fivefifty's comments

Some of the trucks etc were broken down or worn out and some might have been contractor or personal vehicles brought over that they probably decided wasn't worth the cost to take back.

The ammo, weapons and military vehicles I believe quite lot of it technically belongs (or belonged) to the Afghan national army or at least was donated to them, although from what others on here have said, they were barely functioning as a force with rampant corruption at all levels.

None of this is new, pretty much exactly the same thing happen after South Vietnam fell, with the North Vietnamese getting an even more massive stockpile of basically US military equipment that makes what the Taliban have captured pale in comparison. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/29/archives/arms-left-by-us-... https://militarymatters.online/weapons/vietnam-loves-america...

Not to mention all the helicopters they just pushed into the sea during the Saigon evacuation to make more space on the decks of ships.

Even back to end of world war 2 they dumped huge amounts of equipment into the sea or buried them or just left them in place to avoid the costs of taking them back. I suppose it does make some sense from an overall cost and logistical point of view, but on a personal level it does seem incredibly wasteful. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/wwii-ended...

It does make sense if you think about it in terms of overall calories consumed rather than metabolic rate.

Children are very small and light, so even with a higher metabolic rate they need less calories overall than an adult. However a teenager is usually reaching adult size, but still with the same higher metabolic rate as the child, meaning they will need more calories than a typical adult who is on a lower metabolic rate even at similar size, that is why teenager seem to eat so much.

Pregnant women likewise may not have a higher metabolic rate, but they still need to eat more calories overall then before they were pregnant as they are growing in size and weight. It's not much different to a bodybuilder eating more calories to build then maintain a greater muscle mass.

Like most things there's quite a lot of factors to play into this but I would say one of the main factors here is that generally men start reducing natural testosterone production and gradually losing muscle mass sometime after around age 30. Basically, the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn to maintain it.

Also to compound this your metabolism tends to adapt to whatever you are doing. Even if you are doing lots of exercise, your body does tends to become more efficient at doing that exercise, using less calories to do the same thing over time. The same is true of running on lower and lower calories, your body adapts to run on less calories so it actually helps to do something of a 'bulking' period every so often to keep your metabolism running at a higher rate and not letting it drop down to 'economy mode'.

If you change nothing from your 20s to 30s, keeping exactly the same calories in your diet and same amount of exercise then you will most likely start to gradually gain a calorie surplus from this loss of muscle and thus start gain some more fat from the excess calories. You'll basically need to reduce calories or increase exercise to compensate.

Also look into what you can do to help maintain/improve your natural testosterone production (better sleep, nutrients like zinc and magnesium etc) as this will help offset it to some degree (poor sleep alone will absolutely destroy your natural testosterone levels). Alternatively you can look into Testosterone replacement therapy, which seems to be quite common these days.

This is exactly right, I had a 1.5 hour each way commute before we switched to work from home last year. I calculated that I saved around AU$5000 a year just from not having to commute or buy food/coffee out let alone the massive time saved. Not to mention the reason I had such a long commute in the first place is that I chose to live further away from the city to save money and actually afford to buy a home.

Plus as you say the 15 hours a week I get back on average, is basically another part time job or contract work I could pick up if I really wanted to earn some more on top.

This is very true, a few years ago that I started eating around 4-6 eggs a day because it seemed a good source of nutrients and I had seen various articles saying the cholesterol thing was a myth etc. After about 3 weeks of that many eggs per day, I ended up at the doctor feeling lightheaded and not quite right and turned out my blood pressure was insanely high and after a blood test my cholesterol was through the roof.

I cut out the eggs but otherwise kept my diet fairly similar and about a month later my bloodwork showed I was back to normal cholesterol.

Definitely there are some people who when they eat eggs it will spike their blood cholesterol significantly, but I have also seen other people who can eat lots of eggs and it doesn't seem to change their cholesterol in bloodwork at all.

Yes Australians in general are quite accepting of authority. America fought a war of independence to be free of the British Monarchy. We got offered a vote to leave the monarchy and be a republic and we voted no. There is no bill of rights or anything in Australia, most of our freedoms are largely implied and the government can pretty much prevent us from doing whatever it wants whenever it likes and does so frequently.

For example, the government has essentially banned us all from leaving the country for the past almost two years due to the pandemic and despite some grumbling we mostly just accept it and in fact many people are quite supportive of the lockdowns as although it keeps us in, more importantly it keeps everyone else 'out'. As long as we feel comfortable and safe in our homes we seem to have been fairly happy to accept whatever restrictions the government imposes on us.

Perhaps ironically one of the reason for this is that we largely haven't had much of a diverse media to push back on this, the Murdoch press has a very large influence on the governments that get in and what they do. Any government that doesn't align with the Murdoch press isn't going to get very much done at all and one that does will get most anything it want through with at the least minimal opposition if not wholesale support.

Basically it's to do with ownership, Rupert Murdoch/News Corp actually has nothing much to do with Sky News UK (anymore) but completely owns Sky News Australia.

Sky News UK is owned by Sky Group, which also used to own Sky News Australia until a few years ago when it was acquired by News corp. News Corp of course used to own a controlling stake in Sky group and even tried to buy the whole lot at one point but failed and now it's mostly owned by Comcast I think.

It's also worth nothing that Sky News Australia also runs a relatively 'normal', fairly respectable news network during the day but then in the evening they switch over to start broadcasting much more right wing conspiracy laden content and pushing this onto digital channels such as Youtube where it then gets picked up and used by more fringe right wingers in the US to legitimise their views (kind of look this 'mainstream' australian news channel is broadcasting this clip, it must be true and the US mainstream media just is covering it up). This is commonly known as 'Sky after dark'.

This article from the guardian probably gives a better overview of what they are doing these days and why it is so insidious. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/24/sky-n...