Annabelle

A few things came to mind reading your post. I'm not an expert in health/nutrition, so take this with a grain of salt, but it is what I have gleaned over the years. The more overweight you are, the easier it is to lose weight (there is that saying about how the last 10 pounds is the hardest to lose). So keep that in mind, and don't think you must be doing something wrong if the pounds aren't dropping as rapidly as they were at first. Weight isn't really even a good way to measure your success. Ideally, as you are losing fat, you are gaining muscle. Muscle burns fat, so it is great to have around, but it is also heavier than fat. Scales can therefore be misleading. I personally haven't owned a scale for years. Related to the above point, what kind of exercise do you do? I think that trying to lose weight by controlling your diet alone is a recipe for failure, because the all-important exercise component is missing. Not only will exercise help you burn calories and gain fat-burning muscle, it will help with stress-management (one of your triggers for overeating). Weight training would be great if you can manage it, but the most important thing is to find an activity you enjoy, that gets your body moving and your heart rate up for about an hour a day. Long walk? Ball hockey? Jump rope? Swimming? Biking? Trail running? The list goes on forever, and you don't ever have to see the inside of a gym, if you're not into gyms. If you're anything like me, the physical mechanics of eating can be comforting (repetitive chewing, swallowing, the hand-to-mouth action, feeling of food in belly, etc). You have been training your brain for years and years to enjoy this (literally, building neural paths that react favorably in response to doing it). The desire to binge-eat is not going to go away overnight, if ever. It may come around less frequently, but it will still be there, so I suggest picking a plan of action for when it does come around. Maybe you can satisfy the urge by binging on celery and humus, for example. If so, keep some of those handy in the fridge! Good luck!

The study data I have seen suggest spanking ought to be viewed with neutrality or mild suspicion. In your wildest fantasies, did this really not occur to you?! And this conclusion could be easily deduced from the OP. There are two ways one could go with the spanking question (and this is a general theme, if you look at philosophy/science papers on any topic): 1) Is spanking good, or bad? 2) Can we prove hypothesis X regarding spanking? (e.g. hypothesis: spanking a child causes their IQ to drop). Failing to prove a hypothesis doesn't say anything except that you failed to prove the hypothesis (maybe you're just bad at collecting or analyzing data). Succeeding in proving the hypothesis doesn't answer question 1), because question 1) is such an all-encompassing question. There could be dozens or hundreds or facts regarding spanking to consider. And facts aren't even necessary. You could talk in abstract terms about the dignity of a person, or, as you have, you could appeal to our moral instincts, i.e. that spanking an adult seems wrong, and what makes a child any different? If you want to go after question 1) (pretzelogik and Stef), and facts aren't the most important thing to you, be bold and say so. Don't just grab onto stats that seem to support your argument, but are actually built on shaky studies. Doing so will only distract and detract from your overall point.

I just got to thinking (and forgive me if it's forward to talk as if the two of you are going to end up together, but that's the way you introduced the situation)... Before you two met each other, neither one of you could have known whether or not you would end up being the spouse with the higher income. Maybe it would be reasonable for a nurse to expect to be the one who makes less, and for an engineer to expect to be the one who makes more, but you couldn't know for sure. So for all you knew, it could have been you who would be the lower earner and would have to stay home. You say that discovering that would have come as a shock to you, so maybe that is exactly what she is going through (or doubly so for her if she expected to be part of a dual-income household, where there would be no chance of having to give up her career). Thus my other piece of advice would be not to push too hard. If you're not planning on having kids for a while, you guys have time to ease into the idea. Incidentally, I'm not sold on the whole "school sucks" thing. There were aspects of school that definitely sucked for me, but I'm glad my parents didn't homeschool me. They were pretty clueless about the world when they were younger, and I didn't think they could have provided me with a quality education. They taught me the things they knew about in the evenings, and for the rest, I had teachers with years of experience teaching children. Maybe things are different now that we have the internet... My main complaint is that I didn't feel comfortable talking to my parents about any upsetting things that happened during my day, so a lot of experiences remained unprocessed until I became self-aware enough to process them on my own. I think the most important thing is to work to maintain an open relationship with your kids, so that they feel comfortable coming to you with anything. You can help them figure out how they feel about events, you can help them problem-solve, and they can feel secure knowing that you'll step in if the situation is just too much for them to handle. I think kids are resilient enough to go through a lot without getting too damaged, as long as they have that support system at home. Not only that, but they'll learn how to deal with challenging situations. Great practice for adult life, where there is no one to shield you from the world at large.

Good luck! By the way, not sure if it's just my computer, but your post goes off the edge of my screen without offering a horizontal scrollbar. I had to copy + paste it into a text editor to read the right half of it. Did you write it in a word processor or something? I have the best luck here either typing directly into the web form, or typing into a basic text editor and pasting into the web form. If you write it in a fancy word processor and paste it here, the text brings along formatting styles from the word processor, causing all sorts of issues.

Try this thought experiment: Imagine your girlfriend made more $$$ than you, and therefore it would make more economic sense for her to be the breadwinner. How would you feel about giving up 10-15 years of the prime of your working life in order to raise your kids? Sure, you get to form strong relationships with your kids, and have fun with them, etc. But you also lose your career, lose any fulfillment you get from working, get to spend less time with adults, spend a lot of time doing housework, and so on. When the time eventually comes to return to work, it will be too late for you to get very far. In the meantime, you will all be trying to survive on a single person's income, so money will be tight. For me personally, there is no way I would give up my career. I'd rather give up having kids, so that is what I plan to do. I don't know how your girlfriend feels in that regard, but I would strongly encourage you to spend some time finding that out. Really listen to everything she has to say on the subject. Be open to having your mind changed about some things. I predict that if you approach this with the "how do I convince her to see things my way?" mindset, things will go badly. I'd put absolutely every card on the table, and work with her to find the optimal solution. There are lots of types of schools and childcare out there, and lots of working arrangements, too. In sum, I think that if either of you feels pushed into doing something you don't want to do, resentment will set in just as soon as the novelty of having kids wears off.

I take it from the silence that I made a good point and no one has any counterarguments? It's not a huge deal, but I am proud of myself for having dispelled a myth (that even I believed for a moment) about small donations. I hope others find it useful in deciding how to donate.

I'm a donor. But it makes no sense for you to care about that. The merits or otherwise of an argument don't depend on donations. Same here, and I agree. To answer your question, Patrick, here is the part of Stef's post that my post is in response to: I don't know if the convenience store analogy is apt, because I don't know how convenience stores are charged for transactions, and I don't have time to investigate right now. Fortunately, the issue here is not convenience stores, but paypal. In this case of paypal, I have demonstrated that it is the frequency of donation, completely independent of donation size, that determines the amount of $$ lost to paypal. So assuming that Bob is not donating more frequently than the average person (say, monthly), Stef is not losing out on any more of Bob's money than he is the average person's. If Stef wants to see more of the money intended for him winding up in his own bank account, he should encourage everyone to save up and donate larger amounts less frequently, not just Bob. The only question left, from my perspective, is why Bob is donating less overall than the average person. The answer could be as simple as that Bob listens to fewer podcasts than the average person. Only having time to listen to 1 podcast a week (=$2/month) seems entirely plausible to me. In other words, I think my post has everything to do with Stef's post. If the above didn't make sense (looooooong day; so tired) let me know and I'll try to clarify.

Regarding the argument that it would be better for people donating small amounts to save up and donate less frequently, the fact is that the savings incurred by a switch from monthly to yearly payments (for example) is identical no matter what amount you tend to donate per month. Let's assume a 2.9% transaction fee and a $0.30 fixed fee. Behold the math: The savings are simply 11 * fixed fee (which is $0.30). So, really, this paypal transaction fee argument applies just as much to $50 donations as it does to $2 donations. Thus, if the concern is raw dollar amounts lost to paypal, the consideration should be frequency of donation, not amount of donation. Using the paypal transaction fee line of reasoning, it is just as inconsiderate for a philosopher king to donate monthly through paypal, as it would be for $2 Bob to donate monthly through paypal.

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting spending weeks on end looking at them. [] That would get a bit dry! My broader point though was that a lot has been said and thought about these issues. Just because we might not agree with scholars' ultimate conclusions doesn't mean we can't get a lot out of their work. I personally would like to see Stef map out the economics/philosophy landscape in detail (rather than largely dismissing it), and then show where his work fits in: how it relates to and differs from other theories. Right now I think he keeps his work so separate from the rest of philosophy, that someone who has just discovered philosophy through his stuff doesn't have a good point of reference for approaching the rest of the field, or debating with others.

I'd love to see Stef use standard terms more often. Theory of the second best Perfect information Information asymmetry Market failure Externalities One could probably spend a few weeks following links from the above. Lots of interesting food for thought. There's no need to be scared of thinking done by people who have come to different conclusions, if they are intellectually honest and lay out their logic for you to follow. You should be able to see where their value system differs from yours, leading you in different directions.