Conservatives think liberals are wrong.
Liberals think conservatives are evil.
Jonathan Haidt is illuminating:
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[...]liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree.
A stronger case would be "it must be more profitable than the alternatives with the same risk" but you skipped a step and went right to "appreciate faster" which is not the only way it could be profitable. In fact "flipping houses" to make a living at this scale is an artifact of your current time and place which is the US in a massive inflationary bubble [1]
We libertarians have been beating the inflation drum for decades now and been largely ignored and / or laughed at. Maybe it's time to revisit how adding trillions and trillions to the economy every year could maybe possibly lead to higher prices in "inflation hedge" type goods.[2]
Arguing with economic laws makes as much sense as arguing with gravity. The only reason you get as far as you do is that the level of econ education approaches zero in the general population. What you said is not even wrong, it's not well defined, it's not supported by any evidence and it betrays that you have absolutely no clue about how markets work at all. It's a lot like if you had said "falling down hurts as long as we don't abolish gravity".
I am super anti sugar. I don't eat it except in fruit and I don't give it to my child.
I still don't want the government messing with nutrition. It's track record with that is just awful and there is no reason to think it's going to get better.
Politicians please do it as Hippocrates said:
"First do no harm"
Before you ban, label or tax sugar you have to get your house in order: Stop distorting the food market with subsidies and stop giving people wrong information (Food pyramid etc).
Also, the food pyramids and plates are from the USDA, the federal government. Not a state government like sugar warnings are coming from. So you're talking to two different organizations when you say "before you label sugar, fix the food pyramid".
"Generations of Americans are accustomed to the food pyramid design, and it’s not going away. In fact, the Healthy Eating Pyramid and the Healthy Eating Plate complement each other."
I can't agree more with this. I'm in Chile right now, and they have put warning labels on all sorts of food here, saying things like high sugar, high fat, high sodium, and so on. Well, now it seems all food is unhealthy, so you might as well eat whatever you want. Yes, there is such thing as reductionism, losing sight of the forest for focusing on the trees. Sugar from fruits is not the same as refined sugar, despite them being the same molecule. The world is built out of interrelations not of platonic essences.
It's funny how tech and food have so much in common. Wanna make a lot of money? Sell people absolute junk and tell them it is good for them. Once enough people have listened and you've got critical mass, wholesome healthy alternatives that are sustainable over the long term can be eliminated by implying they are "uncool" with clever brand placement.
I agree with that. But are cheese, butter, lard, and panela (dried sugarcane juice) unhealthy? Should you buy cheese that is unsalted but contains other less studied food preservatives or just eat less cheese?
> Politicians please do it as Hippocrates said: "First do no harm"
This is not tenable for politicians. Bodies are by default healthy, and have enormous powers of self-repair. A do-nothing bias works in favor of that.
Politicians, though, mostly resolve questions of competing interest. A do-nothing bias in politics means yielding to short-term thinking, special interests, and the desires of the powerful. Sugar's a great example, in that it's generally harmful but specifically very profitable, so left unchecked we'll get a suboptimal societal outcome while enriching people who unnecessarily put sugar in food.
The thing is that people that come to this sub is over-represented by wealthier individuals, or californians, that already don't drink a lot of sugar.
And it is tempting to put restrictions on others that don't affect you.
To the people that downvote sisu: how about a warning label, always visible, on every social-website, this included, that extended computer time is bad for your health?
wealth inequality doesn't mean more poor people. I know it's a lot to ask nowadays but please be informed enough about economics to at least know the very basics if you are going to bring it up.
The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less, in Western Europe of all places, is absolutely ridicolous. If anything the opposite is the case. As regards jobs we also have the opposite problem: too few simple jobs.
> wealth inequality doesn't mean more poor people.
Wealth, inequality, and poor are not well-defined.
Using the typical measures:
poor being near the poverty line for an area
wealthy being access to capital (be it over 100x the poverty wealth line or double the average) and inequality, the gap in absolute terms from top to average. The pareto principle will always illustrate how greater inequality defines that there are more poor people, even when the poverty line changes. Abstract equations, notwithstanding.
> The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less
Ironically, the beef industry may be kept on life support due to the ongoing climate change. New grazelands will appear from beneath the tundra across the world offering another few generations of opportunity. Buy your land in the US Dakotas for your grandchildren. It's a golden opportunity.
it's a fun game: define poverty in terms of wealth inequality and presto if inequality goes up, poverty does too. But here is the thing that we forgot in the west because we essentialy abolished it: poverty is about material depreviation and that happens to be the one thing about it that would actually stunt IQ. We don't have material deprivation, not in Norway nor anywhere else in Western Europe, certainly not at an increasing rate. We have access to all the calories we want and at prices and qualities unequaled in human history. We also have endless free books btw.
> bananas
It should be obvious that Europeans don't need bananas for proper development. In addition that has nothing to do with poverty.
Also, fascinating that if you haphazardly connect the hand wringing topic du-jour with anything at all you get people
that scour the internet for even the tiniest scrap of evidence for you.
> Yours isn't any more valid than theirs, so what did you add to the discussion?
At least I know some economics and history so of course my perspective is more valid. There has never been a time or place where everyone was better off materially and if you are not aware you and OP should start reading some of those books.
> In addition that has nothing to do with poverty.
Given these are orthogonal situations, I don't know why you think I said they are connected. I was speaking to the valid perspective of change in the food chain.
> At least I know some economics and history so of course my perspective is more valid
Appealing to your own authority? What about everyone else? Not compelling.
> Also, fascinating that if you haphazardly connect the hand wringing topic du-jour
Bringing something to the table should be the defacto approach. Bring something to support your views, other than rhetoric. You'll be a more effective poster (and speaker) if there's something there to talk about. Good luck with whatever.
Jonathan Haidt is illuminating:
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[...]liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree.
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From: https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva...