821–830 of 1001 posts
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> The equivalent would be severely limiting it (for example, prohibiting business flying). People fly to go on holiday and experience cultures other than their own which is something we should be encouraging rather than discouraging. I strongly agree with reducing needless business travel but if doing so also limited vacation travel I think it'd be a net negative.
We should be discouraging all air travel. All of it.
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The CDC has been unfortunately hopelessly politicized. It happened long before the pandemic. OTOH, I would make the differentiating point that air travel has positive benefits to society and costs and one has to weigh those against each other. You can’t make the blanket statement “earth would be better off if air travel went away completely.” It’s hard to find any benefit to smoking, first hand or second, so it’s eas…
As we've seen in the past 2 years, there's no real positive benefit to society to frequent business flying (at pre-pandemic levels). Like smoking, we don't need to completely ban air travel. The equivalent would be severely limiting it (for example, prohibiting business flying).
I'm sorry but I don't buy that. Business flying has obvious benefits including, perhaps obviously, enabling businesses to be run efficiently.
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Another article from The Lancet from around the same time reported a whopping... 6 months of life expectancy reduction when consuming 100-200g of alcohol a week versus 0-100g of alcohol a week. [1, Figure 4] A drink is 14 grams of alcohol, so that means that your risk from consuming 150 grams, or over 10 drinks a week, is still relatively low in terms of all-cause mortality. Figure 1 also shows that consumption of 0-…
For comparaison, smoking is ~10 years of life expectancy reduction https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal... . Surprisingly obesity seems to only replace some of your last years with years with diabetes, without decreasing your longevity https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4951120/ . I think I didn't read that study correctly, or didn't find a good one. Air pollution might be aroun…
I'm a sociable person, and in my(western) experience there are more good times when alcohol is involved, even with people who does not drink often. I get that it may have an adverse effect on health and longevity. But in the end, we are all going to die - to grow old just to be old doesn't sit right either.
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There is no dissonance here, this is FUD. The language is wildly different because the actual risks are wildly different. One kills a lot of people and the other doesn’t. How many people are actually dying from air travel radiation? The numbers are low enough that they’re hard to find evidence for. Here’s a study, for example, that attempted to answer the question for pilots, who obviously fly frequently. They weren’…
First of all, this is a good and fair pushback. But I’d respond that I chose secondhand smoke for a reason. I similarly doubt there’s any measurable impact of being around a smoker every once in a while, but the language around secondhand smoke got more and more hysterical leading up to the widespread implementation of smoking bans, to the point that it’s not uncommon today to hear people complain that walking near a…
Doesn't have to be the smoke itself that's harmful. Presumably, if you can smell someone's second-hand smoke, you're also inhaling the bacterial spray contained in their breath, no? Something I think about if I'm walking outside without a mask on and end up stuck walking for a while behind a smoker. I tend to put my mask back on.
In this thread: a lot of people trying to justify their preexisting choice to drink or remain sober.
Also many pointing out that the notion that avoiding any consumption of alcohol is a ridiculous notion, as implied by the article, given that it's a common component of many foods.
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If you want to feel some dissonance about this, you might note that this is the exact language the CDC uses for things like secondhand smoke -- "There is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke" -- which everybody nods along to and accepts without much scrutiny. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco... Meanwhile, when it's something like, say, cosmic radiation exposure from c…
There is no dissonance here, this is FUD. The language is wildly different because the actual risks are wildly different. One kills a lot of people and the other doesn’t. How many people are actually dying from air travel radiation? The numbers are low enough that they’re hard to find evidence for. Here’s a study, for example, that attempted to answer the question for pilots, who obviously fly frequently. They weren’…
The problem with conservative forums like HN is eventually you get on this treadmill of "and so and so isn't so bad" be it alcohol, smoking, Hitler, etc that's a mix of ignorant and purposely dishonest to push agendas. This takes people down some strange and often ignorant and hateful roads, which then helps craft their personalities and core beliefs into something very negative.
The reality is, alcohol is pretty toxic and a health organization really shouldn't recommend a daily allowance of it. I think the cognitive dissonance with people who want to be "right with the science" but also want to drink needs to come out somehow and it often comes out, at least with health issues, with these overly-broad and just weird attacks on groups like the CDC or WHO or whatever. Instead, these people could just admit that "Yes, I do this very unhealthy thing for pleasure and its as unhealthy as the experts say it is." Instead, they'd rather nitpick at random things and reach an irrational conclusion than accept the truth of it all.
On the healthcare end it works the other way like "Here's some unwarranted nitpicking about vaccines," that terminates to a crazed anti-vaxxer position. Its the same kind of dishonesty and leads to the same types of irrational conclusions.
For a lot of people, not only is this how they often think, its the default mode of how they think. They sling mud, project, and attack at any perceived slight against their personal beliefs and the culture war they're always fighting. Its a sign of an emotionally immature mind and these people are everywhere and they build powerful echo chambers. When we see them die of covid as they post facebook memes denying its existence, we then know the fruits of this kind of mental labor. Its dishonestly all the way down.
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There is no dissonance here, this is FUD. The language is wildly different because the actual risks are wildly different. One kills a lot of people and the other doesn’t. How many people are actually dying from air travel radiation? The numbers are low enough that they’re hard to find evidence for. Here’s a study, for example, that attempted to answer the question for pilots, who obviously fly frequently. They weren’…
First of all, this is a good and fair pushback. But I’d respond that I chose secondhand smoke for a reason. I similarly doubt there’s any measurable impact of being around a smoker every once in a while, but the language around secondhand smoke got more and more hysterical leading up to the widespread implementation of smoking bans, to the point that it’s not uncommon today to hear people complain that walking near a…
Yes I want the language to be specific about the levels of risk. I would agree that “no safe levels” is vague and less helpful than one or two percentile data points. That said, I completely agree with the CDC’s stance and language on both second hand smoke and air travel radiation.
Don't worry, in 5-10 years it will be good for you again. I still remember being lectured in school on the food pyramid and the importance of getting your 8-10 servings of grains a day.
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First of all, this is a good and fair pushback. But I’d respond that I chose secondhand smoke for a reason. I similarly doubt there’s any measurable impact of being around a smoker every once in a while, but the language around secondhand smoke got more and more hysterical leading up to the widespread implementation of smoking bans, to the point that it’s not uncommon today to hear people complain that walking near a…
> to hear people complain that walking near a smoker on a sidewalk outside is a risk to their health Doesn't have to be the smoke itself that's harmful. Presumably, if you can smell someone's second-hand smoke, you're also inhaling the bacterial spray contained in their breath, no? Something I think about if I'm walking outside without a mask on and end up stuck walking for a while behind a smoker. I tend to put my m…
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The CDC has been unfortunately hopelessly politicized. It happened long before the pandemic. OTOH, I would make the differentiating point that air travel has positive benefits to society and costs and one has to weigh those against each other. You can’t make the blanket statement “earth would be better off if air travel went away completely.” It’s hard to find any benefit to smoking, first hand or second, so it’s eas…
This isn't politics, it's safety. I accept the argument that the CDC has become overly innumerate in how to live a healthy life, but it's not a liberal or conservative idea to be cautious.