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Comment by tloriato | Hacker News Reader

“Hello #3576. You have reached your 1kg monthly limit of natural meat. Please consult the official list for alternatives.”

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Or "you've reached your monthly quota of alcohol purchases". Which isn't far fetched at all! In parts of Canada, up into the 50s, you had to bring your permit booklet to buy alcohol from state operated stores where they recorded your purchases: https://www.tvo.org/article/buzzkillers-a-brief-history-of-t...

I mean,

> Vinmonopolet (English: The Wine Monopoly), symbolized by Ⓥ and colloquially shortened to Polet, is a government-owned alcoholic beverage retailer and the only company allowed to sell beverages containing an alcohol content higher than 4.75% in Norway.

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

Sweden is similar - you can't buy a beer with > 3.5% alcohol. Subjectively, they improved the quality of these 2.1% / 3.5% beers. It was piss some 10 years ago.

Higher percentage, "normal" alcoholic products are sold in government-run Systembolaget[1]. And there's almost no cash in Sweden.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget

It's so sad that Sweden doesn't allow real beer in the shops like Norway does.

I don't know, I have started to think we shouldn't sell any type of hard drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, in grocery stores. Why not sell these products in separate specialized stores, like we already do with Vinmonopolet?

> any type of hard drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, in grocery stores.

I volunteered at an addiction and methadone clinic for awhile. I recommend you try it then come talk about what “hard drugs” are.

Alcohol kills more people than "harder" drugs and is much more acceptable within polite society. Same situation with tobacco, which also happens to be one of the most difficult substances to quit that we know of. Your average patient suffering from substance abuse will have an easier time quitting most drugs in comparison to nicotine. Given intravenously, nicotine is 5-10x more potent in producing a euphoric effect than cocaine.

Heroin, meth, etc. might kill you quicker and be more unpleasant to administer with more noticeable withdrawals, but if we're talking about ultimate cost to society they're not the worst offenders.

Please remake your argument using RATE of users who remain high functioning.

First, it is not the drug but a persons past experiences (usually some kind of trauma) that drives addictive and destructive behaviour. Opiates just happens to be one of the most effective tools to supress and temporarily deal with said trauma.

Secound, methadone is an awful drug primarily prescribed for it's much longer half-life (compared to diamorphine/heroin). This makes it more convenient for the ones who are tasked with controlling the traumatized persons intake of the medication. Diamorphine is less physically addictive than methadone and features considerably fewer side effects.

Alcohol is more damaging to the body and harder and more risky to quit than diamorphine. This fact is easily overlooked because the drug is so ubiquitous and socially accepted in our culture. The recreational and casual use that we observe in everyday life makes us believe that alcohol is a less dangerous drug.

Alcohol and tobacco are among the hardest drugs we have, it's just that we are so habituated to their use that we falsely believe they are safer, less addictive and easier to quit once physically dependent.

Vinmonopolet is nicer than any liquor store I was at in the US, though (Am american, lived in norway the last 9 years). And there are options to get it delivered to your house. Plus, it is really easy to order something if they can get it (and ways to import it yourself if you don't see it on their website). My liquor store experience improved greatly upon moving here.

Do they close early? Sure, but that's easy to work around. Are they expensive? Sure, but I don't drink heavily so it isn't a big deal.

Plenty of places have such a solution, including some US states.

There are still US states where wine can only be sold in state-owned stores.

Currently working at a PA one, I even get a .gov address.

When I visited Ottawa (in Canada) a couple of years ago you had to go the the special liquor store (LCBO) to get beer!

This was the case in Sweden as well (probably the rest of Scandinavia too, but I don’t know for certain off the top of my head).

Dear monkeybutton, you're about to commit a consumptioncrime, a social service worker will visit your household in the next few to days to check if everything is fine with you and your loved ones.

> Please consult the official list for alternatives.”

More likely a new way to tax stuff that the government does not like. Eating too much red-meat from methane-producing cows? Extra climate change tax for you!

Can’t they just add a meat sales tax to accomplish that?

Or just measure the methane output and charge the farmers a tax on that directly. That would give them incentive to feed their cows that methane reducing seaweed.

Not if the tax is progressive (higher earning people, or people eating more meat get taxed at a higher rate).

> Can’t they just add a meat sales tax

No, because the (sinisterly clever) idea of ekianjo allows the implementation of something which is sought by some: progressive taxation of limited resources or externalities etc, as opposed to fixed one. It's akin to rationing. You drive 10000 miles/y, pay 1/u or 1000; if 20000 miles/y, pay 2/u or 4000...

They should probably think about the Natural Gas that makes up 60 % of the total value of Norway's exports before they go virtue signalling to people eating meat from farms that use tractors.

> They should probably think about...

Problem is hypocrisy is hardly a reason that you can use against those in power.

But they are also exporting green electricity certificates to balance it off. #greenwashing

this would arguably be a great thing

Let's not stop there and let's profile people on everything they purchase and increase their taxes on everything that's not remotely considered healthy enough, because you know, they increase the burden on the whole society!

That's the recipe for the abolition of individual freedom.

You can choose to pay more taxes/fees at least, people already do that for certain things that are designed to nudge people to behave properly (e.g. pay 10 cents for a bag to encourage you to bring reusable bags and some people just don't care). Sin taxes are not new things.

There’s a lot of talk in N about the “people health” and how people need to eat less sugar etc. And how things like sugar should be taxed more. But you can still buy as much candy and whatever at the grocery store. And it doesn’t seem terribly expensive, either. (Alcohol is, though.)

There should be some opt-in assistance for making better lifestyle choices, I think. More walk, less talk. There are already self-help ideas that center around promising other people that you won’t do X, or that you will do Y, and then having to pay them money or something if you do/don’t. Why couldn’t the government help you do the same thing? As a not-for-profit alternative.

EDIT: I don’t mean that the disincentive should be that you give the government money if you fail. That would be a bad incentive for the government.

I’m a vegetarian because of environmental (and more recently, ethical) reasons. I’m an enormous advocate of reducing the quantity of animal products that the world uses.

This is definitely not a “great thing”. There are much less invasive ways to influence behavior and nudge consumers to consume fewer harmful products. Like simply using product-specific taxes or labeling requirements. Or targeting the producers directly.

We don’t need to increase government surveillance, ever.

You should look up "Dairy is scary" on YouTube then (promise, it's worth it!). Being a vegetarian has much less impact than one might think.

Heh I’ve been vegan for ages, just watched it. Great reminder.

Ah yes, the meat people eat definitely has more impact than the oil Norway produces.

You don't get to dectiate what people eat, imagine the other side, you are not eating enough meat, we will tax vegetables more in your purchases.

Meat is part of a healthy diet. Sure, some survive on other stuff, but in general, meat is healthy.

It's essential.

Seconded. I'm on an all-meat diet and I turned my health around thanks to it. Most often people who advocate eliminating meat look sickly, because they are.

Where do you get your dietary fiber from?

I don't, turns out transit works fine (actually much better) without it.

I won't speculate on whether this would apply to everybody but my hypothesis is my health issues stemmed from gut biome disregulation caused by - way too many causes to list - and somehow only total elimination of carbohydrates and plant matter fixes it.

I'm happy that worked for you, but nutrition is too complex to make sweeping statements like that. Some scientists say that animal fats are unhealthy, while others correlate the increase in lifestyle diseases with the increased consumption of vegetable fats. We just don't know enough about how the body works.

I'm all for meat, fish and vegetables. That's the healthiest slice of the available foods. Any reason you've cut out vegetables entirely? I'd consider eating lots of green veg, while avoiding the starchy ones. My entrance point was AIP which basically forces one to do this.

I think it has to do with gut biome somehow. I've seen excellent biome diversity scores from other people on the diet, but in my case it's from repeated experience with gradually eating more and more fruit (and nothing else), not necessarily large quantities even (though I did ocassionaly eat quite a lot apples).

I haven't really tried with vegetables (not interested taste-wise), so it might be the carbs / fruit sugars that weren't great for my gut biome, which I suspect is messed up as it is for many people nowadays.

I never needed to turn around my health as a vegetarian. There's about a 99.999% chance that I'm stronger and faster than you, I wish I could demonstrate. You'd be embarrassed saying what you just said in front of me!

I believe vegetarians can be healthy.

However, I’ve identified many people that were vegans just by their looks before they (inevitably) announced it. You’re supposed to be able to supplement your way in to what you need but either the majority don’t or they’re still missing something.

> I believe vegetarians can be healthy.

There's no need for belief, all over the world vegetarians live around a decade longer. There could be any number of confounding factors of course but the burden of proof concerning health and diet is definitely on the pseudo-carnivores consuming their packaged flesh.

> There's no need for belief, all over the world vegetarians live around a decade longer.

Controlling for wealth, total calories consumed, and a number of other known and suspected positive and negative contributors to longevity, quantity of meat eaten seems to end up positively correlated with longevity across the board.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8881926/#!po=26...

The better conclusion might be that vegetarian is an elite affectation that is not as bad for you as the competing elite affectation of overeating.

HN is so fucking stupid.

Part of. Extreme consumption of meat, especially red meat, is unhealthy. Not to mention bad for the planet.

Meat is literally recycled grass. Zero net carbon footprint. Sure cows release methane, but it’s part of a cycle and doesn’t contribute to long-term climate change.

All other “C footprint” is a consequence of poor farming practices, not meat. Blame the process (and the energy source) not the product.

There already is taxes like that, e.g on gasoline. Its very easy, just put a flat tax per liter. Then the more you use the more you pay. No need for extra surveillance, unless you want progressive taxaction of those resources.

In the US we do it already. The insurance companies can themselves define what healthy lifestyle is and they charge you higher premium. Or deny you coverage.

If you have any objection you can take them to the court and face their multi million legal teams.

Compared with taxes, at least this way everyone gets the same amount of meat independent of how wealthy they are.

Because the wealthy surely wouldn't be able to find a way around a supermarket meat restriction...

*illegally

Sure, there are illegal ways around all laws. That does not make laws useless.

Norway is already the country where it's quite normal to drive to Sweden to buy tobacco, alcohol and yes meat, and other stuff that's cheaper across the borders. Restaurants source cheaper meat illegally this way etc.

Unfortunately, Sweden is in the EU and Norway is not so there's quite a lot of customs rules on that border.

And I should point out that this is a day trip: It takes me less than 90 minutes to get to Sweden. There are busses and trains that go as well. There might be a lot of customs rules on the border, but I've never seen them actually stop folks either.

Right, the border is chill (except for the crazy covid times, hope that's behind us). Mostly easy and fair rules for regular people. But the point is, if your car is full of meat and it's for a restaurant, not personal consumption, it's definitely illegal.

I lived in Tromsø and drove to Sweden and Finland a fair few times... there is zero customs enforcement. At least for cars, for lorries they're probably tracked in some other way.

This is bad because different people want meat different amounts. Best case you get a meat black market (with corrosive effects on law and order ala alcohol prohibition) which will still lead to very inefficient meat allocation.

If Norway reaches the point where they have to ration meat, I don't see the problem with such a system.

You don't have to track everyone to ration resources.

You can just say, 1KG per person, and voilla its done.

Uh, you literally have to track people's consumption to ration resources.

During WWII it was done with state-issued ration tickets and a crackdown on the inevitable black market that emerged. That's a good alternative to this.

Why would Norway need to ration meat anyway ?

Ask tloriato that's hi scenario, not mine. I guess he fears the vega-fascist movement

No. The limit will be less generous. :)

Doing stuff like this today is going to be 100x better than what people 3 generations from now will have to live through thanks to climate change.

The question is whether we’re willing to inconvenience ourselves today to protect future generations - and the answer is looking like no.

Given that since 2020 we observed that (at least in the US) many were not even prepared to accept minor inconvenience to protect the _current_ generations, I’d say the answer is emphatically “hell no” rather than just looking like it.

I have the opposite take. The lesson from COVID is like the lesson from the war on terror imo, the majority of people largely DID accept massive curtailing of individual freedom due to fear, and will do it again the next crisis that comes along. The climate change crisis is slow moving and 100% of the people don't accept it as happening but if it produces an actual short term crisis like a famine then the statists will be ready to use it to propose (or possibly just enforce without passing laws) massive intrusions on individual rights again and continue to search for similar crises to keep doing it.

The answer is no for stupid solutions like tracking everybody’s meat consumption and a government limiting it. You will be swiftly told to fuck off (and rightly so). You need to get people on your side and contributing without massively changing their lifestyles, instead of alienating them. We need massive reductions in business contributions to climate change and we need investment in current clean energy solutions and investment in further research. The current younger generations already are less well off economically than the last. They shouldn’t have to make further sacrifices for future generations.

Exactly, I don't know why we are focusing on meat while we all know that energy and business emissions are more important, it looks like its an intentional distraction from big oil, and to give Norway's government more spying powers.

I don't necessarily disagree in principle, but I think what you're saying will be very hard or impossible.

Those "business contributions to climate change" exist because they're producing goods that consumers want; you can't significantly reduce that without also affecting consumer lifestyles, by reducing the options for the number of goods, or making them more expensive.

Further research in clean energy is all very nice, but that's what I've been hearing for 25 years, and if we look at what has actually been accomplished then I think it's a pretty big gamble to bet that "further research" will all make things work out.

The last 100 years or so have been quite exceptional in many ways; I think the expectation that younger generations will have it at least as good as the previous one is just not realistic.

>> The last 100 years or so have been quite exceptional in many ways; I think the expectation that younger generations will have it at least as good as the previous one is just not realistic.

Whether or not this is true (it very well could be although we won’t know for a while) I think the idea that younger generations will just accept that is unrealistic.

You're probably right there! But the alternative ("keep doing our thing like 10 years from now doesn't exist") will be worse, so ... yeah. It's a bad situation :-(

Once we exsuahst all options to reduce climate change with limited impact on the customer, things like renewable energy(people don't care where their energy comes from), replacing unnecessary plastics with paper, etc, we can then talk about things like limiting meat consumption.

But affecting peoples lifes without actually tackling industries and corporation that do way more harm is just stupid and basically serves Oil companies targets, they created the "carbon footprint" just to distract people from focusing on them.

>>Those "business contributions to climate change" exist because they're producing goods that consumers want; you can't significantly reduce that without also affecting consumer lifestyles, by reducing the options for the number of goods, or making them more expensive.

>without actually tackling industries and corporation that do way more harm is just stupid

I think you're missing the parent poster's point, which is that consumers ultimately pay for everything. "tackling industries and corporation" ultimately means affecting consumer's lifestyles.

There is a difference between affecting the consumers life to change to renewable energy and affecting the consumers life to virtue signal by banning meat while ignoring corporations.

Are consumers social planners?

Did consumers plan the massive road infrastructure in America? Did consumers make public transportation a fifth-rate form of transportation? Did consumers plan American Suburbia post-WWII? Did consumers decide that housing in central locations should be so expensive that they have to live a driving-distance from work (see: bad public transportation)? Did consumers decide that the goods that they consume have to take multiple trips around the world?

Why blame the output sink for so much?

> The answer is no for stupid solutions like tracking everybody’s meat consumption and a government limiting it.

When the era of plenty that we currently live in ends, I feel that a lot of people are going to be in for a rude awakening.

It’s not a question of us inconveniencing ourselves today. It’s a question of us and all of our descendants inconveniencing themselves in perpetuity.

Which seems unlikely. The future is long.

This kind of comment is one I only see from people who haven't actually read the IPCC's reports and don't actually have a feel for how bad it's going to be by 2100. Am I wrong?

You would be correct if the governments consisted of smart, very technical people, who weren't brainwashed by colleges into implicitly believing the current "feel good" narrative.

But in reality, the people in charge are a complete opposite of that.

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