Has becoming primal/paleo ruined your life? page 8

[specsAreGrok]

I'm still paranoid and pissed at the Fed.

On that note, I went looking for nutritional information on my favorite standard beer and ran into this thread which I found relevant to your comment:
Carbohydrates | Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales

Similar question came into our QC Manager last week (someone wondered why we don't have nutritional labeling on our beers). While the reply isn't exact to your question, here is the reply of our QC Manager Lenore (cause I think she summed it all up so well!)...

Being an alcoholic beverage, we are governed by a different government arm than the FDA. Nutritional labeling requirements demand that we list content for things that beer does not contain (since they are written for food, not beer). We used to have caloric info on our website, but the government said that we had to remove it. By law, we can’t only show the data that is pertinent to beer, we have to show all that they specify. So we’d have to analyze our beer for things that it doesn’t contain.

Also, since many of our beers are small batches or only made once or occasionally, we wouldn’t have the info in time to get label approval and get it out the door before it is old. Perhaps if they change the rules so that they are make more sense with regards to craft beer, we’ll be able to do as you request.

Craft beer is just a little fish in the big fish bowl. The rules are made more for the big fish.

and

So basically, we at least had SOME nutritional information before (calories in each beer), but now thanks to meddling government bureaucrats, we now have ZERO nutritional information. Way to go, Big Brother!

[Him]

We only think it's what we want because we are programmed to do so. Most people are unaware of or refuse to acknowledge alternatives.

You don't see that as an indictment of the whole idea? It should be throwing up a major flag saying, "Whoa there! Humans are programmed to work a different way so change your approach or you're doomed!"

Humans are animals. Like other animals, we have an innate sense of fairness that works on very primitive terms. If we see ourselves doing the same work as another, but getting less reward, that's unfair. It's like the experiments done with chimps... push a button get some food. If chimp A gets 1oz of food per button press, and chimp B gets 2oz of food for the same button press, when chimp A realizes the difference you are faced with one ticked off chimp. They will even stop pressing the button altogether even though it would be arguably better to get something than nothing. They are programmed, to use your terminology, and that programming is part of our evolutionary history.

If everyone pays into health insurance, but one guy gets nothing while another guy gets a $100,000 pay-out in the form of a surgery, that absolutely hits humans in the monkey back-brain. It is unfair at an evolutionary level. It's exactly the same as when chimp A realizes that chimp B gets twice as much per button press.

You hear that if you talk to people. I've talked to people after receiving major medical care. How do most describe it? By how much it hurt? By the recovery time? By how much better life is afterward? No. The most consistent description is in terms of how much it cost insurance. It was a $40,000 procedure, a $125,000 procedure. Why? Because after paying thousands of dollars into health insurance, that's the payout...and it was a jackpot! It's proof that you weren't the sucker that is getting only an ounce of food when someone else is getting two.

People don't think that way... they are driven to be that way by a billion years of evolution. Fairness means getting back what you put in, and the more you pay in (health insurance premiums, taxes, et cetera) the more you are driven to get out if you want to feel like the system is fair.

I think it's another variation on the Tragedy of the Commons..... by creating universal health care (whether through regulation of business or direct government provision) you create a Commons, and the natural response to a Commons is that everyone wants to extract all they can from it because someone else benefiting when you don't is unfair in that back-brain evolutionary sense. You are then forced to exert more and more control to try and keep people from abusing the Commons, which ties us back to Pilot-induced Oscillations and totalitarian governments and a whole host of other problem. The reality is that human nature rarely allows us to take the most direct approach to solving problems, and creating a health-care Commons is a very direct approach to paying for health care.

[Rojo]

Experts can harness their knowledge. They can combine circumstances and knowledge to create and exploit opportunity.

Huh? So if I'm an expert on the Civil War, how would that work exactly.

In the second instance you implied that Engels was a capitalist. That is factually incorrect. Engels was a nepotist.

No, it's not "factually incorrect". A capitalist is someone who makes money from money. It doesn't matter how they got it.

I can't really argue with you using your definitions.

[magnolia1973]

It's proof that you weren't the sucker that is getting only an ounce of food when someone else is getting two.

People don't think that way... they are driven to be that way by a billion years of evolution. Fairness means getting back what you put in, and the more you pay in (health insurance premiums, taxes, et cetera) the more you are driven to get out if you want to feel like the system is fair.

That wasn't really my point. I think we spend a shit load of money on people who would rather die. I don't see my dad and say "waste of money" or "he'd getting his share". I see my dad and think what we are doing to him is rather inhumane. We are quite OK with the idea of euthanizing animals to prevent/cut suffering. We don't do that for people, instead we do the opposite and extend suffering. It's like spending money to cause human suffering. I just remember the last time I saw him, he wanted pain meds. Give the man all the pain meds he wants. "No, they can kill him". But they keep pumping him full of antibiotics that do the same thing, only more slowly, painfully and expensively.

I guess the corporation does win in this case. Is that their intention? To profit from misery? I'd like to think that they view what they do as positive (extending life). I hope they aren't gleefully in a boardroom making a chart of extending a bedridden patients life by X to sell Y more drugs.

[Rojo]

That wasn't really my point. I think we spend a shit load of money on people who would rather die.

And here comes Sarah Palin with her "Death Panels". It's tricky. Whether by corporation or government, it shouldn't be a money decision. I think most of us can agree. We have all the technology in the world to keeep someone clinically alive but lack the cultural equipment to say "enough". Look what Michael Schiavo went through.

[boomingno]

That wasn't really my point. I think we spend a shit load of money on people who would rather die. I don't see my dad and say "waste of money" or "he'd getting his share". I see my dad and think what we are doing to him is rather inhumane. We are quite OK with the idea of euthanizing animals to prevent/cut suffering. We don't do that for people, instead we do the opposite and extend suffering. It's like spending money to cause human suffering. I just remember the last time I saw him, he wanted pain meds. Give the man all the pain meds he wants. "No, they can kill him". But they keep pumping him full of antibiotics that do the same thing, only more slowly, painfully and expensively.

I guess the corporation does win in this case. Is that their intention? To profit from misery? I'd like to think that they view what they do as positive (extending life). I hope they aren't gleefully in a boardroom making a chart of extending a bedridden patients life by X to sell Y more drugs.

"First do no harm" does not seem open to the interpretation that extending life can actually inflict harm.

[Him]

Huh? So if I'm an expert on the Civil War, how would that work exactly.

First, that's a different level of abstraction. You were claiming that Karl was an expert on a category (capitalism). Now you are talking about being an expert about an instance within that category (The US Civil War circa 1861-1865). That's simply bad logic on your part.

If we remove your fallacy and say you are an expert on civil war (vs "The Civil War") just as you said that Karl was an expert on Capitalism (vs. European Industrial Capitalism Circa 1840-1880), then you have this:

Darfur
Chad
Palestine
Ivory Coast
Libya
Syria
Azawadi War of Independence
Colombia
Afghanistan
Uganda
Somalia
Sa'dah insurgency
Iraq
Burma
Republic of Ingushetia

Those are all within the last 10 years. Go, join in, show 'em how it's done. Or report on the civil wars, using your expertise to explain what's going on. Or use your knowledge to stop/shorten the damned things, thus reducing the destruction of wealth which will put you in a position to skim off some of the peace dividend. There are many ways to profit.

If you want to retain your fallacy, well, what the hell, go join one of those civil wars anyway. Maybe your knowledge of Sherman's march to the sea will help you in Syria.

No, it's not "factually incorrect". A capitalist is someone who makes money from money. It doesn't matter how they got it.

Sorry, your definition contains a glaring omission. A Capitalist is someone who makes money from their own money. You aren't a capitalist just because you work for a capitalist, even if the labor you provide is something a capitalist would normally do for herself. If you invest and earn a return you are a capitalist. If someone else invests and you get a cut of the reward you are labor. Did Engels qualify as a capitalist? No. He ran a factory, but he did not own it. His father owned it, he worked for his father. Engels was a nepotist, he was a manager, he was not a capitalist.

I can't really argue with you using your definitions.

They aren't really my definitions, and the definitions aren't the problem anyway. The logical fallacy you are trying to use is called "Discarded Differentia". You are leaving parts out of the definition in order to support your point, like leaving out the fact that to be a Capitalist you need to use your own capital. The reason you can't argue is that your position depends on such fallacies.

[Him]

That wasn't really my point. I think we spend a shit load of money on people who would rather die. I don't see my dad and say "waste of money" or "he'd getting his share". I see my dad and think what we are doing to him is rather inhumane. We are quite OK with the idea of euthanizing animals to prevent/cut suffering. We don't do that for people, instead we do the opposite and extend suffering. It's like spending money to cause human suffering. I just remember the last time I saw him, he wanted pain meds. Give the man all the pain meds he wants. "No, they can kill him". But they keep pumping him full of antibiotics that do the same thing, only more slowly, painfully and expensively.

It is unfortunate when a person can no longer express their own will and is therefore trapped into following the judgment of others. Especially when the prevailing judgment goes against what that individual would have wished. There are ways of avoiding that situation but they aren't used nearly so often as they should be.

I was addressing the motivation behind that norm. In other words, why is the normal view that heroic measures are great? They aren't great from a quality of life standpoint. They aren't great from a pain standpoint. They aren't even great from a conscious longevity standpoint. The only way the norm is really reasonable is from one point of view: "I paid into the insurance system my whole damned life, now it owes me every cent back..." That's a perfectly fair (from a monkey back-brain perspective) way to approach the situation, and most people in the US have paid into one form of insurance or another. Unfortunately, because it's the normal view, it gets applied to everyone even when it's a poor fit (e.g. people who opted out of insurance), and that then becomes the justification for requiring everyone be more normal (individual mandate) rather than broadening the definition of normal to include those different views.

[waterjen]

So help me, if anyone ever sticks a tube in me, I will strangle them with my last strength.

This.

[valmason01]

THats my theory but I have been told I am going to hell for believing that.

Wouldn't he just touch them, and heal them and not ask for an insurance card?