Time for a quick little freakout–in line with this sort of blatant paternalism:
Sugar is so toxic it should be controlled like alcohol, according to new report that goes so far as to suggest setting an age limit of 17 years to buy soda pop.
It points to sugar as a culprit behind many of the world’s major killers — heart disease, cancer and diabetes — that are now a greater health burden than infectious disease.
Are you kidding me here? Why is the modern reaction to problems like this always some form of government regulation? People are utterly and truly aware of the affects of sugar. Instead, these things are painted as some giant societal ill:
“We recognize that societal intervention to reduce the supply and demand for sugar faces an uphill political battle against a powerful sugar lobby,” the researchers say, “and will require active engagement from all stakeholders.”
But such “tectonic shifts” in policy are possible, they say, pointing to bans on public smoking, limits on alcohol sales and condom dispensers in public washrooms. “It’s time to turn our attention to sugar.”
The battle is not political, it is with consumers. Get that through your heads.
This is an excellent site for two reasons. One, it is a working responsive design and it is grid based. Two, it has great content. A site “about style, taste and good manners.” Plenty here to peruse if you’re into this sort of thing. Me, not too stylish, and I lack the manners to be confused with anyone of class, but admire those that can pull it off. Wish this weren’t in German, but here’s a translation.
Also, be sure to change your browser window’s size and see how the site responds.
I have a couple of friends embarking on a journey of fitness, hell, and betterment. I envy their drive to run long distances and share their desire for physical fitness, but damned if I won’t ever have a goal like they have. No way will I ever aim for a half marathon. I hate running without competitive purposes (yeah, yeah, people run to compete, but that shit is boring). I look forward to reading all about it.
We all grew up as athletes together, once felt young, and hope to recapture that feeling in some way. I’m at a disadvantage, though, I’m afraid. I might be able to maintain or establish some kind of cardiovascular fitness, but my knee is going to forever deteriorate until one day I’ll be half man, half mechanical parts, and that sucks. I wish my knee had never been injured, dammit.
Thankfully I’m not married to someone that takes this position in life. Unfortunately, it appears the individual in question does not care about the logic of the argument, just that their feelings were hurt…and they want sweet, sweet revenge (or not that last part at all).
FLG: We just more care about different things, and women choose to believe that what men care about is dirtier or less important, and thus we are pigs. Look, if every time you feel like he should know what you are expecting without telling him, then think of the French maid outfit. It’s best just to tell him what you’d like. If he says no or balks in some way, then maybe there is an issue. For example, if you told him you wanted him to come over with soup and he didn’t, then that’d be an issue. Or at least an issue you could discuss like adults. This he should know what I want and then when I don’t get it I don’t talk to him stuff is, frankly, high school bullshit.
Santa keeps tabs on what you do and when you sleep. He will punish or reward you on the basis of your performance. So you should be good for purely moral motives. The trouble, again, is that after having given a variety of non-moral, strictly self-interested reasons to act, it is a perfect non sequitur to conclude that we must act on the basis of purely moral motives. In fact, if we’re right, the Santa myth undermines the idea that we should act on the basis of our moral reasons. By accepting the Santa myth, then, we nearly ensure that we will not be good.
Ah, Joe. You’re not part of the new enlightenment. The old, superseded enlightenment took a narrow view of harm to others, where harm had to be directly imposed on other people, and “other people” was far too exclusionary. The new enlightenment says it’s a harm to others if those others can’t help themselves from coming in to rescue you if you get into trouble, so force can be used to keep you from taking risks.
It boggles the mind how often this view is a justification for the abuse of individual liberty. This particular post at Offsetting Behavior is funny, because its true–judges aren’t really designed to protect the Enlightenment notion of liberty, rather they’re more apt to protect the state interest.
Now I’m just making everything up.
Liberty. It’s a simple idea, but it’s also the linchpin of a complex system of values and practices: justice, prosperity, responsibility, toleration, cooperation, and peace. Many people believe that liberty is the core political value of modern civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other values of social life. They’re called libertarians.
The study rated every U.S. county for their manufacturers’ exposure to competition from China, and found that regions most exposed to China tended not only to lose more manufacturing jobs, but also to see overall employment decline. Areas with higher exposure also had larger increases in workers receiving unemployment insurance, food stamps and disability payments.
The authors calculate that the cost to the economy from the increased government payments amounts to one- to two-thirds of the gains from trade with China. In other words, a big portion of the ways trade with China has helped the U.S.—such as by providing inexpensive Chinese goods to consumers—has been wiped out. And that estimate doesn’t include any economic losses experienced by people who lost their jobs.
Most serious professions take this kind of self-knowledge for granted. Architects and prospective architects know which are the best architecture schools; they can readily find out the average salaries of apprentice, mid-level, and senior architects in their country and region; they know what titles and honors they can aspire to, and have a generally accurate idea of how long they must toil as apprentices before they can expect to be promoted—or start worrying if they have not been.
Web design, if that’s what we call it, has had no such data. Moreover, no professional organization is dedicated to our field’s advancement in the way that, say, AIGA promotes, explains, defends, and takes the measure of graphic design.
With your help, we took the first steps to change that with the publication of our 2007 A List Apart survey and findings. We have published surveys and findings each year since. Here, admittedly a little late, we present our findings from 2010.
Thoroughly amused. This is one of those times where StumbleUpon really came through for me. Cheeky little company.
Anyway, this is a web comic that gets you to believe the standard comic publishing model has very little future. Why? Because it would have had far too many loopholes and special interests to compete against–the newspaper is an exclusive club after all. No, this is just further proof that in some instances, the internet is a leveler when it comes to self publishing.