Mindconnection eNL, 2019-01-06

Home

In this issue:
Good News | Product Highlight | Brainpower | Finances | Security | Health/Fitness | Factoid | Thought 4 the Day

Item 1. Thanks largely to the long overdue Tax Reform Act of 2017, more Americans have jobs today than at any point during the 8 painful years we suffered under Barry Soetoro.

Item 2. Tax Reform 2.0 is gaining steam. One of its key provisions is that it will make certain temporary tax breaks permanent. Those breaks largely benefit the poor and middle class.

Item 3. While Wal-Mart is subsidized by the federal government (the company grossly underpays its employees, most of whom are eligible for food stamps for that reason), Amazon is rolling out its $15 minimum wage for workers. Wal-Mart externalizes costs via slave labor and thus puts local Mom and Pop shops out of business if they pay a living wage. Amazon, on the other hand, takes wages out of the competition equation by paying a decent wage.

Item 4. When the people running Google got greedy and debauched their search engine, what they expected was a big boost in ad revenue. What they got instead was disappointed users leaving Google. Their "thinking" was people who hadn't used another search engine and had habitually been "googling" for answers would have no basis for comparison. But a crappy experience is a crappy experience.

Not only did "72% of product searches start on Google" change to "72% of product searches start on Amazon" but users began switching to other search engines for non-product searches. Duck Duck Go took the high road and its product is super good. So good that it got 9 billion searches last year. Read the full story here: https://searchengineland.com/duckduckgo-broke-9-billion-searches-in-2018-and-its-growing-310002

The ReadingPen2 Reading Assistive Scanning Pen

You scan, it reads to you.

• Hear text read to you. Just scan a word or line of text, and the Reading Pen 2 reads it to you (earbuds included, for privacy).
• Helps with reading fluency and comprehension.
• Currently used by many schools to help both dyslexic and non-dyslexic students and by some state agencies to help adults with reading disabilities.
• Speaks (and shows) letter by letter spelling, synonyms, and definitions of scanned words or lines.
• Shows the syllabication onscreen. Also has one-touch translation to Spanish.
• Provides definitions and other information from the American Heritage Children's Dictionary and Thesaurus, American Heritage College Dictionary, and Roget's II Thesaurus.
• Easy to use. Recommended for adults and children age 10 and up.
• Mobile, completely self-contained, requires no computer.

On sale!

Buy yours now.

Beware the "work from home" come-ons, such as a "job" in which you agree to receive, inspect, and forward packages. This "job" makes you part of a theft ring. Many people fall for this particular scam. But stop and think; why would anyone need you to do this? Why don't they inspect their own packages and ship them once instead of shipping to you first?

Another scam is day trading. You pay for all these worthless classes, as if there is any logic to this gambling system. Then you place your bets and lose. But stop and think; if "the system" is so great, why is anyone wasting time providing classes when they could simply work the system? Stock trading is a zero sum game, after all. If their system worked, they would not want to teach you how to dilute their earnings from it.

When thinking of a side gig, go for what you are passionate about. What is it you are interested in and good at doing? Here are some possibilities:

• Turn your hobby (or hobbies, perhaps) into a cash stream. For example, you like woodwork so come up with a few products you can make and people can order from you.
• Teach, perhaps adult education classes or your own private tutoring. For example, you play the piano so you offer lessons. Or you are good with basic math so contact the local adult education programs director.
• You bought a premium lawnmower. Offer to handle the lawn maintenance to the busiest people on your block (I have a neighbor who does this).
• You have done many knitting projects over the years. So assemble a photo portfolio (perhaps on your phone) and hang out your shingle. You can make little booties and hats for newborns or pets, coffee mug hot pads, foot comforters, large Afghan style blankets, or other items that people would enjoy and not mind paying for.

Did you notice that with each of these there's no "easy money"? And that it's your talents and interests that allow you to do or make something people want?

You should also apply this concept to your main gig. Where you work now, what are you doing to produce in a way that your employer will want to keep you on the payroll? What value can you add, such that promoting you and increasing your pay is something your employer will gladly do? You may have to talk with people to figure all this out, and if so make it about THEM not about YOU. Rather than ask, "What does a guy need to do to get ahead around here?" ask an executive, "What keeps you up at night?" and then work on that problem.

https://techtalk.pcpitstop.com/2018/08/29/hackers-hit-gold-mine

A prominent online supplements store that publishes many articles and features videos of heavily tattooed people showing us how to look good (I'm serious, their models are nearly all disfigured by excessive tattooing) recently published an article "debunking" the need for six meals per day.

The article referenced a study. I think it had a group of people who eat three meals a day go for a week eating six meals a day. There were baseline caloric burn measurements taken for a week of three meals, then "delta" caloric burn measurements taken for a week of six meals. The study didn't find a statistically significant difference between the two weeks.

The author also referenced the idea that the advantage of six meals per day is it "stokes the furnace" so you burn more calories. This study contradicted that idea.

So the author concluded that there is no advantage to eating six meals a day versus cramming the same food into only three. This kind of non-thinking is common, but that does not make it right.

Photo taken about one week before 40th High School Class Reunion

I have heard the "stoke the furnace" theory, but it doesn't make physiological sense to me. What purpose is served? It's not why we athletes eat six meals per day. There are multiple reasons, a major one being what happens on the intake side.

The primary effect of eating the same amount of food with six smaller meals versus three is you spread the intake of nutrients. That study did not even consider this. What happens when your body has excess calories at any given time? It converts them to fat.

In the late 1990s, over one million people took up Bill Phillips' Body For Life Challenge. It was a 90 day experiment in which each participant would, among other things, eat six meals a day. The results were spectacular.

It's not about burning more fat off, it's about preventing more fat from being put on in the first place. We simply are not designed to cram all of our eating into three meals.

The body adapts to a three meal regimen by storing excess (for that meal) as fat. To do that, insulin is secreted. Insulin is antagonistic to testosterone, which means you get these negative hormonal fluctuations. Assuming they are good meals, eating six meals per day eliminates these fluctuations. You want higher, not lower, testosterone. Three meals a day means lower testosterone. Six meals a day, assuming they are good meals, means you have higher testosterone.

When testosterone is low, the body does not store calcium in the bones or build muscle but it does store fat. When testosterone is high, the body burns fat, builds muscle, and stores calcium in the bones. But wait, didn't that study show no difference in caloric burn? If so, how can I say what I just said?

The study did not control what people ate. If you're on an insulin-boosting diet (e.g., processed grains), your body is going to boost insulin and depress testosterone. Remember, I said "assuming they are good meals". You will still get the advantage of better flow through your bowels and probably better nutrient absorption, plus decreased gas. You will certainly get decreased "munchies" and thus take in fewer calories that get converted to fat also.

If that study had looked at body fat percentage, allowed four weeks for a change to be evident, and controlled the meals (same meals as before, just divided in half and eaten twice as often), it would have shown a remarkable change in how people looked and felt. In other words, if it had replicated what Bill Phillips did with Body For Life, it would have produced the results that Body For Life produced.

Having a study look at an irrelevant variable and then concluding from that a proven principle is false might be "good enough" for people who don't take health and fitness seriously. But for the rest of us, the truth is much more palatable.

Spreading your meals across the day rather than jamming them into only two or three sessions will optimize your health, appearance, and energy levels. These benefits are well worth any minor inconveniences involved in meal prep or meal breaks.

Skip the wheat and the corn; they have no place in a human diet. But don't skip meals.

• The best workouts are short and intense.
• A good diet contains far more flavors and satisfaction than the typical American diet.

The tobacco companies cause more death and agony than ISIS does.