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Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

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Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#191

Post by nitrogen »

CameronNemo wrote: post #107
nitrogen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the unfortunate side effects of the SF tax though is that an $8 canister of sports drink powder (essential to provide calories and minerals during longer periods of exertion) has a $7 tax. I don't think a tax approaching 90% is in any way just.

> I don't think a tax approaching 90% is in any way just. For this specific case, or in general? Because there are certainly externalities that are larger than the internalized cost of a good.

In this specific case. The drink facilitates athletic activity, and taxing it as if it harms health is ludicrous. Honestly I think the whole sugared drink tax is a bit ridiculous, but taxing a sports drink mix at 90 effing percent when a soda is taxed at a few percent can't be the true intent.

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#192

Post by BubRoss »

anticensor wrote: post #178
BubRoss wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a serious question? Are you talking about voting for politicians? Anyone can start as many corporations as they want. Also corporations have roughly 100 million shares and anyone can buy a single share, so your formula would give one corporation more votes than the number of people who participated in the 2016 US election. Do you really think corporations are under represented in the political process?

I wanted to illustrate sillyness of the idea. Partners of a corporation are already represented, no need to represent the whole partnership.

That seems like a rehash of what I was already saying, I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#194

Post by phonypc »

OrgNet wrote: post #140
phonypc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different sugars affect properties like texture and moisture retention differently, and aren't equivalently sweet.

Do you have a concrete example for the moisture retention case?

Cookies? Swap brown for white in a recipe and you'll wind up with a wildly different product, and they're 95% the same (white is almost pure sucrose, brown has a small amount of fructose and other traces).

Syrups contain quite a bit of water, and differ a bunch in constituent sugars.

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#195

Post by Mirioron »

ben_w wrote: post #44
Mirioron wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society pays a high cost for eating meat. It takes a lot of resources to grow meat for consumption. Furthermore, there seems to be a lot of things pointing towards how meat consumption isn't good for our health. So, let's ban advertising for meat products. Next step we levy heavy taxes on meat products and for the final step we outright ban it. After all, it's for your own good. The state knows best.

All true. I guess the balance of power doesn’t support that, partly because: 1) there is no memetic equivalent of “sugar => calories => fat and ugly”, indeed rather the opposite because of its association with the Atkins diet. 2) farming is a job everyone seems to support even though it’s a small part of the economy, and meat is a cash crop (or am I misremembering?) > The state knows best. All true except that. We’ve…

>All true except that.

It was a jab at authoritarianism. I think that people should be able to consume what they want. I'm okay with warnings and public health campaigns to a degree, but heavy sin taxes go too far. If these sin taxes were there to actually offset the cost to society, then I might consider them, but they almost never do that. At first, maybe, but eventually every sin tax just turns into additional funding for the government.

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#196

Post by webninja »

nevode wrote: post #193
kaffeemitsahne wrote: post #97

Just ban all ads and be done with it. Really don't understand why it's taking us (collectively) so long to get there.

How would people know about a new product being launched?

Good point. So where do we draw the line between good advertising (i.e. new products, new movie trailers) and bad advertising (i.e. “beauty” product manipulations, sugary drink commercials)?

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#197

Post by therealdrag0 »

karmakaze wrote: post #190

By only targeting sugar, Singapore will become the test area for what happens when a population converts to artificial sweeteners. I'm both curious and afraid for the results to come in.

Don't we have stable populations of people consuming artificial sweeteners for like 50 years now?
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