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Comment by rifung | Hacker News Reader

> For example, everybody on the planet is now familiar with soft drinks. If anybody has never tasted Coke, it's not by accident. But Coke's ad budget is enormous. If all soft drink companies stopped advertising tomorrow, society would not be worse off. And we'd have billions of dollars [1] to spend on something useful.

Not that I disagree, but where do you draw the line? Sure, if Coke stopped advertising we'd have billions of dollars to spend on something "useful". On the other hand, if Coke stopped making soft drinks, we'd have billions of dollars to spend on something "useful" AND significantly decreased obesity.

If you are going to make the argument that having soft drinks improves life somehow, then that implies it's better for people to know about soft drinks, and how will they know? Advertising.

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As a doctor, I'm all for banning soft drinks, recognizing that it probably will never happen.

But, the health externalities associated with drinking such beverages should get priced in and be used to offset eventual health complications. This is not easy because no one likes taxes, but you get what you pay for.

May we be allowed cake and ice cream or would you ban those as well? Maybe you can get a special license if it's a birthday?

Just tax sugar.

Or stop subsidizing corn

Why don't we have both? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Small funny story about that.

In Finland we do (or did, it might have changed on 2017) tax sugar. Then they added artificial sweeteners and even mineral water under the tax because it’s ”fair” that way. Thus negating the original point.

That's not entirely true. Artificial sweeteners are suspect of (indirectly) causing diabetes, too. For mineral water, on the other hand...

Yeah, just drink tap water. Bottled water is quite a big waste with all the plastic, transport etc. Especially in countries with great water supply like Finland, it shouldn't exist were it not for marketing.

You need to judge a social impact of something before you ban it. The reason why soft drinks are under fire is because there is a lot of people who drink them literally every day. I know several people who drink 8-12 cans of diet coke every single day. On the other hand people usually don't eat cake or ice-cream everyday. I mean, I have no doubt that you could find someone who does, but it's not a widespread behaviour, so there is no reason to ban it.

It's very shaky reasoning. For starters, I'm sure you are seriously underestimating how much per time unit, and how much people do eat sweets. Second: if someone likes taste of sugar, and you deny that person sweet drinks, you likely to see increased consumption of sweets, or just plain sugar added to other drinks (coffee anyone?) How deep are you ready to go with prohibitions in that light?

If we're basing this on anecdotal evidence, I've worked with entire departments who ate cake or ice-cream every day.

That doesn't mean cake and cookies should be banned, nor should soda. It's nanny state nonsense, and one of the more steeply graded slippery slopes...

If you're really concerned for people's wellbeing, ensuring access to healthcare goes a lot further than denying people snacks..

Really? Entire departments that ate cake and ice cream every day of the year? Where was this and why?

It was at one of the behemoths now owned by IB.

As to why, clearly it was due to people wanting to eat pleasurable food.

People with riskier lives should simply pay more into healthcare insurance.

One general way to achieve that is sin taxes (on sugar in this case).

People with riskier lives

Glad you phrased it that way, because a lot of the people who want me to pay a tax for eating a cookie probably aren't imagining themselves paying a tax for going Whitewater rafting, or for driving their car multiple times a day.

>I know several people who drink 8-12 cans of diet coke every single day.

Are these people not aware of kidney stones and the associated pain?

> I know several people who drink 8-12 cans of diet coke every single day.

Interesting. That's not even sugar water. We're going to need some pretty elaborate regulations at this rate.

I guess you'd be for banning alcohol then? The aggregate negative effects on society due to alcohol are incredible, extending far beyond simple healthcare questions.

You can have it - just don't expect me to pay for your coronary. A long and painful death that costs millions. Was it worth it?

Thank god, an argument against universal healthcare.

I’ll eat the snacks I want.

I’ll pay for the healthcare I want and need.

You do what you need. And neither one of us is responsible for the other.

Now leave me be.

Problem with this argument is: what do you do when someone who can't pay shows up at the ER.

They will die without treatment. They can be saved, but not for free. What action, if any, do you recommend?

Leave it up to the hospital. They are best equipped to assess the cost and likelihood of being able to save the person. They also are most responsible for the repercussions in terms of positive/negative publicity and reputation.

Won't this lead to a situation where some hospitals are known for doing free work, while others aren't? The former will quickly go bankrupt if they aren't subsidized by a charity or religious organization, which has serious drawbacks in itself.

As for the rest, the doctors, nurses, and paramedics are now going to be required to do something that's against their training and likely their nature, by letting people die on the sidewalk out front. Do you suppose this policy will be workable in the long run?

Thinking of the parallels with public defense.

Basically, if you're poor, you will get a public defender. Someone who is overworked, underpaid and probably won't give your case the appropriate time it needs to develop a valid defense..

Whereas if you have money, you can afford an attorney that can spend the appropriate time to create a robust defense.

Eat all the sugar you want... just make sure your bank account is full when you have your heart attack.

May we be allowed cake and ice cream or would you ban those as well? Maybe you can get a special license if it's a birthday?

Absolutely reasonable question. How about coffee? Soda-prohibiters usually ignore it, because, I guess, they like it themselves, or expect a huge backlash. However, it's a very common way of excessive sugar consumption world-wide.

You don't have to drink coffee with sugar, and in fact, many people do drink it "black".

You missed the message in my comment. Soda don't have to be too sweet either.

Yes, it does. You don't get to choose how much sugar is in a can or fountain drink when you buy it, it's pre-made.

You could buy reduced-sweetness soda I suppose, but I don't know where you're going to find that. Even the boutique brands are very sweet.

You can also buy artificially-sweetened soda, but lots of studies are now showing that crap isn't any healthier for you.

No, it doesn't, not sure where you live, but I see low-calorie soda drinks in every supermarket I visit. You also, believe it, or not, are free to not buy any soda at all, in the same way you may decide not to put any sugar in your coffee. Probably, it's true to say that majority of buyers still prefer sugary sodas, because simply put people like sweet tastes a lot. Logically, it means that forced unavailability of sodas will be compensated by other means, including oversweetened coffee, chocolates etc. and I'm just asking where this I-save-you-whether-you-like-it-or-not zeal will end: would you regulate a number of grams of sugar allowed to buy per day as the next logical step?

As I said, the zero-calorie stuff uses artificial sweeteners, which is just as unhealthy and likely to cause diabetes as the stuff loaded with sugar.

There's no option to just have less-sweet soda. It does not exist. (Unless perhaps you're counting the fact that artificially-sweetened drinks simply don't taste sweet to some people, but that's a different argument.)

Whether you want to believe it or not, it is very easy to control how much sugar you pour into your cup of coffee at work (and you don't have to put artificial sweetener in it either as the only alternative; you can simply not put anything in it). There's no such option with soda, because it's premade. I don't know why you're arguing about this, because it's a simple fact.

As I said, the zero-calorie stuff uses artificial sweeteners, which is just as unhealthy and likely to cause diabetes as the stuff loaded with sugar.

Not sure I see what do you mean by "artificial" here. Making extracts from stevia is not more artificial then from sugarcane. What is more (un)healthy is still matter of gathering data, but it doesn't make an argument in either case. The argument is that you are not obliged to buy soda, as you are not obliged to put sugar to your food, and drinks. As well you are not obliged to drink alcohol for which WHO says there's no safe dose - unlike sugar. And which if we stick to your reasoning should be prohibited in the first place. But wait... does it sound as if it was tried already?

I don't know why you're arguing about this, because it's a simple fact.

I don't know too, because I'm nor arguing about exactly that. I suggest you to look at my previous comment again, you probably glanced over it too quickly.

I don't know why you keep bringing up the obligation to buy soda thing. I never said you were. You aren't obligated to buy coffee either. What's the point of this argument?

The whole thing started when someone compared soda to coffee and said coffee had sugar too, and I responded that you don't have to put sugar in it, or as much, since you're the one controlling the sugar addition. We're not talking about safe doses of sugar here, or the WHO, or whether you're obligated to drink anything besides water. We're just comparing the sugar in soda and coffee, that's all, and the simple and completely undebateable fact is that you can put a little bit of sugar in coffee, whereas there is absolutely no way for you to control the amount of sugar or other sweetener in your soda. (I guess you could try adding sugar to non-sugar soda, but you can't take out the artificial sweetener (or stevia, which just tastes bitter), and good luck getting sugar to actually go into solution while the soda is still cold.)

Finally, I don't drink soda at all, or coffee either, I'm just pointing out that the drinker is the one in control of the sweetener with most coffee, and this is simply not the case with soda.

Even coffee with sugar has way less sugar than a similar volume of soda.

Or beer? Are all these soda banners ready to give up their IPAs?

How is there an externality? It's not like smoking where it affects other people.

I would bet excess sugar (and carbohydrate) consumption is the second largest externality via taxpayer spending on people’s healthcare due to obesity and diabetes. The biggest externality is destabilization of the environment from pollution.

That's only a problem if healthcare is taxpayer-funded. Otherwise it's your and your insurer's problem to price this in somehow, maybe even offering cheaper plans for people living healthy (e.g. meeting weight goals).

I don’t foresee any country with a high standard of living start to turn people away at the emergency room who are experiencing heart attacks.

The whole idea behind insurance is that the unlucky ones who require more care than average have their costs covered by those who require less than average. Taxpayer funding systems are literally the same thing.

Yes you can get cheaper premiums by living healthy, but how far do you want to go? Are you going to let your insurance company log everything you eat and how many steps you walk every day? Seems much easier to just factor in the external cost of goods into their price.

When I got my driver's license at age 17 (or possibly the learner's permit? I forget), we learned that the car insurance company would reduce the premium for me if we regularly submitted them some kind of proof that I was getting good grades. It's possible this was some kind of "public-service program to encourage desired behavior", but I suspect that at least part of why they did it was because straight-A students are less likely to get into accidents.

For medical insurance, it seems they could at least do something like "if you send us evidence of healthy exercise/diet/weight, then we'll lower your premiums; otherwise you'll get a premium based on the estimated risk of the set of people who don't do this". (If the government doesn't forbid it. healthcare.gov says "They also can’t take your current health or medical history into account", which sounds like it might rule out some of that.)

This already happens, health insurance plans and employers give rebates in exchange for proof of gym visits/daily steps/gym membership.

I’m much more cynical:

1. It was probably a tax write off.

2. It was probably also both a community service project AND a reflection of lower expected insurance payout.

3. Maybe the straight-A students are correlated with insurance payers that would rather pay the repair known 1-off payment (or skip doing anything at all) vs the unknown recurring increase in insurance payments?

(Source: drove a dented-up pickup for over a year after a short romp along/into an orchard)

1. What would a tax deduction have to do with an insurer charging lower premiums to its customer?

2. The lower expected payout is exactly what an insurance company is trying to determine, and they’re very good at doing that assuming they have lots of data.

3. Most vehicle insurance cost are liability related, meaning the damage their insured to others, and namely healthcare costs. A collision with another person or their property will not be fixed without the insurance company getting involved, and a reduction in those is what the insurance company is betting on.

The whole idea of insurance is amortization of rare costly events over large numbers of people. Ideally, each person's insurance cost is equal to the expected value of the payout.

Why does it have to? Coke as a company is responsible for some horrifying effects on the world. Health effects, economic depression in the developing world, ongoing environmental harm. And for what? Sugar water. Not space travel, not energy, not transportation, not safer aircraft or cars, not saving lives, no. For fucking. Sugar. Water.

And they're far from the only company burning energy, effort, time and knowledge to accomplish nothing but profits at the expense of virtually everything else touching them.

The parent comment said that externalities should be priced in, I am saying it's not an externality and is already "priced in" if it hurts only the drinker. That's orthogonal to Coke being good or bad.

The externalites aren't priced in though. Heavy consumers of soft drinks require more health care on average which affects insurance prices of non-drinkers. To be truly "fair" this should be factored into the price of such products so that buying a coke includes an x dollar tax for your estimated increase in medical needs. This is however only doable with a socialized medical system.

The other option is to let insurance companies monitor your diet, but that sounds quite a bit more dystopic...

This view is too myopic. In India, for example, Coke sucks millions of litres of fresh water when surrounding areas are suffering from drought or mostly barren. There has been cases where Coke was forced to move out of a location due to outrage from people ... Personally, I'm of the view that individuals should be responsible in their decisions and how banning advertising of toxic products or the product itself will lead to a better society ...

Coke is enjoyable to many, that's a benefit. Air travel and space travel also cause ongoing environmental harm, whose says the benefits of those outweigh the environmental cost?

Maybe we should ban them as well. All companies "burn" energy, effort, and time to produce profits, that's pretty much the goal of a company.

> Coke is enjoyable to many, that's a benefit.

True. But would people enjoy it as much if it were priced accordingly to give the workers who made it a living wage? If they had to pay full non-subsidized prices for the corn sugar they use, and to give those workers a living wage as well? In other words, would people enjoy it as much if it was instead of a dollar a bottle, more like four dollars?

And don't even try and shift to a different company. It is not unreasonable to assume that there is ethical compromise involved in purchasing anything from a company Coke's size. Chiquita almost started a war so they could continue exploiting South Americans for cheap bananas.

I take issue with this "well there's no haaaarm" point because there very often IS harm. There is tons of harm if you follow the supply lines back to the developing world where western corporations exploit entire nations for the sake of cheap goods that then are consumed at a break neck pace in the West, far more than they should be, which then even harms THOSE people by making them overweight.

If your company could do actual good in the world by ceasing to exist, then I question why you need to exist in the first place. That's all I'm saying.

The environmental externalities of bottling and shipping flavored water are considerable, though Coke is not the only offender.

> and be used to offset eventual health complications

that would be predicated on an honest and direct pricing scheme for healthcare. taxing soda may be a feel-good thing to do, but how can you say - with a straight face - how much dialysis treatment or 'beetus meds actually cost? The whole business model of healthcare is built on information hiding.

Wow. Banning something unhealthy. That didn’t work out so well for alcohol or drugs. The last thing I want is more government power.

Rather than banning, how about having an age minimum, something that’s worked fairly well* for alcohol and cigarettes?

*depending on your definition of working fairly well

Because a law has worked really well to stop underage drinking, smoking, and weed.

It’s the same consequences. Little Johnny with well connected parents and a judge who doesn’t want to ruin the life of someone “who could be his kid” gets off easy while they expel little Jerome who is just “going to turn out to be a thug anyway.”

The good solution - already practiced in many European countries for alcohol and tobacco - is to punish the store if they sell to a minor, not the kid who buys it.

The store is punished. The store usually doesn’t sell to the minor, a minor can get someone overage to get it from them - especially in college.

It also hasn’t stopped kids from getting weed and cigarettes.

he also said "health ... associated ... should get priced in" - how about 6€ for a can of coke?

people would drink it, but far less.

It still has the same problems, in that people can bootleg it. Just at a smaller scale. Remember, they have low-grade turf wars in NYC over cigarette sales due to the really high taxes.

And that also goes to my other point. They have the police another tool to harass people and the police ended up choking a man to death for selling cigarettes illegally that he brought across state lines.

Cigarettes have cost $6 a pack in the US for over a decade and nobody bootlegs these. Same for beer, at $6-12 for a 6-pack.

Bootlegging is generally a short term response to diminished access. But soon after the controls arise, demand generally shifts elsewhere to less inconvenient alternatives.

I can think of no examples of continuing bootlegging in the US, aside from piracy of media, which is another kettle of fish.

This is the result of giving the police yet another tool to harass people for minor offenses.

Whether Eric Garner was bootlegging cigarettes or not - do you think it was worth it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner

A government does not gain power by exercising it.

The more laws you pass where the government can decide to punish people for their own choices that don’t hurt anyone else. The more tools you give them. There is long history of public officials not applying laws equally.

If you live in a country where the government decides to punish people (as opposed to the courts), you do indeed have bigger problems than advertising.

A government has power only if it does exercise it. If all government employees sat around all day and did nothing, the government would be powerless. The more a government exercises power, the more power it takes away from others (like the people).

It's only through action that power manifests (and the inaction of others to oppose the use and abuse of that power).

> A government has power only if it does exercise it. If all government employees sat around all day and did nothing, the government would be powerless. The more a government exercises power, the more power it takes away from others

That's bullshit. A government can't take away power from others by exercising the power it doesn't have yet.

> (like the people).

A democratic state cannot take away power from the people, the people cannot take away power from itself. And non-democratic states don't have a legitimate government anyway.

Can't help but think the only reason for that attitude (government power is bad) is that the government isn't representative of its people.

Or if you belong to a demographic who is routinely stopped for the color of your skin or you look like you “don’t belong”....

I think not in terms of should, but as a bare minimum. You sell a product with little socially beneficial upside and significant negatives. Then you should be happy to only have to pay a Pigouvian tax instead of being banned outright.

As a doctor, I'm all for banning soft drinks, recognizing that it probably will never happen.

Just curious, what are some of your hobbies? Things you like to do in your spare time?

LOL, looks like some people can see where I'm going with this.

There is no epidemic of dangerous hobby-related health issues, but obesity is aone of the biggest health problems in the developed world, especially the US.

There's no epidemic that can be ascribed to one food item in isolation, either. Why pick on soda? Where are the (reproduced!) studies that justify that? (Standing by for the inevitable authoritative-sounding pubmed link that actually proves nothing of the sort.)

Meanwhile, why should my health insurance rates go up because Dr. Joshgel is into cave diving or parachuting or enjoys the occasional track day in his GT3?

Or because someone else leads a sedentary life playing video games? How about banning those? There's no valid science behind claims of an "epidemic" of soda-induced obesity, but if you're going to generalize the argument to include all common causes of obesity, I'd respond by pointing out that there's certainly no shortage of studies showing the harmful effects of a sedentary lifestyle.

Rest assured, after the Dr. Joshgels of the world have come for my soda, they WILL come after something you enjoy. Maybe your steak, maybe your beer, maybe your guns, maybe your Playstation or your sofa. The slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy, but these people aren't logical. They're too busy being right.

People who are seriously into extreme sports already have pay for extra insurance as related injures aren't covered for such high risk activities.

There's also huge taxes on alcohol and tobacco for instance.

There's also a lot of other stuff that is banned already or strongly regulated or taxed heavily. Recreational drugs, medicine, certain additives that turned out to be harmful. Or rules like having to buckle up in your car. A lot of nanny state stuff that saves people from themselves.

People who are seriously into extreme sports already have pay for extra insurance

No, they don't, unless they are doing something their policies call out explicitly. Which is extremely rare.

There's also huge taxes on alcohol and tobacco for instance.

Because unlike soda, the damage done by those products is unequivocally identifiable.

The damage in excessive sugar intake is unequivocally identifiable as well.

I especially like how every time I state something specific, you respond with a vague generalization that, if acted upon, could be used to justify all kinds of bans, laws, and taxes... some of which, once again, you would not personally care to be subjected to.

I responded to the extreme sport one. As for the sedentary lifestyle that's not directly a product in itself.

Maybe you're just not convinced about the actual harm that sugar and obesity causes. I won't be able to write a good summary of the research here and now,but there's a lot of evidence out there. It's more dangerous than many people would assume.

Soft drinks aren't an arms race where most of the money spent is pure waste. When I buy a soft drink, I value it directly, so it isn't waste.

> that implies it's better for people to know about soft drinks, and how will they know? Advertising.

Are you really saying the only way you have ever known about a product is advertising? I honestly have trouble believing that, but if that's the case please consider that you're an outlier.

Me, I avoid ads vigorously and have for decades. I have no trouble learning about new products.

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