[a]

The machine was busted when I went back.  I eventually had my go on the body fat machine yesterday.

I have been going to the gym a couple of times a week and the highlights of the results are as follows.

Weight 95.7kg.
Body Fat 30.5%.
Metabolic Age 70 years.

No idea what the bottom two were a month ago. Glad the intervening pain was all worth it. 

FML on the metabolic age, might take that with me to the Super Seniors?  Struggling to believe that the 70 years is accurate.  My dad was massive and never did any exercise.  Think he must have died at a metabolic age of 120 if this is accurate.  RIP big man.

Will hopefully get this down to 65 on my next update.

FWIW muscle mass was good and visceral fat was only amber.

This is the first time I've heard of metabolic age. What is it anyway?

You burn calories by doing nothing - that is your metabolic rate

In general you burn less calories doing nothing the older you get

So if your chronological age is 45 but your metaoblic rate is what most 70 year olds have then your metabolic age is 70

However - it's the fluffiest of sports science fluff

It's a measurement to compare but it doesn't really mean very much

[Except]

The problem for me is that unless outlook or the chrome browser itself is the source of the data breach or I have some malware somewhere, I can't work out where the username password combo has been accessed.

The message you received - is not like anything I've had with Chrome, and Chrome does tell me about passwords being compromised

There's a chance you're just on an updated version of Chrome (or something like GMail has slightly different version)

But how it works on Chrome (at least how I've got it) is in settings/passwords - it shows all your saved usernames and passwords

If any are compromised there is a red triangle near the top which says "check passwords" and how many are compromised

When you click on that it shows you all the compromised passwords with an external link to the websites themselves where you can change your password

Except when it tells you your password is compromised - it doesn't mean someone definitely knows your username and password

What they do is monitor website security breaches. If a website gets compromised and passwords leaked - it flags every user of that website as having compromised passwords. So if a site has a billion users and a 100 passwords get hacked - all billion users would get notified that their password is compromised.

What you've described doesn't "exactly" match this - but it could be along those lines

If it had a link in the original email it obviously could still just be spam.

That family line was from 1820

miner
miner
miner
miner
miner -> pools win -> newsagent
                                university lecturer
                                doctor, teacher, me (pensions bod)

Which says a lot about the opportunities that must have been missed by many due to a lack of education.

My wife's family history is very different to mine

Mine has strands of Ag lab -> ag lab -> ag lab; and fishermen -> fishermen -> fishermen and sailor -> sailor -> domestic servant ->sailor

But hers is much more teacher -> teacher -> lawyer -> teacher -> university professor

Which I think somewhat reinforces your point

The only thing I can think of is that under Chrome Settings - Privacy Settings - Site Settings - Images - you can choose to default to display or not display images; but that should effect everything.

Just checking one of them with the url link taken out

The url was just directly the website - that's why that's all it did

It doesn't link to anything without that - is it visible?
(that's a check to see if your settings were blocking displaying it because it thought the link was dodgy)

To cut a long story short Dr Kluzek cured my plantar fasciitis by drawing some blood from my heel, spinning it in a centrifuge until it was dizzy and then injecting it back in. Amazing.

How on earth did someone work out that this would be a cure?

I have no idea Dave but this is what happens.


https://www.hss.edu/newsroom_treating-injuries-blood-spinning-prp.asp

I googled how it worked and I think John Hopkins hospital probably were the most accurate. Their explanation started with, "The mechanism behind PRP injections is not completely understood"

Or as Science Wife explained it - "Sports Science is often just a bit flubbily"

I think that means, they know it does something, they can see it has an effect - they're not entirely sure why

Click to see full-size image.

Alternatively there's this comparison

She's still going to be a woman in her 60's however you cut it - but there's a big difference between an unexpected candid shot years away from public scrutiny and a press photo for when you've got prepared for the event and you know you're somewhat in the public eye

Click to see full-size image.

[Bonhams]

A story very much relating to the previous discussion about NFT's being worth whatever someone will pay for them

NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet struggles to sell

Someone bought an NFT of the first tweet for $2.9m and decided to flip it for a profit after one year. They put it up for auction and suggested a guide price of $25m

Even with donating half to charity that would leave them with about $10m profit

Except - as of this article - the highest bid was about $6000 and even with the publicity of stories like this the bid has only gone up to $10k as of when I last looked

The person who owns it may well think this is a valuable asset which "should" appreciate in value - but other people have to think the same way.

The seller has said, "...this NFT is the Mona Lisa of the digital world" - the problem with that analogy is that it is not. It is not art.

If you wanted to have a real world (fungible) equivalent, it's more like a letter sent by someone like Edison.

Something interesting, something fairly unique, something valuable even - but not Mona Lisa valuable

Bonhams
Typed Letter Signed ("Thos A Edison"),
Sold for US$ 956 inc. premium

NFTs don’t have to be a JPEG.

Rather IMO in their next use case they will be a digital receipt of ownership of a tangible real-world asset.

The image example was obvious because of the art comparison

And what is the advantage of an NFT receipt compared to - just a receipt?

Oh I wasn’t having a dig - I find it fascinating that society (more broadly) has come to conflate “NFT” with “JPEG”.

The digital receipt, effectively, makes the item tradable 24/7 to a global audience without process involvement beyond an exchange/similar listing. Immediate transaction, full log of ownership and history, NFT can be used to capture key information through the item’s life. Information capture can be used to drive improved customer experience / increase monetisation.

The example I’ve given to people is if my golf club operated membership by NFT.

Scan on gates on the way in, automated message to welcome me by name. “Mr Gascoigne we’ve noticed you typically like a bacon roll and a white Americano before you tee off - would you like that today? // We know you’re a terrible golfer who loses lots of balls - would you like a box of Pro V1s marked up for you before you start? We’ve got you booked for a 1040 tee with Steve, John and Dave - their Satnavs show they’re all doing alright but Dave may be a little late - in case that happens we’ve held a 1120 tee for you” etc.

I’m sure plenty of businesses do this already with 101 different systems. I could, however, see a decentralised system effectively consolidating this market.

Eg I go to a DIFFERENT golf club, arrive at the gates, “Mr Gascoigne we know you typically like……”

While I agree there is a place for blockchain applications - the example - the only good example so far - I've seen is that Olive Oil growers can bottle their olive oil with a chip in the cap with the blockchain transaction encoded on it for sale - that blockchain transaction gets updated whenever it is sold (grower - exporter - wholesaler - retailer - customer) and the chip gets broken if the bottle is opened. That means the end customer can scan the chip and ensure that there has been an unbroken chain from the grower (apparently fake olive oil and adulterated olive oil are a big thing in the high end market).

But

The example you have given - you don't need NFT for that. For the system to pick up on that behaviour you would need to scan, say, a membership card when you went in and bought things (and recorded results? I don't really know how golf works) - you don't need an NFT for that. It could all just be done digitally already - you're effectively just describing what every loyalty card has the potential of doing.

This seems to be the problem with all the best blockchain ideas I've seen, they do work, or they would work if they're just a concept - but they aren't any improvement on existing ways of doing the same thing.

NFTs don’t have to be a JPEG.

Rather IMO in their next use case they will be a digital receipt of ownership of a tangible real-world asset.

The image example was obvious because of the art comparison

And what is the advantage of an NFT receipt compared to - just a receipt?

An NFT is often called digital art. My own personal opinion which is probably not shared by many is that art is basically a giant scam. A massive rip off. A waste of time. Useless.

So it follows that digital art would be the same. People get ripped of for paintings and sculptures every day. They also sell for ridiculous prices the same as some NFTs have done (bored apes). So what is the difference? I wonder if David McWilliams has any paintings on the wall of his very nice house. And if he considers himself also exploited?

They have a similarity in that their value is basically whatever anyone will pay for it

But actual art is a physical object (the art available to buy is at least)

NFT's don't represent a physical object. They don't represent copyright ownership of the original creation, they don't stop people legally copying and sharing the original creation, they don't stop copyright owners of the creation creating multiple NFT's - all pointing at the same digital object.

I saw someone describe buying an NFT is like buying a url pointing to a website - and you don't even get to own the website, just the url

Even if you pay $100m for a painting - you physically own a painting that you can put on your wall and nobody else can.

This seems a lot different to NFT's

Right so if the government can seize my property and freeze all my money at any time if I take part in a protest that they don't agree with...

It wasn't the protest - I think it was more all the criminal damage. Even if it was just blocking the public highway - you know we already arrested the people doing the roadway blocking for the Insulate Britain protests. Along with the Unexplained Wealth Orders (a) you are correct it could happen in the UK and (b) it won't - to you - unless you do something illegal. That might be an illegal protest - but it will still be illegal and it would be up to you to decide how strongly you feel about it.

You can call the Canadian truckers thing the thin edge of the wedge - but the Canadian government used that power for the first time with this. The unexplained wealth orders could be called the thin end of the wedge - the truth is, they're just not. They're ways to tackle crime, and they're needed because people are very good at "getting away with it"

...Until they ban us because they don't agree with our politics or our religion or because we are a sex worker, or because we have a bad credit score or because we are Russian or Iranian. Or until they decide they aren't servicing that country or until they decide to hike up their fees and gouge us because they act as a monopoly and we have no alternative....

How likely do you think this is for, say, 99% of the population of the UK? (for example)

...
It just annoys me when people are saying crypto is useless, pointless or irrelevant just because it doesn't help them in their own specific life situation. I just want people to be open minded to it. That is all I am asking.

Effectively what you seem to be saying is that cryptocurrencies are useful if you are in a situation where the penalty, loss and instability of using the cryptocurrency are still less than the risk, instability and availability of using your own countries system.

Like I said (quite early in this thread, not just now) - crypto might be a useful reserve currency, like US dollars, for a few places in the world; but there's still no evidence to suggest that it could be anything other than either a super niche currency or a particularly gamble-y sort of "investment" mechanism.

"The use case for crypto grows every week, every month"

Well, maybe

But in terms of the points you have raised

There were hundreds of Canadians who had their assets frozen - for less than a week

And that was hundreds out of a population of 38 million

The UK has Unexplained Wealth Orders at it's disposal - that doesn't necessarily have to tie in banks; they can seize property with that

Al Capone (and several others) were taken down by accountancy; finance has always been a weapon to use against crime and disorder

Yes, there are unstable economies in the world that have generally used US dollars as their unofficial currency because it's much more stable than their own currency and places like that might have find a benefit to switching to a cryptocurrency.

But 99% of the population in an average (rich, western) country will never need to transfer money internationally, 99.999...% of the population will never have a run in with state sanctioned asset seizure

And about that level probably do trusts the banks with their money, and national governments to regulate them

They don't have to have your best interests at heart - the banks want to make money, the governments want the banks to grease the wheels of the economy - they only have to have their own best interests at heart and that will keep everything running smoothly for you.

That's why monetary shocks like 1929, 1987 and 2008 stand out - because they're so unusual

For context about 5% was wiped off the world economy in 2008 - one of the worst obviously

Cryptocurrencies tend to have that level of variance several times a year - and there is no self interest from anyone behind them to protect any consumer.


EDIT and in case it seems too much like dismissing those in non-rich, non-western countries - yes you make a reasonable point that if you're a citizen in somewhere like Zimbabwe and want to do business with someone in Belarus then cryptocurrencies might well be a good choice - but I question it's relevance to the vast majority of people who are ever likely to read this thread

How do we know who's in the right here?
...

I thought these days it was generally agreed that expanding your country by invading your neighbours was bad?

Is there any doubt that is the end goal for Russia?

A lot of people on twitter exclaiming that "gypsy" is an offensive term and that Roma should only ever be used

eg
https://twitter.com/madeline_cct/status/1489927947729395713?s=20&t=wBUKK7kNJ-KD61hGifUNcg

I thought that was a generally used "official" term now?

Is it a Europe vs the UK thing maybe?

gypsy is an offensive term Jon, although that's what officialdom and the media insist on using.

Gypsy however is fine.

I deliberately used the lower case because that's the only thing I've seen from people commenting on it

I don't think they're making a statement about the difference between gypsy and Gypsy - from what I've seen many seem to be equating it to the n* word for black people

In the tweet I linked as an example she says something like, "if a Roma person calls themselves a gypsy that doesn't give other people the right to use that term"