In fact, helmet laws lead to a reduction in the number of young, otherwise healthy, transplant donors (since most die of cranial damage) but stating that as a reason to oppose helmet laws would have been objectionable to even the Hell's Angels.
You underestimate the Hells. A "patch" will be by soon to "educate" you.;-)
Seriously, maybe we should work on reducing the lifestyle diseases that increase the demand for heart transplants. That includes obesity and smoking, btw.
And you do these things not because you are a bold individualist. Not because you respect individual freedoms. Not because you are a rebel. You do it because You. Are. An. Addict.
Obviously they're addicts. What person would make the choice, exempt peer pressure, to smoke in the first place? And what, except addiction, would keep them smoking?
There are a lot of smokers who are trying to quit who welcome tougher laws. Same for a lot of ex-smokers, who don't need the "scent cues" of others smoking. I'm sure we all know people who have tried to quit, but their spouse won't, so they fail. Or their business partner won't. So they fail. Or their co-workers won't. So they fail.
People who want to quit *need* the tougher laws. They don't need people blowing smoke in their faces at work or in public places.
It's ridiculous. I've seen people who are trying to quit, and others who actively sabotage them by continually offering them a cigarette. Why? Maybe misery really does love company. Or maybe they don't want someone else succeeding when they believe they can't.
At 6'9, ordinary "quickie" measures such as BMI don't cut it. Applying the square-cube law, it's obvious that taller people can carry proportionally more weight.
On the other end, shorter people can't get away with more than a few pounds before they're "chunked out."
A generation ago, big babies were encouraged. A chubby infant was a healthy infant. Parents encouraged their kids to take second (and third) helpings. The problem is that those early-developed fat cells don't just disappear. Someone who's been skinny all their life and suddenly porks out (say to make a movie) will have a much easier time losing the weight than someone who's been fat since they were a baby - but neither one will have an easy time of it.
There are multiple reasons why losing weight is so hard. From the evolutionary point of view, we evolved to want calories, especially calories that are associated with fats. More calories meant more likelyhood of survival, which is why today greasy french fries, fried chicken, etc., taste so gooood! Our biology works against us losing weight. Try it, and watch the body go into "horde mode." You're less energetic, as your body attempts to horde calories.
Then there's the whole modern diet thing - fast/fat food, HFCS-gobbed soda pop, etc. How can anyone resist a bargain such as "all you can eat?"
Nobody (except maybe Morgan Spurlock in "Supersize Me") asks to be fat. But people give up. They go on a diet, see their weight go up (it will go up initially, as the fat cells replace fat with water, and water weights more than fat), get discouraged, and stop. It sucks.
Still, there are successes. One of my co-workers lost *cough* pounds, and went from a real rolly-poly to a bean-pole. He just got fed up, and completely changed what he eats. Lots of fresh fruits and veggies, both for meals and as snacks. No soft drinks, no caffeine, no sweets (not even *gasp* chocolate!!!). It obviously wasn't easy, because a waist is a terrible thing to mind, and we're not conditioned, either from biology or socially, to lose weight.
Banning HFCS as a food additive would help everyone who wants to lose a few pounds.
Uncontrolled type1I diabetes will also let people "eat as much as they want" without getting fat - all that high-calorie sugar is passed through the urine, while doing damage to the fine capillaries everywhere in the body (retina, hands and feet, kidneys, etc.)
Then you end up losing weight by losing a hand or a foot. It's something that can literally end up costing you an arm and a leg.
stop drinking sodas IMMEDIATELY and drink water instead
If there's anything that anyone should take from here, it's that. Sodas sweetened with HFCS depress the hormone that tells your brain that you're sated. The more you drink, the hungrier you feel, so the more soda (and junk food) you'll eat.
I know people who haven't drunk a glass of water in years. The idea is foreign to them. It's got to be either a soda, or coffee or tea.
Smoking has both physical and social components to the addiction. Why do you think school kids "get into it?" Come to think of it, without the social component, would ANYONE smoke? From what I've heard, someone trying it for the first time is more likely going to feel sick than anything else.
Remember, a generation grew up watching their idols smoke on TV and in the movies. Tobacco companies pushed this sort of product placement because they knew it worked. People want to immitate their heros.
I would love to live closer to work, but I can't afford the houses there.
You could also work closer to home. Possibly for less money, but hey, at least you wouldn't have to drive.
Or maybe you don't really mind so much?
... or rent... after all, now is NOT the time to buy a house unless you're really into catching falling knives.
... or double up/car pool with someone else...
... or lobby your bosses for a shorter work-week, offset by more hours per day. Going from 5 days x 8 to 4 dayx x 10 will reduce your weekly fuel costs, vehicle wear and tear, and commute time by 20%, as well as help the environment. If you have any form of flex time, just accumulate the 10 hours per day and take 1 day a week off. Ease into it by doing it once a month, then every two weeks...
Well, no one is holding a gun to your head to make you patronize a place that allows smoking, nor are they forcing anyone to work there. Freedom of choice? Remember that?
Freedom of choice requires that there is a choice. If there is smoke everywhere, in every restaurant, then there is no such choice, and hence no freedom of choice.
This is slashdot. You need to either give them a Windows analogy or a bad car analogy:
Windows: When every laptop sold comes with Windows pre-installed, there is no choice but to pay the "Windows tax!"
Bad car analogy: If I want to buy a fuel-efficient car built in North America, but North American manufacturers are all producing crap that falls apart in 2 years and guzzles gas like there's no tomorrow, I have not choice but to stop supporting North American car manufacturers.
Fat people analogy: "I have no choice. I eat to forget my problem." "What is your problem?" "I'm fat!"
Smokers' logic analogy: "I smoke to relax." "Why do you need to smoke to relax?" "Because I'm so tense from worrying that smoking will kill me!"
Regardless of the "efficiency" of the individual body, the simple fact is that fewer calories in means less is available to be converted to fat. If people ingest fewer calories than they burn off, they convert tissue to energy. First fat, then, once all the fat is gone, muscle.
There's no way around this simple fact. If you eat less than you need, you will lose weight over the long run. If you eat more than you need, you will store the rest as fat.
Part of the problem is that, once you start putting on the pounds, you simply don't feel like expending as much energy as before, so you're going to continue gaining weight.
Another problem is that various diseases and medications can interfere with your behaviour, making it harder for you to want to exercise on a regular basis. And this doesn't count the effect of HFCS, which keeps your body from producing the hormone that says "hey, I'm full - STOP EATING!!!" - so the more HFCS-sweetened food you eat, the hungrier you feel.
HFCS should be regulated the same as any other drug that has such a profound effect on the body. Its' use as a sweetener should be banned.
We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.
We could probably get along with 2 billion, but any reduction won't be by intelligent means. War and disease will be the only way it will happen, and its pretty inevitable, unless a large asteroid gives us the smackdown first.
A laorge portion of the population being grossly overweight is a symptom of misuse of resources, as well as vast market inefficiencies in the allocation of resources. Since the market can't sort it out, war and the ensuing diseases will. It's just a question of who pulls the trigger first.
How about you just don't go to places that you don't want to go to? Too much smoke for you? Don't go there!
So by your same logic, if you don't like me taking a dump in your coffee, don't go to a coffee shop where I decide to take a dump.
But fortunately, people like me (non-addicts) are in the majority, we have science on our side, and we make the rules. Don't like being unable to feed your addiction? Stay in your own home.
Actually, it will probably come to that, both for smoking, and for places that promote binge eating ("all you can eat" restaurants).
There's nearly always a solution when it comes to weight loss. I suggest you exercise early in the morning before work, It'l be a bitch to start with but youl have much more energy all day long, especially after work.
... and make supper your smallest meal of the day. Less chance for the body to convert excess calories into fat. Studies show that 2 people eating the same number of calories daily, the one who consumes most of them in the evening before going to bed will gain the most, or lose the least.
but there are also a lot of skinny people that eat just as much and just have a higher metabolism
So the people who claim that they're fat because they have a "slower metabolism" should obviously just eat less. Problem solved.
Whether someone has a "faster" or "slower" metabolism isn't the issue - it's about energy intake vs. energy output. Fat people, by and large, need to eat less. It's not like everyone has a "right" to eat as much as they want and not get fat...
So, if you find your scale is saying "one at a time, please!" - reduce your caloric intake, increase your energy output, and you'll lose weight. Too many fat people claim that their metabolism somehow violates the laws of thermodynamics, that no matter how little they eat, they still gain weight.
People in the USA are the fattest on the planet by far as we are the nation that consumes the most energy capital. High food and gas prices will help us in the long run --portions will become smaller and that's a good thing. Notice the French, mostly they are slim and their food comes in small portions and is generally of higher quality than ours.
So you have the gull (sic) to tell me that because I am smoking, I am killing myself when the actual figures say I have almost a fifty percent chance of living longer then the average person in the US
"almost 50% chance of living longer" == "greater than 50% chance of dying sooner."
In other words, smokers, on average, die sooner. And their quality of life in the end years isn't that great either.
Education is good I guess, but this is approaching the need to educate people to potty train their children. Eating is one of the most basic factors of being alive, and if people cant grasp that then I'm almost (well not really) surprised they figured out how to breed.
I'm not talking so much about adults working in a sedentary environment, but the seemingly simple idea of cooking a meal once in a while so your kids aren't 150lbs at 10.
I was shocked to find out that, with all the "convenience food" around, there's a LOT of people under 25 who simply can't cook. If it's not "microwave-ready", it's beyond them. Something as simple as making spaghetti...
Why? Because their parents, rather than take the time to cook, used "convenience food" so they could spend more time watching TV. And I'm not singling out mothers here - both sexes should cook for their kids; guys - cooking means more than the occasional bar-b-que. It also means cleaning up the mess you left in the kitchen.
"Yes its all OK now, we can _blame_ it on the fat people!"
Blame is all its about. We can and do blame countries for over-population, countries for over-consumption per person, people in SUVs, etc. It seems like blame may be the word of the year.
There's more than enough blame to go around for everyone. Parents who don't feed their kids properly and think that McDonalds 3 times a week is okay, food manufacturers who use HFCS instead of sugar cane (HFCS depresses the production of the hormone that makes you "feel full" so you're still hungry after a dose of HFCS-laden food, so you eat more), governments for not regulating the use of HFCS as a food additive, given its' effects on the body's hormones, the rest of us for not being more insistent in making this an issue, fat people for "giving in" rather than making the hard choices...
Ditto for overpopulaton, and people who use SUVs as "penis extenders" or status symbols.
On a related note, I hear that the next big bubble to follow the collapse of gas-guzzling SUVs is in fact going to be plastic surgery to extend the penis. Benefits cited are:
1. cheaper initial cost
2. lower maintenance
3. can't be repossessed, foreclosed upon, or split in the event of a divorce
Uh, I haven't seen any smokers robbing a liquor store to get their next fix.
Of course not. They want nicotne, not booze. When the Canadian government raised taxes on cigarettes, robbers started cutting through store roofs. Also, there was a rise in people buying cartons of cigarettes and then rushing out of the store with them rather than paying, same as now there's a rise in people pumping their tanks full and "forgetting" to pay.
Bike helmets are a joke, IMHO, but they do not specify where and how bike riders ride. Same for seatbelts. On that same line, many states are rejected helmet laws for motorcycle riders in the name of liberty, which is what we are really talking about here.
Over here, if you're not wearing it on your head, you're fined. Also, you have to ride in a staggered pattern on the road, not abreast. As one doctor told me, it's not the people who get killed in a bike crash, its' the ones who survive... made me look around for a better helmet, not because I'm a bad driver, but because I didn't want some errant motorist turning me into a veggie.
I don't think it would bother me to see these laws relaxed quite a bit as it might make my day to see the ladies around the office go topless during their breaks on warm summer days.
Women have won the right to go topless in New York, Quebec, Washington, DC, and Maine, among others.
The whole point is that smoking is a legal activity.
Only because it was "grandfathered". If it were being introduced to society today, it would be banned as much more harmful than, say, cabannis. Legislators and governments are addicted to tobacco $$$.
1. farmers shifting production from wheat to subsidized biofuels
2. people shifting from rice to wheat
3. wheat crop failures
Wheat shortage sends bread, pasta prices soaring
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 | 12:13 PM ET
CBC News
Soaring wheat prices have Canadian bakeries struggling, farmers rejoicing and customers digging deeper at the till to pay for their bread and pasta purchases.
The price of flour has been climbing steadily over the last year.
(CBC)
The price of flour has doubled in the past two months as weather problems, including two years of droughts in Australia, have depleted wheat stocks to lows not seen since the 1970s.
Also contributing to the shortage is the flux of grain farmers switching to other crops, such as canola or corn, that produce biofuels.
"It's a very, very tight situation," said Canadian Wheat Board analyst Bruce Burnett. "World production has been under consumption in the last couple of years, so we have been drawing stocks down and we've finally hit levels that have made the market very, very concerned about supplies and rightly so."
Burnett said the prices are likely to remain high for at least another 18 months, as it could take up to three years of strong harvests to rebuild the worldwide stocks.
Bakers rising prices
The pricing crunch is affecting bakeries, and their customers, across the country. In Winnipeg, KUB Bakery said its prices need to go up to help cover the rising costs.
"We're not going to gouge anyone, we're going to take what we need to stay afloat. Bread is going to have to go up, any product with wheat in it will go up, that's a certainty," Ross Einfeld, the bakery's manager, told CBC News.
"I'm sure all bakeries across the board have the same problem. Their flour price has doubled, their ingredient price has doubled. So you're going to see prices increase."
Calabria Bakery, in Scarborough, Ont., is also finding rising flour prices a challenge.
The bakery's Sam Cuzzolino said they use roughly 15 tonnes of flour a month for bread and pizza dough and "as far as the bread side goes, if we're breaking even I'd be amazed at this point."
He said if the profits in the 50-year-old business continue to decline, he'll have to consider stopping baking bread altogether.
Mount Pearl, N.L., bakery manager Tom Bennett said bakeries can only swallow flour increases for so long.
"It's such a labour intensive thing and really, when you see the cost going up to pass it on to the customer, it's a very big increase for them to swallow," he said, adding that his customers would be upset if he raised his prices from $1.75 to $2.50 a loaf to help cover the costs.
The rising costs are also shrinking the bottom line at Coleman's grocery store in Mount Pearl, Newfoundland.
"From what we were paying a year ago to what we're paying now, it's actually phenomenal," said Tom Bennett, bakery manager.
"You wouldn't really think all these different things going on would affect the price of flour here in Mount Pearl, but it has."
Soaring prices have farmers 'optimistic'
While bakeries are struggling, the high prices are encouraging for farmers.
Doug Chorney, a wheat farmer near Winnipeg and a member of farmers' group Keystone Agricultural Producers, says he and his colleagues are "very optimistic."
"These are the best prices for wheat we've seen in many farming careers, perhaps ever. Everyone is optimistic this is going to be a good year, providing we can produce the crop that hasn't grown yet," he said.
Chorney, who said he has already decided to plant more wheat this year, also said the expected profits may help keep some farmers
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, helmet laws lead to a reduction in the number of young, otherwise healthy, transplant donors (since most die of cranial damage) but stating that as a reason to oppose helmet laws would have been objectionable to even the Hell's Angels.
You underestimate the Hells. A "patch" will be by soon to "educate" you. ;-)
Seriously, maybe we should work on reducing the lifestyle diseases that increase the demand for heart transplants. That includes obesity and smoking, btw.
Obviously they're addicts. What person would make the choice, exempt peer pressure, to smoke in the first place? And what, except addiction, would keep them smoking?
There are a lot of smokers who are trying to quit who welcome tougher laws. Same for a lot of ex-smokers, who don't need the "scent cues" of others smoking. I'm sure we all know people who have tried to quit, but their spouse won't, so they fail. Or their business partner won't. So they fail. Or their co-workers won't. So they fail.
People who want to quit *need* the tougher laws. They don't need people blowing smoke in their faces at work or in public places.
It's ridiculous. I've seen people who are trying to quit, and others who actively sabotage them by continually offering them a cigarette. Why? Maybe misery really does love company. Or maybe they don't want someone else succeeding when they believe they can't.
If only ... despite my love for chocolate, I'm still white!
Must be those smoke-filled back rooms we keep hearing about :-)
At 6'9, ordinary "quickie" measures such as BMI don't cut it. Applying the square-cube law, it's obvious that taller people can carry proportionally more weight.
On the other end, shorter people can't get away with more than a few pounds before they're "chunked out."
A generation ago, big babies were encouraged. A chubby infant was a healthy infant. Parents encouraged their kids to take second (and third) helpings. The problem is that those early-developed fat cells don't just disappear. Someone who's been skinny all their life and suddenly porks out (say to make a movie) will have a much easier time losing the weight than someone who's been fat since they were a baby - but neither one will have an easy time of it.
There are multiple reasons why losing weight is so hard. From the evolutionary point of view, we evolved to want calories, especially calories that are associated with fats. More calories meant more likelyhood of survival, which is why today greasy french fries, fried chicken, etc., taste so gooood! Our biology works against us losing weight. Try it, and watch the body go into "horde mode." You're less energetic, as your body attempts to horde calories.
Then there's the whole modern diet thing - fast/fat food, HFCS-gobbed soda pop, etc. How can anyone resist a bargain such as "all you can eat?"
Nobody (except maybe Morgan Spurlock in "Supersize Me") asks to be fat. But people give up. They go on a diet, see their weight go up (it will go up initially, as the fat cells replace fat with water, and water weights more than fat), get discouraged, and stop. It sucks.
Still, there are successes. One of my co-workers lost *cough* pounds, and went from a real rolly-poly to a bean-pole. He just got fed up, and completely changed what he eats. Lots of fresh fruits and veggies, both for meals and as snacks. No soft drinks, no caffeine, no sweets (not even *gasp* chocolate!!!). It obviously wasn't easy, because a waist is a terrible thing to mind, and we're not conditioned, either from biology or socially, to lose weight.
Banning HFCS as a food additive would help everyone who wants to lose a few pounds.
Uncontrolled type1I diabetes will also let people "eat as much as they want" without getting fat - all that high-calorie sugar is passed through the urine, while doing damage to the fine capillaries everywhere in the body (retina, hands and feet, kidneys, etc.)
Then you end up losing weight by losing a hand or a foot. It's something that can literally end up costing you an arm and a leg.
If there's anything that anyone should take from here, it's that. Sodas sweetened with HFCS depress the hormone that tells your brain that you're sated. The more you drink, the hungrier you feel, so the more soda (and junk food) you'll eat.
I know people who haven't drunk a glass of water in years. The idea is foreign to them. It's got to be either a soda, or coffee or tea.
Just don't let the Rock Machine or the Hells know about those grow-ops. At least now we know where the "milk from contented cows" comes from :-)
Smoking has both physical and social components to the addiction. Why do you think school kids "get into it?" Come to think of it, without the social component, would ANYONE smoke? From what I've heard, someone trying it for the first time is more likely going to feel sick than anything else.
Remember, a generation grew up watching their idols smoke on TV and in the movies. Tobacco companies pushed this sort of product placement because they knew it worked. People want to immitate their heros.
This is slashdot. You need to either give them a Windows analogy or a bad car analogy:
Windows: When every laptop sold comes with Windows pre-installed, there is no choice but to pay the "Windows tax!"
Bad car analogy: If I want to buy a fuel-efficient car built in North America, but North American manufacturers are all producing crap that falls apart in 2 years and guzzles gas like there's no tomorrow, I have not choice but to stop supporting North American car manufacturers.
Fat people analogy: "I have no choice. I eat to forget my problem." "What is your problem?" "I'm fat!"
Smokers' logic analogy: "I smoke to relax." "Why do you need to smoke to relax?" "Because I'm so tense from worrying that smoking will kill me!"
Haven't checked the lineup at the local "all-you-can-eat" lately? ;-)
Just watching some of these people eat is enough to make you sick.
Regardless of the "efficiency" of the individual body, the simple fact is that fewer calories in means less is available to be converted to fat. If people ingest fewer calories than they burn off, they convert tissue to energy. First fat, then, once all the fat is gone, muscle.
There's no way around this simple fact. If you eat less than you need, you will lose weight over the long run. If you eat more than you need, you will store the rest as fat.
Part of the problem is that, once you start putting on the pounds, you simply don't feel like expending as much energy as before, so you're going to continue gaining weight.
Another problem is that various diseases and medications can interfere with your behaviour, making it harder for you to want to exercise on a regular basis. And this doesn't count the effect of HFCS, which keeps your body from producing the hormone that says "hey, I'm full - STOP EATING!!!" - so the more HFCS-sweetened food you eat, the hungrier you feel.
HFCS should be regulated the same as any other drug that has such a profound effect on the body. Its' use as a sweetener should be banned.
We could probably get along with 2 billion, but any reduction won't be by intelligent means. War and disease will be the only way it will happen, and its pretty inevitable, unless a large asteroid gives us the smackdown first.
A laorge portion of the population being grossly overweight is a symptom of misuse of resources, as well as vast market inefficiencies in the allocation of resources. Since the market can't sort it out, war and the ensuing diseases will. It's just a question of who pulls the trigger first.
Actually, it will probably come to that, both for smoking, and for places that promote binge eating ("all you can eat" restaurants).
So the people who claim that they're fat because they have a "slower metabolism" should obviously just eat less. Problem solved.
Whether someone has a "faster" or "slower" metabolism isn't the issue - it's about energy intake vs. energy output. Fat people, by and large, need to eat less. It's not like everyone has a "right" to eat as much as they want and not get fat ...
So, if you find your scale is saying "one at a time, please!" - reduce your caloric intake, increase your energy output, and you'll lose weight. Too many fat people claim that their metabolism somehow violates the laws of thermodynamics, that no matter how little they eat, they still gain weight.
http://data1.blog.de/blog/m/mechafanboy/img/euro_vs_america.jpg
I have this as one of my wallpapers on one desktop (KDE, so I have multiple desktops, natch :-).
I believe it gets the point across.
this, this, this - not a pretty sight.
"almost 50% chance of living longer" == "greater than 50% chance of dying sooner."
In other words, smokers, on average, die sooner. And their quality of life in the end years isn't that great either.
I was shocked to find out that, with all the "convenience food" around, there's a LOT of people under 25 who simply can't cook. If it's not "microwave-ready", it's beyond them. Something as simple as making spaghetti ...
Why? Because their parents, rather than take the time to cook, used "convenience food" so they could spend more time watching TV. And I'm not singling out mothers here - both sexes should cook for their kids; guys - cooking means more than the occasional bar-b-que. It also means cleaning up the mess you left in the kitchen.
There's more than enough blame to go around for everyone. Parents who don't feed their kids properly and think that McDonalds 3 times a week is okay, food manufacturers who use HFCS instead of sugar cane (HFCS depresses the production of the hormone that makes you "feel full" so you're still hungry after a dose of HFCS-laden food, so you eat more), governments for not regulating the use of HFCS as a food additive, given its' effects on the body's hormones, the rest of us for not being more insistent in making this an issue, fat people for "giving in" rather than making the hard choices ...
Ditto for overpopulaton, and people who use SUVs as "penis extenders" or status symbols.
On a related note, I hear that the next big bubble to follow the collapse of gas-guzzling SUVs is in fact going to be plastic surgery to extend the penis. Benefits cited are:
Of course not. They want nicotne, not booze. When the Canadian government raised taxes on cigarettes, robbers started cutting through store roofs. Also, there was a rise in people buying cartons of cigarettes and then rushing out of the store with them rather than paying, same as now there's a rise in people pumping their tanks full and "forgetting" to pay.
Over here, if you're not wearing it on your head, you're fined. Also, you have to ride in a staggered pattern on the road, not abreast. As one doctor told me, it's not the people who get killed in a bike crash, its' the ones who survive ... made me look around for a better helmet, not because I'm a bad driver, but because I didn't want some errant motorist turning me into a veggie.
Women have won the right to go topless in New York, Quebec, Washington, DC, and Maine, among others.
Only because it was "grandfathered". If it were being introduced to society today, it would be banned as much more harmful than, say, cabannis. Legislators and governments are addicted to tobacco $$$.
You step into a maize.
(i) inventory
Inventory: One fat person
"Feed the fat person to the grue-weevil. [Enter]"
Hi squiggie :-)
Also wheat, caused by:
In 10 years? (the timespan you posited). Not going to happen.