I suspect it can be solved in many different ways, but when you sell food by the pound, it's much more advantageous to distribute your limited quantity of nutrients in as much produce as possible.
When reading comments like this, which are good-natured, and a natural response, do you ever think “wouldn’t be great if we as humans had more trust built into our systems, and people actually making a best-effort attempt at honouring that trust”? Instead of everything being a scam until proven otherwise, and even then the scam is probably just one level deeper in what triggered the interest in that product in the first place.
Terrible as it sounds trust is in computer terms a gaping security vulnerability. If anothet clever actor can take advantage of it they can gain all sorts of things at cost to you.
Distrust is like an immune system - it has costs and can occasionally hurt you but it developed and is ubiquitous for a reason.
Sadly human nature is what it is. It seems like it would take a long time for evolution to make humans not naturally lazy, greedy, jealous and xenophobic. It's also not clear that, even in a world where resources are abundant, there would be any evolutionary pressure to not be this way.
This comment was triggered by the essay “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams” by Jia Tolentino in the book Trick Mirror, the essay also being available in audio form online. So the scam here was to get you to google that book, I wonder if my scam will convert anyone?
Frankly, it seems to me like it's rather relatively simple thing to regulate. We already mandate things like adding vitamins to milk or flour. Extending this to vegetables really doesn't seem like big problem: farmers would just have to buy magnesium-enriched fertilizer.
Diet is quite more complicated that just taking a multivitamin, unfortunately. Some nutrients compete for absorption (Zn and Ca, for example) and shouldn’t be taken together. There’s also debate about the need for phytonutrients that also come along with plants. The data is mixed enough that the US Preventative Services Task Force isn’t yet willing to endorse supplements as a means of reducing cardiovascular or cancer risk.
My personal opinion is that the human body may be too complex to say we fully understand a seemingly straightforward solution like just taking a multivitamin. We evolved over an awfully long time before industrialized agriculture and supplements. I’m not trying to demonize them because they have solved the number 1 concern humans had for the last 10,000 years of not getting enough calories, but I think it’s wise to temper the hubris of thinking we understand the human body well enough to expect a simple fix from a pill.
Another issue is that the effect of a nutrient can sometimes differ based on what it is consumed alongside. Pills are not necessarily as effective as supplemented food.
This is an instance of the orthogonality thesis, by the way. Your assertion is that "increased ability to think" should cause "increased desire to eat Traditional Food (tm)", which is no more true than the assertion "increased ability to think causes increased desire to consume Renaissance art". Desires are, by and large, orthogonal to the generalised ability to achieve desires (the ability which you label "sense"). Some desires are not orthogonal - the desire to survive and be healthy, for example, which is instrumental in achieving many other desires - but to argue your assertion on those grounds, you must prove that Traditional Food is sufficiently dramatically better for achieving some instrumental goal.
Come on, this is a bit too aggressive of a statement. On the other hand, there is some anecdotal evidence that nutrients in pills are not absorbed by our gut as well as more "naturally" delivered nutrients.
I'm down. Add a glucostat for optimal blood sugar level too. Just get a waterproof Ergodox, wrap around 8k monitor, and a sensory dep tank (with optional high-tech minimal techno piped in).
Sounds like a good way to have every milk container say "rBST free, from cows raised without hormones!" Which could also be stated "farmed in accordance with California law."
Yeah, in this case, I'd rather have the former... Since I'd assume the latter? Maybe that's me.
And, to be clear— I don't want to be dismissive of the importance of govt regulation! It's just that working out the marketing opportunities can happen much faster than effective regulation.
This was always the problem with capitalism based on short-term gain, it will inevitably sacrifice loyalty for a quick buck. The same will happen or is already happening to online stores who do the same, eg by showing ads.
That said, at some point a failing business will realize the end is coming and cash out as much as possible, accelerating its own end in a calculated profit maximization scheme. Brick and mortar stores might as well self-destruct if they also believe they're going down anyway... It's not like anyone works there for the fun of it.
It's literally a therapist's job to help you figure this out, I don't want to undermine this.
Please speak to a professional, you are not alone.
In the meantime, here are some of my own "no bullshit mantras" I found comforting in similar times, mostly from Zen Bhuddism :
* You are not supposed to be anywhere. Your only real obligation is to be you, now.
* There is no "better" version of you now. There is no other way to be you now. In fact, there is no other way to be, but to be what you are.
* What you are is beautiful, no matter who you are. I don't mean the Aguilera song, I mean it's literally a miracle that you're here now.
* Everything is as it is. There's no point in feeling guilty for things being the way they are, rather than the way you or someone else would have them. In a world where time only flows one way, every "ought" is an illusion.
If you like these ideas, I highly recommend meditation, such ideas are much easier to contemplate with a calm mind. I hear Alan Watts has good talks about this available on Youtube. Mindfulness meditation has also been associated with improvements in mental health (you can find many studies about this on Google Scholar).
This is such a horrible and dangerous ideology. To tell someone stuck in a rut that the rut is perfect and just where they need to be? I couldn't think of a more harmful message. OP has turned himself into a person he doesn't want to be. The solution is to change himself, not to accept that being alone and empty and unattractive is actually normal and beautiful. That's the kind of thing you say to people with no hope to make them feel better, not something you give as advice to a healthy young man who has all the potential in the world to come out of his shell.
To OP and anyone in his situation, please do not get sucked into this thought pattern. It's very easy to convince yourself that simply not changing anything is the answer; not changing is easy and wouldn't it be great if I could take the soma pill and be content with my circumstances as they are? You know this is bullshit, so don't allow yourself to do it.
You think the OP has never heard this before? This is the attitude that creates the guilt that weighs people down in the first place.
You, like most people, are talking about the future. I'm sure you're about the 1000th person telling this person to turn their life around. But this future is a projection, it's imaginary, whereas the pain is very real in the present moment. So start with the present.
This stuff works only when you fully understand it; that means when you are over 40 and you don't need advice because you have some life experience. It's a catch 22.
I mean, if someone is fat and unhealthy, then sure is a better version of them. If someone has wishes, goals and plans for themselves, then there is a better version of them, when they achieved everything they wanted.
If it's not, then why try to improve yourself? If you are the best you ever were, then why try to reach for a higher purpose?
As an eastern European, this kind of saccharine mantras feel like self defeating, toxic positivity, ambitionless kind of things. The western people do like them, for some reason.
Not the person you're replying to, but I wanted to offer a perspective that might bridge what you see as a gap in philosophies.
The "future you", the one that is healthier (i.e. literally from a medical perspective, not just perception), can only exist if you make choices today that enable progress towards that future state. In other words, the current you, the unhealthy you, already contains the seed of what is necessary to become the future you. Perhaps all you need is a conducive environment, so you can blossom; a seed requires water and fertile soil, but the seed is the one doing the work. You might need to find some water (most metaphorically, but sometimes literally: lots of people are just dehydrated and it contributes to low energy or lethargy), or a different soil to plant yourself in (different city, different job, different friends, etc.), but it is you who does the work to allow yourself to germinate, to bloom.
The point of thinking like this, is to avoid disassociating the future you, to avoid thinking of that person as somehow different from or "other-than" your current you. People already get discouraged enough by looking at the glossy and fake Instagram influencers around them; what a tragedy it would be to let your present self get discouraged by your future self!
You are already that person. You are already worthy.
The other commenter takes this somewhere interesting, but to me the main point is to not get trapped by guilt. That's why I say "you now" and not just "you". I'm not implying that you're the best you ever were, only that guilt (or pride) does nothing to change what you are in the present.
In other words, it's okay to just be you. In fact, the world is only better for it if you can live without guilt. Achievement and ambition are much less real to me.
I can't read the article, but the fact that they include suicide in the list indicates a strong possiblity that they did not control for socioeconomic factors.
Maybe richer people drink more coffee, and also tend to die less?
Sorry if it's an easy critique but it's hard to believe the substance that basically only raises your heart rate is actually doing anything (good) long term.
Well, it's all relative. Assuming all corporations are equally amoral (or close enough), defense means war profiteering, whereas (traditional) media is a blight on our society that has largely abandoned any pretense of social function and actively holds us back by playing on our collective fears.
On the other hand, pharma as a concept certainly needs to exist to save lives. As a Canadian, pharma is not so bad here, but I believe their existence as a for-profit* entity is contrary to the purpose of universal healthcare, which I think is a common enough sentiment. American pharma, however, actively profits from the inequality inherent to the (rather evil) lack of universal healthcare system. Any positives for society seem strictly incidental, as exemplified by the price of insulin.
I could not agree with you more regarding media. And no, not "big media" just media. It's absolutely miserable and has let us all down.
I also agree with your point regarding profiteering. This behavior can be observed in many industries, not just pharmaceutical, but it seems a more egregious violation when it affects our health or the well-being of someone we know.
Your comment grabbed my attention because I couldn't immediately think of anything to support the sentiment of it being immoral to work in the pharmaceutical industry so I was naturally curious to find out.
Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective.
It's fine, just have the legislature pass a Bill of Attainder that declares the thing you know is a proven fact, and you're peachy. It worked great in the Trial of Thomas Wentworth.
I tend to agree, although I hate ads on principle.
But there are a lot of things I hate and don't have to think about. I don't go around protesting the war because in my country that's not something I have to care about, for example.
But advertisers made me have to care. If I didn't have adblock, I'd be running JS from some unverified third party on every other site. Couldn't they restrict it to pictures? Of course not.
So now I have to care, and I'm not going to cooperate with advertisers, who - before adblock got so mainstream - were content to serve us literal viruses as long as someone paid them.
