Comment by bnralt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bnralt | Hacker News Reader

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I think many of your examples are of times we failed to counter problematic tendencies as a society, gave up, and then even worse (in this case, more addictive time consuming activities) things come along. It's basically the realization of a slippery slope, where failure to stop one problematic trend is used to justify an even worse trend.

Society can survive with bad tendencies. Think about 50 years ago when American restaurants were full of cigarette smoke, and rivers would get so polluted they'd catch on fire. People still survived, even thrived. If we had ignored those problems, probably someone today would be saying "Opiates? Global warming? Just more moral panics, the way a few decades ago everyone was worried about the environment and smoking."

The dangerous thing is that once these trends become part of your society, it's hard to imagine the world without them, and hard to see why people make such a fuss about them because they can become an immutable part of your reality. You become blind to them. I'm sure, given enough time, we'll become blind to new negative trends in society just as we've become blind to previous negative trends. But that's not a good thing.

Totally agree. When I hear the argument "People always say this, they said this before with TV and videogames", it just makes me think that people are discounting some of the huge negative impacts these technologies have had (or at least contributed to).

Just look at the overall physical fitness of, say, an average 18 year old in 1950 vs today in the US. By loads of measures (obesity, muscle strength, cardiovascular fitness, diabetes, etc.) there is an enormous degradation in the physical fitness of America's youth. I'm certainly not blaming this all on TV and videogames, but at the same time I think it's a huge mistake to pretend our technological advances haven't had other, large negative side effects.

Slight tangent re: fitness. Over Christmas my dad and some similarly aged people (70’s) were reminiscing about their childhood, and pointed to the lack of Doritos as memorable. Junk food was neither the product of decades of addictiveness-enhancing R&D not cheap.

A poor person today by contrast has junk food as the cheapest option.

Cheapest by effort plus taste divided by cost maybe. It’s still much cheaper to buy a bag of rice and a bag of beans and some frozen veggies. You can eat sub $1 meals

Thank you! This line about "unhealthy food is the most affordable option" doesn't really hold up in my experience.

Some "superfoods," exotic fruits, nice cuts of meat and fish, and certain vegetables are expensive, and that's a problem, but its a problem at the margins. The basic building blocks of a healthy diet are all widely available and affordable.

Some quick googling says the avg price for a dozen eggs in the US is $1.48. A can of tuna is $0.77. A pound of bananas is $0.57. A pound of potatoes $0.75. Dried beans/lentils/rice are even cheaper.

I understand there are complicating factors. You need a place to cook, and a big mac probably generally looks more enticing than canned fish, especially if you've spent all day on your feet at a job you hate. But these are separate problems, unrelated to the food supply chain.

You struck a good balance here -- well put! :)

Another complicating factor of all this is "The Pleasure Trap" of "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" in a society far from what humans are adapted for.

Related:

"How to escape The Pleasure Trap!" By Douglas Lisle and Alan Goldhamer https://web.archive.org/web/20150430050047/http://drfuhrman....

"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by Deirdre Barrett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli

"The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

"The Lifestyle Cure" https://tlc.ku.edu/

From the last: "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"

Except if like a great many in the U.S., your only source of nearby groceries within reasonable walking distance is a gas station. In that case a bag of Doritos is $40+ cheaper than hiring a cab to take you to the grocery store and back for a bag of beans and rice. Also saves you a couple of hours of travel and cooking.

When I was younger even though I lived on a major street downtown in a city, there were no grocery stores around. Plenty of fast food restaurants with $1 menus though. Cheap, quick, and easy, but not all that healthy. Actual grocery shopping was a once or twice a month thing - bus ride out to the store in the strip mall, cab ride back, 2+ hours total and a lot of money.

One of the things I love about my house now is that there's a full grocery store right at the end of the street (along with other stores and a restaurant a block over). But most people don't have that.

Developped countries share the same technologies, but this obesity and diabetes problem you're talking about seems largely rooted in North America.

You're a little quick to correlate screens and health metrics. I don't think that explanation holds up at all if you consider data in other countries.

> Developped countries share the same technologies, but this obesity and diabetes problem you're talking about seems largely rooted in North America.

In France ("the land of delicate and healthy food", as it is sold to you), obesity rate was multiplied by 3 since the 80s. Overweight rate raised by 50%.

Diabetes has also been on the raise: double or tripled since the 90s.

You know, in general all the crap that develops in the USA reaches other countries after a while. Depending on which specific 'crap', it is just a matter of variables delays and variable intensity, but it surely comes one day.

> France ("the land of delicate and healthy food", as it is sold to you)

Is it? I would associate that description more with Italy. With France I associate butter, cream, cheese, fatty cuts of meat ...

To many people, Italy would first evoke pizza and (the huge amount of Nonna's) pasta :-)

"Gourmet", "Chef", "Cuisine" and dozens of other terms: even in the English culinary vocabulary, the French words have a predominant role. It ruled the world of 'proper' cooking at some point. But I was more thinking about how, from the USA, the French are presented as having a balanced diet, eating a bit of everything but not eating too much of anything, cooking by themselves and not resorting to mostly ready, industrial, over-processed meals, how they would be a sort model in those matters related to food.

What was very fashionable at some point in the discourse on healthy food (10-15 years ago, maybe), was the Greek/Cretan diet; which was often extended to the whole Mediterranean, including Italy indeed, and south of France. Traditionally the butter & cream you mentioned are associated with northern France: the South was supposed to be a land of oil (olive oil in the most Mediterranean part, other oils in other parts) and the North a land of butter.

As well as the almighty Baguette.

With Southern France and maybe Paris being the exceptions, the eating habits of the average Frenchman are closer to those of the English and the American than to those of the Southern European.

Said that, obesity is largely a problem of the Anglo-sphere, it has many causes, including a severe lack of food culture (eg adults who think it’s proper to eat candy bars or to eat at McDonald’s). It is not inevitable that the horrid American food habits will become the norm everywhere, the US is not the teleos history is moving towards.

Physical strength has declined according to simple metrics (grip strength) in Northern Europe:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235282731...

In Japan the same trend appears but it's delayed by two decades:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1728869X1...

Obesity and diabetes have also trended upwards outside North America but this has been mitigated by better regulation of the food industry.

The U.S. was economically recovering from World War 2, the Great Depression, and other things. Most working class Americans had a hard time affording food because of that. So, it was not like they could easily get away from being skinny, anorexic, etc. during that time. They were too busy saving or investing money for their bills, children's futures, and careers to improve the U.S. economically before younger generations got spoiled rotten by America's improved economy. Now, the younger generations of America today are barely affording food because of increasing wealth inequality, increasing cost of living, and decaying infrastructure decades ago. So, working class Americans are economically screwed again, but it is to benefit antisocially greedy oligarchs only. So, you better expect skinny people, anorexic people, and starving people to become a bigger population in the U.S. The ruling class in America are kind of doing what Nazis did to Jews in concentration camps by starving them to death. Except America is the concentration camp for working class slaves with the illusion of freedom disguised as the democratic party, republican party, human rights, etc. Overall, the ruling class has exclusively cut-throat power that lets rich men live in luxury during this pandemic while working class Americans suffer more with each new year rather than suffering less with each new year.

Technology does not respect biology. There is a mechanical view of man, that is similar to what hydroponics is to gardening. You look what are the required nutrients etc, and provide just that in a very sterile environment. Of course, the results are quite garbage. The fruits are tasteless, and the problems it brings (e.g. insect infestations) require a lot of pesticides. The technological vision is to solve these problems with new technological solutions. If modern life has become unbearable, it's not a worry because there are pills, wondrous cannabinoids, etc, to fix defective individuals. Quite a society!

But all of those things increase the GDP, so they are automatically an improvement.

Someone posted "The bicycle is the slow death of the planet" not so long ago. It's not meant to be taken literally, but this is not very far from some people's line of thinking.

Well put. In addition, biology can't really be patched. CRIPSR nonwithstanding. We are stuck with the bugs that developed many thousands of years ago. Our bugs will continue to be exploited.

There is no path but mastering ourselves eventually, idiosyncracies included.

"it's hard to imagine the world without them"

There is soviet sci-fi novel that features a distopian society where people a killed before they become frail and become a burdain, and its considered an honour. They can't imagine the world otherwise.

Sounds similar to Logan's Run

"Carrousel" from Logan's Run, is the western equivalent.

I think that was also a storyline in a Twilight Zone episode.

For the curious, it's "The Hour of the Bull" by Ivan Yefremov.

(It should be noted that this particular feature is not the central premise of the book, but merely one of the facets of said dystopian society.)

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