I would get two of the local small (about 50g each) cured cheeses made out of goat and sheep milk a week and eat them, and was having trouble cutting down on blood sugar until I stopped doing it and that one change with all else being roughly the same consistently reduced the blood sugar level increases - since I have Type II Diabetes - between my “running days” (I run 10km twice a week, which by itself has a huge positive impact on it).

Around here there’s also what we call “fresh cheese” (basically cheese that hasn’t been cured) and I usually get a couple of those made of goat cheese and they don’t seem to be a problem.

Of course, this is all a bit so-so and anecdotcal since its pretty hard to control all other variables plus blood sugar seems to also be affected what you consumed days before (I’ve seen blood sugar go up long after the last meal and during a fasting period - so supposedly not because of sugar intake or digestion - which I suspect is due to the sugar stored in the liver or maybe yet another unexpected methabolic pathway).

In my experience of trying to control blood sugar levels with food and exercise, it is exactly as you said: metabolism is crazy, crazy complicated :/

I definitelly need to try that.

Thank you.

Yeah, but they have a lot of calories via fat (especially cheese) and what I’ve seen in my own diet (which includes regular checking of blood sugar levels), if I eat more of it (again, especially cheese) the sugar levels in the blood go up all else being the same.

Don’t ask me the exact details of how the human body does that, I’m not a specialist and this is just what I observe happens if start eating more cheese.

Which is a shame, 'cause I love cheese :(

Yeah, it it makes a massive difference the GI index of the sugars in the food one eats, so for example it’s a lot better to consume pulses (like chickpeas) than it is pasta, since the latter is pretty much just starch and (after cooked) water whilst the former is a far more complex food with also lots of protein and fiber (only talking about macronutrients here).

Mind you, this diet of mine is not because of overweight, it’s to keep Type II Diabetes under control with as little insulin as possible and to get it into remission (so far, it has worked very well having reduced the need of insuline by about 80%), so it’s based on studies that have been done on this and is much more tightly controlled with regular checking of blood sugar levels.

But yeah, a lot of it is to reduce the intake of low GI sugars (I used to be a big consumer of bread, for example, since I live in a country with really good bread, and that stuff is for special occasions only nowadays), which means quite a lot of cuting down on carbohydrates consumption but also means replacing some with better sugars (so, say, pulse or peas instead of potatoes or pasta)

Mind you, part of the problem is that my work is sitting down in front of a computer, so even with regular exercise I simply need a lot less sugars than I used to eat - if was naturally more physically active in most days beyond the whole walk to work and back thing and two 10km runs a week, cutting down so much on carbohydrate-rich foods would’ve been a bad thing.

Still, its pretty amazing by comparison just how much excess of sugars there was in my diet previously and that was even with some care with what I ate and quite a lot of sweets avoidance.

Fruit yoghurt is pretty much yoghurt with fruit jam added, so it ends up with quite a lot more sugar than the natural stuff which has no added sugar, so ever since I’ve had to start watching out for my sugar intake I’ve started only eating the natural one and adding cinnamon or vanilla extract for flavour.

It’s amazing how after a while of cutting sugars from your food you get used to it, don’t feel the need for it anymore and even start finding the most sugary stuff (like certain kinds of sweets) unpleasantly sweet.

The actual spaghetti you add it to has an even higher percentage of carbohydrates - in the form of starch which the human body easily turns into sugars - than the sauce so paradoxically you’ll end up with less sugar in your blood stream by downing that sauce by itself than if you eat it with spaghetti.

(That said, this is for uncooked spaghetti: when you cook it it grows by absorbing water which reduces the fraction of carbohydrates in the final product, so depending on the type of spaghetti it might or not end up with more carbohydrates than the sauce).

Oh yeah - I’ve had to start watching my carbohydrate intake for health reasons and it’s amazing just how much of that stuff is in processed food: for example “American Style Onion Rings (frozen)” from Lidl is over 40% carbohydrates - so basically the 450g pack of it has 180g of sugars and the kind of stuff your digestive system will turn into sugars.

One would think it would be only starchy foods (like bread, pasta, rice and such) and cakes and sweets that have lots of it, but no, most processed food is loaded with carbohydrates, often already directly as sugars, probably because the cheapest ingredient to bulk it up is flour.

Mind you, lots of natural or lightly processed foods have quite a bit of it - for example natural yoghurt with nothing added has maybe 6% of carbohydrates (tough yoghurt with fruit is way worse, since the adding of fruit is generally mixing it with fruit jam which has a lot of sugar) and most fruits have quite a bit of sugar (for example, common varieties of apple have about 14% of sugar - so your run of the mill apple comes with 1 spoonful of sugar included - and some varieties have a lot more) which is why there’s this funny paradox that natural fruit juice has a lot more sugar in it than the same amount of Coca-Cola (since when you make the fruit juice you throw away the fiber and most of the protein leaving a much higher percentage of sugar than originally).

Generally, the kind of stuff that has almost no carbohydrates are veggies, like lettuce or broccoli.

After the Emissions Scandal and an estimated 10 thousand excess deaths a year in Europe because of diesel emissions: Fuck the European Auto Industry.

Their dragging of feet on moving to EV technology is also disgraceful.

And don’t get me started on the over-reliance on cars in most of Europe.

All in all, they’re a negative for Europe, not a positive, and if they can’t compete with the bloody Chinese, well, let the Free Market they so love for everything else do a little Constructive Destruction on them,

People generally do it because they’re in a political party, plus you get paid for it though I think it takes many months for it to come in (never really worried enough about it to keep an eye out for that money coming into my bank account) and it doesn’t add up to much per hour for what’s a really long day (from about 6 AM to around 10 - 12PM depending on how long it takes to count the votes of one’s polling station).

It’s an interesting experience if a bit tiring.

It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.

Yeah, it’s exactly the same in the very opposite end of Europe (and about as poor) - Portugal - which I know becaused I maned the polling places a couple of times and read the rule book.

Portugal has exactly the same system (I’ve lived in both countries) which has actually even more features (such as letting you pay yours bills at any ATM) than the Dutch one.

I think that at least in Europe the countries were ATMs rely on VISA or Mastercard for inter-bank withdrawals like in the UK and US are the exception rather than the rule.

I live in a 10 million people European country which is the leading cork producer in the World

Also the first European country to explicitly decriminalise drug consumption.

Those two things are unrelated.

Oh yeah, it’s still not at the same level of ease of use as Windows.

It’s massivelly better if compared to the old days in Linux and, curiously, it’s easier for those who in Windows were never “sophisticated” user that did not relly on store frontends to manage the installation for them, but if you’re the kind of user of Windows that does actually know what folders and executable files are, it’s more complex to get going than in Linux.

Curiously in my experience even Linux native games are way more complex to get working in Linux that the Windows equivalent are in Windows (or even Linux: I have at least one game were the Windows version installs almost flawlessly in Linux whilst the Linux version is a “missing library” nightmare), unless they’re recent enough that they come in something like Snap or Flatpack)

In my experience with standalone EXE installers and Lutris, the problem is often that Lutris just guesses wrong the name of the game executable after installation is done or can’t even guess it.

Personally, every single time I had a problem of installing a game with Lutris from an EXE installer and when starting it afterwards the game goes to “Running” (see the left top list) and then quickly ends with no error, it’s Lutris having guessed the game launch EXE incorrectly.

Having started with using Lutris’ GoG integration first (were an install script generally takes care of all that) and only later moved to standalone EXE installers, I can see how one would lose hope on the whole thing if they started with the installers since so far for me almost all of such installations failed to give me something that just runs without tweaks afterwards, and for almost all of them the problem was Lutris picking up the wrong launch EXE or even having no launch EXE at all (which gives you a small and easy to miss warning in the Lutris install log at the end of installation).

If you still can, go and check in the game configuration in Lutris for one of those games (it will be in a tab with only a handful of option, not in the last tab with a ton of obscure options) if the launch EXE is present and correct.

I was lucky that when I moved to Linux some months ago I got used to install my games from Lutris and Steam, which seems to solve most problems and only maybe 1 game of the 15 or so I tried so far wouldn’twork no matter what.

That said, I and to figure out how to do diagnostics and use Winetricks and my little doc of Tips & Trick cover 5 games (out of about 15) so those are the ones that would work only after tweaking.

I still have weird situations like The Sims 3 from Steam not working but the pirate version I tried working flawlessly on first try (so now I know how to install pirated games with Lutris) which is maybe not the kind of thing the publishers would want people to know, but more often than not things just work.

All this to say that it’s way better now than before if you use the kind of tools that wrap Wine (or in the case of Steam, Proton which is a derivative of Wine) with install scripts that will do the necessary game-speciric tweaks for you, but even then you’ll need to learn how to diagnose problems and do the tweaks yourself if you want a higher that 60% or so rate of success or if you want to hoist the Skull & Bones and sail the high seas from your Linux Galleon.

Bullshit!

I’ve been using Windows 7 for years well after end of support and my computer never got hacked!

Oh yes it did

There is a real possibility that the person who would be best for Palestine would be Trump simply because he doesn’t follow through on what he says and is too incompetent when he does.

It’s a very sad state of affairs that the US Presidential Candidate that might be the least Nazi-supporting one is Trump, not because of his ideology not being Fascist but because he’s incompetent, inconsistent and has a tendency for non-interventionism.

You have it backwards: going after the natural voters of the other side in a two-party system is the riskiest thing you can do because the other party has a massive advantage with those voters which is an historical track record of telling them what they want to hear and them voting for it - rightwingers trust them on Rightwing subjects and are used to voting for them.

Even if (and it’s a massive massive if) a party succeeds at it once due to the party on the other side having deviated too much from its traditional ideology, all it takes for the party on the other side is to “get back to its roots” to recover most of those lost votes and subsequently win, whilst meanwhile the leftmost party that moved to the right has created for itself an obstacle in their own “going back to its roots” in the form of a section of the electorate which feels they were betrayed.

Sure, they’ll eventually get it back if they themselves quickly “go back to their roots”, but it will take several electoral cycles.

Further, if that gap remains too long on the Left even in a two party system it would create room for a third to grow, starting by local elections, then places like Congress, then Senate and eventually even the Presidency.

One of of the key ways in which First Past The Post maintains a Power-Duopoly is because growing a party enough to challenge the rest in multiple electoral circles takes time and the duopoly parties will try to stop it (generally by changing back their policies to appeal to the core voters of that new Party).

The US itself once had the Whig Party as one of the power duopoly parties and that exists no more.

The Democrats abandoning the Left is not a stable configuration for them and carries both the risk that the Rightwing electorate sees them as fake and the Leftwing electorate feels betrayed, and now they’re stuck in the middle with a reduced vote.

Whilst the first paragraph does make some sense, it presumes that in such a situation the Republicans would not conclude it’s the style of the candidate rather than his ideas that caused the rout. That might be a little optimist considering that the traditional Republicans’ were just as far right economically before and almost as right in Moral issues, but they had a different style of candidate (remember Reagan?).

It might also be a little optimist to expect an absolute walloping of anybody, Republican or Democrat.

That said, it’s a valid scenario, though it relies on very low probability events.

The second paragraph is inconsistent with every single thing the Democrats have done in their pre-electoral propaganda, from the whole “vote us or get Trump” (something which wouldn’t scare the Right) to the raft of pre-election promises on Left-wing subjects like student debt forgiveness or tightening regulations on giants such as Telecoms a little bit. If they really thought they could win with only votes stolen from the Right, they would be making promises which appeal to the Right, not the Left.

Besides, the whole idea that Rightwing voters would go for the less-Rightwing party rather than the more-Rightwing party is hilarious: why go for the copy if you can get the real deal?

From what I’ve seen in other countries were Center-Left Parties totally dropped their appeal to the Left and overtly went to appeal to the Right, they got pummeled because the Maths don’t add up and, as I said above, Rightwing votes will choose the “genuine article” over the “wannabes”.

It’s not by chance that in Europe even whilst becoming full-on Neoliberal parties, Center-Left parties maintained a leftwing discourse and would throw a bone to the Left once in a while (say, minimum wage raises) when in government.