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Comment by yung234 | Hacker News Reader

More generally there is way too much crap in the environment and it is past time for people to start protesting this. We are likely paying a price for this in rising rates of obesity and deteriorating mental health. It's time for cleaner outdoor air, better indoor air quality and ventilation and a tighter rein on the proliferating number of chemicals that surround us. As the item notes, Parkinson's rates have been increasing for some time and are expected to continue to increase in the coming decades.

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Good luck getting any laws on this passed if Republicans control any branch of congress, or not struck down if they continue to leverage their judiciary control for blatantly political ends.

Good luck heating your house or feeding your family if the Democrats continue their blatant political goals of depopulation.

Depopulation? You mean stepping back from overpopulation? Do you want to live in a world where everyone lives in a 200sqft box and eats manufactured sludge because we don't have resources for people to live like actual humans unless they're from an oligarch family?

I can feed my family with a small permaculture farm, some chickens and goats, without relying on anyone else. I can heat my house with wood and solar energy retained in water, again without relying on anyone else. If my farm is surrounded by polluters and thus the ground is so tainted that nothing grows without buying Monsanto's entire catalog, that would be the fault of Republicans who've blocked environmental regulation.

Overpopulation is a myth best left behind in the 1970s.

You should try living in Hong Kong and see how you feel about overpopulation. As climate change makes huge swathes of land unlivable and population continues to grow that will be your future.

'You should try living in the Yukon and see how you feel about overpopulation. As climate change...'

Your experience is valid but the population density of a particular city (or lack thereof in a particular territory) is a poor indicator of whether the earth's population is too high for its carrying capacity.

> heat my house with wood

In what world is this remotely good for the environment, in any way?

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Also, if you do really live on a farm off the grid, you might be interested in this NYT profile: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/thomas-massie-rep...

In a world where there aren't way too many billions of people.

I like people! I think life is inherently good, and more people alive to enjoy the world is something we should be aiming for.

I dislike being around people. More people means more competition for the good stuff like space, a nice view, quiet, delicious fish/game, etc.

You might argue that more people produce more other good stuff, but that is a flawed argument for a few reasons. For starters, a lot of scarcity in our economy is fake and introduced to maximize profit. Second, there's only so much valuable work to be done, but everyone has to have a job, so somewhere between 50-80% of people end up doing meaningless work (think of all the people involved in making/marketing a lot of infomercial garbage and lame tchotchkes like dog bowls shaped like toilets that flush when the dog eats). Nobody would miss those things if they'd never existed, and I'm sure none of the people responsible wanted to do that sort of thing growing up. It's basically a big capitalist circle jerk.

I am an introvert, I don't always like being around people. But I am glad that those people got a chance to exist and experience life, and am willing to accept inconvenience for that.

But if they didn't exist then it would not have mattered? We are just space dust, until we are born we have no conscience, those who not exist cannot miss anything.

Well since there are many billions of people, solutions should adapt to their presence, not to a sick ideal of eliminating several billion of them. The world is in the first place not even overpopulated, it just manages its resources badly in certain contexts, and secondly, no person alive today has any less right to life than you. Ergo, if you hate several billion extra humans, you should also hate your own presence by this logic.

1. Republicans refuse to enforce any environmental regulation on industries, no matter how dire the consequences.

2. Poisonous chemicals leech into air, soil, water. Then they accumulate up the food chain. Humans are at the apex.

3. Synthetic hormones, plastics, and etc. decimate fertility.

If you’re concerned about population growth, you should support some degree of environmental regulation. Only one mainstream* party in the states gets you that.

* A mathematical consequence of first past the post voting systems is that the two largest parties are stable. Third parties only exist as unstable equilibria. If you desire a serious third party, you should also support election reform. . . which also means not voting Republican.

Stop giving democrats a pass for doing nothing. Look at how ineffective Buttigieg has been on rail safety re: east palestine.

Tribalist myopia enables this status quo.

Don't get me wrong, I kind of hate the democrats too. It's frustrating that the choice is between "kind but mostly incompetent and somewhat corrupt" and "cruel and extremely corrupt"

So, tribalist myopia.

Pardon my myopia, but what’s an example of Republican-proposed legislation or reform aimed at protecting Americans from exposure to potentially harmful waste products? I genuinely don’t know.

People are expendable. There's a new crop every year. Corporate profits, on the other hand ...

[Environmental contamination] is way less of an explanatory variable of obesity and mental health than [dietary choice and activity level]. Its effect resides in the error term.

The (extremely long) blog argues otherwise: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

I don't entirely agree with what they have to say, especially when they search for a possible target chemical, but they provide a whole bunch of contradictory evidence against the naive laziness hypothesis. Of which the most convincing argument is lab animals: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2010...

Lab animals do not have control over their diet and activity level, and yet are becoming more obese.

There are a couple of issues drawing too much from this study.

1. They haven't found any mechanistic evidence to support this.

2. All of these populations had access to manufactured food. (Either human or pet food)

3. This is really only one study, not really a field of research.

IT seems like the theory manufactured food has gotten tasty since the 80's would also explain this data.

> dietary choice

Is it really a choice when 75% of all food found in the supermarket has been spiked with sugar and 88% of the US population is suffering from metabolic issues? And sugar has been linked to a host of degenerative neurological conditions.

> activity level

We can't outrun a bad diet.

>Is it really a choice when 75% of all food found in the supermarket has been spiked with sugar and 88% of the US population is suffering from metabolic issues? And sugar has been linked to a host of degenerative neurological conditions.

Yes, it is. If you walk into the store, pick up the item, pay for it, take it home, and eat it, then it was 100% your choice. Just because a decision is difficult doesn't absolve an individual of responsibility.

>We can't outrun a bad diet.

You can, but it's not easy. However, what tends to happen is when you increase you activity level your body will auto-regulate cravings for better food. High performance athletes can get by on mostly fast food if they need. Most don't because they know it's not optimal.

Both of your notions are currently popular but that doesn't make them right. Emotional reasoning has taken over diet, fitness, and health and caused millions of people to give up their personal responsibility and sense of control. It's harmful thinking.

Somehow you have to pay for the convenience of having quick food 24/7. To really asses if air pollutants play a role in weight gain subjects under test should eat the same calories and breathe the same (or different) air, still it would be difficult as not all metabolisms are the same. As a totally anecdotal note, i’ve never met an obese person who doesn’t overeat.

> More generally there is way too much crap in the environment and it is past time for people to start protesting this.

Some of this crap is worse than others. Some we can destroy and maybe make our food supply and water safe. But others are really hardy, by design (Teflon!). There's no good way to get rid of them and this should have been treated as an emergency ages ago. In a sense they are worse than radioactive waste because they don't even decay.

If teflon didn't decay it would be fine as it doesn't pose a health risk, its basically inert. Its the manufacturing chemicals and degradants (PFAS/PFOA) that are the problem and represent persistent contamination.

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