Fat shaming actually increases risk of becoming or staying obese. So although obesity is unhealthy, fat shaming is still bad and stupid since it does not help, and actually hurts.
There are better ways to help people become healthy.
>The present research demonstrates that, in addition to poorer mental health outcomes, weight discrimination has implications for obesity. Rather than motivating individuals to lose weight, weight discrimination increases risk for obesity.
1) You cant say that unilaterally - Fat shaming may very well also prevent skinny people from becoming fat. You can't just look at already fat people.
2) These self reported "weight discrimination" studies have so many biases you really shouldn't take them as fact.
3) The usual correlation =/= causation speech. It could very well be that amount of discrimination also varies with weight (duh) and that those that get a lot of discrimination are already past the point of motivation to change (just one of many alternative theories. This specific example isn't the best by any stretch).
All in all, it just does not make as much intuitive sense that fat jokes (among other things) encourage people to stay fat and this little study is definitely not enough to override occams razor in my opinion.
Did you bother to read the abstract of the source provided? It directly refutes pretty much all of your points including a control group. For your convenience, I've italicized the relevant text:
>Participants were drawn from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative longitudinal survey of community-dwelling US residents. A total of 6,157 participants (58.6% female) completed the discrimination measure and had weight and height available from the 2006 and 2010 assessments. Participants who experienced weight discrimination were approximately 2.5 times more likely to become obese by follow-up (OR = 2.54, 95% CI = 1.58–4.08) and participants who were obese at baseline were three times more likely to remain obese at follow up (OR = 3.20, 95% CI = 2.06–4.97) than those who had not experienced such discrimination. These effects held when controlling for demographic factors (age, sex, ethnicity, education) and when baseline BMI was included as a covariate.
When you're a young person, peer pressure and need for peer acceptance/interaction is a powerful force that can defy rational action. Young people have limited perspective beyond the immediate social environments of their family and friends.
If all of the interaction at school is in these virtual spaces they may be compelled to try and socialize in the hope of peer acceptance.
Loneliness and social needs can be hard to deal with for some kids and the hope of positive interaction may drive them to keep trying to reach out to their peers even in the face of vicious bullying.
I feel like this kind of horrific tragedy must be addressed and especially in the context of virtual/computer facilitated environments by developers and engineers.
Here is a problem that I would like to see combated with machine learning and sentiment analysis. Combined with moderation and report functions efforts can be made to identify extreme bullying and address/stop the perpetrators. Indicators of suicidal thoughts in, for example, Google searches could be a channel for parental notification to prevent these kinds of tragedies.
I am not an expert, but leveraging the technology available to help in the fight against extreme bullying seems like a worthy pursuit alongside education of parents and children as well as stricter legislation on harassment and bullying that leads to injury or death.
Well put, the relationship trends more and more asymmetric. Add in rhetoric designed to convince workers to buy into a system that exploits them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6240495
In general, employers have far more leverage over employee's lives than the individual employee has over the corporation's well being even though we sometimes pretend that it is symmetric and that the market is fair.
Employers optimize for maximum profit for "the shareholders." Somewhere along the line, morality is tossed out, and shortly afterward even legitimate long-term sustainability is also out (cultivating a strong workforce, valued for their talent rather than purely for their labor).
Add in the feedback loop of political apparatuses being appropriated for profit (lobbying) and the political arena is just another exploitable lever for amassing more resources by those with the resources to do so.
Which creates a fertile ground for Marxism 2.0 . The moment the screws tighten even more and instead of middle class you get technical/service class for the elite you will have a lot of unhappy people to deal with.
And as history has shown time and time again when you have a lot of poor and unhappy people new ideologies could spread like fire.
Another thing that concentration of wealth brings is that when the chant becomes "eat the rich/powerful" there are very few rich people left to mount a solid defense - the Arab Spring, the Fall of the Berlin wall all showed that.
(I mix political/military/economic power because I think in electroweak style theory they are all the same - the ability to mess up with other people's lives)
A similar analogy that occurs to me is the justice system. Yes, there will be guilty criminals who walk free of a innocent-until-proven-guilty, trial-by-jury-of-your-peers justice system. The alternative is convincingly worse enough that we accept the false negatives and outliers of the system that protects us.
In this case, letting millions suffer in poverty with real effects of poor healthcare (instead of investing in preventative care), restricted access to better opportunities for themselves and their children seems thoroughly worse than accepting the outlier "parasites."
I am of the belief that given the foundations of Maslow's hierarchy and a real education, many of those "parasites" with limited opportunities can be changed into people who feel they have a chance and pursue "self actualization." Poverty is a vicious cycle; it's hard to be ambitious in a "i want to change the world" way when you have no choice but to take whatever you can to support your family on minimum wage.
I agree completely that instead of throwing money at administrative peripheral problems like eliminating any parasitism, we should address the root problem.
Overall, people living in poverty do not have the same opportunities as the wealthy. Given the same opportunities there is no reason that they would not pursue the same "worthier" career aspirations. The assumption that poor people are parasites is the most colossal example of Fundamental Attribution Error[1] I can think of.
> Overall, people living in poverty do not have the same opportunities as the wealthy.
This is the basic issue every argument against any social program needs to address.
The last time basic income came up I saw a poster strawmanning it by claiming that the "producers" would be financing everyone else to have daily parties. Actually nobody is suggesting that we give enough money for people to throw parties every day. The suggestion is to give people enough money to survive in a way that eliminates government waste on the program. Then we will see what sort of jobs or tasks they create for themselves. The majority will not be content to watch TV all day.
Are you referring to the chart that illustrates funding as a percent of GDP? If so, I think that the numbers may be larger than you think. Half a hundredth of a percent of the US GDP is still 7.5 billion dollars per year.
To put this into perspective: The entire annual NSF budget is $7 billion.
From Wikipedia:
"With an annual budget of about US$7.0 billion (fiscal year 2012), the NSF funds approximately 20% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities.[1] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing."
The entire NIH budget is 30 billion a year. NASA's is 18 billion.
The second chart of the article shows that adjusted for inflation, the purchasing power of scientific funding has decreased from 10-30% since 2004.
The article is pretty bad, but I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the issue. If you work out the numbers, it's still an alarming problem.
I think that the article should do the math for the audience to better report on the problem though. Five minutes of following links looks like the Salon article is a summary of the Huffington Post article, which is a summary of the original report by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB).
In light of these predictions, I am more curious as to how governments will address this problem. I find it difficult that governments will easily give up on their surveillance goals.
The question then becomes how will they work around the shifting generational trend that Charlie has identified? For example, will they leverage new analytical technology that enables them to employ a smaller number of people by automating tasks?
For those of you who have read his Laundry Files novels, the SCORPION STARE network grants panopticon surveillance combined with lethal line-of-sight gorgonism emulation, which hypothetically enables automated control of a wide network of remote controlled camera weaponry to a few pilots instead of employing large numbers of people with guns.
Maybe Charlie has predictions as to how governments will automate their surveillance systems or other new ways of maintaining their control in their supposed mission to protect the people in the face of less loyal prospective workers?
The drive of the hacker is to solve problems and find novel or efficient solutions to problems and the tools used to solve those problems.
It's not surprising that this can be taken to the extreme as we strive to continually optimize our tools, which are especially flexible since they are spun out of almost pure abstraction.
A healthy dose of perspective is helpful to reminds us that at the end of the day we solve problems and make cool things.
Though dealing with poorly designed man-made abstractions can be frustrating, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to improve our tools and environments and it's especially incredible how collaborative the effort is (open source) compared to some other industries.
Being a first-time bootstrapper, I am striving very hard to minimize financial exposure. However, this means that I had to convince my cofounders and team to work for free; or rather, they agreed to join because they believe in the vision and for the learning experience and journey rather than for immediate monetary compensation.
Although they admittedly joined on happily and believe in our potential, I do struggle with doubt and accountability to them. The article seems to emphasize the mental strain caused by blows to self confidence or finances, which can certainly be crippling and terrifying.
However, by minimizing financial exposure and trying to keep a perspective that protects self-confidence, those are less of a concern to me compared to facing the possibility of failing my friends who contributed their time freely and signed on to what was originally my vision.
The pressure and anxiety over prospect of disappointing the friends who became teammates based on their belief in you and your vision seems hard to avoid. To be blessed by forgiving loved ones, friends, and teammates is priceless and the articles recommendation to "Most important, make time for your loved ones...Don't let your business squeeze out your connections with human beings...When it comes to fighting off depression, relationships with friends and family can be powerful weapons." resonates the most.
There are better ways to help people become healthy.
>The present research demonstrates that, in addition to poorer mental health outcomes, weight discrimination has implications for obesity. Rather than motivating individuals to lose weight, weight discrimination increases risk for obesity.
Source: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...