good article)
I am usually content to pay for my content by looking at ads.
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Researchers all over the world are studying the obesity epidemic. Millions and millions of dollars are being spent on this, and no one has come to any firm conclusions. But someone always pops up with a simple answer: Wheat! High Fructose Corn Syrup! Junk Food! Itās to laugh.
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Like I said before I know why Iām overweight. But honestly fresh foods are great, can taste really good, and are good for youā¦but you know what, thereās a reason French cooking isnāt great for you either. IAnice heavy cream Alfredo sauce, or scratch made eggs benedictā¦umm baby. Donāt get me wrong, I eat my share of junk food, but damn if Iām going to live my life eating nothing but steamed veggies, low fat meats, and drinking water so I can be thin. People like fat, sugar, and salt because those were the high caloric rarer things in nature, and now they are super easy to get. It does come down to calories in/out and will power - I just donāt have the will power not to eat tasty food.
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āItās the poverty, stupid!ā Not that James Carville needs to be credited with anything, but anytime you want to try and connect a societal ill affecting a large number of folks, you try the correlation with āthe stressors of povertyā first. 99% of the time it will be your strongest and most durable correlation. I mean, did you really expect that keeping people poor and building more groceries stores would be a significant improvement? Not unless theyāre giving away produce and the time and energy to prepare it (I donāt want to hear any complaining about how easy and fast it is to prepare fresh food. Go out and spread the word, see what happens when that information runs into the exigencies of the real world and then tell me about it).
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You can get fat and empty carbs outside of a food desert, but you canāt get sufficient nutrition inside of one. Look at specific nutrient deficiencies in food deserts, Iām willing to bet youāll find a meaningful correlation. So thatās where your kale comes in (oh, and substitute ākaleā with āany produce whatsoeverā).
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There are lots of ways to support what you like. Use the amazon links in boingboingās gift guide. Buying one BB t-shirt that you otherwise wouldnāt have, would give the same amount of revenue as yearsā worth of ad viewing for a single user.
If you ask the editors, I can guarantee theyād rather have people buy a little bit schwag every once in a while and turn off the ads than the other way around. They make money, you get a better viewing experience, and you get cool stuff that constitutes a powerful advertisement to your friends.
Adblocking software is just a tool and Cory has written a thousand times about how your system should belong to you. The vast majority of people are capable of using it responsibly.
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Yes, of course to all that. My choice has been to accept the adsāuntil Iāve gotten served a vibrator and over. Now I have to reconsider.
That was exactly what many people thought. It was the go-to reason among many advocates for the hungry as to why the poor were thought not to consume healthy food, despite STAMP and WIC.
This story is bad news for two reasons:
- The simplistic solution didnāt work,
- Complaining that it was simplistic, and that we now need to do something else sounds like:
2a) Moving the goal posts, and
2b) Saying the poor are infantile and unable to make correct choices.
Like I said: Killer urban coyotes. That is a solution that even die-hard conservatives will get behind.
There are ads on the internet?
Another option is to address it from the tracking side of things. Youāre getting vibrator ads primarily because of your age and gender (and to smaller extent because of additional demographics). Companies that make expensive vibrators donāt pay for non-targeted ads on general interest blogs like BB. Managing cookies, tracking options in your browser and google/facebook, and using plugins like Do Not Track or Ghostery will get you there. This way you can get served ads, but not targeted ones, if thatās your preferred compromise.
Boy are they barking up the wrong tree then.
The primary problem, just like most other social issues in the US, is that the decades-proven solutions in near-unanimous use among rich nations are off the table here.
Guaranteeing a minimum standard of living for everyone, including food, housing, medicine and education would go a long, long way to alleviating poverty and preventing itās symptoms. Every country with a higher quality of life does this, and vast majority of them do it using a lower GDP per capita and a racking up a lower sovereign debt per GDP.
Itās important to remember that the problem isnāt logistically intractable, itās only politically intractable. When we conflate those two things, we guarantee ourselves the status quo.
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I personally would still prefer to be a poor person in an Italian village with access to land to grow my own food than being poor in a food desert with no land to grow anything edible.
I would be interested in a comparison of health outcomes between poor people who grow their own food (in areas where the land is fertile and there is sufficient water) and poor people who have to rely on what they can get in shops of any description.
And of course poverty kills otherwise all the rich people would try hard to be poor.
In London you can map the impact of poverty along the tube line. And it is not down to the frequency of shops.http://www.envplan.com/openaccess/a45341.pdf
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Just when they finally got their gardens decriminalized, now some yahoo will be petitioning the LA City Council to ban the gardens because they read an article that says food deserts arenāt a problemā¦
Fines For Parkway Gardens Suspended in Los Angeles | TakePart
Well, thereās your problem right there. BB has never been SFW, and never claimed to be.
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Truthiness, sorry.
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I donāt think anyone suggested that you shouldnāt do whatever works for you.
The complaint was that the plural of anecdotes is not data. If cutting out wheat works for you and yours, thatās great (really, it is!). That is not the same as āmodern wheat is the root of all evil, and the cause of the global obesity crisisā.
Even though you may be correct in your attribution, your anecdotes provide no firm causal link between wheat and your recovery. It could just as easily be a food additive that you were sensitive to, or that in eliminating wheat, you improved your diet in other ways that addressed a different underlying deficiency.
Again, good for you that it works, and by all means, encourage other people to try itā¦ but donāt claim that there is any kind of scientific consensus to that effect.
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Or possibly you are getting vibrator ads because you buy, or at least look at a lot of vibrators.
The targeting metrics in the backend of places like Google ads are something to behold. Advertisers can āremarketā to someone who chose not to buy by having google put their ads in front of that person more often in the future.
Itās all a bit alarming and creepy, but I think Iāve just learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. I can tell I have spent a lot of time on something productive when I start seeing ads about it everywhere I go. I can tell Iām wasting time if I start seeing video game ads all the time.
Hypothesis: worrying about money feels to your body exactly like worrying about where your next meal is coming from. As a useful survival mechanism, it encourages an appetite for high-calorie and fatty foods, so you can store up fat for the lean times.
Only relatively recently has material poverty been accompanied with the ready availability of all the calories you can eat.
I have no evidence for this.
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The creepiest is when I get ādo you knowā for people I have absolutely NO personal online connection with, like the place I had physical therapy. They could have gotten the connection from my credit union or my insurance company. I never looked them up online or posted their name. They arenāt near where Iāve ever lived. Itās hard to shrug that level of creepy off.
