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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Richer because they by and large aren't worried about access to clean water, where their next meal will come from, or having a roof over their head when they sleep. Their transportation and entertainment options are essentially no worse than those of "the rich", if they go to an emergency room they must get treatment, etc. etc. etc.

(Please don't go into a riff about the homeless before you subtract the mentally ill that have been dumped on the streets, plus addiction is a big, but not at all new, problem.)

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The poor don't have to worry about where their next meal will come from anymore?

I said "by and large" they don't have to worry. At least worry about starving; elsewhere I noted the concern today is about "food insecurity", and a bigger concern is obesity.

The latter tells me things are qualitatively different. And that's in a very short time, my parent's lifetime, for they were born during the Great Depression. Probably even mine, e.g. the modern Food Stamp program began shortly after I was born.

Ubiquitous access to food that causes disease does not make 'The poor of today better of than the middle class of the past'.

Using the toxicologists' maxim ""All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison." (normally "The dose makes the poison"), is there any food that does not/can not cause disease?

So all food is equivalent! Following your maxim, we can replace food stamps with an unlimited supply of strychnine and just let people choose a healthy dose for themselves.

You're welcome to show me (I'm from Missouri) where anyone has seriously suggested strychnine or other "official" poisons are foods.

Which is very different from e.g. pointing out that while strychnine has an human LD50 of 1-2 mg/kg, "In low dosages, strychnine can act as a stimulant and has been used by athletes to enhance their performance." followed by a couple of Olympic examples in 1904 and 1992 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strychnine).

That was an absurd comment, meant to illustrate how meaningless it is to say 'anything is poisonous in the right dose' in a thread about whether the poor today are better off than the middle classes of some past era.

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