Iodine is also found in seafood and dairy and eggs, which may have been less common in the American diet a century ago, especially among the poor, but are widespread today. Americans no longer need iodized salt. (Not sure about vegans.)

It's definitely in seafood. Dairy and eggs depend on what the cows and chickens have been fed. In regions with low soil iodine content, you can expect the eggs and milk to also be low in iodine.

Vegetables and grains also have a significant amount of iodine in that sort of soil (it's where the cows and chickens get it).

Vegans should already be extremely watchful of their nutrition, as there's for example B12 in a lot of animal products, where a B12 deficiency means you are getting nerve damage.

> His views most certainly aren’t what a majority of people want

I'm not sure what you gain by telling yourself that.

I could just as easily assert, without any evidence (i.e., like you), that every single person who didn't vote loves Trump and supports all his policies.

> If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.

That has nothing to do with whether people support him. 20 or more (exact number varies on the reporting) women say that he sexually assaulted them, he was convicted of one sexual assault, and yet white women still voted for him.

Experiments consistently and repeatedly show that when given practical descriptions of policy actions and outcomes, the majority of Americans do not choose the ones that republicans promote. BUT when told that they are Republican policies, then about half of Americans do support those policies.

Well then, liberal politicians aren't doing a very good job, are they?

This is like a cliche from the chess world, where the guy who lost the game, then does a postmortem to convince everyone that he was actually winning the whole time. "Except for that one little blunder."

The Dems keep losing losing losing, but rather than figure out how to fight better, you instead try to convince yourself that people support you. And then you go back to debating Israel v Palestine or trans pronouns while our own country descends into tyranny. (Literally - many progressives I know.)

Meanwhile, Trump owns the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court!

Straight from “you don’t have any evidence!” to “well who even cares that’s not important”.

I have no idea what you're saying.

I think this is a chatbot. It has no memory for one of its posts to the next. Fascinating.

If 80% of Americans didn't vote Trump, you're trying to claim they just as likely love him as those who did, even when polling of those voting for him show many dislike him?

Yeah, I'm not the one unable to read evidence.

Polls also repeatedly show people dislike a large amount of his policies.

And it's a fact he didn't even get 50% of voters to vote for him.

Also noteworthy: The LCHF diet significantly lowered 24-hour glucose concentrations

Well, you can look at the US and global situation with obesity and diabetes, and see that whatever people are doing is not working.

I'm not the guy you are replying to, but most MDs really don't know anything about nutrition. That simply is not a topic they ever took a class in, and official nutrition recommendations themselves are completely changing. The "food pyramid" with a base of carbs? Must eat breakfast of sugary cereals and orange juice? That's all murderous nonsense. (And it's changed!) And so on.

MDs want "stable" patients who resemble patients they've familiar with. Even though that could mean being diabetic on half-a-dozen meds. Based on my genes, I would be fat and diabetic by now if I had kept following only my doctor's advice.

I presume the diet been great for weight loss and blood-sugar maintenance.

What other effects have you noticed, good or bad?

According to Trump, he is doing this to get libertarian support.

Carbs?

Arrgghhh... Once more I wish I could edit things a day latter to fix all my stupid mistakes. (I blame is on diagnosed dysgraphia).

Oil is not carbs of course. I guess I meant fat.

Very interesting read.

I don't play video games, but I do play online chess, and in online chess, there is a huge epidemic of cheating. Many cheaters are banned by chess.com. Some of these bans go unnoticed, but in other cases, the cheaters passionately insist that they were not cheating. And I don't believe them.

In a minuscule number of cases, chess.com has been known to reverse a ban. But chess.com does not provide the details of their anti-cheating technology.

So in the arena of chess, I do side with the provider, because as a practical matter, I believe they are almost always (>99.9%) correct. Of course, they still suffer from false negatives, because intermittent cheating is virtually impossible to prove.

I'm not sure what lessons to draw from the article.

I had the interesting experience of being banned from a Call of Duty 4 server, back when the franchise still had servers.

It happened like this: we were playing the game mode Sabotage, and it went into overtime. When this happens, the game shows the exact location of every player on the map to every other player and prevents respawns until there's nobody left on one team, at which point the other wins. In CoD you can shoot through walls with a damage penalty on your shots depending on how penetrative your weapon is, and I was carrying a heavy semi-auto sniper rifle with a short range scope.

It was down to me and another player. The other player was running up some stairs inside a building, to try to get a more advantageous route to the alley where I was lurking. I popped around the corner with the intent to spam my entire ammo reserve through the wall at him, knowing I could take advantage of a body shot to chase him and probably finish him off. By some combination of map knowledge and sheer luck, my first shot hit him exactly in the head and killed him, while my entire team was spectating me. The game instantly stopped and they couldn't see any evidence I was planning on magdumping through the wall. I was pretty much instantly kicked and banned.

This has given me a lot of empathy for accused cheaters. If you're getting 10,000 kills in a year and the average player can tell whether kills are hacking with 99.9% accuracy, you're going to have 10 "ban-worthy" kills every year. I've got no idea how the numbers shake out for chess, but I would be surprised if there were zero or negligible false positives.

Being banned because of using a normal feature can get even more ridiculous.

Playing some games on GeForce NOW (a game streaming service) can get you banned by just using the service or exhaust the allowed plays per day because it runs in ephemeral VMs and each session is from a different server. This is with the game being explicitly added and supported by the developer/publisher...

Chess is obviously a game without hidden information in the game state, so cheating comes in one of two types on these online services:

1. There is no human player at all, just a bot playing the game (maybe being paid for by a user to boost their rank). This is likely detected by all the usual anti-bot heuristics that many web services have. Another option might be looking for statistical outliers on how highly player's moves correlate to open engines like Stockfish (this was the cause of a big cheating scandal in pro chess last year, if I remember right)

2. There is a human player, but they're just feeding the moves into an engine like stock fish and copying them out. Again, this is probably based on statistical correlations.

Here's the thing with any anti-cheat, the standard for a scientific paper is based on a P value indicating the likelihood of something being chance is about 5%. This is obviously way too high a threshold for anti-cheat, it would make 1 in 20 of your bans false bans. But the logic of an "acceptable" heuristic about lucky shots, or headshot rate, or blink stalker micro saving low hp units, or stockfish-correlated chess moves is part of basically all anti-cheat systems.

I'd guess they tune their thresholds to be something more like 1 in 1000, but after a point the way you reduce false bans for these things is to ban less, which given the high rate of actual cheating, is not desirable to the game companies. So if going from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 10000 requires halving the amount of bans you dish out, game companies are just not going to do that.

So then some CS drone has to answer the ticket about why the user was banned. They know that 999 of every 1000 tickets are lying, so they just automatically close it with no recourse. It's not worth the company's resources to make a recourse process. For PR purposes it's better to just pretend that isn't the case, and say there's no false positives. We've seen the PR reaction machine initially respond the same way when the "is something hooking the game process" checks detect all the Teamspeak overlay users and bans them all, until the sheer volume of affected people cause them to relent. So it's hard to believe that when they have statistical modelling based bans affecting much smaller numbers of people, they don't just steamroll them.

Heck, it's not anti-cheat, but I've had a copy of Red Alert 3 basically stolen by EA as they claimed my CD key was pirated (it wasn't, I bought it on Steam directly). Of course CS claimed infallibility, but it's made me be a lot more suspicious of other cases where CS claims infallibility.

But these games have millions of players, so 1 in 1000 is... quite a lot of people actually.

> So then some CS drone has to answer the ticket about what I was banned. They know that 999 of every 1000 tickets are lying, so they just automatically close it with no recourse. It's not worth the company's resources to make a recourse process.

In other words, classic corporate greed. As for that 1 in 1000, they're making the product they paid for unusable, which should be illegal. I'm aware it's not in many jurisdictions as you're buying a license and what not, but it should be. In places with strong consumer protections like Germany or Australia, Activision could likely get fined over this kind of behavior.

Scenario (1) is trivial to detect.

But Scenario (2) is rather complex - most strong players who are "smart cheaters" would use the Stockfish suggestions infrequently, perhaps just once per game. The difference to the game result can be significant, but detecting this sort of cheating is a statistical exercise.

As you said, it comes down to thresholds, and setting a tradeoff between false positives and false negatives.

And let's not forget that a false negative, which is the default case and extremely common, also has an effect – it disadvantages all the honest players who lose to a cheater.

Why do you believe they are almost always right? Without understanding the anti cheating technology, I feel it's impossible to judge.

Because computer-aided cheating is trivial to do and known to be widespread.

It's apparent that chess.com has tuned the detection threshold to near certainty, which lets many cheaters through, at least for a long time.

What often gets lost in criticism of the corporate entity is that undetected cheating (i.e. false negative by the anti-cheating software), which is very common, also has a cost, and victims.

I don't play online games either (or chess, for that matter), but as I understand it quite a lot of the anti-cheat tools work by trying to detect if cheating software is running. Since it's trivial to modulate the exact hash of a .exe, it works by heuristics, similar to anti-virus software. False positives with this are not uncommon, just as false positives in anti-virus isn't uncommon.

This is different from chess.com, which looks purely at the in-game behaviour. Chess cheating is probably a lot easier to detect reasonably reliably, as it's so much more limited: you just have a 8x8 grid, limited game pieces, clearer win and lose conditions, etc.

So in short, I don't think the situations are really comparable.

Imagine if police could charge you with a crime, but refuse to show their evidence or explain how they believe you committed the crime, with the reasoning that "we must not provide details about our process, or evidence to show you committed the crime, to protect the integrity of our policing methods"

There is difference between putting you into a prison and denying you access to an online game.

Presumably something was sacrificed to be able to have the game, usually money which is in turn acquired through sacrifice of one's time/life (a job).

In both cases, the victim is being deprived of time out of their life.

Not really, when you consider the context of each situation. Being banned from an online game is a sort of localized "prison" within the context of the game.

It's called a "thought experiment"

When you consider the contexts, you can also realize they are two different things that should be handled separately and in different ways.

The lesson is: fight for what you believe in. The world is unfair and the more you comply, the more you will get shoved around. I bet that guy didn't even play the game anymore after he got unbanned; it does not matter at all.