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What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

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Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#61
post #21

I have a pet theory that saving children from natural deaths is harmful to future generations. Surely by intervening so much, we're giving unhealthy people as much evolutionary advantage as healthy people. If the whole world reaches western standards of infant mortality and stays there long enough, will children eventually become dependent on even more interventions and be even more vulnerable to death without them?…

What makes you think that our ability to save (disease venerable children) is itself not an evolutionary advantage?

And then we can follow from there, if we stop saving them we do not develop our evolutionary advantage further.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#62
post #52

From the chart, it seems obvious that the old strategy of hide HIV and sexual transmission diseases under the rug, to protect the rights of the carriers, is not working at all. At least not for protecting "collateral damage" children. Practically the Same children infected and killed by sexual transmission diseases in 2007 than in 1997. AIDS mortality has even increased. Same as 'iNTS' (what's this?) There is a lot o…

It's quite easy to solve actually.

We can have an app where if you consent to have sex with someone then your sexual health status is automatically shared with whoever you consented to before the act.

You only have sex once you get green light, otherwise you are on your own!

Does it breach their right? IDK, I'll let someone HNer educate me on that.

And if it's a solution then why isn't it being implemented, how can we leave it upto people to be truthful about their status?

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#63

How many deaths from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia could be prevented with, say $4 Billion dollars? Well, the people of Palo Alto, after a few tragic suicides-by-train, want the people of California to pay tens of billions of dollars to put Caltrain underground through their town. (The number of deaths of children in Palo Alto from the train pales in comparison to the number of deaths to children from gunshot wound…

- Palo Alto homeowners mistakenly believed for years that the new HSR would be buried so that the noise wouldn't affect their property values. It's a kind of mass delusion thing, since you're looking at $2 billion/mile or so - Mountain View, an adjacent city, just went througn the same calculus wrt tunneling and found it just as breathtakingly unaffordable - Atherton was mentioned in the article or comments, which is…

The $4 Billion figure was the cost to Palo Alto, that they thought they could make up with increased "property values" and taxes. They expected the People of California to pay another $20 Billion or so to complete the work. All for their precious snowflakes and property values.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#64
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To emphasize the flaws of this argument, flip it around. You are effectively arguing that you can change the views, values, and beliefs of an entire nation by marketing. This doesn't sound so unreasonable when it's an 'us vs them' because it's easy to underestimate others. So instead let's make it a 'them vs us' argument. If what you're saying is accurate then similarly you ought be able to radically shift the views,…

With enough time and money, I don't see why this is out of the question. Time already changes all norms, so the money just speeds things up. I can absolutely see my society being changed, and I along with it. Smoking has had buckets of money thrown at it to hold it afloat for a long bloody time, but it has only taken 30 odd years to really cast it as being shunned by consistent government health campaigns (Australian…

Nothing was ever propping smoking up. We've been smoking for literally thousands of years, long before any notion of formal marketing. Nor was it killed by some sort of marketing campaign. A large part of what happened was we had a generation grow up with ubiquitous electronic devices. You see a cascade of similar social effects such as declines in teen pregnancy, declines in violence, and a wide array of other phenomena all on the same timeframe (also alongside declines in fertility, testosterone, increases in obesity, increases in mental illness, etc).

You can even see this phenomena in practice by looking at the reverse -- quite a handy tool for measuring the soundness of an argument. In many parts of the developing world there have been similar bans on advertising and you also have plain-packaged cigarette cases with absolutely disgusting examples of what can happen if you smoke, such as people with facial disfigurations from oral cancer. Some countries have even seen extremes such as cigarettes being literally blurred out on television and push back against media that contains such to begin with. But again, negligible effects. Large part of the reason being nothing's replaced it as a past time. Bring in the zombifying pale glow of our digital screens and it'll get dropped like a bad habit.

Another counter-example to this would be things such as 'D.A.R.E.' It was a decades long well funded government program that tried to reduce drug usage through 'marketing.' It ended up having a paradoxical effect and increased various forms of drug usage.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#65
post #21

I have a pet theory that saving children from natural deaths is harmful to future generations. Surely by intervening so much, we're giving unhealthy people as much evolutionary advantage as healthy people. If the whole world reaches western standards of infant mortality and stays there long enough, will children eventually become dependent on even more interventions and be even more vulnerable to death without them?…

OP's position is a bit extreme, but I wanted to share this as it's somehow related: forced sterilization under Japanese Eugenic Protection Law.

About 16,500 people, mostly women with disabilities, were targeted between 1948 and 1996 under a Japanese law that aimed to stop the birth of children described as “inferior”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/18/victims-of-for...

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#66
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tunnel isn't to prevent suicides. It's to enable running six trains per hour. With the tracks at street grade as they are now, this causes traffic issues and increases the risk of train and car collision, which cause massive delays.

You can run trains on a viaduct above intersection, or the other way around. You don’t need to put a train in a tunnel. Railways in major European cities typically run more than 6 trains per hour, and they rarely are all underground.

That's the option that will likely be used. They haven't decided for sure that the trains will run in a tunnel, only that the residents prefer it for obvious reasons.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#67
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who gets to decide who lives and who dies? Doctors do all the time, they even have their own word for it: triage. When resources are insufficient to cover the needs of everybody, difficult decisions need to be made. Or as the case may be, easy decisions...

Is a decission reserved to parents, in this case. Triage is a term that aim to save the maximum number of people in disasters with many victims. Not to decide if somebody dies or lives. People is classified in colors black, red, etc after its state. If you are in an accident and you cry and shout repeatedly you are classified in a lower priority than the quiet person that do not moves.

Between population growth not slowing anywhere near fast enough and rapid environment loss due to climate change, there is a good chance we'll see the mother of all triages. Not something to look forward to.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#69

How many deaths from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia could be prevented with, say $4 Billion dollars? Well, the people of Palo Alto, after a few tragic suicides-by-train, want the people of California to pay tens of billions of dollars to put Caltrain underground through their town. (The number of deaths of children in Palo Alto from the train pales in comparison to the number of deaths to children from gunshot wound…

The tunnel isn't to prevent suicides. It's to enable running six trains per hour. With the tracks at street grade as they are now, this causes traffic issues and increases the risk of train and car collision, which cause massive delays.

Nope. That and "property values" are the reason why the people of Palo Alto want it. Which is why it's relevant to the topic of "what can we spend money on to save lives." Here's a community of wealthy people most of whom will say they're for "social justice" who want to take billions of dollars of taxpayer money to _maybe_ save a few lives.

https://padailypost.com/2018/06/02/tunnel-idea-is-still-aliv...

> Councilman Greg Tanaka said the tunnel option would reduce suicides and air pollution, though city Chief Transportation Official Josh Mello expressed doubts about the city’s ability to pay for it.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#70
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does this actually work cross-culturally? With a degree of care, yes. Major marketing and advertising agencies are perfectly au fait with these challenges, because they're responsible for multinational brands. A company like Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble is very used to selling products to consumers in radically different cultural contexts, as are the agencies they employ. Marketing within the US is meaningfully cr…

To emphasize the flaws of this argument, flip it around. You are effectively arguing that you can change the views, values, and beliefs of an entire nation by marketing. This doesn't sound so unreasonable when it's an 'us vs them' because it's easy to underestimate others. So instead let's make it a 'them vs us' argument. If what you're saying is accurate then similarly you ought be able to radically shift the views,…

>If what you're saying is accurate then similarly you ought be able to radically shift the views, values, and beliefs of America using marketing.

If someone had the money and the motivation, I have no doubt that they could. There's reasonably compelling evidence that Russia is engaged in exactly that as we speak, albeit on a fairly modest budget. It's undoubtedly true that the USA has done so overseas; the CIA, the State Department and the DoD allocate substantial funding to "soft power" and PSYOP initiatives. The US Agency for Global Media alone has a budget of $750m, with the explicit objective of fostering support for America's definition of freedom and democracy.

An obvious example of marketing-driven cultural change is the diamond engagement ring, which became a norm almost solely through the marketing efforts of De Beers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27371208

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