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Comment by h4zel | Hacker News Reader

TBF, there are a LOT more tall people than overweight people. As a fellow tall person, I think accessibility is always great. It's just targeting as many people as possible. The law is about more than just accessibility, though. Fat people are absolutely discriminated against in society.

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I agree that accessibility is a good thing!

> [T]here are a LOT more tall people than overweight people.

Just to put some numbers to the facts:

https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/obesity.pa...

> More than half of adult New Yorkers have overweight (34%) or obesity (22%).

Even if you're using a definition of "tall" meaning "taller than average" (50%), a larger percentage of the people are overweight in NYC.

Wow, NYC has only half the rates for overweight status and obesity compared to the United States as a whole.

It depends how tall and how overweight you're talking. I suspect most places cater for one standard deviation of height and weight. Two, maybe? Three probably not.

There's no single threshold to say you're fat and you're thin. I'm sure cinemas could put big seats in for the overweight but at some point that 99.99% person is going to visit and be too big even for that.

For heights I've commonly seen the 5th-percentile female and the 95th-percentile man being used to define a height range covering most of the population.

It depends on how you define tall. Logically there should be as many short people as tall people!

Fat people are discriminated against, but the question is how much should obesity be catered for, and what range in body size?

Alcoholics and drug addicts and are also discriminated against by society, so shouldn't these lifestyle choices also be protected by the law?

Nit pick because this is HN: what logic tells you there should be as many short and tall people? You're assuming the distribution is not skewed.

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