To Fight Global Warming We Must Tax All Recreational Exercise | Hacker News Reader

To Fight Global Warming We Must Tax All Recreational Exercise

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

15 pointsgetp16 comments

"There are about 300 million Americans who consume about 1,500 calories per day."

Fail. When surveyed, the average American claims to eat around 2,000 calories a day, and studies have shown that people greatly underestimate that. Also, over 3,800 food calories per person disappear daily. Even if you consider that much of it is waste, the average number of calories eaten per day is well above 2,500.

Guess who just read "In Defense of Food"?

We'd better tax leftovers, too.

Not if they are left in the fridge. An air-tight fridge to be sure.

it is a very blog entry, from the creator of Freakonomics. There is no real study, no real data, and wikipedia is quoted.

Not worth the read, insubstantial and borderline trollish. Disapointing comming from somebody like him.

Of course, he's trolling in response to similar behavior from the authors of the Lancet article.

The authors propose solving a health problem with economics, giving climate change as a motivation. Levitt is pointing out climate change is a poor motivation for what they are trying to accomplish, and, if you follow their reasoning to its logical conclusion, it will actually encourage worse health problems.

I would argue that in the context of his blog it's not trollish. I think satire is a lost art, certainly the works of Swift could be seen as trollish in some context as well.

Now, does it belong on the front page of hacker news? No, probably not, but that's a different issue.

Though it's somewhat longer than this, "A Modest Proposal", I assume, would meet with a similar response from you, no?

For what it's worth, I thought it was reasonably funny.

I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I'm damned if I'm going to use up mine running up and down a street. -- Neil Armstrong

Maybe he shoulda done the math.

Using his logic, if exercising increases you pulse rate from 70 to 140 beats per minute for 30 minutes per day and decreases your pulse rate from 70 to 60 beats per minute the other 23 1/2 hours per day, how much longer would you live after 50 years of this?

Neil Armstrong could be right. He may be referring to Kleiber's law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law ) and the Metabolic theory of ecology ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_theory_of_ecology ). Apparently, "for most organisms, the average # of heartbeats in a lifetime is equivalent. Elephant ~ 30 beats/min. Shrew ~ 1,000 beats/min" ( http://members.cruzio.com/~zdino/psychology/ecology.htm ). "The size of these hearts differs enormously, but over the course of each species’ lifetime, they appear to beat the same number of times - approximately 1 billion" ( http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/paste... ).

I think edw519's point flew past you. Here it comes again:

A resting athlete's heart rate is lower than a resting couch potato's heart rate. What does that mean in the context of what you just posted?

Altheles may have a genetic predisposition to be more healthy. Regular exercise may reduce risk of clotting but it may not have much influence on the upper bound of your lifespan. A search for '"twin study" resting heart rate' found that a few genes significantly affect resting heart rate ( http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2350/7/17 ) and that environment significantly affects active heart rate ( http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/94/8/1864 ).

I think edw519's point flew past you. Here it comes again:

Kinda mean.

Yeah, I've been grading exams the last two days. It's hard to be diplomatic after a while.

Also, for the next Earth Hour [1], we should consider the first minute to be 'Earth Minute', and all hold our breaths in the dark against global warming.

[1] http://www.earthhour.org/

Very good. How do we solve the overpopulation problem, which is the root cause to global warming?

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