I don’t have data to quote here but considering heart problems were rare back in the day when butter, lard and tallow was used in generous amounts in combination with obesity being rare and daily labor was common, I would assume it would be mostly fine. Heart problems in non-overweight people are rare even today, especially at younger ages.

There are also 2 new high quality studies out there showing milk fats being significantly safer for heart health compared to other saturated animal fats. I can link that study for you on request. However you wouldn’t need to use butter for your potatoes necessarily. You can oven bake potatoes in rapeseed oil or olive oil just fine and get the same calories in, if you happen to be afraid of milk fat that is. Finding a milk alternative would be harder however since the seed and nut oils out there are generally much less nutrient dense than whole milk. The exception would be soy milk but then you have to be careful not to get a version full of sugar.

When trying to gain weight (or simply not go minus as in your case) the method will be the opposite of what is needed to lose weight. I have helped someone with this in the past and what I saw as his greatest trouble was that he would get too full to eat more very quickly. I asked about his diet and it was just full of foods which are very filling without actually containing many calories. Lots of fruits and vegetables with almost no carb and no fat.

So really what you need are easily digestible and not too filling calorie rich ingredients. Think lots of grains and fat. Buttered potatoes instead of air fried potatoes. Carrots instead of lettuce. White pasta over whole grain pasta. Cream or mayo based sauce instead of a stock/water based sauce etc. However still try to eat healthy. If going for bread take the white bread without added sugar for example. And still include vegetables but don’t make them over ⅓ of your plate. I have read many success stories with adding heavy amounts of dairy to the diet which makes sense since milk is there to grow a calf as fast as possible. Drinking a package of milk a day is almost a miracle cure to being underweight if you can stomach it. In fact the medical food packs they give to malnourished children are dairy based. Consider it if your diet allows it.

However what specific meals which are convenient to bring I don’t have many ideas. But I hope this mode of thinking will help at least a bit. It has to be a big portion that you can actually stomach. Think about which foods you seem to be able to eat a huge amount of and then narrow those down to the most calorie rich. They also have to not clog your stomach for the whole rest of the day so being easy to digest is also key.

Calling it selfishness implies one only does it for himself/herself and no other reason. I don’t think that’s always true. At the same time it’s not a totally selfless act either. For me it has to be a positive to both me and the child or else it wouldn’t be worth it. Currently I can’t know if the child will enjoy life or not. But if I somehow knew the child would only suffer in life I would absolutely refuse to have that child. But I can’t know and that makes this complicated.

I think I can connect this back to the comment I made about adoption. I could adopt a baby and be just as happy with that as if I had a biological one because to me that is a comparable experience. However I wouldn’t adopt a violent and problematic teenager. Doing so would probably decrease my life quality and endanger my and my partners life. For the calculation to work I want both me and the child to have good lives. I admit it’s not a totally selfless act. But it’s not a totally selfish act either.

For the ideological stuff I don’t have that as a main reason personally but brought up because I think it’s important in a broader perspective. It’s absolutely true that one parent’s ideology has a huge influence on a child’s future. The Amish for example has only ¼ of those born in the community eventually leaving. And how many join the Amish? About zero. It’s a religious movement solely run by those born into it. However the high rate for the Amish is extraordinarily high when looking at other religions and this is because ones ideology is not only influenced by one’s parents but by one’s community as well.

There are a lot of people who were born in conservative or religious households and only left that ideology when they started interacting with people outside the family, for many that’s highschool or College. Internet as well in today’s era. The Amish keep so many because they have their own closed community. However think about it like this. If only one category of people had kids of ideology x. Then all kids would start out with that. In addition they won’t talk to people with a different ideology at school or college or maybe not even youth oriented internet because all other children were also born into ideology x. Suddenly they end up in a bubble and converting them would be much harder. For any other movement but ideology x it would be an uphill battle. Again having children for this sole reason would be stupid in my opinion. But it was a worrying thought of mine when I see through the statistics of who is actually having children nowadays.

Are there really that many kids who need adopting? What I have heard there are far fewer domestic kids who need adoptive parents than there are people willing to adopt if you are looking at young children under 3. This causes a lot of people to adopt internationally which is insanely expensive, often very dubious ethically and a bureaucratic nightmare. A lot of source countries for adoption have banned international adoption in the last years making the supply lower than ever. Adopting internationally does not mean you’re giving a child a home who wouldn’t otherwise have one. No you’re just competing against other prospective parents. The child would just get adopted by another family.

What is available domestically and where one can actually do real good are older children, mostly male, around the ages 12-17 who come from abusive households. The people who adopt from this category are real heroes and do enormous good to the world. However this is a totally different endeavour that not all are able to tackle. Many of these kids are violent, criminal and may despite their young age already have drug addiction problems. It really is a lot and is often a real physical threat to the adoptive parent. I have considered it but right now I’m not ready for it. It also closes the possibility for your own biological children in the future because having a violent older step sibling can ruin your childhood and I wouldn’t want to do that to my kid. Maybe when I’m much older I’ll consider it. Those kids deserve loving parents too and arguably need them more than anyone else.

I really regret to hear that you feel that way about your own existence. I really don’t want to cause someone to exist who then regrets their own existence in such a way. I would be very interested to know what went wrong in your life and what your parents could have done differently. Or is it perhaps not the fault of your parents but the world at large that is to blame?

Of course that’s true. However what is the conclusions of this? Should our long unbroken line of ancestors who reproduced end or should it continue? That’s the big question of it all.

I have not used either for cars but I have tried both for driving bicycles. The thing with open street map is that they have a lot more of the small streets that bikes can go on but cars can’t. In my experience google maps usually wants me to drive my bike right on some huge multi-lane car road for 3 hours and totally ignores the bike path right next to it. When I went on a 1 month bicycling trip I tried both but found that OSMAnd had vastly better suited roads. Some of the tiniest tiny roads it sent me on were some of the most memorable of the whole journey. Sometimes the path in OSMAnd will just be a dirt path half a meter wide and I love that. I thought many times who on earth even added all these roads! I’m so thankful for every local nerd who added every single dirt road in his neighborhood on there. Simply amazing sometimes. But yeah it doesn’t work at all if you don’t download the map that’s true. Also I really can’t answer for navigating by car.

Yes Gaza is ruled by Hamas which is a terrorist islamist un-democratic organization which can’t provide for its people, leading to foreign aid organizations providing most of the amenities there. A source for that will come later. The west bank is ruled by the Palestinian authority which is a functional state which has been mostly peaceful for the last few decades and which I support. The Palestinian authority is on paper supposed to rule Gaza too however Hamas declared war against the Palestinian authority in 2007 because they opposed the results of a democratic election and took over the Gaza strip. You can read about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaza_(2007)

Music festival celebrating “friends, love and infinite freedom” right by the border fence. Hamas killed 260 of the attendees on the first date of the war. Washington post source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/08/israel-festival-attack-gaza-militants/

“Hamas’ traditional weapon is the Qassam rocket, a cheap garage-built weapon assembled from industrial piping, home-made rocket fuel of sugar and potassium nitrate fertilizer, and commercial explosive” Forbes soruce: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/10/09/how-hamas-leveraged-cheap-rockets-and-small-drones-to-ambush-israel/

This sources does say it’s made from fertilizer but this does not say explicitly that the fertilizer is from foreign aid (I found sources but they are all isreali). However if it is or is not does not matter as much as the fact that fertilizer should have been used to produce food for the starving people in Gaza. Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, can’t provide for most basic amenities for their people. Foreign aid powers a lot of basics such as schools and healthcare (which is great!) while Hamas uses their budget to bomb isreal. (If you want to read an American-jewish pro-isreal source about the accusation it’s here: https://jewishjournal.com/israel/336609/made-in-gaza-hamas-rockets-the-product-of-foreign-aid-and-smuggled-material/)

https://apnews.com/article/business-middle-east-israel-foreign-aid-gaza-strip-611b2b90c3a211f21185d59f4fae6a90

This article talks a bit about the foreign aid which goes to Gaza. Thankfully most foreign aid is now earmarked for certain projects (which is why the UN runs their own schools for example, so they know where the money is going)). Isreal has called for this for a long time because they were concerned foreign aid is used to fund terrorism. In addition isreal grants work permits to tens of thousands Gazans to work in isreal across the border. On the other hand it’s not possible to enter Gaza as an Isreali. I think it’s clear that isreal is the party with the most good will in this conflict. It’s also worth mentioning that some arab nations does not support Hamas either. Egypt for example is on the side of the Palestinian authority and has had a blockade against Hamas ever since the take over in 2007.

When it comes to Israel vs Palestine then I absolutely think it’s alright to support either side. Both sides have valid reasons to exist and both sides have done horrible things to each other. But remember this is not Israel vs the Palestinian authority (the west bank). This is Israel vs Hamas (Gaza). That makes a world of a difference. In this conflict I believe Hamas is in the wrong.

Many people accuse Israel to be an apartheid state. I would argue Israeli arabs have it much better than blacks in south Africa did (polling even shows arab-isrealis (the ones who ended up in isreals side of the border in 1948) prefer living in Israel instead of Palestine because of their quality of life) however they are certainly not equal to the Jewish isrealies. But now ask yourself. How would a Jew be treated in Gaza? There are none and there is a reason for that. They would get killed on the street immediately. If isreal is an apartheid state then Gaza is a puristic ehnostate. Both are racist but Gaza is infinitely worse. They don’t want to coexist with Jews at all, no they want them all dead.

Hamas is one of the worst organisations on earth. They don’t even care for their own people. When western nations give Gaza free fertilizer to feed their people and reduce starvation then Hamas used it to build bombs to fire at Israel. When western charities gave Gaza money to feed their people, they bought guns instead. This is a regime ruled by nothing else than hate and does not even have a concern for their own people. Isreal supplies Gaza with water and electricity and has done so for decades. Gaza would never do something like that for isreal. I believe there is no case for Hamas at all. They are in the wrong here quite definitely. Just look who they are attacking. First target was a music festival by the border where they raped, kidnapped and murdered all the participants. This music festival was a music festival for peace. That’s why it was right by the border fence. Hamas didn’t believe in peace.

This is totally correct. Just to add how they do it, it’s in-line filtering. The juice goes through a pipe at high pressure though a filter and all the solids are removed through this process. This is used for many edible liquids. Almost all beer is filtered in this way for example. Most varieties of beer are cloudy without filtering. The filtering of juice (and beer) increases the shelf life. In addition it makes the juice easier to turn into juice concentrate. In my country at least all the big juice brand are just reconstituted juice concentrate. Juice concentrates are by far cheaper in many regions because they are traded as a commodity on the world market so you can source it from the cheapest source. Fresh juice however has to be made locally and has a low shelf life, hence the higher price.