As a kid I had a hand-me-down World Book Encyclopedia that was published in the late 1950s and I clearly remember the entry for "Sugar" starting with something very similar to, "Not only does sugar taste good, but it's good for you!" (I tried showing it to my parents in the hopes of them allowing more sugary desserts, but fortunately they weren't buying it.) I came to find out decades later that many of the entries in the World Book Encyclopedia were written by industry.
I come from a generation greatly impacted by this.
Fat was bad. We got reduced fat milk, everything was fat removed stuff. We at margarine.
But the breakfast cereals were laden with sugar.
To this day this trend continues. I saw a box of cookies at Fry's the other day. Reduced fat! But same calories as the non-reduced fat box, just less fat and more sugar.
Technically all Americans got bananas, because the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) and the Standard Fruit Company (now Dole) subverted nations to ensure uninterrupted supply.
Meat industry. They're pushing "big sugar lied to you" (true), "(saturated) fat good for you!", which is contrary to most evidence we have.
Only because sugar is bad for you does not mean fat is good for you. Evidence is rather on the side of complex carbs, high fiber, moderate protein, moderate unsaturated fat and low saturated fat intake.
Yes, fat is 'good for you'. Without consuming it, you die.
But I would say that in general, 'x is good/bad for you' is a harmful oversimplification. Sugar is also not 'bad for you'. It's not that simple. Glucose is important and sometimes extremely beneficial to consume (in any form).
As for saturated fat: it's complicated. Correlation != causation. For transfats we have a pretty good idea via which causal mechanism problems arise. For saturated fat we only have correlations. Given how hard nutritional research is and especially how hard it is to draw conclusions from it, I would say it's better to refrain from feigning confidence on substances where the jury really is still out.
When someone asks for examples of particularly bad actors, replying "everybody is a bad actor" is a pat non-answer that communicates nothing except the answerer's disillusionment.
True, but it’s useful disillusionement that conveys useful knowledge: companies must be monitored. Every industry, left to itself, will commit horrible acts for profit. There’s no such thing as an ethical business in the dark.
Think of the places where corruption is endemic. Having an outlook of "well, everybody is corrupt" normalizes the behavior and makes it easier to justify sliding into corruption oneself.
If the outlook were useful, it would help to fix the problem instead of doing the opposite.
The disillusionment doesn't offer any benefit that can't also be gained with a touch of common sense alone. But going from "some people are terrible, sometimes" to "everybody is terrible" forecloses any possibility of improvement.
Most industries employ honest people, don’t have to cover up anything major.
There’s a big difference between slightly misleading marketing (say, calling your 10% hand stitched clothes “hand stitched”) and outright paying scientists to cover up genuine harms to health and the environment.
Literally every industry does their best to distort reality to what best fits them. People naturally do this too, so it's not particularly surprising or even necessarily malevolent.
And if oil, sugar and tobacco are out, where can we work guilt-free? At one recent discussion, a tenured sociology professor said her industry was not bad. And someone else chimed in by pointing out that they take huge tax dollar grants to churn out near worthless degrees studying research that often can't be replicated. And then they load on student debt to get the kids to pay for it. This made the snooty, tenured scold shut up.
That one is a bit complex. Recycling things like paper, metal and glass works very well, in particular if they are sorted at the source. Most plastics can’t be recycled cost effective, which a lot of plastics producers have work very hard to hide.
Recycling glass is terribly inefficient. It’s so heavy that it requires a ridiculous amount of energy to heat up, and even then needs a very high amount of “fresh” glass to keep it usable.
In addition, transporting glass is inefficient, and it is much more prone to breakages.
The real issue is the fact that every company gets to have their own plastic bottle design, with 3-4 different plastic types that have to be triaged. They typically also want way thicker bottles than required because they feel more premium.
A government that mandates a specific shared plastic bottle designed to be recyclable would be much, much ecologically effective than switching back to glass.
I don’t know if metal cans or tetrapack are better.
>A government that mandates a specific shared plastic bottle designed to be recyclable would be much, much ecologically effective than switching back to glass.
Given the thread we're in that bottle will some type of unimaginable cancer after 30 years and in 2070 people will be talking about how big plastic captured government.
Glass on the other hand is the definition of inert, who cares if it's more expensive if it keeps us alive longer?
The people who live near the glass recycling foundries, and the environmentalists pissed at the footprint of the continual energy requirement to melt it all down and move it around.
Also, it doesn't further enrich/entrench the oil industry to the same degree as most plastics based manufacturing does.
Back when beverages came in glass bottles, they would sterilize and refill them rather than recycle them. Much less energy and no fresh glass required.
I've got an old 7up bottle that was about 20 years old when I bought it in a 6-pack.
Not very much. I rarely buy beverages in anything else than aluminium, glass or cardboard. For some food stuff, like meat, cheese and some vegetables I think it is hard to get rid of plastics completely, but you can easily reduce the amount by 80%-90%.
As far as I heard paper can’t be recycled because the fiber gets shorter every turn. It can be respiralled until it’s worthless pulp.
Eg:
> Fiber cannot, however, be recycled endlessly. It is generally accepted that a fiber can be used five to seven times before it becomes too short (as a result of repulping and other handling) to be useable in new paper products.
It’s a very big different between “can’t be recycled” and “can’t be recycled endlessly”. If the fibers can be used 5 times, it means that we can reduce the numbers of trees that have to be chopped down by 80%.
It’s complex enough that I don’t think your answer really covers it. For example glass is not very efficient to recycle. It needs to be transported to be used and often the cost of transporting it is not worth it.
Glass bottles are still reused in big parts of the world, and millions of tons of glass is recycled every year. So clearly some people think it is worth it.
tbf, they still work, but my educated guess would be that the overall ROI distribution looks similar to the gambling/adult industries: a minority of the population bringing in an outsized return due to peculiarities in how their brains work
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” -Dwight Eisenhower farewell address 1961
We had pop tarts and cereals and carnation instant breakfast in the 70's and 80's and kids weren't fat. Not to mention fruit roll ups and koolaid and...
If you eat a load of sugar in one sitting you will feel sick, lethargic, have a sugar high or some combination. It also literally _feels_ bad for your teeth. Having a coke or a cookie every now and then is fine but constantly eating it just feels off.
Eating lean chicken with a small amount of butter or oil feels obviously healthy.
Most of the other gaps are just things like OK, you're working 50 hours a week to optimise your bank account, just wind that back a tiny bit and spend 5 hours on your personal health, stop being a mug and take it seriously.
It's like when people ask "how do you have time to...". You turn off the TV and Instagram for a bit (no problem with using them, just maybe not for 2-3 hours a day) and pick up that book you wanted to read or whatever. Job done. It's both trivially easy and very hard if you make it a core aspect of your personality that you are some sort of helpless plebian.
Nutrition researcher here. The combination of free acids and free sugars seems to have a synergistically terrible effect on metabolism. The man who discovered diabetes tried to warn about this. The bottom line is you don't want processed carbs or processed fats. They aren't in a form that is much available in the environment, even supposed similar items like pure honey or cream don't show the same effects. Eat starches, fruit, and natural fats (animal, fish, nuts).
My understanding is that the long glucose chains in starches are still more readily broken down by the human body than individual glucose-fructose bonds in sugar. I've heard conflicting stories about fructose by itself, too (maybe worse than glucose, maybe not; maybe a positive for satiety but depending on how it's timed etc.)
This is absolutely a smoking gun, but I still don't understand exactly how it works.
So TLDR the sugar industry paid for (1?) literature review paper that said that existing papers reporting risks of sugar were flawed.
But what I hear is that _until recently_ sugar research has been put on the backburner, and only recently are people starting to re-examine the links between sugar and heart health.
How are these two related? Did the one paper really put people off researching it for 50 years?
Talking about fat seems to have been more attractive because it's more "obvious" (see also: how long we were stuck on wrong ideas about dietary cholesterol, and still seem to be about sodium). Also because there's more chemical variety in fats to argue about. You can have complete fats vs. fatty acids separated from a triglyceride backbone; you can have saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids; and each point of "unsaturation" (where there is a double bond between carbons in the "backbone" of the molecule) allows for cis/trans isomerism. With sugar you basically only have glucose and fructose, and chains thereof, to think about; and that also covers starches automatically.
Yeah, sugar isn’t good for you. It’s a lot of concentrated calories. And possibly has some other issues as well. Probably stay well below the guidelines. An occasional sweet treat isn’t gonna kill you but don’t go guzzling down coke instead of water.
Lots of fats aren’t good for you either. Especially the saturated kind.
PS: Is there a concerted pro fat effort going on HN right now? We’ve had 1 opinion piece by a non scientist journalist paid by industry to pretend saturated fat is good for you against all evidence so far, and now we have a 2016 article being pushed up to the top defending fats without being marked as such, within hours.
It's common for posts here to lack date markings that they should have. It doesn't change the conclusion of the research, except that "60 years ago" would be more accurate now.
It also seems to be common (enough that I've noticed the pattern within a couple of months) that there are suddenly two articles on related topics out of nowhere. A lot of the time, this seems to happen because someone reads the first link, browses around and find something else interesting.
It's not that dense though. Fat is 2.25x as calorie dense as sugar. Many are surprised to learn that peanuts, fatty meats, oils, butters, and granolas have more calories per gram compared to Skittles. The only way to avoid overeating fat is to make the portions sizes absurdly small. There is often a shock at learning that only a tablespoon of peanut butter, which is a miniscule amount of food, is 100 calories. It's trivially easy to adds hundreds of calories with butters and other fats.
Here's the other thread for reference[0], and yeah, something might be going on. The referenced one from yesterday is by Nina Teicholz who is meat industry paid to confuse people like us. If you read the other post, at least watch this about the author [1]. If you read that post, watch that video.
So many cases in human history are where one thing is believed, people and studies come and show that it's false, and then it takes a really long time for culture to come around to it. Earth being round, tobacco, climate change among others.
Based on what the non-industry funded science shows, saturated fat being considered any bit healthy is in the long stage of culture taking a long time to accept what the science is saying. And it's not helped by studies with industry funding that know how to skirt the edges. Many places to choose from, but here's one from Dr. Barnard talking about sugar vs saturated fats [2].
In general, it is wise not to dismiss everything as a conspiracy theory. Flat earth and moon landing conspiracies are not the same as those that involve corrupting a small number of individuals for massive gain.
I am obligated do my usual unpopular reply that people are not calorimeters, the type of food and the cadence matters a lot and perhaps even more than the quantity. Humans are very complex organisms made up of many other complex organisms that react in very complex ways to food and each other. The effect of hormones dominate the caloric expenditure to the point that sufficient hormone intervention can be impossible to overcome with any amount of eating.
I think the desire to simplify the model down to calorie in and calorie out is a way of putting all responsibility onto the unhealthy individual as an aversion to empathy. Our population has been intentionally misinformed and our food has been poisoned in a way that personal responsibility cannot always overcome, so while people may still deserve the brunt of the blame we must also understand that the food industry/medical/politics played a substantial part in creating the situation and as hard as it is to fight back against these profitable industries it is even more difficult to remodel people to have more willpower.
Except animal fat is not ultra processed. 200 calories of Oreos is simply not the same as 200 calories of red meat. Anything in excess is bad, though, agreed.
It can still be simple -- look at it like this: 200 calories of Oreos provides very little additional benefits, while 200 calories of meat provides more additional benefits for your diet. It doesn't matter as much when comparing Oreos to meat, but it really matters when you're comparing orange juice to soda. The processing might play a factor, but really you're looking for calories containing nutrients that keep you alive and healthy -- processing level is pretty subjective.
myth that juice is somewhat healthy should be added to this list of fiction that we are discussing. eat raw fruits. much better than extracting just the sugary water and throwing most of fibres away.
The way the body responds to food is much more complex than the way a calorimeter does. For example, having lipids (components from fat) in your small intestine reduces your hunger, because your body knows you have a lot of good energy coming up. Sugar and other low-complexity carbs, on the other hand, is quickly absorbed, and does not do much to reduce hunger even in the short term.
Even different sugars (glucose/fructose/sucrose) affect the satiety response differently.
Are you honestly implying fats aren’t easy to gain weight on? There’s a reason arctic explorers packed lots of butter and oils. It’s a super efficient way to store energy and consume it.
I eat lots of healthy fats and no sugar or wheat. I'm borderline underweight. When you eat such a diet, your insulin levels stay low. High insulin is what causes your body to convert sugar to fat and store it. Low insulin causes your body to burn your fat reserves. I just got back from a 5 day, 50 mile backpacking trip where I averaged about 1000 calories a day. Not once was I hungry.
The arctic explorers weren't gaining body fat from the fats they ate, they were burning them almost immediately.
We are learning more and more that gaining weight has more to do with insulin response and various other super complicated pathways -- not simply "calorie in = some weight gained". If that were true, people wouldn't lose weight on near/full ketogenic diets high in fat.
No, I'm not. I am saying that humans are complicated, and that the effect of food on weight is not simply down to "how calorie dense is this substance." Unless you are force-feeding a person into obesity, other factors beside caloric density matter a great deal.
You may want to do some reading on the satiety response. You could also imagine whether you think you would gain or lose weight over the next month on a tallow-only diet.
Interestingly the push to reduce fat, which led to increased sugar coincide with the onset of the obesity epidemic. But of-cause correlation isn’t causation.
I feel like we are in a point of time where science is enshittified so much, it will be almost impossible to come back to a reasonable and sustainable interaction with the world and ecosystem around us.
This is just doomerism and painting with a planet wide brush. IMHO it's not so simple.
There has been much laudable and scientific progress in the past 50 years. Higgs Boston discovery and mRNA vaccines being two that come to mind.
And examples of progress that science helped start and then international and national institutions brought to the masses: Smallpox eradication, HIV treatment, lower childhood mortality, etc.
Sugar is often blamed for the obesity epidemic in America. But the data--anecdotal and clinical--shows that high-fat diets do not perform better compared to low-fat diets for weight loss.
The hard part is that the food industry in the US has seen fit to add sugar to everything. Sometimes it seems like the only way to avoid overeating sugar is to make everything from scratch, which is both time and (often times) financially inefficient.
I had the good fortune that the people the government sent to my school to teach such nonsense were the unhealthiest people I had ever seen in my life up to that point. A good priming for a 7 year old into distrusting the government and the start of a resolve to a general rule of thumb that the people telling me how to be healthy should at least appear healthy themselves.
I had a similar thought when I did my yearly checkup at Kaiser some years ago. The doctor what interviewed me looked like hell. I thought for them any health advice they are giving is just a theoretical concept that they clearly don’t live by.
> […] a general rule of thumb that the people telling me how to be healthy should at least appear healthy themselves.
If a medical professional tells you that you shouldn't smoke and that it's bad for you, but are smokers themselves, are they wrong? Should you not follow them?
Calling someone a hypocrite (which is essentially what you are doing) is a specious reasoning:
I wouldn’t call them a hypocrite because I believe they followed their own advice and were well intentioned in their advice.
In the case of a doctor that tells me smoking is bad even though they smoke, I’m more likely to believe them because they have first hand experience even if they don’t follow their own advice. I don’t think it’s hypocritical to not follow your own advice especially from the point of view that they would follow their own advice if they could and are open about that. In fact there have been numerous smokers in my life who have told me they’re addicted and recommended to me to never start and I did heed their advice.
But that’s not what happened in grade school so I’m not exactly sure what point you are making.
> the confusing thing to me is that people who rail about the government, are simply complaining about the power of companies to control it.
This is a baseless assertion with no evidence, written in an emotionally manipulative manner ("the confusing thing", "I'm curious", etc).
The government is responsible for drafting laws and regulations, and for setting nutritional standards. Not companies. This is a fact.
If a government official decides to claim that sugar is ok and fat is bad, that's something they have to take responsibility for given that they are literally doing so as a representative of the government.
The sugar industry is not mind-controlling these government employees. They are being corrupted, yes, but ultimately they are making the decisions. The primary moral failing is with the individuals making the decisions. This is factual. If you make a decision, you are more responsible for that decision than someone else who did not make it, by definition.
None of this is to say that this bribery and corruption on the part of the companies is somehow excusable or doesn't make the problem worse, just that the primary responsibility lies with our elected officials and those they then nominate and hire in turn.
You see this often here in the HN comment section, on a variety of topics: "For-profit industry did [wrongdoing], and the government [went along with it | was fooled | didn't act fast enough], therefore I don't trust the government!" They're always silent on corporate power. It's odd reasoning to say the least.
And totally counterproductive, given the underlying insinuation that scaling back the government would solve the problem, when in reality it just hands more power over to corporations to do even more [wrongdoing].
The fact that the discussion tends to lead this way is a good reason to treat phrases like "You see this often here in the HN comment section" with suspicion.
When there's a revolving door between the two, there's not really much of a difference. It's simply a distrust and distaste for the American elites (public and private).
There are some elites that are self sacrificial and view other Americans as countrymen and not units to extract from but they are very few. As somebody who rails about the government, it's fundamentally an elite problem. You can propose any system you want, but if those running it are rotten it's not going to work.
> the sugar companies that took over the government
If those sugar companies now _are_ the government (after they've taken it over, as you say), the question becomes: do you like those sugar companies? Do you trust them?
At the time I was unaware of reasons why and simply knew that the visitors were from the governments national scientific body. I did later find out that the initiative was partly funded by cereal corporations. I did believe and still do that the people sent thought they were acting in the best interest of the students.
These days I consider our governance to be oligopolistic corporatism where the government is a corrupted tool of the corporations that mainly exists to keep the peace between the corporations so they can more effectively extract monopolistic rents. I do like the idea of a hypothetical ideal of an uncorrupted government but I have no idea how such a government could be achieved and worry that attempts to achieve this could easily backfire and make things worse.
Edit: I consider the attempts to pin all ills on government to be the result of yet another successful public relations campaign by large corporations. Unfortunately society has been polarized to the point that I don’t have a political home with either the left or the right - and again I think this is an intentional conspiracy to undermine effective opposition.
The distorting power of money. And then think: if it can distort our collective understanding of the world, could it distort our government, our elections, etc.?
The problem with capitalism is that it destroys democracy. Money distributes to a small group of people who then have overwhelming influence over the government, available information, and so on.
We also see that as money flows away from the poor, and the affordability of essential goods like housing, food, and healthcare worsen, those who should gain from democracy rightfully grow to hate it, and vote to destroy it (e.g voting for Trump).
Idk if capitalism is solely to blame. Is not like we’ve seen less corruption on the other end of the spectrum.
Many European countries are also capitalist, but don’t seem (at least from the outside) to have the same rampant corporate influence on government as the US.
Granted they are more open to socialist policy, most of which seem like good ideas.
We have some companies in the US that have been around for nearly as long as the country itself. These companies pre-dated regulation and had a hand in building it. As a legislator, you’d want input from experts before writing laws.
IMO that’s why corporate involvement in politics is so normal in the US.
I’m not sure if that the case for many European countries.
It’d be great to find a new economic axis that can break us out of the planned economy/radical free market axis.
That's too broad of a term to carry universal meaning without the context provided by the article.
The piece is more of a modern translation based on present conditions, and it isn't to be confused with "the Nordic model" or any other instance or attempt that readers might instinctively cling to when hearing the word.
We’ve known about this problem for a while and communism was the solution to it. But there’s an even bigger problem with communism is the lack of correct incentives.
Turns out capitalism is better than communism purely because it has the right incentives.
In most countries we have hybrid models.
> We need a new economics
Right now many parts of the US are dangerously close to extremist liberalist agendas. It’s as big of an issue (if not bigger) as the neoconservative issue back when bush jr was president.
Wouldn’t be surprised if liberalism took over and communism became the overarching thought process. We already redefined pronouns.
Please keep in mind the standard of discourse expected here. The discussion should definitely not have been able to veer all the way from sugar vs. fat to "pronouns".
(Also, "liberalist" is a terrible term for the "extremist agendas" you appear to have in mind. I refuse to let them coopt the label.)
>Moving from the conflict between capitalism and democracy to complaining about neo-pronouns is quite a jump.
Democracy does not conflict with capitalism. It's capitalism vs. communism. For democracy it's democracy vs. autocracy. Communism can still be a democracy.
Also I never said anything about neopronouns. What is even a neopronoun?
>It's pretty wild to put the "extremist agendas" of what pronouns people use anywhere near the significance of our economic and governmental systems.
It's associated. I use to be a liberal, but the definition changed and now I'm more moderate. I agree with distribution of wealth but I don't agree with pronouns which are also a liberal thing. These two things nowadays go hand in hand with the term "liberal".
Communism (per Marx) describes a stateless society. A society without a state cannot be a democracy. Communism is antidemocratic per definition.
The reason why communism describes both the economic and the political system of a society is because the two are intertwined.
> Democracy does not conflict with capitalism.
Capitalism offers various means to private entities to steer democratic vote. The two are intertwined just like all other political and economic systems.
> These two things nowadays go hand in hand with the term "liberal".
Perhaps. I don't know what your bubble currently considers to be liberal politics. I still don't see why you consider pronoun usage to be such a significant issue.
I don’t want to single out this back and forth particularly, but it reminds me of so much of the political discourse on HN, just endlessly spinning wheels.
e.g. Why can’t someone hang up portraits of both John D. Rockefeller and Mao Zedong in their room, admire them both, and still get along fine in life, maybe even achieve great successes? Regardless of any specific set of words, definitions, arguments, etc…?
It could be argued that capitalism has played a significant part in the improvement in our living conditions and the technogical development of our species. Then again, it could also rather easily be argued that capitalism is a plague on society that will inevitably result in total domination by a handful of billionaires.
But what realistic alternatives are there? And even if such an alternative exists, why would those in control - who benefit the most from capitalism - relinquish their power?
Capitalism is an objective benefit to our species, much has improved that couldn’t have under feudalism. Yet, just as you might rearrange your house when you have kids, we should rearrange our economy when the existing system no longer meets our needs.
The challenges you point out are massive, but if it’s true that a change is necessary, then the challenges must be overcome.
I imagine most Europeans would be happy with a rule such as "no individual to own €1B in assets" as a start. But even if rules for a fairer, more equitable form of capitalism can be devised, I fear the entrenched position and loose morals of the top capitalists would be difficult or impossible to overcome.
Me too. It seems almost impossible. But I don’t know any other option, so I invest my hope in the possibility that, if there were a broader openness to change, maybe some new ideas might come along (or abandoned ones might become possible)
„Manufacturing consent“, as Noam Chomsky has described it with regards to media. How many areas can you think of where the public is misled. „Yeah, sugar is not to blame.“ or „Smoking does not cause cancer.“ or „You need to eat meat for good health.“ These opininons are pushed by powerful media conglomerates. But not only health-wise: Think Ukraine war, Gaza (portraying them constantly as aggressors, the other side as defenders), environment (still lots of people deny environmental changes), harmfulness of weapons in the US, and so much more.
As a kid I had a hand-me-down World Book Encyclopedia that was published in the late 1950s and I clearly remember the entry for "Sugar" starting with something very similar to, "Not only does sugar taste good, but it's good for you!" (I tried showing it to my parents in the hopes of them allowing more sugary desserts, but fortunately they weren't buying it.) I came to find out decades later that many of the entries in the World Book Encyclopedia were written by industry.
I come from a generation greatly impacted by this.
Fat was bad. We got reduced fat milk, everything was fat removed stuff. We at margarine.
But the breakfast cereals were laden with sugar.
To this day this trend continues. I saw a box of cookies at Fry's the other day. Reduced fat! But same calories as the non-reduced fat box, just less fat and more sugar.
Sugar industry, tobacco industry, oil industry.
Which other industries have distorted reality, and which future ones will be revealed in the coming decades?
Banana industry basically had America destroying democracies in S America so we could access their resources. United Fruit.
Great book about it The Fish that Ate the Whale.
https://www.amazon.com/Fish-That-Ate-Whale-Americas/dp/12500...
So the company could access their resources. No Americans, save for retiring government appointees, got so much as a banana.
Technically all Americans got bananas, because the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) and the Standard Fruit Company (now Dole) subverted nations to ensure uninterrupted supply.
the companies were owned by shareholders who profited handsomely.
Meat industry. They're pushing "big sugar lied to you" (true), "(saturated) fat good for you!", which is contrary to most evidence we have.
Only because sugar is bad for you does not mean fat is good for you. Evidence is rather on the side of complex carbs, high fiber, moderate protein, moderate unsaturated fat and low saturated fat intake.
Yes, fat is 'good for you'. Without consuming it, you die.
But I would say that in general, 'x is good/bad for you' is a harmful oversimplification. Sugar is also not 'bad for you'. It's not that simple. Glucose is important and sometimes extremely beneficial to consume (in any form).
As for saturated fat: it's complicated. Correlation != causation. For transfats we have a pretty good idea via which causal mechanism problems arise. For saturated fat we only have correlations. Given how hard nutritional research is and especially how hard it is to draw conclusions from it, I would say it's better to refrain from feigning confidence on substances where the jury really is still out.
Auto industry with the creation of suburbs and jaywalking laws.
Every single one. PR is a normal corporate department.
When someone asks for examples of particularly bad actors, replying "everybody is a bad actor" is a pat non-answer that communicates nothing except the answerer's disillusionment.
True, but it’s useful disillusionement that conveys useful knowledge: companies must be monitored. Every industry, left to itself, will commit horrible acts for profit. There’s no such thing as an ethical business in the dark.
I disagree.
Think of the places where corruption is endemic. Having an outlook of "well, everybody is corrupt" normalizes the behavior and makes it easier to justify sliding into corruption oneself.
If the outlook were useful, it would help to fix the problem instead of doing the opposite.
The disillusionment doesn't offer any benefit that can't also be gained with a touch of common sense alone. But going from "some people are terrible, sometimes" to "everybody is terrible" forecloses any possibility of improvement.
Agree with your disagreement.
To ignore gradations of disappointment is to excuse everything via apathy.
One thing can be bad, while another is worse.
That seems a bit reductive.
Most industries employ honest people, don’t have to cover up anything major.
There’s a big difference between slightly misleading marketing (say, calling your 10% hand stitched clothes “hand stitched”) and outright paying scientists to cover up genuine harms to health and the environment.
Most big industries are, at the least, hiding labor rights violations overseas or among migrant workers. Usually legal, of course, but not ethical.
Plastic industry and chemical (pesticide) industry
The plastic industry is basically an extension of oil
AI, social media
Cognitive dissonance means many here won't agree. Easier to point fingers than do self reflection and neutral critical thinking.
Literally every industry does their best to distort reality to what best fits them. People naturally do this too, so it's not particularly surprising or even necessarily malevolent.
And if oil, sugar and tobacco are out, where can we work guilt-free? At one recent discussion, a tenured sociology professor said her industry was not bad. And someone else chimed in by pointing out that they take huge tax dollar grants to churn out near worthless degrees studying research that often can't be replicated. And then they load on student debt to get the kids to pay for it. This made the snooty, tenured scold shut up.
War/Weapons industry has been very active lately.
Every other movie coming out of Hollywood features the army, guns or military equipment in some fashion. Cinema is a PR channel for this industry.
Industrial ranching/farming
AI
Tourism, Airplanes, Flights transport industries
Consumer software industry
Tech Startups
Not just startups
Recycling.
That one is a bit complex. Recycling things like paper, metal and glass works very well, in particular if they are sorted at the source. Most plastics can’t be recycled cost effective, which a lot of plastics producers have work very hard to hide.
Recycling glass is terribly inefficient. It’s so heavy that it requires a ridiculous amount of energy to heat up, and even then needs a very high amount of “fresh” glass to keep it usable.
In addition, transporting glass is inefficient, and it is much more prone to breakages.
The real issue is the fact that every company gets to have their own plastic bottle design, with 3-4 different plastic types that have to be triaged. They typically also want way thicker bottles than required because they feel more premium.
A government that mandates a specific shared plastic bottle designed to be recyclable would be much, much ecologically effective than switching back to glass.
I don’t know if metal cans or tetrapack are better.
>A government that mandates a specific shared plastic bottle designed to be recyclable would be much, much ecologically effective than switching back to glass.
Given the thread we're in that bottle will some type of unimaginable cancer after 30 years and in 2070 people will be talking about how big plastic captured government.
Glass on the other hand is the definition of inert, who cares if it's more expensive if it keeps us alive longer?
The people who live near the glass recycling foundries, and the environmentalists pissed at the footprint of the continual energy requirement to melt it all down and move it around.
Also, it doesn't further enrich/entrench the oil industry to the same degree as most plastics based manufacturing does.
Environmentalists are pissed wind turbines kill birds. We should stop paying attention to people who want us to live in a cave licking moss.
Back when beverages came in glass bottles, they would sterilize and refill them rather than recycle them. Much less energy and no fresh glass required.
I've got an old 7up bottle that was about 20 years old when I bought it in a 6-pack.
I've been wanting to post an Ask HN on this: What's to stop us from going back to steel, paper and glass? You know, packaging we can actually recycle.
Last three years I've been in the Netherlands, all pop was glass bottles, similar with most water
And more importantly, how much of a tax would it take to make single-use plastic bottles uneconomical? Are we talking 20 cents?
close the externality with a carbon tax
Not very much. I rarely buy beverages in anything else than aluminium, glass or cardboard. For some food stuff, like meat, cheese and some vegetables I think it is hard to get rid of plastics completely, but you can easily reduce the amount by 80%-90%.
Making those things emits a lot more pollution than plastics. And costs a lot more too.
Cost differences and price sensitivity.
Profits
Convenience
As far as I heard paper can’t be recycled because the fiber gets shorter every turn. It can be respiralled until it’s worthless pulp.
Eg:
> Fiber cannot, however, be recycled endlessly. It is generally accepted that a fiber can be used five to seven times before it becomes too short (as a result of repulping and other handling) to be useable in new paper products.
- https://archive.epa.gov/wastes/conserve/materials/paper/web/...
I thought the same about glass but that turns out to be genuinely endlessly recyclable. Good to know!
It’s a very big different between “can’t be recycled” and “can’t be recycled endlessly”. If the fibers can be used 5 times, it means that we can reduce the numbers of trees that have to be chopped down by 80%.
It’s complex enough that I don’t think your answer really covers it. For example glass is not very efficient to recycle. It needs to be transported to be used and often the cost of transporting it is not worth it.
Glass bottles are still reused in big parts of the world, and millions of tons of glass is recycled every year. So clearly some people think it is worth it.
AI insdustry.
green energy industry is far more active than the oil industry now, especially green energy companies owned by oil companies with dry oil fields.
Crypto.
News industry?
Crypto.
Big tech and advertising industry.
Keep that in mind when you read or hear news about anything.
Someone has a vested interest in the side of the story you’re getting, and they may have even paid for it.
Facebook and instagram industry
Not that it's any secret (now) - but how 'bout the alcoholic beverage industry, and the pharmaceuticals industry?
Facebook industry.
advertising companies still pretending (and pushing the idea) that ads work
tbf, they still work, but my educated guess would be that the overall ROI distribution looks similar to the gambling/adult industries: a minority of the population bringing in an outsized return due to peculiarities in how their brains work
media
You are missing the worst one of all.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” -Dwight Eisenhower farewell address 1961
Did we listen? Nope.
Remember kids, breakfast is the most important meal of the day and any sugary cereal is good for you as long as it's low fat!
Loved by kids and mom's too! I probably watched 1000 commercials that said that.
But national sugar consumption has fallen since the early 2000s despite rising rates of obesity
https://marginalrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Su...
I think it has more to do with 'too many calories' than blaming sugar.
Does "sugar" include high fructose corn syrup?
Because a lot of US sweetener consumption has moved away from sugar to corn, because subsidies.
We had pop tarts and cereals and carnation instant breakfast in the 70's and 80's and kids weren't fat. Not to mention fruit roll ups and koolaid and...
Most dietary advice IMO is bloody obvious.
If you eat a load of sugar in one sitting you will feel sick, lethargic, have a sugar high or some combination. It also literally _feels_ bad for your teeth. Having a coke or a cookie every now and then is fine but constantly eating it just feels off.
Eating lean chicken with a small amount of butter or oil feels obviously healthy.
Most of the other gaps are just things like OK, you're working 50 hours a week to optimise your bank account, just wind that back a tiny bit and spend 5 hours on your personal health, stop being a mug and take it seriously.
It's like when people ask "how do you have time to...". You turn off the TV and Instagram for a bit (no problem with using them, just maybe not for 2-3 hours a day) and pick up that book you wanted to read or whatever. Job done. It's both trivially easy and very hard if you make it a core aspect of your personality that you are some sort of helpless plebian.
Nutrition researcher here. The combination of free acids and free sugars seems to have a synergistically terrible effect on metabolism. The man who discovered diabetes tried to warn about this. The bottom line is you don't want processed carbs or processed fats. They aren't in a form that is much available in the environment, even supposed similar items like pure honey or cream don't show the same effects. Eat starches, fruit, and natural fats (animal, fish, nuts).
My understanding is that the long glucose chains in starches are still more readily broken down by the human body than individual glucose-fructose bonds in sugar. I've heard conflicting stories about fructose by itself, too (maybe worse than glucose, maybe not; maybe a positive for satiety but depending on how it's timed etc.)
This is absolutely a smoking gun, but I still don't understand exactly how it works.
So TLDR the sugar industry paid for (1?) literature review paper that said that existing papers reporting risks of sugar were flawed.
But what I hear is that _until recently_ sugar research has been put on the backburner, and only recently are people starting to re-examine the links between sugar and heart health.
How are these two related? Did the one paper really put people off researching it for 50 years?
Talking about fat seems to have been more attractive because it's more "obvious" (see also: how long we were stuck on wrong ideas about dietary cholesterol, and still seem to be about sodium). Also because there's more chemical variety in fats to argue about. You can have complete fats vs. fatty acids separated from a triglyceride backbone; you can have saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids; and each point of "unsaturation" (where there is a double bond between carbons in the "backbone" of the molecule) allows for cis/trans isomerism. With sugar you basically only have glucose and fructose, and chains thereof, to think about; and that also covers starches automatically.
(2016)
[2016]
Yeah, sugar isn’t good for you. It’s a lot of concentrated calories. And possibly has some other issues as well. Probably stay well below the guidelines. An occasional sweet treat isn’t gonna kill you but don’t go guzzling down coke instead of water.
Lots of fats aren’t good for you either. Especially the saturated kind.
PS: Is there a concerted pro fat effort going on HN right now? We’ve had 1 opinion piece by a non scientist journalist paid by industry to pretend saturated fat is good for you against all evidence so far, and now we have a 2016 article being pushed up to the top defending fats without being marked as such, within hours.
The health of saturated fat is not "against all evidence". See e.g. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/5-studies-on-saturated-....
It's common for posts here to lack date markings that they should have. It doesn't change the conclusion of the research, except that "60 years ago" would be more accurate now.
It also seems to be common (enough that I've noticed the pattern within a couple of months) that there are suddenly two articles on related topics out of nowhere. A lot of the time, this seems to happen because someone reads the first link, browses around and find something else interesting.
I think if someone finds low fats good for them, then there isn't much reason to shout it from the mountaintops
If someone finds high fats good for themselves, then they might feel lied to and want to shout it.
That may be reason for what youre observing.
It’s a lot of concentrated calories.
It's not that dense though. Fat is 2.25x as calorie dense as sugar. Many are surprised to learn that peanuts, fatty meats, oils, butters, and granolas have more calories per gram compared to Skittles. The only way to avoid overeating fat is to make the portions sizes absurdly small. There is often a shock at learning that only a tablespoon of peanut butter, which is a miniscule amount of food, is 100 calories. It's trivially easy to adds hundreds of calories with butters and other fats.
Here's the other thread for reference[0], and yeah, something might be going on. The referenced one from yesterday is by Nina Teicholz who is meat industry paid to confuse people like us. If you read the other post, at least watch this about the author [1]. If you read that post, watch that video.
So many cases in human history are where one thing is believed, people and studies come and show that it's false, and then it takes a really long time for culture to come around to it. Earth being round, tobacco, climate change among others.
Based on what the non-industry funded science shows, saturated fat being considered any bit healthy is in the long stage of culture taking a long time to accept what the science is saying. And it's not helped by studies with industry funding that know how to skirt the edges. Many places to choose from, but here's one from Dr. Barnard talking about sugar vs saturated fats [2].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41957637 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkqWdY5_2-8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xeHDqBB6X0
Hold your horses, saturated fat is still no good …
There are people who disagree with that idea
... in excess. Like sugar.
In general, it is wise not to dismiss everything as a conspiracy theory. Flat earth and moon landing conspiracies are not the same as those that involve corrupting a small number of individuals for massive gain.
[2016]
They are probably both bad in excess, since that’s how calories work.
I am obligated do my usual unpopular reply that people are not calorimeters, the type of food and the cadence matters a lot and perhaps even more than the quantity. Humans are very complex organisms made up of many other complex organisms that react in very complex ways to food and each other. The effect of hormones dominate the caloric expenditure to the point that sufficient hormone intervention can be impossible to overcome with any amount of eating.
I think the desire to simplify the model down to calorie in and calorie out is a way of putting all responsibility onto the unhealthy individual as an aversion to empathy. Our population has been intentionally misinformed and our food has been poisoned in a way that personal responsibility cannot always overcome, so while people may still deserve the brunt of the blame we must also understand that the food industry/medical/politics played a substantial part in creating the situation and as hard as it is to fight back against these profitable industries it is even more difficult to remodel people to have more willpower.
Except animal fat is not ultra processed. 200 calories of Oreos is simply not the same as 200 calories of red meat. Anything in excess is bad, though, agreed.
It can still be simple -- look at it like this: 200 calories of Oreos provides very little additional benefits, while 200 calories of meat provides more additional benefits for your diet. It doesn't matter as much when comparing Oreos to meat, but it really matters when you're comparing orange juice to soda. The processing might play a factor, but really you're looking for calories containing nutrients that keep you alive and healthy -- processing level is pretty subjective.
I would say OJ and soda should both be avoided.
I compared Oreos to red meat because two medical students argued with me that Oreos, which are vegan, were equivalent or even better than red meat.
They believed this because the medical establishment had gone full tilt against red meat for the past 50 years.
And of course they used their authority on the subject as an excuse for believing something insane.
myth that juice is somewhat healthy should be added to this list of fiction that we are discussing. eat raw fruits. much better than extracting just the sugary water and throwing most of fibres away.
Of course. Processing is a grayscale, but as you go up the scale, the less healthy something is, as a rule of thumb.
~3500 calories of orange juice and ~3500 calories of soda will both add 1 pound of mass I to your body.
Yeah, because they are both intensely sugary.
3500 calories of lean meat won't.
The way the body responds to food is much more complex than the way a calorimeter does. For example, having lipids (components from fat) in your small intestine reduces your hunger, because your body knows you have a lot of good energy coming up. Sugar and other low-complexity carbs, on the other hand, is quickly absorbed, and does not do much to reduce hunger even in the short term.
Even different sugars (glucose/fructose/sucrose) affect the satiety response differently.
Are you honestly implying fats aren’t easy to gain weight on? There’s a reason arctic explorers packed lots of butter and oils. It’s a super efficient way to store energy and consume it.
Yes.
I eat lots of healthy fats and no sugar or wheat. I'm borderline underweight. When you eat such a diet, your insulin levels stay low. High insulin is what causes your body to convert sugar to fat and store it. Low insulin causes your body to burn your fat reserves. I just got back from a 5 day, 50 mile backpacking trip where I averaged about 1000 calories a day. Not once was I hungry.
The arctic explorers weren't gaining body fat from the fats they ate, they were burning them almost immediately.
We are learning more and more that gaining weight has more to do with insulin response and various other super complicated pathways -- not simply "calorie in = some weight gained". If that were true, people wouldn't lose weight on near/full ketogenic diets high in fat.
That’s not at all what they implied and your example backs up the point they WERE making.
No, I'm not. I am saying that humans are complicated, and that the effect of food on weight is not simply down to "how calorie dense is this substance." Unless you are force-feeding a person into obesity, other factors beside caloric density matter a great deal.
You may want to do some reading on the satiety response. You could also imagine whether you think you would gain or lose weight over the next month on a tallow-only diet.
Interestingly the push to reduce fat, which led to increased sugar coincide with the onset of the obesity epidemic. But of-cause correlation isn’t causation.
I feel like we are in a point of time where science is enshittified so much, it will be almost impossible to come back to a reasonable and sustainable interaction with the world and ecosystem around us.
This is just doomerism and painting with a planet wide brush. IMHO it's not so simple.
There has been much laudable and scientific progress in the past 50 years. Higgs Boston discovery and mRNA vaccines being two that come to mind.
And examples of progress that science helped start and then international and national institutions brought to the masses: Smallpox eradication, HIV treatment, lower childhood mortality, etc.
Sugar is often blamed for the obesity epidemic in America. But the data--anecdotal and clinical--shows that high-fat diets do not perform better compared to low-fat diets for weight loss.
And people still can't hold two things in their head: Saturated fat and added sugar are both bad. Two things can be bad!
Also they can be fine in moderation.
Similarly, if you find a zero added sugar low saturated fats treat and eat too much of that, then you can still run into problems.
It seems more productive to me to not classify food as “bad” but to focus on balanced diets, including sugars and fats, in healthier proportions.
Of course. They aren't poison- eating one added sugar or saturated fat won't kill you. It's if you make it a habit.
The hard part is that the food industry in the US has seen fit to add sugar to everything. Sometimes it seems like the only way to avoid overeating sugar is to make everything from scratch, which is both time and (often times) financially inefficient.
That’s my point. Instead of calling it “bad” it would be more accurate to call it something else; “occasional”, “treat”, etc.
I had the good fortune that the people the government sent to my school to teach such nonsense were the unhealthiest people I had ever seen in my life up to that point. A good priming for a 7 year old into distrusting the government and the start of a resolve to a general rule of thumb that the people telling me how to be healthy should at least appear healthy themselves.
I had a similar thought when I did my yearly checkup at Kaiser some years ago. The doctor what interviewed me looked like hell. I thought for them any health advice they are giving is just a theoretical concept that they clearly don’t live by.
> […] a general rule of thumb that the people telling me how to be healthy should at least appear healthy themselves.
If a medical professional tells you that you shouldn't smoke and that it's bad for you, but are smokers themselves, are they wrong? Should you not follow them?
Calling someone a hypocrite (which is essentially what you are doing) is a specious reasoning:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
I wouldn’t call them a hypocrite because I believe they followed their own advice and were well intentioned in their advice.
In the case of a doctor that tells me smoking is bad even though they smoke, I’m more likely to believe them because they have first hand experience even if they don’t follow their own advice. I don’t think it’s hypocritical to not follow your own advice especially from the point of view that they would follow their own advice if they could and are open about that. In fact there have been numerous smokers in my life who have told me they’re addicted and recommended to me to never start and I did heed their advice.
But that’s not what happened in grade school so I’m not exactly sure what point you are making.
I’m curious why does your ire land with the government, instead of landing with the sugar companies that took over the government?
Do you view it as a failed promise that they would represent you and that that was something that should be expected given history?
Is it a moral failing of the government person?
I suppose the confusing thing to me is that people who rail about the government, are simply complaining about the power of companies to control it.
> the confusing thing to me is that people who rail about the government, are simply complaining about the power of companies to control it.
This is a baseless assertion with no evidence, written in an emotionally manipulative manner ("the confusing thing", "I'm curious", etc).
The government is responsible for drafting laws and regulations, and for setting nutritional standards. Not companies. This is a fact.
If a government official decides to claim that sugar is ok and fat is bad, that's something they have to take responsibility for given that they are literally doing so as a representative of the government.
The sugar industry is not mind-controlling these government employees. They are being corrupted, yes, but ultimately they are making the decisions. The primary moral failing is with the individuals making the decisions. This is factual. If you make a decision, you are more responsible for that decision than someone else who did not make it, by definition.
None of this is to say that this bribery and corruption on the part of the companies is somehow excusable or doesn't make the problem worse, just that the primary responsibility lies with our elected officials and those they then nominate and hire in turn.
Unfortunately, "knowing the truth when an industry exec is lying to you" is not among the prerequisites for a politician to be successful.
You see this often here in the HN comment section, on a variety of topics: "For-profit industry did [wrongdoing], and the government [went along with it | was fooled | didn't act fast enough], therefore I don't trust the government!" They're always silent on corporate power. It's odd reasoning to say the least.
And totally counterproductive, given the underlying insinuation that scaling back the government would solve the problem, when in reality it just hands more power over to corporations to do even more [wrongdoing].
> given the underlying insinuation that scaling back the government would solve the problem
This is almost never actually stated in comments on HN. This is statement is just projection and/or inventing hypothetical strawman positions.
The fact that the discussion tends to lead this way is a good reason to treat phrases like "You see this often here in the HN comment section" with suspicion.
When there's a revolving door between the two, there's not really much of a difference. It's simply a distrust and distaste for the American elites (public and private).
There are some elites that are self sacrificial and view other Americans as countrymen and not units to extract from but they are very few. As somebody who rails about the government, it's fundamentally an elite problem. You can propose any system you want, but if those running it are rotten it's not going to work.
> the sugar companies that took over the government
If those sugar companies now _are_ the government (after they've taken it over, as you say), the question becomes: do you like those sugar companies? Do you trust them?
At the time I was unaware of reasons why and simply knew that the visitors were from the governments national scientific body. I did later find out that the initiative was partly funded by cereal corporations. I did believe and still do that the people sent thought they were acting in the best interest of the students.
These days I consider our governance to be oligopolistic corporatism where the government is a corrupted tool of the corporations that mainly exists to keep the peace between the corporations so they can more effectively extract monopolistic rents. I do like the idea of a hypothetical ideal of an uncorrupted government but I have no idea how such a government could be achieved and worry that attempts to achieve this could easily backfire and make things worse.
Edit: I consider the attempts to pin all ills on government to be the result of yet another successful public relations campaign by large corporations. Unfortunately society has been polarized to the point that I don’t have a political home with either the left or the right - and again I think this is an intentional conspiracy to undermine effective opposition.
We should be unhappy with a government that is so easily controlled, and that isn't looking out for our interests
The distorting power of money. And then think: if it can distort our collective understanding of the world, could it distort our government, our elections, etc.?
The problem with capitalism is that it destroys democracy. Money distributes to a small group of people who then have overwhelming influence over the government, available information, and so on.
We also see that as money flows away from the poor, and the affordability of essential goods like housing, food, and healthcare worsen, those who should gain from democracy rightfully grow to hate it, and vote to destroy it (e.g voting for Trump).
We need a new economics.
Idk if capitalism is solely to blame. Is not like we’ve seen less corruption on the other end of the spectrum.
Many European countries are also capitalist, but don’t seem (at least from the outside) to have the same rampant corporate influence on government as the US.
Granted they are more open to socialist policy, most of which seem like good ideas.
We have some companies in the US that have been around for nearly as long as the country itself. These companies pre-dated regulation and had a hand in building it. As a legislator, you’d want input from experts before writing laws. IMO that’s why corporate involvement in politics is so normal in the US.
I’m not sure if that the case for many European countries.
It’d be great to find a new economic axis that can break us out of the planned economy/radical free market axis.
> It’d be great to find a new economic axis that can break us out of the planned economy/radical free market axis.
Here's one start:
https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...
That seems to be more a guide on how to sell socialism rather than providing another economic axis.
Did I miss something?
> socialism
That's too broad of a term to carry universal meaning without the context provided by the article.
The piece is more of a modern translation based on present conditions, and it isn't to be confused with "the Nordic model" or any other instance or attempt that readers might instinctively cling to when hearing the word.
Communism was developed to combat this issue.
We’ve known about this problem for a while and communism was the solution to it. But there’s an even bigger problem with communism is the lack of correct incentives.
Turns out capitalism is better than communism purely because it has the right incentives.
In most countries we have hybrid models.
> We need a new economics
Right now many parts of the US are dangerously close to extremist liberalist agendas. It’s as big of an issue (if not bigger) as the neoconservative issue back when bush jr was president.
Wouldn’t be surprised if liberalism took over and communism became the overarching thought process. We already redefined pronouns.
Please keep in mind the standard of discourse expected here. The discussion should definitely not have been able to veer all the way from sugar vs. fat to "pronouns".
(Also, "liberalist" is a terrible term for the "extremist agendas" you appear to have in mind. I refuse to let them coopt the label.)
Moving from the conflict between capitalism and democracy to complaining about neo-pronouns is quite a jump.
It's pretty wild to put the "extremist agendas" of what pronouns people use anywhere near the significance of our economic and governmental systems.
>Moving from the conflict between capitalism and democracy to complaining about neo-pronouns is quite a jump.
Democracy does not conflict with capitalism. It's capitalism vs. communism. For democracy it's democracy vs. autocracy. Communism can still be a democracy.
Also I never said anything about neopronouns. What is even a neopronoun?
>It's pretty wild to put the "extremist agendas" of what pronouns people use anywhere near the significance of our economic and governmental systems.
It's associated. I use to be a liberal, but the definition changed and now I'm more moderate. I agree with distribution of wealth but I don't agree with pronouns which are also a liberal thing. These two things nowadays go hand in hand with the term "liberal".
> Communism can still be a democracy.
Communism (per Marx) describes a stateless society. A society without a state cannot be a democracy. Communism is antidemocratic per definition.
The reason why communism describes both the economic and the political system of a society is because the two are intertwined.
> Democracy does not conflict with capitalism.
Capitalism offers various means to private entities to steer democratic vote. The two are intertwined just like all other political and economic systems.
> These two things nowadays go hand in hand with the term "liberal".
Perhaps. I don't know what your bubble currently considers to be liberal politics. I still don't see why you consider pronoun usage to be such a significant issue.
I don’t want to single out this back and forth particularly, but it reminds me of so much of the political discourse on HN, just endlessly spinning wheels.
e.g. Why can’t someone hang up portraits of both John D. Rockefeller and Mao Zedong in their room, admire them both, and still get along fine in life, maybe even achieve great successes? Regardless of any specific set of words, definitions, arguments, etc…?
> We need a new economics
It could be argued that capitalism has played a significant part in the improvement in our living conditions and the technogical development of our species. Then again, it could also rather easily be argued that capitalism is a plague on society that will inevitably result in total domination by a handful of billionaires.
But what realistic alternatives are there? And even if such an alternative exists, why would those in control - who benefit the most from capitalism - relinquish their power?
Capitalism is an objective benefit to our species, much has improved that couldn’t have under feudalism. Yet, just as you might rearrange your house when you have kids, we should rearrange our economy when the existing system no longer meets our needs.
The challenges you point out are massive, but if it’s true that a change is necessary, then the challenges must be overcome.
I imagine most Europeans would be happy with a rule such as "no individual to own €1B in assets" as a start. But even if rules for a fairer, more equitable form of capitalism can be devised, I fear the entrenched position and loose morals of the top capitalists would be difficult or impossible to overcome.
Me too. It seems almost impossible. But I don’t know any other option, so I invest my hope in the possibility that, if there were a broader openness to change, maybe some new ideas might come along (or abandoned ones might become possible)
[dead]
„Manufacturing consent“, as Noam Chomsky has described it with regards to media. How many areas can you think of where the public is misled. „Yeah, sugar is not to blame.“ or „Smoking does not cause cancer.“ or „You need to eat meat for good health.“ These opininons are pushed by powerful media conglomerates. But not only health-wise: Think Ukraine war, Gaza (portraying them constantly as aggressors, the other side as defenders), environment (still lots of people deny environmental changes), harmfulness of weapons in the US, and so much more.
Conflating propaganda from think-tanks, and PR from think-tanks is disastrous for our oligarch... I mean democracy.