>But why should the government force me to change that by taxing it?
Because the government ends up paying for the medical treatment of a lot of smokers when they're older. And it's incredibly expensive. You can say you won't rely on government funds, but there's no way to actually opt out of Medicare for life or sign up to never be guaranteed stabilization when you show up at a hospital.
Nicotine is also notoriously addictive, which weakens the "my choice" argument.
>Why tax sugary drinks
That's totally a nanny state thing. Personally, I would mildly support it. But it's not a hill I'd die on.
>or ban or criminalize drugs other than the caffeine, nicotine and alcohol?
Hard drugs cause blight. People don't mind so much if they see a soda can on their street, but if they see a used needle they'll move. And again, any society with a safety net has an interest in preventing common causes of people falling into it.
>why not ban dangerous sports, too?
It hasn't proven to be a big problem at the population level. Hell, public health experts would love to have that problem, because it'd mean more people were exercising.
> Because the government ends up paying for the medical treatment of a lot of smokers when they're older. And it's incredibly expensive. You can say you won't rely on government funds, but there's no way to actually opt out of Medicare for life or sign up to never be guaranteed stabilization when you show up at a hospital.
That's why I'd get a tattoo on my chest, if necessary, saying "Smoker!". I know that most of the price of tobacco is insurance for medical treatments. Not Medicare, as I'm not in the US, but similar. I am OK with tattooing "DO NOT STABILIZE OR CARE FOR AT ALL - SMOKER !!!1".
> Nicotine is also notoriously addictive, which weakens the "my choice" argument.
I am an adult human who participates in society and has chosen to smoke. Please treat me as an adult who has made a (bad) decision and is willing to suffer the consequences.
> sugary drinks... nanny state
Same with any drug.
> hard drugs...
People who abuse hard drugs to the point where we need to save them or others from them are most often uneducated or poor (and living in a poor neighborhoods, with all that it brings). Believe it or not, I know several people with PhDs in things like physics and biology who regularly take "hard" and/or "soft" drugs besides alcohol and nicotine. Only one needed intervention after ~10 years and it was because of pre-existing psychological issues that led him to abuse the drugs. I and lots of people I know who lead normal lives can list more 3- or 4-letter abbreviations of stuff we've tried than a HN comment will let us fill. Or maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, not sure, but you get the point.
If you look at a poor neighborhood, you'll see a lot more people with drug problems. Not because richer people don't do drugs, but because it's not an escape plan, it's not some random impure thing you get and because it's done within a safe place. It's a social issue, not a drug issue. Work on solving poverty and education, not on making us drug users feel like criminals for trying new stuff or on making our drugs more expensive. Whether it's legal like alcohol or nicotine, or illegal a psychedelic, a benzo, weed, an opioid, a dissociative or anything else, it's a drug. I am an adult. Let me experience my adulthood like I want to. You don't take drugs and that's fine, but please understand that you have no fucking idea what you're missing if you're doing it correctly. Literally anything you've likely experienced, like romantic relationships, climbing mountains, orgasms and so on, is categorically and qualitatively different from the amazing things you can experience on various drugs.
Everyone is creating visuals, not just data scientists or designers that probably should know these rules.
I generally am against people who have expectations of how they want others to communicate. Be it colors, pronouns, whatever- you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment and it’s not out of malice so just move on or find your own way to deal with what people are putting out there.
>We are getting to this weird situation where instead of Alice sending a message to Bob, Alice sends the message to her AI, which sends it to Bob's AI, which then tries to recover Alice's original message.
Somebody's going to revolutionize how we use AI by creating an algorithm where the output of an AI is modified so that it has fewer tokens but results in a similar-enough input for another AI to respond to. Like dropping purely syntactic words or using small synonyms. It'll be a bizarre shorthand that makes no sense to humans, riddled with artifacts of the model.
Or we're going to realize that creating output with one AI for another to ingest is needlessly breaking a session into different pieces. But that would mean a lot of professional emailers getting optimized out.
>Grokipedia operates by Grok writing what it considers the true and interesting facts. That doesn't mean it's always right, but it's a model far less influenced by influencer operations.
If Grok is trained on a corpus of information written by humans trying to influence other humans, and it has no ability to perform its own original investigation in the real world, then how can it be anything but the product of influence?
As somebody who supported GG for the first month or so, Wikipedia has the better intro from where things stand in 2026. GG started by piggybacking on general distrust of gaming journalists, but was quickly consumed by misogyny.
An article doesn't avoid bias by avoiding unpleasant facts.
It has ticked up 1-2 per 100k over the past few decades for that group. Zoom the chart out, and you would probably be excused for assuming it is flat with some noise.
By all means, we should study this more. But the way folks are talking about this is a touch nuts.
It went up by 4 per 100k. And, since it was at 6 in 2000, that's a large increase.
>Zoom the chart out, and you would probably be excused for assuming it is flat with some noise.
That's true of all cancers, if not all statistics.
The concern here is two-fold:
(1) The people under 50 now will be over 50 in a decade or so. We can already see that the trend of colorectal cancer among those aged 50 to 64 was decreasing until 2012, but had since gone up. This will likely get worse. Early onset colorectal cancer is a canary in the coalmine.
(2) Unless this trend is caused by a specific chemical exposure or a purely dietary reason, the behavior/lifestyle/health conditions behind it are likely to lead to other types of cancers. Obesity and lack of exercise have been linked to a lot of cancers. I'm worried about losing progress across the board when these young people reach their 60s.
It was not true of all cancers two decades ago. Which is largely my point. Things are better than they were 50 years ago. Including this. Should we try and make sure we don't reverse that progress? Absolutely.
And it is notable that this research largely pointed to genetics as being ~20% of the cases of early onset results. That combined with how it presents in a very different way from older patients seems to point to us also getting better at spotting it.
All of which is good! It is progress. And I hope we get even better at it.
If you are merely noting it as a concern for "things to continue to watch," I'm fully with you. Read the rest of the comments on this post, though. Tons of people pointing at things that just don't present in the evidence. Fear that we will find that one killer ingredient/process to explain the uptick here; all while failing to acknowledge that we did find many such problems in the past and have made quite astounding progress on it.
Personally, I enjoy reading through comments that are obviously from non-native English writers. They often include idioms or sentence constructions from their native language, which is fun to see.
Besides, this isn't an English poetry forum. Language here is like gift wrapping for an idea: pleasant if pretty, but not the most important thing.
Wasn't this something Nine Inch Nails tried at a concert during their ARG for Year Zero? They wanted to beam messages to specific audience members'. It just didn't work well.
Because the government ends up paying for the medical treatment of a lot of smokers when they're older. And it's incredibly expensive. You can say you won't rely on government funds, but there's no way to actually opt out of Medicare for life or sign up to never be guaranteed stabilization when you show up at a hospital.
Nicotine is also notoriously addictive, which weakens the "my choice" argument.
>Why tax sugary drinks
That's totally a nanny state thing. Personally, I would mildly support it. But it's not a hill I'd die on.
>or ban or criminalize drugs other than the caffeine, nicotine and alcohol?
Hard drugs cause blight. People don't mind so much if they see a soda can on their street, but if they see a used needle they'll move. And again, any society with a safety net has an interest in preventing common causes of people falling into it.
>why not ban dangerous sports, too?
It hasn't proven to be a big problem at the population level. Hell, public health experts would love to have that problem, because it'd mean more people were exercising.
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