241–250 of 260 posts
This reminds me of a post by another Indian student visiting the US. The observation that that person made which stuck with me the most was his realization that rich people dressed in a manner that wasn't very different from folks in other social strata -- it was much harder to tell at a glance how much money someone had. I think this is broadly true.
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Although technically true, it's much easier (and quicker) to gain X calories than to lose them via exercise. So if you're overweight, your number one priority is to control your diet. Regular exercise is important for health reasons, but not to lose weight. There are exceptions. If you're a professional cyclist, for example, and able to output several hundreds of Watt for several hours, 6 days a week, you'll quickly…
If only thing you will do is to control calories, you are pretty much guaranteed to get into the yoyo cycle of loosing/gaining weight. Majority, like almost all, people who only focus on calories stop performing in their lives, becomes tired/sick, give up and gain weight. If you are overweight, if your concern is not purely temporary esthetic, focusing on calories control is receipt for long term failure. Also, the e…
> It is to build muscle, raise temperature, speed up your metabolism.
Those effects are negligible compared to eating, say, 20% less. In particular because exercise makes you hungry, and if you don't control your diet, you'll regain the lost energy through increased appetite afterwards. So again, yes, please exercise regularly, but that alone won't make you lose weight.
> High level competitive sport has nothing to do anything. It has zero to do with what average adult experiences.
Uh, yeah, that's exactly what I wrote: professional athletes are an exception, and their case doesn't apply to regular people.
The biggest one most people from India might experience is tap water - drinking it takes getting used to. The idea that tap water isn’t safe to drink unless it’s treated in some way is ingrained. And when you start drinking the tap water, it takes a while to get used to the taste (charcoal filters can help). The author hasn’t started driving a car yet, but when they do they’ll discover that the rules of the road are…
>electricity is always available although that might not be surprising to someone from a wealthy, urban background in India It won't be surprising to pretty much any Indian. When was the last time you visited the country?
Maharashtra staring at load shedding as 13 coal-run power plants shut down - https://m.economictimes.com/industry/energy/power/maharashtr...
Is that recent enough for you? And these are urban areas, not rural ones that are lower priority. I’ve actually lived in a rural area for several years. For a couple of those years we only had electricity for 10 hours out of 24.
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>electricity is always available although that might not be surprising to someone from a wealthy, urban background in India It won't be surprising to pretty much any Indian. When was the last time you visited the country?
Power cuts set to return to Chennai after disappearing during COVID-19 lockdown - https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/chennai/2020/jul/10/... Maharashtra staring at load shedding as 13 coal-run power plants shut down - https://m.economictimes.com/industry/energy/power/maharashtr... Is that recent enough for you? And these are urban areas, not rural ones that are lower priority. I’ve actually lived in a rural area…
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pretty sure it's same everywhere in world, you have it either powdered (flour like), granulated (salt like, but slightly bigger) or in cubes oh well and then there is China from what I remember, where they sell something like quite big rocks even in regular supermarkets, unseen in Europe
Depends on where in Europe. You can certainly find rock sugar/lump sugar in supermarkets in, say, Germany (where it's called "Kandiszucker"), whereas in the UK you're likely to have more success in small ethnic shops.
> The people that I see day to day are generally extremely fit. (Or is it just students?) At least in germany it's quite depended on your social class. I am also a student I am sitting in a huge library. There is literally not a single obese person here and nearly everyone I personally know goes to the gym. I only know a single person who's a bit bigger, but he plays American football and needs more "mass". He's defi…
Part of the mismatch between statistics and what one observed is surely social class. Most people I know are also a normal weight (I think) but there other parts of the city or country where one will see many overweight people. Another part is that people often don’t know what an overweight or obese person looks like. That is, people hear the word and think of someone who waddles instead of walking or who takes up tw…
I‘m from Germany and even I found the vastness of everything in the US remarkable. In some regards it‘s amazing: the country itself, the national parks, the wide roads, parking space, buildings. In other regards it‘s obscene: beverage sizes, package sizes in Wal-Mart (some are larger than what our local wholesale stores have to offer), and SUVs and pick-up trucks. When I rent a car on my trip, I was glad I upgraded t…
Not everywhere. I met an American who had grown up with his US military family in Germany, who thought that Westchester County (just north of New York City) looked like the German countryside.
I worked at a multi-national company that frequently flew people to the United States HQ offices for short visits or sometimes longer stays. For many of the younger developers this was their first direct exposure to the United States. Interestingly, most of them had built up a lot of preconceived notions about the United States from social media sites like Reddit. Many of those sites project an extremely pessimistic…
And of course, because Reddit is an American site that is majority American, most of said criticism comes from self-loathing Americans. The best description of Reddit I've ever seen is "maladjusted 19 year old desperate to prove that he is smarter than his parents" (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ihk09/iama_cuban_who_l...>).
I worked at a multi-national company that frequently flew people to the United States HQ offices for short visits or sometimes longer stays. For many of the younger developers this was their first direct exposure to the United States. Interestingly, most of them had built up a lot of preconceived notions about the United States from social media sites like Reddit. Many of those sites project an extremely pessimistic…
> third world country with cell phones As a Brit who's visited a few times, to me it seems that America is both the glittering future and a banana republic at the same time , overlaid on top of one another. There's no ceiling and no floor. Lots of places have glaring poverty right round the corner from the tourist parts, all round the world. Unfortunately there was a spate of British tourists getting shot in Florida…
Would you describe an ex-mining town in northern England or the midlands as being the latter without the proximity to the former?
I worked at a multi-national company that frequently flew people to the United States HQ offices for short visits or sometimes longer stays. For many of the younger developers this was their first direct exposure to the United States. Interestingly, most of them had built up a lot of preconceived notions about the United States from social media sites like Reddit. Many of those sites project an extremely pessimistic…
>I have to admit, one of my guilty pleasures was watching people slowly realize that the United States, while not without problems, is actually not a bad place. This comment hit home: I did some work with a university that sent a lot of grad students to Europe. It was always fun watching the fantasy that Europe has everything figured out crash and burn.
Health care is an example of this. Having Canada and the UK, the foreign countries Americans are most familiar with, both have single-payer systems (and the UK also having a monolithic delivery system, and Canada more or less outlawing private health insurance) with zero cost on delivery for most care gives Americans a distorted view of healthcare in other developed countries. There's really no meaningful definition of "universal health care" that excludes the US post-Obamacare while including (say) Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. All three countries are like the US in a) mandating having some form of coverage, and b) having said coverage come from a variety of public and private sources.
Or copays and deductibles. In France, the normal reimbursement for care is 70%, much like that of a US high-deductible plan. Paying for ambulance rides in Switzerland is the norm, not the exception. But a comment on Reddit by an American complaining about how he had to pay for being taken to a hospital in an ambulance and how this wouldn't happen anywhere else will get 10,000 upvotes even though such a statement wouldn't necessarily be true outside Canada and the UK. To put another way, the Canada/UK model of single-payer and 100% free on delivery (much less the UK model of monolithic everything else) is, in their own ways, aberrations, with much of the developed world using mixed public/private models with meaningful cost on delivery that would not be unfamiliar to an American.