I would like to pitch the idea that the obesity epidemic is a symptom of failed city infrastructure. Imagine if riding a bike was a no-friction activity; you walk out your door, you have a bike there and the bike lanes are treated as first-class infra instead of cars. Imagine how much more you would bike in this situation, and how much healthier you and everyone around you would be
You’re trying to find a problem for your solution.
The obesity epidemic actually due to the increased availability of ultra processed foods.
European countries have access to those same ultra processed foods and yet their consumption and the obesity rates are dramatically lower. I think there are factors beyond simple availability that we should look at fixing.
Once upon a time people worked 9-5 with a commute somewhere under twenty minutes - so somewhere in the realm of nine hours of employment before home tasks like cooking and cleaning started happening. I believe most millennials and under work at least ten and a half hour (and the number of people trying to juggle multiple jobs has gone way up).
The ultra processed and fast foods are generally the default option when you are so fully drained by a sedentary employment and craving chemical joy to deaden the depression of existence. Millennials have eschewed alcohol and tobacco like no other generation and sugar is the only chemical fulfillment they can find so it becomes a spiral of comfort food into physical pain into inability to seek other enjoyment into comfort food.
I'd hesitate to ascribe the obesity epidemic to a single cause due to the exceptions that prove the rule.
As a lifelong bike commuter who's fifty pounds overweight and prediabetic, this isn't the cure-all you seem to think.
It'd be great, but it won't be enough.
Or walking. I've been to a few US cities, and the common denominator for all of them is that walking anywhere isn't really an option. Sure, you can't always walk A to B in most cities, but at least European cities have public transit to cut down on the distance, necessitating only two short walks to and from a transit station.
Observation: Saudi Arabia is heading down a Houstonian path. There was one pedestrian bridge near me, and outside of that one, getting anywhere involved strategic jaywalking to cross freeways. At least they seem to have a decent bus network, though.
I really prefer walking to cycling. I'm totally fine with bike infrastructure, but I'd really just like neighbourhoods to have amenities they can walk to.
I've lived on the east coast, west coast and in Europe. Out here in the west coast (Vancouver) the cities are nice enough but anytime I leave my home I have to walk down a hill (and my partner struggles with that due to arthritis), walk along half a mile of four lane arterial roadway, squeeze through two blocks along the same roadway on an extremely narrow unprotected at grade sidewalk while semis barrel by leaning over my head... then I get to a shopping center and transit nexus and can go elsewhere.
While living in Southern Spain I'd walk two blocks on quiet pedestrian streets to a waterfront promenade which was littered with restaurants and provided a wide (like 20 meter) surface to stroll along to reach the city center - at one point before the city center you'd need to cross a two lane high traffic road but that road had protected crosswalks every 150 meters.
The contrast between these two places (and don't even get me started on how pleasant Barcelona is to pedestrians) is stark.
That might certainly be one factor, but my intuition is that the primary driver is still todays diet. Things like soda drinks that let you consume teaspoons of pure sugar in an instant without appropriate feedback simply didn't exist in the past.
Not just obesity, but also the loneliness epidemic, since mental health is boosted as much by the weak relationships of the people that one sees regularly, day-to-day, whose name one might not even know, as it is by close, intimate relationships. (And even the latter are suffering the loss of social contact.)
One of the reasons I don't think I'll ever want to live outside of NYC. I walk every day. Sometimes take a bike. It's much nicer than the car world of the suburbs I grew up in
When you pop a balloon, the helium floats to space and is lost into the solar wind forever. Unlike every other element we could run out, and nobody cares. (Helium is important for a lot of serious things, too)
There's more pressing issues, of course, but if you want one that's very unknown compared to it's long-term significance, there you go.
I have goodish news. We aren't going to run out of helium any time soon.
Based on current rates of helium consumption the US alone has something like 250+ years of stored helium. We pumped a porous mountain full of all the helium we could back in the 60s and it's been kept stable since.
We still have no alternative to helium in a few of its most important use cases, but there is price where the helium we haven't bothered collecting will become cost effective to go get. Those untapped reserves are estimated 3-10 times what we have ever used.
I'm also fairly certain that we will have figured out a way to produce helium in the next hundred years. We know how it came to exist naturally it's really just the matter of someone being crazy enough to try and replicate those underground conditions and spend the money on the project.
I have faith that helium is a solvable problem for the human race.
Because of how entirely permanent this is, it pays to look far - like millions of years. That's what it took to accumulate.
We know how it came to exist naturally it’s really just the matter of someone being crazy enough to try and replicate those underground conditions and spend the money on the project.
How that works is just normal radioactive decay. The conditions aren't actually important.
It's probable we'll be able to make a bit with fusion, but the amounts will be small. IIRC we also collect some from decaying radioactive things in manmade settings, but again, it's hard to beat an chunk entire planet underneath a salt dome. Next options are harvesting it from space (but it's really spread out) or a gas giant (but there's stupid amounts of gravity).
The USA's two-party system is a fucking farce and we're not going to see major, widespread change under either party. But if I bring this up I get called a "Russian bot" and accused of telling people not to vote... even though I vote.
We've gotten a ton of change with trump. That's why it's felt so disruptive. Might not be the kind of change you were hoping for, but it's certainly change.
Speaking of real, the USA is not a law of nature. It's only been around for a short time, historically, and it took a bloody civil war to keep it going this long. The warning that we have to vote for the correct color every time, or the country falls apart, is wrong. Voting for the correct color and the country still falls apart is possible if that color can't make the fundamental changes needed.
Don't worry (/s), I think you're down to one now.
STAR and RCV is growing among some states and counties. Have hope.
The issue is that the same people that would lose votes from doing so would have to change the system. Which obviously means they have no incentive to do so.
In healthy democracies reform happens anyway, though because there's grassroot demand and politicians willing to capitalise on it one way or the other. It's just that that's not one.
The problem is that the US first needs to be in a stable place in order to break free of the 2 party system. I don't think we're going to see that in our lifetimes.
I'll also add that one of the two parties actively wants to see me and anyone like me dead, so there's a lot of pressure for many of us on simply surviving
I'll also add that one of the two parties actively wants to see me and anyone like me dead, so there's a lot of pressure for many of us on simply surviving
Oh, for sure, hence why I'm not anti-voting. I still want to save my ass in the short term, even while thinking about the long term.
Trans people will be murdered over bathroom laws. You want a masculine bearded guy in the women's room? That's exactly what anti-trans bathroom laws require. Those guys are gonna get shot.
Which is stupid, since unisex bathrooms already exist. It shouldn't be hard to install those in every single new building everywhere.
We call them "Woke DEI Bathrooms" now.
Amazing how this basic solution is always omitted... Leta do 10 years of culture wars!!!!?
Remember in the 2000's before gay marriage was legal a lot of people would suggest elimination of the word marriage and just call everything civil unions to appease religious objections?
That's what eliminating gendered bathrooms sounds like. Gay and straight people enjoy being married. Trans and cis people enjoy their gendered privacy that makes them feel safer. I believe you're intentions are good but removing a universal cultural norm isn't the solution. It's side stepping the issue of transphobia, exactly like whites only bathrooms sidesteped racism.
To be honest, I don't want to minimize the problem or make excuses but I don't think trans men are going to be the targets of this. It is (trans) misogyny and going to get targeted to trans women nearly exclusively
Disabilities' rights. If we grow old, we're gonna be dealing with some type of disability one way or an other. Sometimes it happens earlier. Plus, helping disabled people can sometimes also help non disabled people by making their lives easier.
A lot of problems, such as homelessness and increase in illness is caused by disability. People not being able to work anymore, or even work not being able to accomodate their needs cause homelessness. Covid basically making a lot of people immuncompromised, yet no work is being done to encourage people wearing masks by the government or other influencial entities.
Class struggle and the institutionalized corruption that the owner class is deploying against working people.
Bootlickers' pathological behaviours that support the owner class narratives as they larp what they hear on teevee
Especially the devoid of empathy billionaires who are just growing parasites, sucking the blood out of the planet and all of us.
Overpopulation.
It used a problem that was talked about a lot in the latest century. Then some countries reduced their nativity by their own and it was marked as "it's going to solve itself".
Problem is, population keeps growing worldwide. Even in these countries with reduced nativity, population keeps growing via immigration.
Also the main drive on reduced nativity was increase of the quality of life and feminism. I think both things are in danger. Quality of life has been descending in later years, and feminism is being eaten by an increase in religious madness all across the world.
So I think overpopulation is still going strong and it will keep going stronger. And it will be a self induced problem, because overpopulation will reduce quality of life, and a reduced quality of life will make people breed more.
I actually think is the number one problem, way more dangerous that climate change. Because, among other things, there's nothing more polluting than a human being, the more humans in this Earth the more impossible will be fight back climate change. Humans pollute.
And the worst is that no one cares about this issue, and people tend to become very violent when you mention it as a problem.
The thing about that though, is that to reduce the population in the least invasive, most peaceful way, is progress. And I mean progress in the geographical locations that are currently being kept from progressing. Human rights and progressive ideas, better healthcare, worker's rights; these are all crucial to achieving lower birthrates. It's an intersectional problem, always has been, always will be.
I worry that with declining birth rates capitalism will fall. OK maybe that is a good thing.
I totally agree, it’s alarming to see the projections of population growth. It seems unsustainable and I fear the consequences will be catastrophic. I think about this every time I see a news piece about declining birth rates or countries incentivising procreation.
I recently watched this Thoughty2 video on YouTube that touched on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRN2p7sSL_Y
He essentially concludes that, at this point, technology has been able to mitigate the overpopulation fears that have existed up until now.
I full agree with you. Just because we can exist on the planet does not mean we're better off. We're already living with the consequences of over population.
The first thing we need to do is change our eating habits. The over-farming of land is increasing the need for chemicals to grow food - not to mention climate change. Bird flu is coming. The manner in which we have to raise animals is atrocious and leading to pandemics. Everything is full of antibiotics so farmers and ranchers don't have to throw away "bad stock". Which of course is due to the increasing need to produce more food.
I think the worst part is that when this is brought up people blame the corporations and the governments. They're right that legislators should do more about this but, in America at least, the people are the one's who are supposed to have the power. We're supposed to make choices and cast votes for the world we want to live in. Instead, we keep making the same choices that give corporations more and more power.
America is torn between wanting all the freedom to make their own choices while complaining that government isn't doing enough.
That the 105 male/100 female birth to young adult ratio needs a fix to get to 100/100 at least.
The distraction comes from me being not too kind to either of the duo-culture of the US empire on this issue.
I thought female birth ratio was higher than males
No, slightly more AMABs get born than AFABs. Over time the difference cancels out, as AMABs tend to die a bit more sooner.
By itself this is not that big of an issue. A much bigger issue is the gender imbalance that you find in certain localities due to local governments, universities and companies not taking this gender imbalance into account. But I'm glad that you brought up this issue.
I don't appreciate pronouns being as wide spread in a working environment. For people who have had to fight for their gender identity I will of course respect that choice - but gender is a rather irrelevant quality in the workplace and I feel like the wide proliferation of pronouns on profiles in Slack/Teams/etc... improperly emphasizes the importance of gender in the workplace. I'd much rather use they/them as blanket pronouns and try and demphasize gender in our language. There are numerous more important factors of people's personalities that are more interesting than gender like interests (imagine if there was a common pronoun for someone interested in D&D as example) and I'd rather use those factors for identity than gender.
I admit this is likely to be fairly controversial but I do think the world would be a much more pleasant place if gender wasn't constantly reinforced in language.
You will be called "the new hire" until I eventually learn what your name is in a year or two.
Typically it is frowned upon to call a woman sir. Doesn't sharing your pronouns prevent that from happening, ma'am?
Is this a real issue in your opinion?
Yes, it is to me. English (and most languages tbh) has constructs that constantly reinforce a concept of binary genders and highlight that as an important factor.
When you learned about Mr., Miss, and Mrs. did you find that awkward? To know how to title a woman (absent the more modern Ms.) you'd need to know their marital status - but for dudes it's whatever? That fucking pissed me off as a kid - how are you supposed to know if someone is married when writing them and who fucking cares...
To me, at least, gendered pronouns are the same way - I'm writing to a person, about a thing, as them as an individual. Gender is generally irrelevant to this interaction so why the fuck is it necessary for it.
Imagine if it was astrology sign instead: I just finished writing up a response to OsrsNeedsF2P. I hope Virgo appreciates the care I put into it because I enjoy the question Virgo asked.
Imagine needing to know someone's birth sign to talk about them and imagine that English constantly reinforced that birth sign was the way to identify others and that there were twelve and only twelve proper birth signs.
Gender expression is an important part of our identities - I have a complex expression as a non-conforming man - but it's not the important part of our identity. It's a factor of our identity and, I'd argue, only really rarely a top five factor. People are philosophers, crafters, writers, artists, hikers, gamers, cooks, painters, etc... those activities we enjoy are much more core to most of our identities. Our gender expression is important but should usually only impact a very narrow portion of our identity.
So to me, yea, it's a real issue.
"I'm not racist, I just treat everyone like their white."
You're trying to hide our differences without understanding our experinces, needs and challenges are different. Obscuring our differences isn't equality, it's another form of oppression. People are different, men and women are different, each deserves the same opportunities as the other but eliminating acknowledging those differences only makes the lopsided treatment easier to overlook.
Ah, as someone who doesn't hide differences do you walk into the office like...
"Hey Nigerian Dan, did you get the memo from Polish John about half-irish half-welsh Sarah's presentation later today?"
In no way am I trying to erase people's identities, I just want to highlight that language places an immense emphasis on gender that erases non-binary people and cements it psychologically as an important trait for social interaction.
People are fucking complex, there's no reason to constantly bucket them into groups by gender identity.
