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Comment by kingkongrevenge | Hacker News Reader

Joe doing it up the butt created the AIDS epidemic. Seems publicly relevant to me. Not that I personally care much about Joe doing it up the butt, but once you think government has a role in sculpting society there is no distinction between personal social issues and personal business issues.

Women choosing to have children out of wedlock has a huge effect on everyone. Much more than some guy offering unpaid internships.

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Having lots of sexual partners creates epidemics of, wait for it...sexually transmitted disease.

The manner in which people have sex, unless we're talking dry humping and such, has nothing to do with creating epidemics.

It certainly does. Anal sex is far more dangerous.

It does carry a higher risk of transmitting an STD from one person to another, yes. So I'm wrong to say that it has "nothing" to do with it. But in terms of epidemiology, the higher risk of transmission associated with a given form of sex is insignificant compared to having many partners. Spread, not risk of transmission, is by far the dominant factor here, even if they're not entirely separable. Sort of like the difference between scalability and performance.

And people eating pork created the swine flu epidemic. Please.

Because a disease preys on a population does not mean that population created the disease, whether or not it becomes an epidemic.

I'm pretty sure that AIDS didn't spring fully formed out of the abyss, thanks to anal sex.

And then, if you want to get picky, the deliberate ignoring of the health issues by public authorities escalated the epidemic.

While I'm not particularly fond of kingkongrevenge's example, I don't think you're faithfully representing it. He didn't claim it created the disease -- he claimed it created the epidemic.

So did the widespread distribution of farmed pig products create the swineflu epidemic, as I said -- if the reports are to be believed.

I see what you're saying, but I don't agree that I misrepresented it at all.

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