I wonder what practical effects have the regulation. ?
Substantial. When people don't have the option to buy a big drink, a large majority who were going to have bought that big drink will make do with a small one.
What prevents someone to buy 2, 5 or 10 drinks? What prevents starbucks to give a discount based on "n number" of drinks bought? Are you limiting them also to a drink per day? What prevents the client from hoping shop to shop? Ration tokens?
Nothing prevents someone from buying a larger drink. The legislation wasn't aiming at 100% efficacy in preventing people from consuming >16 oz in one sitting. It was aimed at materially reducing the numbers who did so.
Are your choices yours to make when you're five? Is it the government's business if you make choices that are detrimental to your child's health? Where is the boundary of acuity, philosophically speaking: presumably you agree the government should attempt to stop you from murdering your child; should it attempt to prevent you from giving your child a cigarette to smoke?
I don't see that this is an easy area in which to be hard-and-fast about things.
You're plain wrong on the facts about diabetes not costing a lot of money. Well-controlled diabetes such as yours may be relatively cheap to treat, but poorly controlled diabetes drives a huge amount of healthcare costs, indeed a material percentage of the whole costs of healthcare. Those costs include, but not are limited to, foot amputations, emergency admissions, retinopathy treatment, CVD treatment, etc etc.
Actually, you really can force people to make healthy choices by legislation.
You can remove transfats from food. You can ban smoking in public. You can charge sin taxes on alcohol and smoking. You can require car occupants to wear seatbelts. Etc.
All of these things will reduce the quantum of harmful behaviour that people undertake. Whether each such piece of legislation is a good idea or not is a separate question from whether such legislation can be effective.
Note that there is no reason except for a rhetorical desire to win an argument for a piece of legislation to be perfectly effective and cause no undesirable side effects. So some people will still drive drunk, or without a seatbelt, or smoke a cigarette in public, etc. And small businesses may suffer from not selling so many cigarettes. But it is unquestionably the case that governments can and do act to force people to adopt healthier behaviours, and this can lead to a measurable improvement in a population's health.
Those analyses are a bit narrow. Smokers are much more likely to die while still economically active. So the net benefit is rather more complicated to calculate.
In any event, the answer to the problem is obviously not, "encourage more people to take up smoking" but instead "find ways to compress morbidity at the end of life, and provider better cheaper care".
Why do you have to cosider the subpopulations? The whole point here is to work out whether a specific sin tax is worth introducing. Obviously, if the costs of the sin are negligible in the context of the costs of the health system as a whole, then the sin tax is not worth introducing.
Mountain biking is a particularly difficult example to bring, because the injury costs must be weighed against the lower burden cyclists will impose on the health system than other citizens due to their better overall health (eg lower CVD rates).
But in talking about "not encouraging these activities", you have this arse-over-tit.
There is a public health emergency, as exemplified by the fact that the costs of diabetes treatments have risen by 40% in five years. And not from a small base, either.
A large and growing fraction of the US population is adopting eating and drinking habits, under the influence of food and beverage companies who very well understand the psychology at play that influences how people behave(*), that will harm and eventually kill them.
A shoulder-shrug seems like a really stupid response.
* For example, people eat more off larger plates, on average. They may each believe they're not going to, but they do. Similarly with cup size.
Diabetes is more expensive to treat than Alzheimers, by some margin. Additionally, most costs of treating Alzheimers are not health care costs but social care costs, and a significant proportion would be incurred anyway due to frailty and other medical conditions.
If you want to be utilitarian about it, you need to be a better health economist. They aren't going to die early enough to reduce costs. They are going to suffer from multiple life-long diseases that cost a huge amount to treat, such as diabetes.
Pervasive is in the eye of the beholder. It may not be enough for you to care about, but 4% is still millions of pissed-off consumers, so it's not surprising that *tech companies* are seeking to provide a fix for this.
And there is no automatic *need* for government involvement in this tech. Apple doesn't involve the government in its kill switch, for example. So far as I know, the work on solutions is market-driven, not government driven, although the government might be cheering from the sidelines. You appear to be tilting at windmills.
I'm pretty sure that consumers have used Apple's kill switch to brick their phones thousands of times since the feature was introduced, each time benefiting that particular consumer greatly. During the same period, I'm pretty sure that the government has used the kill switch to deny consumers access to information precisely zero times. So your assessment of who benefits is far off base.
Finally, your sig reads like casual misogyny dressed up as an in-joke among boys. In light of your unfortunate analogy about rape, it would be really good if you could spend a bit of time reflecting on your attitudes to women. Because the impression you're giving to me is that you are sexist. And I'll bet I'm not the only person with this impression. Obviously, you may not care if other people have that impression of you. But I kind of hope that you do.
I know what your original point was. I don't know why you think it's useful to repeat it here. I wasn't taking issue with it. I was taking issue with your ridiculous false choice. Which remains ridiculous (as well as offensive to rape victims).
Is it really that hard for you to reflect on the analogy you drew and either admit it was ridiculous and offensive or alternative stfu? You could pretend you were having an actual conversation with another human in a bar, where women might be present who could have overheard your remark, if it helps.
But it's a ridiculous false choice. Tech companies can take steps to reduce the likelihood of their devices getting stolen. There is no equivalent actor who can take steps to reduce the likelihood of women getting raped ("men" and "the gummint" really don't count).
That the article doesn't actually give any examples of what the errors were, nor attempt to assess whether they were material errors or trivial? The methodology is admirably explicit on the science and completely opaque on the cognitive method used by the not especially eminent physicians to determine whether an assertion was accurate or inaccurate in either the Wikipedia article or the medical literature equivalent.
wtf are you talking about? Neither she nor the article mentioned a comparison with the US justice system, which is no more relevant than the fact that those nasty fuckers in North Koreas commit judicial murder and torture. The article, in a British rightwing rag, printed a specious myth about sentences used in UK courts to appeal to its apopleptic and dyspeptic readership.
Not everything has to be understood through the lens of the US.
Am bored of this now. No need for an objective definition of consensus. It is patently clear unless you squint really really hard in the opposite direction that the two statements: 1. "many doctors believed smoking was not harmful to health" and 2. "an overwhelming majority of doctors believed smoking was not harmful to health" mean materially different things. It is also clear that 2 is synonymous with the statement: 3. "there was a consensus among doctors that smoking was not harmful to health" but that 1 and 3 are not synonymous.
Are you really going to dispute ordinary meanings of ordinary words any further? What on earth for?
I really really can't be arsed to explain to you what I meant by allocative efficiency in this context. You'll have to live with that frustration.
I'm done for this discussion, which has become completely fruitless.
I think you have the image of Galileo too firmly lodged in your mind, boldly declaring "it still moves".
Science is determined by the preponderance of evidence. And Ockham's razor plays a part too. If you found a result that suggested there was no link between smoking and cancer, we're not suddenly going to ignore the huge mass of evidence that suggests there is a link, because the greater likelihood is that you're an asswipe with an axe to grind, have made a mistake in your work, or that an artefact has weakened your results.
To pick up on your Newtonian physics point, the new science had to explain both the new areas where the old science didn't work and the old areas where the old science did work. The same would be true for a result that purported to show no link between smoking and cancer.
You're arguing against yourself, because I've never raised the notion of there not being unquestionable settled science. I've simply said that where there is strong consensus in science, people are going to be interested in pushing ahead with building on that consensus and very reluctant to reexamine the fundamentals based on a single study purporting to show they're all wrong. Things that make the latter more likely are the reputation of the authors, reviewers and publication, the credibility of any replacement theory including its ability to explain previous results, etc etc.
You've misunderstood what I meant by allocative efficiency. It doesn't involve payment. Never mind.
There was no such consensus about smoking being good for you. That's a myth. The tobacco industry drove a particular view in their self-interest, but the evidence contradicted them - the former is not science, the latter is. Here's a nuanced reading. You'll note that the epidemiological studies were only conducted in the late 50s, so it wasn't about contradictory evidence as about the first credible evidence on the subject. http://www.healio.com/hematolo...
And here speaks someone for whom ideology has transmuted into idiocy. Soundbites like "all scientific results are one study for being disproven" are a substitute for actual thinking. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of studies into the link between cancer and smoking. One study purporting to have evidence to the contrary would have, to put it politely, extremely limited impact in overturning the scientific consensus in this area. Hundreds of studies would be needed before the consensus changed. The chance of any journal accepting an article attempting to disprove the link is miniscule - because in all likelihood, the article is wrong, and it's a waste of everyone's time to review, read and act on it. Rail away about the purity of the scientific process all you like, but it does't change the fact that scientists like to invest their time in credible work, and by-and-large won't waste effort on things that are in all probability wrong, artefactual or the products of misguided kookery on the off-chance that they might just be right. Allocative efficiency.
No no no. You are missing the point. The phrase "settled science" is a heuristic. A shortcut. It means "it will be boring and pointless and not advance the state of knowledge to waste your and our time testing this result again, given the degree of testing it has already been subject to (unless you happen to have really compelling evidence that it is worth delving into all this again)." A good example would be the remote possibility that you would get a new paper published on whether there is a link between smoking and lung cancer. That is settled. It would be a waste of resource to investigate it again. Investigate further, for sure: how the link works, how the epidemiology differs for different demographics, etc. But saying "look, I've shown that the link between smoking and lung cancer" is real would be greeted with a yawn and saying "look, I've shown the link is false" would be met with "what a pile of bollocks".
1. People don't generally claim it's settled at the same level as Newtonian physics. It's not the same type of science. It's settled more like the way that medical science is settled: our best current explanation of a complex system, subject to change for greater resolution, but not in the fundamentals. 2. We are currently betting our lives and those of our descendants that the net effect of human activity is *not* to cause global warming. Given the choice, I'd rather take the other bet. But I'm reliant on everyone else, and people like you are making that pointless.
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Mods, the comment above is not a Troll. Even if you disagree with it. Sheesh people!
I wonder what practical effects have the regulation. ?
Substantial. When people don't have the option to buy a big drink, a large majority who were going to have bought that big drink will make do with a small one.
What prevents someone to buy 2, 5 or 10 drinks? What prevents starbucks to give a discount based on "n number" of drinks bought? Are you limiting them also to a drink per day? What prevents the client from hoping shop to shop? Ration tokens?
Nothing prevents someone from buying a larger drink. The legislation wasn't aiming at 100% efficacy in preventing people from consuming >16 oz in one sitting. It was aimed at materially reducing the numbers who did so.
Are your choices yours to make when you're five? Is it the government's business if you make choices that are detrimental to your child's health? Where is the boundary of acuity, philosophically speaking: presumably you agree the government should attempt to stop you from murdering your child; should it attempt to prevent you from giving your child a cigarette to smoke?
I don't see that this is an easy area in which to be hard-and-fast about things.
You're plain wrong on the facts about diabetes not costing a lot of money. Well-controlled diabetes such as yours may be relatively cheap to treat, but poorly controlled diabetes drives a huge amount of healthcare costs, indeed a material percentage of the whole costs of healthcare. Those costs include, but not are limited to, foot amputations, emergency admissions, retinopathy treatment, CVD treatment, etc etc.
Spot on!
No. I hope that helps.
Actually, you really can force people to make healthy choices by legislation.
You can remove transfats from food. You can ban smoking in public. You can charge sin taxes on alcohol and smoking. You can require car occupants to wear seatbelts. Etc.
All of these things will reduce the quantum of harmful behaviour that people undertake. Whether each such piece of legislation is a good idea or not is a separate question from whether such legislation can be effective.
Note that there is no reason except for a rhetorical desire to win an argument for a piece of legislation to be perfectly effective and cause no undesirable side effects. So some people will still drive drunk, or without a seatbelt, or smoke a cigarette in public, etc. And small businesses may suffer from not selling so many cigarettes. But it is unquestionably the case that governments can and do act to force people to adopt healthier behaviours, and this can lead to a measurable improvement in a population's health.
Those analyses are a bit narrow. Smokers are much more likely to die while still economically active. So the net benefit is rather more complicated to calculate.
In any event, the answer to the problem is obviously not, "encourage more people to take up smoking" but instead "find ways to compress morbidity at the end of life, and provider better cheaper care".
Why do you have to cosider the subpopulations? The whole point here is to work out whether a specific sin tax is worth introducing. Obviously, if the costs of the sin are negligible in the context of the costs of the health system as a whole, then the sin tax is not worth introducing.
Mountain biking is a particularly difficult example to bring, because the injury costs must be weighed against the lower burden cyclists will impose on the health system than other citizens due to their better overall health (eg lower CVD rates).
But in talking about "not encouraging these activities", you have this arse-over-tit.
There is a public health emergency, as exemplified by the fact that the costs of diabetes treatments have risen by 40% in five years. And not from a small base, either.
A large and growing fraction of the US population is adopting eating and drinking habits, under the influence of food and beverage companies who very well understand the psychology at play that influences how people behave(*), that will harm and eventually kill them.
A shoulder-shrug seems like a really stupid response.
* For example, people eat more off larger plates, on average. They may each believe they're not going to, but they do. Similarly with cup size.
Diabetes is more expensive to treat than Alzheimers, by some margin. Additionally, most costs of treating Alzheimers are not health care costs but social care costs, and a significant proportion would be incurred anyway due to frailty and other medical conditions.
If you want to be utilitarian about it, you need to be a better health economist. They aren't going to die early enough to reduce costs. They are going to suffer from multiple life-long diseases that cost a huge amount to treat, such as diabetes.
On your original point.
Pervasive is in the eye of the beholder. It may not be enough for you to care about, but 4% is still millions of pissed-off consumers, so it's not surprising that *tech companies* are seeking to provide a fix for this.
And there is no automatic *need* for government involvement in this tech. Apple doesn't involve the government in its kill switch, for example. So far as I know, the work on solutions is market-driven, not government driven, although the government might be cheering from the sidelines. You appear to be tilting at windmills.
I'm pretty sure that consumers have used Apple's kill switch to brick their phones thousands of times since the feature was introduced, each time benefiting that particular consumer greatly. During the same period, I'm pretty sure that the government has used the kill switch to deny consumers access to information precisely zero times. So your assessment of who benefits is far off base.
Finally, your sig reads like casual misogyny dressed up as an in-joke among boys. In light of your unfortunate analogy about rape, it would be really good if you could spend a bit of time reflecting on your attitudes to women. Because the impression you're giving to me is that you are sexist. And I'll bet I'm not the only person with this impression. Obviously, you may not care if other people have that impression of you. But I kind of hope that you do.
I know what your original point was. I don't know why you think it's useful to repeat it here. I wasn't taking issue with it. I was taking issue with your ridiculous false choice. Which remains ridiculous (as well as offensive to rape victims).
Is it really that hard for you to reflect on the analogy you drew and either admit it was ridiculous and offensive or alternative stfu? You could pretend you were having an actual conversation with another human in a bar, where women might be present who could have overheard your remark, if it helps.
But it's a ridiculous false choice. Tech companies can take steps to reduce the likelihood of their devices getting stolen. There is no equivalent actor who can take steps to reduce the likelihood of women getting raped ("men" and "the gummint" really don't count).
On the whole, I preferred the FT spat, but it was a bit drier as a read, I suppose
That the article doesn't actually give any examples of what the errors were, nor attempt to assess whether they were material errors or trivial? The methodology is admirably explicit on the science and completely opaque on the cognitive method used by the not especially eminent physicians to determine whether an assertion was accurate or inaccurate in either the Wikipedia article or the medical literature equivalent.
Seems pretty dubious to me!
wtf are you talking about? Neither she nor the article mentioned a comparison with the US justice system, which is no more relevant than the fact that those nasty fuckers in North Koreas commit judicial murder and torture. The article, in a British rightwing rag, printed a specious myth about sentences used in UK courts to appeal to its apopleptic and dyspeptic readership.
Not everything has to be understood through the lens of the US.
Am bored of this now. No need for an objective definition of consensus. It is patently clear unless you squint really really hard in the opposite direction that the two statements:
1. "many doctors believed smoking was not harmful to health" and
2. "an overwhelming majority of doctors believed smoking was not harmful to health"
mean materially different things. It is also clear that 2 is synonymous with the statement:
3. "there was a consensus among doctors that smoking was not harmful to health" but that 1 and 3 are not synonymous.
Are you really going to dispute ordinary meanings of ordinary words any further? What on earth for?
I really really can't be arsed to explain to you what I meant by allocative efficiency in this context. You'll have to live with that frustration.
I'm done for this discussion, which has become completely fruitless.
No, "many" is not a consensus. A consensus means, in practice, an overwhelming majority. I hope that helps.
And you still don't understand what I meant by allocative efficiency.
You write as though Popper and falsification were the only ways of thinking about science, as though Kuhn had never existed.
I think you have the image of Galileo too firmly lodged in your mind, boldly declaring "it still moves".
Science is determined by the preponderance of evidence. And Ockham's razor plays a part too. If you found a result that suggested there was no link between smoking and cancer, we're not suddenly going to ignore the huge mass of evidence that suggests there is a link, because the greater likelihood is that you're an asswipe with an axe to grind, have made a mistake in your work, or that an artefact has weakened your results.
To pick up on your Newtonian physics point, the new science had to explain both the new areas where the old science didn't work and the old areas where the old science did work. The same would be true for a result that purported to show no link between smoking and cancer.
You're arguing against yourself, because I've never raised the notion of there not being unquestionable settled science. I've simply said that where there is strong consensus in science, people are going to be interested in pushing ahead with building on that consensus and very reluctant to reexamine the fundamentals based on a single study purporting to show they're all wrong. Things that make the latter more likely are the reputation of the authors, reviewers and publication, the credibility of any replacement theory including its ability to explain previous results, etc etc.
You've misunderstood what I meant by allocative efficiency. It doesn't involve payment. Never mind.
There was no such consensus about smoking being good for you. That's a myth. The tobacco industry drove a particular view in their self-interest, but the evidence contradicted them - the former is not science, the latter is. Here's a nuanced reading. You'll note that the epidemiological studies were only conducted in the late 50s, so it wasn't about contradictory evidence as about the first credible evidence on the subject. http://www.healio.com/hematolo...
Why bother bringing up the implications of AGW? I didn't. So you're arguing against your own issue. Go project somewhere else.
And here speaks someone for whom ideology has transmuted into idiocy. Soundbites like "all scientific results are one study for being disproven" are a substitute for actual thinking. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of studies into the link between cancer and smoking. One study purporting to have evidence to the contrary would have, to put it politely, extremely limited impact in overturning the scientific consensus in this area. Hundreds of studies would be needed before the consensus changed. The chance of any journal accepting an article attempting to disprove the link is miniscule - because in all likelihood, the article is wrong, and it's a waste of everyone's time to review, read and act on it. Rail away about the purity of the scientific process all you like, but it does't change the fact that scientists like to invest their time in credible work, and by-and-large won't waste effort on things that are in all probability wrong, artefactual or the products of misguided kookery on the off-chance that they might just be right. Allocative efficiency.
No no no. You are missing the point. The phrase "settled science" is a heuristic. A shortcut. It means "it will be boring and pointless and not advance the state of knowledge to waste your and our time testing this result again, given the degree of testing it has already been subject to (unless you happen to have really compelling evidence that it is worth delving into all this again)." A good example would be the remote possibility that you would get a new paper published on whether there is a link between smoking and lung cancer. That is settled. It would be a waste of resource to investigate it again. Investigate further, for sure: how the link works, how the epidemiology differs for different demographics, etc. But saying "look, I've shown that the link between smoking and lung cancer" is real would be greeted with a yawn and saying "look, I've shown the link is false" would be met with "what a pile of bollocks".
1. People don't generally claim it's settled at the same level as Newtonian physics. It's not the same type of science. It's settled more like the way that medical science is settled: our best current explanation of a complex system, subject to change for greater resolution, but not in the fundamentals.
2. We are currently betting our lives and those of our descendants that the net effect of human activity is *not* to cause global warming. Given the choice, I'd rather take the other bet. But I'm reliant on everyone else, and people like you are making that pointless.