Maybe in urban centers. But go out into the hills and you will find many towns where land prices tanked once the local resource industry moved on. It isn't just 18th century gold rush stuff. There are towns from the 80s that just emptied when the local industry moved on.

https://justinmcelroy.com/2022/07/26/visiting-canadas-50-mil...

As an investment, you forego some upfront capital (downpayment), have some monthly costs (mortgage payment) and a monthly income (rent) and at the end you have an asset (current value) and maybe an obligation to pay another lump sum (principal - downpayment if interest only mortgage).

In the UK at least, for buy-to-let properties, the interest-only mortgage is common, so at the end of the mortgage term you have to repay the principal, and the profit comes from the different between the current value and the principal. In most situations, the rental income is almost entirely used to cover the mortgage payments, maintenance, costs, and paying tax, so during the mortgage period most landlords actually make very little income. It's essentially a bet on whether over the term (maybe 20 years), the difference in value will be better than the lost opportunity cost of not investing the downpayment elsewhere and the risk of periods of having to cover the mortgage and expenses without income during periods when the house is unoccupied, or tenants refuse to pay, etc. Particularly in the early years, the rental income may be substantially lower than the costs to the landlord, but over time, inflation will allow rental prices to increase but the mortgage costs will remain level. A smart landlord will invest the monthly profit at that point, to reduce the impact of the principal at the end of the mortgage.

In some ways, a house bought as a home is very similar, but in others very different. Typically bought as a home, a mortgage will be higher because the aim is usually to pay off all the principal as well as interest, and the simplistic view is that obviously having a mortgage for your home is better because you're always paying off the capital and end up with an asset at the end, the GP's point is that it isn't actually that simple.

Let's say you lived in the house. You're paying for the mortgage directly, let's assume that on average the mortgage costs are the same as the rent for an equivalent house, but actually at the start, the mortgage is probably going to be a significantly bigger chunk of your monthly expenses. On top of that, you have all the maintenance costs - some will be urgent and necessary, others can be deferred for later (although financially, perhaps not the best option because inflation will make the cost more or less the same now as later).

If you had the same house as a buy-to-rent property, you'd have the same maintenance costs and the same mortgage costs (whether it's interest only or capital repayment, the main difference is just when you pay it), so really the only difference is that you are receiving a rental income and losing the ability to live in the house.

As such, there is actually an equivalence between having a mortgage on a house that you live in and paying rent for that house instead - and the equivalent amount is the amount that you would have received as rent (minus taxes and costs from renting). If you could have rented that property out at £1000 per month, by choosing to live there, you are effectively paying that £1000 a month rent yourself.

In truth, the main factor in choosing whether to rent or get a mortgage is a mixture of availability and cost of credit (which varies depending on your financial situation) and how much you have available to spend on accommodation each month. Having a mortgage front-loads the payments - having a much higher payments initially, but fixed so that as inflation reduces the monthly cost in real terms, much cheaper later on, compared to renting where there is effectively a constant monthly cost in real terms once inflation is applied to it (probably annually, every time the price is renegotiated).

Personally, I'd chose a mortgage, because I was chose a cheap house compared to the area so that I was able to afford the monthly payment (the base mortgage was approximately 50% more than the equivalent rent would have been), and then used every bit of spare money I had each month to overpay, which meant that I paid off the house before the end of the mortgage term.

You might think that paying off the mortgage is an obvious success - I now own a house I can live in rent-free, but the alternative - paying much less each month and investing the rest, with compounding gains would probably be returning me an income that's equivalent to the rent that I would be continuing to pay if I didn't have a house.

Which one is better is down to personal preference, and also quite heavily influenced by societal norms - in the UK and USA, we're very strong believers in owning property, but in much of Europe, the vast majority of people rent and see no problem with that.

Mortgage is temporary though, rent is eternal and usually increasing over time. This means you don't save money in the long term, either.

100x is just bad decision making

Somethings like marriage, kids, buying home just have be done in life as early as you can.

Note money is just a number at the end. The idea is not to have max($money), rather max($free_time, $health). Optimise for $free_time and $health, and then you have a very different life strategy to work towards.

The argument is simply that by living in a house yourself, you are effectively paying rent on that property at the same rate that the house could be rented out if you were not living on it.

Any equity gain in the property itself isn't relevant to the rental value discussion, rather the separate transaction between you and the bank, whereby they lend you money up front to buy an asset and the terms by which you repay that money and the capital gains on that asset in the mean time.

The potential rental income of a property may be similar to the value of the mortgage payments, but generally won't be over the lifetime of the mortgage. As I stated 2 posts up, the cost of a mortgage is front loaded, so the price you pay on a mortgage at the start is generally more than the equivalent rental price would be for the same house, and towards the latter stages of the mortgage it will be much lower, because the monthly mortgage payments are still the same but the real-world cost of those payments has decreased due to inflation.

The simple point is that any time you choose to live in a property, you are either paying rent for the privilege of doing so, or you are missing out on the rental income from someone else who could be paying you to live there instead.

Just one point - there is no way ownership of some home brings actual happiness, you overload the term massively. Not only some theory, I simply never met such a person so that this would be actually valid. I've lived in 3 different cultures and talk about 100s of folks knowing well personally.

Although I've met quite a few folks that, by chasing the dream of some home in suburbs 'to have their own place' ruined their marriage often beyond repair, including happy childhood of their kids.

But also: an owner occupied house is a single lumpy, undiversified asset. And in many cases it's bought on so much leverage, that its value is bigger than the buyer's entire net-worth.

> Even if your house depreciates, it's still a house! There's even an upside - your rent to the government decreases.

Yes. Though depending on government policies, you can also lose use of your house (or even lose your house). Depending on where you live and how you set up your holdings, investing in international stocks and bond can be more stable.

To summarise: owner occupied housing does make sense for a lot of people. But it's far from being automatically always being the best choice.

Yes, definitely. That's why I am saying that whether it's better to invest in owner occupied housing or in something else and using the returns to pay rent, depends on yields and prices and personal preferences. It's not automatic that buying a house to live in is better.

> Paid by your money.

Yes, definitely. Just like when I go to a restaurant, all the ingredients and the chef's labour is paid for by my own money.

Owning a house is a bit like having an extra part-time job with all the things you have to worry about and work on.

The HOAs don't let you be a landlord and rent out your apartment for more than 2 years at a time, and you need to have a reason like you are moving to another country for studies.

Technically when you buy an apartment in Sweden you are (almost always) not actually buying the apartment, but rather just a stake in the HOA corporation with the attached right to live in the apartment. So the HOA has last say about who can live in the apartment (and what renovations you can do).

It is all very complicated and specific to Sweden, but this HOA corporation thing avoids a lot of fees/taxes when selling/buying the apartment (which is a BIG deal, stamp tax alone is 4% of the asset last I heard). But you get these downsides as well.

Detached houses usually don't have HOAs, those you can rent out more freely. However they are not exactly affordable housing, especially considering heating costs of detached houses triple during winter (maybe they only double _if_ you have modern heat pumps). Banks won't lend you money to buy real state with the intent to rent out either.

I agree that most of medicine itself hasn't necessarily made much of a dent in average adult life expectancy at, say, age 30.

In any case, feel free to ignore that part of my comment. And concentrate on the part about the number of children.

Or you can replace the now missing part with: how much should you spend on clothing? Should you spend the same in inflation adjusted terms as your ancestors? Or should you spend the same in terms of proportion of overall income (or time, in case of home production)?

We're in violent agreement here. Home ownership is unforgiving if you lack all ability and the willingness to learn. I'd like to believe that this level of learned helplessness is rare enough in the adult population that it shouldn't factor meaningfully into a discussion of major investment decisions like owning property.

To be even more proper, you'd need to allow the stock market investor to use leverage, just like the guy with the mortgage does.

Or, if you want to avoid the mortgage/leverage complication, we can compare someone buying a house outright with someone investing the same amount in stocks, and uses the returns to pay rent.

> Around here, houses appreciate in value. Quite significantly, actually. A house can gain 100k in value in just a few years.

Total returns on eg the S&P500 over the last few decades have been pretty good, too. And it's a much more diversified and liquid investment than a single house in a single location.

For some people in some places, buying a house might be better than buying stocks, for some others it might be worse. Results also depend on taxes and jurisdiction and personal preferences. But it's not automatic that buying a house is better than renting.

"Households living in poverty are spending a significantly larger proportion of their net income on housing costs than households not living in poverty. This is true both in London and in the rest of England.

London households in poverty are estimated, on average, to spend 54% of their total net income on housing costs. In comparison, those living in households which are not in poverty spend just 11% on average.

The trend is similar in the rest of England with households in poverty spending 32% of their income on housing compared to 8% for those not in poverty"

(a lot of that is numerator/denominator issues - of course if you have more income you're spending a lesser fraction on housing - but it does show just how dominant housing costs are in people's lives)

Wha a world that would be. More in the 35-45 range.

And replacement is not about genes, but about culture. Europe experimented with mass migration with peoples of very different cultures. The idea is that they would nonetheless be assimilated, integrated into the culture, and everybody would grow all the richer for it. It instead just led to the emergence of countries within countries, increasing violence, extreme social divides and extremism, and is arguably playing a significant role in the ongoing decline of Europe. Migration is, in general, a good thing - but if it ever goes beyond a rather small scale, you're just setting the stage for your own downfall. Migration was even one of the major causes of the fall of the Roman Empire!