Phat Unplugged

Replying to both Message 120 and Message 121. Why is that not a surprise? You've been acting delusional for months now. Why would you think your delusional behavior is limited to just gold, government authoritarianism and the national debt? You've got to assume that you're delusional in all aspects of your life.Do not entertain any of your own ideas about how to treat yourself. Do not listen to yourself at all. Everything you do should be under a doctor's advice and orders. Do this or you will die after losing a limb or two.I'm going to beat a dead horse and remind you that you have nearly zero ability to make connections between ideas and facts. Almost everything you believe is what appeals to you, not what's based in fact. You only believe factual things that immediately beat you over the head if you go against them. If you somehow came to believe your TV would still work after being unplugged, you would immediately be disabused of this silly idea. Or if you somehow came to believe stoves aren't hot, you would immediately be disabused of this silly idea.But taking your medications, monitoring your blood sugar, and eating appropriately does not provide immediate feedback. It's as if when you unplugged the TV it took a couple years before it stopped working. In the months after unplugging it you might come to believe that your TV really doesn't need to be plugged in, because the feedback wasn't immediate. And so in the exact same way, when you ignore your medication and don't check your blood sugar and don't eat appropriately and yet you still feel much the same after a few months, you come to believe that diabetes care isn't really that important. But, as is true of almost all your ideas, you'd be wrong. Dead wrong.The delay between your self-abuse and your death was at one time decades, but it has now caught up to you and you now have just a couple years. If you can turn this around you might live a couple more decades, if you're lucky, but if not then, well, don't bother registering for the 2024 election.You are not competent to run your own life. You're probably not even competent to follow the advice of doctors, but that's still your best hope, unless you can afford to hire a full time nurse named Megadeath who's as scary as her name.You will not be with us two years from now. I hope you prove me wrong. You Christians constantly remind me of the joke of the devout believer caught in a flood who as the waters rise declines assistance from the police, a rowboat, and a helicopter, saying each time that the Lord would protect him. God expresses surprise when the man shows up in heaven the next day, saying he didn't understand how the man could have drowned since he'd sent the police, a rowboat and a helicopter. You're going to turn up in heaven and God will be flabbergasted, sputtering about making available to you for years the full depth and breadth of modern diabetic medicine.While in college I met a girl who had Type I diabetes. She was attending nursing school, and she graduated and became a nurse, and we remained friends. Being in the health field she was acutely aware of all the dangers of diabetes and took scrupulous care of herself. She was one of the early adopters of the diabetes pump, having started using one back in 1979. Despite how well she cared for herself she died at age 47 from complications of diabetes, leaving behind a husband and two sons.There, I've beaten this dead horse to smithereens now.--Percy

Do not listen to anyone telling you your A1C is unimportant.You and LNA and Marc and Christian7 and Michael MD are members of a large class of people who judge truth by how clearly and effectively it was communicated, how certain and confident someone seems, how well it aligns with what they already believe, and the effectiveness of its emotional appeal.A couple examples. This sounds good, right: Or how about this: Nice, huh. Anyone can write garbage like this, it's easy, and the "likes" pile up much faster when you write stuff like this than when you write true things like, "As a proportion of GDP there is nothing scary about our national debt." Doesn't really get the blood boiling like the other stuff, does it? And when one's subconscious is roiled with worry about one's health problems, it really helps tamp it down if you can distract yourself by getting worked up over fictional crises.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

He doesn't even understand what *he* writes, let alone what other people write.--Percy

Even back in the 1970's when I had a close friend who was an actual practicing diabetic the importance of monitoring blood sugar so you could work out how much insulin you needed at any given time was well established. If this endocrinologist wasn't stressing this then he was definitely not a "good endocrinologist". My guess is that you're calling him a "good endocrinologist" because you liked him and not because of any display of medical expertise. By the time you went to the low-carb specialists it was far too late for that. By that point a a low carb diet could only act as a supplement to medications like insulin for your dangerous blood sugar levels. If he were reputable he would have seen your A1C and sent you right back to the endocrinologist. That he tried to help you means he was either a quack or an opportunist.There is only one alternative for you now: insulin. You need insulin in one or more of the many provided forms along with self monitoring so you know when and how much to take and can establish a routine of meals and medication. Then there are a variety of medications available that can be helpful. There's acarbose or miglitol to mitigate the sugar spikes of meals, biguanides like metformin can increase your sensitivity to insulin, and a host of others.Diabetes causes 73,000 amputations annually, and about 79,000 deaths, the 7th leading cause. How much of all that is due to adopting the wrong course of treatment or not following the treatment, who knows?--Percy

If you're talking about an A1C test, I thought you just had one. Why would you need another already?You should be checking your blood sugar several times a day so that you can properly medicate. Use of long acting insulin does not mean that your blood sugar can't experience highs and lows during the day, particularly around meals. As meal time approaches you should check your blood sugar in case it is low so that you can eat earlier than you normally would, or perhaps have an appropriate snack like orange juice. And a little after meal time you should check it again in case it is spiking so you can take some short acting insulin. I hope you have some.--Percy

High blood sugar has a number of negative health consequences, some that you noted, others that you didn't such as heart disease, stroke, kidney disease and nerve problems. You know that 177 is too high for a fasting blood sugar (morning blood sugar before breakfast), which is what I assume you mean when you said "morning 177". Your target range for morning blood sugar should be 80 to 130.The ultimate goal is to wean you off reliance on insulin, which may or may not be possible, we don't know yet. That will be between you and your endocrinologist. For now, stop ravaging your body's health with high blood sugar by taking enough insulin in the morning to get it below 130. Up to 180 two hours after meals is okay as long as it is gradually declining (that's the ADA recommendation - personally that sounds very high to me and I like the International Diabetes Federation recommendation of 140).You might try taking pre and post blood sugar readings for various activities like fasting and exercise and see if you can ever get your blood sugar to occasionally drop below 100.--Percy

There are hints of an inverse relationship between consumption of organic food and risk of T2D. They haven't established why, but one speculation is lower levels of pesticides. I found a couple studies:

• Inverse Association between Organic Food Purchase and Diabetes Mellitus in US Adults
  
• Prospective association between organic food consumption and the risk of type 2 diabetes: findings from the NutriNet-Santé cohort study

-Percy

Reply to Message 665 in the Choosing a faith thread. Ringo commented on a very old and very accomplished chatbot called Eliza from the 1980's. Today's chatbots seem to be written by children who have a good mastery of software and browser based GUIs but have moved the state of progress on chatbots considerably backwards.I recently tried another chatbot called Woebot that is supposed to be a mental health assistant. It got a positive writeup in Discover Magazine. I quickly became frustrated with it and deleted it from my phone, but another article appeared in the Post or Times today by a journalist who touted how helpful he found it. I found the damn thing's chatting of psychological platitudes to me ridiculous (I had to invent the problems I was describing), but he found it helpful. I think maybe someone in true need will grasp at anything.I also found it had no idea what I was actually saying. It appeared to be reacting to certain key words, not meaning. For instance, if you say, "I'm not at all depressed about this, but I do find the situation distressing," it will pick up on the word "depressed" and start presenting ideas for how to address your depression.This experience with recent chatbots has left me feeling that perhaps some significant aspect of what we deem progress is merely change combined with forgetting a lot of what the previous generation knew. Who thinks that virtual buttons are an advance over real buttons? Who thinks that TV as it transitions to streaming has gotten better? Has anyone here had a car accident or near accident because they were forced to look at the touchpad while driving because the buttons can't be felt?I have a universal remote with real buttons. I don't have to look at it for most functions. I tried one with virtual buttons a little over a decade ago, it was the high-end popular one but I forget the name now, and I programmed it up the kazoo, then abandoned it after only a week. I don't like having to look at my remote to hit a button.--Percy

The Dunning-Kruger Effect has undoubtedly been mentioned to you before, but it bears repeating. In 1999 Dunning and Kruger published the paper Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. As explained at The Dunning-Kruger Effect:

quote:

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In it, they prove the phenomenon that people with very little knowledge of a particular subject are confident and outspoken on the subject. This lack of knowledge leads to two things – firstly, you have little idea of what you are actually doing or talking about, and secondly, your sense of confidence makes it impossible for you to realize just how little you know.

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Combine this confidence with an echo chamber full of confirmations of false knowledge and beliefs (e.g., "Fiat currencies are unviable") and you have someone who (to exaggerate a little) can't even be convinced that rain is wet.A good recent though unfortunately no longer living example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action was the California gentleman, Mike Hughes, who, convinced the world was flat, built himself a rocket so he could blast into space and prove it. The rocket crashed and he died. Incredibly, but reflecting his own confidence in his ideas, he was only trying to reach a height of a mile, a height achieved within minutes on any airliner as it climbs to its cruising altitude of about 5 miles. He had undoubtedly been a passenger on such flights many times, probably even had a window seat.--Percy

I'm replying again because I find I'm not sure how you meant this. By "critical" do you mean saying to yourself, "Well, that's a stupid idea!" If that's what you mean then please rest assured that it's not what anyone else here means.What we mean is subjecting one's ideas to constructive critical examination by asking questions like, "What specific information leads me to believe that this is true?" In your case too often the answer is, "I saw a nifty YouTube video."--Percy

We've told you about the Dunning-Kruger effect before, that competence and confidence are inversely related. The more confidence you have in your thinking abilities the more it should scare you.There's also the messaging from those who know you. Everyone here sees you as fairly awash in irrationality and unsound thinking. Either he's talking nonsense, or you're unable to describe what he's saying clearly enough to make it sound like he's making sense. Decreased purchasing power is called inflation. All currencies experience a little inflation most of the time. It's a characteristic of a healthy economy, a reflection of healthy demand for goods. When demand exceeds supply by too great a margin then inflation increases. Higher inflation is seen as problematic because it decreases the value of savings, but this is far less a problem than in the past because a much higher proportion of savings are in stocks and bonds, usually by way of mutual funds.In general the U.S. is doing much better on inflation than the rest of the developed world. Missing from your missive is Taggert's reason for believing the U.S. is heading for higher inflation. By the Federal Reserve? They already do a lot of data gathering, but they've got a lot on their plate, plus they reduced staffing by 2% last year. Does Rickards think they *could* do this if they wanted to, or that they *are* doing this? I believe the former but not the latter. I'm not familiar with this use of the word transcripts. Do you mean transactions?My opinion? You still sound crazy in almost every post, and you keep forgetting that the videos you're watching are entertainment, not information.--Percy

Given the subject matter I was guessing that CBDC means Central Bank Digital Currency. It's a digital form of the currency of a country's central bank. None have been implemented yet as far as I know, and I don't understand how they would differ from the digital balances that banks maintain on computers.I seem to recall that Phat has brought up CBDC's before. It doesn't appear to be something he understands. It's probably described in videos he watches as something that we should be very worried about because it will increase inflation and destroy the dollar as we know it. "The Sky Is Falling" - you heard it here first.--Percy

I don't think denial and pugnacity are the answer. What I find most amazing is that you haven't lost everything.--Percy

You are hopeless.--Percy

Rationality. Five people speaking nonsense is still nonsense. It's because of US statute 31 USC § 5116-5117 so that the value of certificates issued on transferred gold between government agencies do not fluctuate in value. The current value is $42.22/ounce. I think it's a bookkeeping convenience for internal government accounting.When the U.S. government sells gold in the form of coins it is at far above the going rate. For example, consider this gold coin from the U.S. Mint: It weighs 1 troy oz. and is nearly 100% gold. The value of gold today is $2156.50/ounce, but this coin sells for $3020.--Percy