101–110 of 127 posts
Depends how closely you watch your spending on food. I'm so disconnected that I only learned just now that we have a soda tax. I will still buy my favorite sludge water without concern for the price.
20-ounce bottle of Coke: $2.50 --> $2.85.
2 liter (72-ounce) bottle of Coke: $2.70 --> $3.96.
If you drink a lot of soda, it can definitely add up.
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Your “actual argument” is to (in contravention of HN guidelines) impugn motives and accuse others of shilling. Once there’s a substantive discussion to be had, I’ll join it!
Honest question, what are you trying to achieve?
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“Haha! People wouldn’t bear any meaningful cost to avoid a piddling 1.75 cents/oz tax, that can be dismissed as laughable.” “I am uncritically accepting a study that says a 1.75 cents/oz tax was successful in changing consumer behavior because the additional burden it added to the cost of soda.” You can’t have it both ways, claim the tax influenced behavior in terms of reducing consumption but not in terms of circumv…
? Yes you can. The argument he's making is that the cost of circumventing the tax is larger than the tax. So if the tax is working because people are sensitive to the extra cost, it would make perfect sense that they would not spend 2 cents/oz to avoid the tax and thus loose money. Now one can certainly make a good argument that people are not fully rational and often do not consider fuel and time costs when looking…
Second, if the point was that driving further can’t save money, it’s flat out wrong because the cost of the driving is largely independent of the tax savings. Eg a single trip to stockpile.
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To be honest your post sounds like it's coming straight out of the sugar industry PR book. 1. Increase burden of scientific evidence/cast scientific evidence in doubt by saying it's not conclusive enough 2. Assert that reducing sugar is not working because people will just get their calorie input otherwise. 3. Blame fat/daemonize fat, that's what the sugar industry has done very successfully over the last decades.
I just want to clarify I am not accusing the OP of being an industry shill, they might just simply adopting arguments seen at other places (and they are very common). And it is incredibly easy to be led into this, I certainly have done this as well and only realized later. It is an important thing to be aware of. I'm rejecting the type of argument, because they do not foster an honest debate. It's really classic FUD.…
> And that’s exactly what happened in Washington shortly after Seattle passed its soda tax: In November of that same year, soda companies campaigned successfully for the passage of a ballot initiative banning all future fees on sugary drinks across the state. Wow, this is nakedly self interested and a law purely for the industry at the expense of democracy, how on earth can that be allowed to happen?
Armed with three years of grocery shopping data, researchers found that total sugar sales are down by almost 20 percent, driven largely by falling soda purchases. This isn't the right definition of success. The first minimal requirement for this to be a successful initiative is that the community lost weight overall. Or even gained weight, but more slowly than other communities. If they could prove that it would be a…
When one drops sugar consumption, it’s generally not replaced by fat. That’s not how obesity usually works.
Armed with three years of grocery shopping data, researchers found that total sugar sales are down by almost 20 percent, driven largely by falling soda purchases. This isn't the right definition of success. The first minimal requirement for this to be a successful initiative is that the community lost weight overall. Or even gained weight, but more slowly than other communities. If they could prove that it would be a…
i.e. If the actual goal was reducing weight, then the obvious thought is all weight increasers should be taxed, not just sugar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just want to clarify I am not accusing the OP of being an industry shill, they might just simply adopting arguments seen at other places (and they are very common). And it is incredibly easy to be led into this, I certainly have done this as well and only realized later. It is an important thing to be aware of. I'm rejecting the type of argument, because they do not foster an honest debate. It's really classic FUD.…
When your entire argument is “you’re wrong because this pattern-matches to what shills say”, then yes, you are accusing the OP of shilling and it would be better to say what specifically is wrong with the arguments.
Why are you not accusing the OP of not having an argument?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest your post sounds like it's coming straight out of the sugar industry PR book. 1. Increase burden of scientific evidence/cast scientific evidence in doubt by saying it's not conclusive enough 2. Assert that reducing sugar is not working because people will just get their calorie input otherwise. 3. Blame fat/daemonize fat, that's what the sugar industry has done very successfully over the last decades.
Neither OP nor a sugar industry shill, but it may well be possible that we need to cut down on zero calorie soda as well. Even though zero calorie soda does not directly contain any energy, it may mess up our feelings of hunger and make us more hungry. [0] So far, scientific studies indicate that people who switch from sugary soda to zero calorie drinks do not lose weight [1]. Feelings of hunger and satiety are compl…