There should certainly be measurements taken, costs considered, alternatives approached when building our healthcare system. No one has ever implied otherwise, ever. To imply that there is some level of healthy after which it doesn't make sense to seek improvement is the dehumanizing and anti-social part. What is the point of building an economy at all if not to improve the lives of the population? Opinions in this thread already seem to be that "people are healthy enough, and if not, it is due to their own choices" rather than "we should carefully consider how to optimize this system for efficiency" while focusing on the actual goal of improving lives for the average person as well as those who need more healthcare.
> imply that there is some level of healthy after which it doesn't make sense to seek improvement is the dehumanizing and anti-social part
No it's not. Every doctor triages. And every medical system has internal cost limits, whether implicit or implict, universal or variable, past which it will not treat. Sometimes that's enforced by gatekeeping entire categories of treatments; in other cases we have patients individually reviewed, e.g. for organ transplants.
If managing obesity is less expensive than treating it, there is a legitimate question around how the cost of that treatment should be split between the public and the individual. (Whether that cost be an explicit split or gatekeeping the treatment to only the most morbidly obese.) Thankfully, that's not the case--treating obesity, even chronically with super-expensive drugs, is still cheaper than the status quo.
Correct, doctors do triage according to need and available resources. When you imply that there is some category of care that doesn't deserve treatment (or is too "costly" to provide), you are triaging and choosing economic growth over healthcare. I think that it is a rational decision to make, although it is certainly not the one that has the most respect for human life.
> When you imply that there is some category of care that doesn't deserve treatment (or is too "costly" to provide), you are triaging and choosing economic growth over healthcare
Yes, every medical system does this. (It's almost the defining difference between medicine and healthcare.)
America does it individually (and inefficiently). Europea by restricting access to expensive treatments. If you don't do this at some level, you'll wind up with edge cases constantly running up bills the economy can't pay for and a collapse of the healthcare system's solvency.
Do you think addicts should receive treatment? Do you think that people who make bad decisions deserve to live? Do you extract the exact amount of value from society relative to the amount you put in, or do you take more than you give? Are you sure? Please explain.
Your perspective is frankly disgusting. I hope you don't have any vices. The point of a society is to pool resources together to improve the collective. Different people in different positions of power and ability have different needs. Hopefully you don't personally have any power to exclude people from that group. I hope that the powers that be don't decide that you deserve less for some reason.
I don’t think being addicted to laziness and having a glutinous appetite is exactly comparable to say, being addicted to heroin. But yes, I do think addicts should receive treatment, just as I think obese patients should (and do) receive treatment for all the diseases they end up with. But addicts, like the obese, impose many of the costs of their own bad life decisions onto others. It’s what you’d call a negative externality, and if some magic treatment came along to fix drug addiction, I would also be very happy to see that negative externality addressed.
Well the food addiction or sedentariness addiction diagnosis are a lot more controversial than a heroin addiction diagnosis, though I can see how they have some things in common. I think labelling any observable manifestation of poor impulse control as a medical addiction is more of a social trend than a legitimate scientific discovery.
The bigger difference though is that we all eat food, and for most of us includes at least some absolutely delicious food that would be incredibly unhealthy to eat in large quantities. We’re all (more or less) exposed to the “addictive substance”, it’s just some people have the ability to deprive ourselves constantly indulging that impulse, while others don’t. We don’t however, need to take small doses of heroin every day to survive.
> labelling any observable manifestation of poor impulse control as a medical addiction is more of a social trend than a legitimate scientific discovery
What gives you the confidence to overrule medical professionals on this? (Note: I am not a doctor and have zero medical training.)
> We’re all (more or less) exposed to the “addictive substance”, it’s just some people have the ability to deprive ourselves constantly indulging that impulse, while others don’t
One, I’d challenge we’re all similarly exposed. I grew up in a house with no sugary sodas and plenty of leafy greens with each meal. Many people did not.
Two, we know from drug addiction that there is no global measure of addictiveness. Some people can smoke a cigarette or cigar or two, on average, per year. Others get hooked after their first draw. There is no reason to suspect something similar isn’t happening with obesity.
I’d say it stops being a useful descriptor at that point. If any activity that a person can possibly find rewarding in any way can be addictive, then everything is addictive. Because for any activity that you can possibly think of, you’ll find definitely find somebody who likes doing it.
By this criteria, I’m sure you’ll be able to find at least one eating glass addict somewhere in the world. But if we can stretch the definition to include glass as an addictive substance, then it kinda stops meaning anything at all.
And when I say these innovative addiction diagnoses are controversial, I mean within the community of clinical experts, which they are.
Based on common sense. Not everyone has tried heroin, but most people have overgorged themselves - maybe eaten too much ice cream or candy or pizza. I am guilty of that, and make sure to make it a rare occurrence and keep myself in shape.
> Not everyone has tried heroin, but most people have overgorged themselves
You're assuming everyone who tries heroin becomes an addict. At first glance it looks like "approximately 1 to 12 months after heroin onset, an estimated 23% to 38% of new heroin users have become dependent on heroin" [1]. By coincidence, that seems to mirror American obesity prevalence [2]. (Obviously heroin is more addictive than food. Don't do heroin.)
> I don’t think being addicted to laziness and having a glutinous appetite is exactly comparable to say, being addicted to heroin.
Your opinion is that of a petulant child. Many years of research has shown that obesity is not this simple. Many chemical processes take place that influence one's ability to make better health choices, and many external factors put constraints on those choices as well. This is the exact same thing as hard drugs. Being obese is not a moral failing. When you say things like this, you show your true colors. You are not extending humanity to obese people, and it is very obvious.
I sincerely hope you reconsider your opinions. I hope you don't have any obese people in your life, or at least hope they don't read these messages. I think they would be disappointed to hear what you think of them.
And again, I hope you don't have any vices and are the perfect model of health, otherwise this would be a quite silly opinion to have.
EDIT:
I've been rated limited on comments so I'll post my last response here instead:
I have nothing further to say to this other than that you should consider talking to someone about your clearly deep-seated hatred for those who don't fit your model of participant in society; it doesn't seem healthy. Find an obese friend and show them your comments and watch their face as they read them. I wonder if you will find the humanity in their response that you are lacking here.
I would say that your suggestion that grown adults should be absolved of responsibility for their own decisions is actually a quintessentially childish idea. The fact that you are so deeply offended by any suggestion otherwise is even more childish.
You're both wrong. Obesity increasingly looks like addiction--as with any addiction, it takes two to tango. But once you have an addict, shame is an ineffective treatment. Debating giving an obese person GLP-1 drugs is akin to challenging methadone for heroin addicts.
I never suggested shame as an effective treatment. But refusing to acknowledge the reality of the situation is not an effective way to discuss the problem. Obesity is the result of lifestyle choices, and those choices do impose their costs on everybody in society. Which is why I would be very happy (and I would suggest everybody should be happy) if an effective way to address the problem was discovered.
The fact that an obese person is harming other people as well as themselves might be an uncomfortable truth for them to hear. But ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.
> Obesity is the result of lifestyle choices, and those choices do impose their costs on everybody in society
Granted. But why does it need to be said?
I'm a skiier. That lifestyle choice alone probably has a higher risk-adjusted cost to our healthcare system than if I were fat. I'd still miffed if prior to setting a bone my doctor decided to lecture me on the risks of skiing. I'd be positively furious if I got that from my health insurer.
> fact that an obese person is harming other people as well as themselves might be an uncomfortable truth for them to hear
Why do they need to hear it? There isn't a need. What they need is to not be obese anymore. That's treatment. My point is skipping the lecture and going straight to treatment is how we solve most medical problems.
I wrote a few paragraphs of response to this assuming that you are implying that there is a level of death/disease that is acceptable because treating it would not be cost-effective, but I deleted it because it would be uncharitable to assume you think that.
It would be interesting to see this information, but would not be useful to act on. If the answer was "it costs more to keep more people alive" (hint: it does, that is why we let so many die of preventable illness), should we keep less people alive and healthy? The pursuit of economic growth at all costs is a disease far more dangerous than anything you would treat in a hospital.
This is using Deno as the glue between Rust and V8; it leaves many things to the end-user, such as stdlib implementation. This isn't quite the same as building it from scratch, but it's still building a good chunk of the runtime I think.
either you don't understand type systems, or you don't understand WebAssembly. in either case, I can encourage reading the article, because it sheds some light on both topics!
why would it be only 1 external display? Can you not plug into a thunderbolt dock and use multiple external displays? I do exactly that with my 2012 MacBook Pro.
Although this is probably not the best example because this is sold by the company that largely funds the open source project. Although that is a big conflict of interest.
It's important to remember that the majority of these statues were not created after the civil war in order to remember them, but during the Jim Crow era in order to intimidate black people. The intent was never to teach history.
I don't know the history of that so I can't argue it. If you could link to some education on it, I'd like to read about it.
I would imagine that it's possible in some circumstances for this to be true for some, mostly confederate figures. I'm really skeptical that that's true for figures like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
The weird-power-dynamic-Lincoln statue with the freed black man aside, I generally agree on statutes of the founding fathers. I doubt a statue of Washington was erected in honor of his support for slavery.
In the greater context of what is happening in America right now, tearing down statues of Washington isn't necessarily about Washington himself. Instead, it is about challenging the idea that our historical figures (and America itself) are infallible.
If I may paint a picture, put yourself in the shoes of a black man in America in 2020. You see thousands of videos of police brutality, blatant racism, and disregard from those in power. A significant portion of the representatives in this country refuse to outright state that racism is still a problem in this country, but you see it with your very eyes every day.
However, you see these statues symbolizing this "ideal" version of America, where everyone is equal, which never actually existed. Further, when people challenge the existence of these statues (and by proxy, that non-existent "ideal") in the face of all of this inequity, they are defended orders of magnitude more intensely than the rights of actual-flesh-and-blood people. It's hard to look at a statue of General Lee, or even Washington, and see anything but a symbol of the fact that America at large cares more about the "appearance" of equality and equity than actually granting it to the people. If the people who defending these statues so vigorously also defended the civil rights of their fellow Americans with the same energy, I don't think we would see as much of a struggle over this.
Respectfully, without a place to read about the intimidation tactic of statues, I'm not sure that I put much weight in it. An alternative explanation on the timing could for example be that people in the majority in those communities sensed that the tides of public opinion were shifting, and they felt a strong desire to reach backward and preserve the past that they had fought for, which they felt like they were now losing. This seems more likely just psychologically to me, with the primary element being about a sense of independence and not really about slavery specifically.
As for blacks in America today, it's complicated to discuss and I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to go down all the paths. I think to some degree your picture is based on the news and what is visible, rather than what we know people actually think. Does BLM/the mob speak for all blacks? Are there any who dissent, on either the history, today's context, the solutions, or all three? Yes, definitely. And if opinions vary, should we not attempt to understand whether or not there is a right or wrong, and proceed according to rightness? If it is not about right or wrong, but the perception of offense, what does that mean? If a symbol stands for something good, and one person out of a million falsely perceives it to be a hate symbol, is that sufficient for a teardown? What if it were 10% or 50%? Is it just a matter of threshold? Do we even know the percentages today for what's happening before we let the mob do its thing?
I think a lot of people are smart enough to know that there is a difference between representing "an ideal version of America," and specific ideals that individuals represented. Washington for example largely representing the fight for independence; Roosevelt standing for social justice; Lincoln for freedom and equality - not American utopia.
When considering people as symbols it is important to isolate what they did that made them stand out from their time, from their common beliefs or actions that were the same as everyone else. Without doing that, we expose symbols to the injustice of being judged by modern moral standards, and sacrifice the good that we isolated. Like it or not, the acceptance of slavery was not exceptional in Washington's time. The ability and bravery to lead a revolution certainly were exceptional. The exceptional is what we isolate and create a symbol from.
It is of course possible to have been exceptionally cruel within the time of American slavery, which would be a reason to not symbolize someone. But that isn't the case for these figures and in fact Washington eventually came to flip his perspective on slavery in his lifetime.
The morality of the past is fixed and the morality of the future is in perpetual development, meaning that if we continue to take the same approach that's happening now, all symbols will eventually be lost in time, because with an unbound future we will likely run the gamut of what is considered right and what is considered wrong in any given "now." By keeping this up, we deprive ourselves of a story and a guideline of history to help us project our own future. We sacrifice timeless positive principles to shifting moral discoveries. We leave our children with less guidance.
> I think a lot of people are smart enough to know that there is a difference between representing "an ideal version of America," and specific ideals that individuals represented. Washington for example largely representing the fight for independence; Roosevelt standing for social justice; Lincoln for freedom and equality - not American utopia.
There are mainstream politicians and political commentators who explicitly say that racism used to be a big problem in the United States but that it simply does not exist any more. I suspect it's a very common belief.
"But the story of the monuments is even stranger than many people realize. Few if any of the monuments went through any of the approval procedures that we now commonly apply to public art. Typically, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which claimed to represent local community sentiment (whether they did or did not), funded, erected, and dedicated the monuments. As a consequence, contemporaries, especially African Americans, who objected to the erection of monuments had no realistic opportunity to voice their opposition."
It's not about statues, but the Wikipedia article about the modern display of the Confederate Flag seems to offer a decent summary of its usage beginning in the 1950s:
