h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I quite like the idea of petrol cars being rare or banned. Fast, silent cars will be much, much better.

I quite like the idea of a car which, when it's doing anything up to 30mph, makes the noise of a horse's hooves doing that speed - trotting, cantering, galloping, whatever, so that blind people, dozy people and children can hear them coming in built up areas. You could even download different "ringtones" for your car, configure the noise it makes. There'd be a legal minimum as well as maximum decibel level it would have to generate, but beyond that, within reason, whatever you like. I'd like mine to sound like a TIE fighter.

Once they're past, say, 30mph, the sound stops entirely. This would have two effects: first of all fewer people would speed because the fact they were doing so would be blindingly obvious by the silence of their car. Second, motorways and dual carriageways would become much less depressing places to live near. There'd still be road noise, of course, but remove the engine from the equation and it's much more bearable.

Perhaps between 30 and 40 you'd still have it make a sound, but make it project a fairly focussed beam of noise directly forward so that pedestrians on dual carriageways could hear cars coming, but once they were past you'd not hear the noise.

You know what would be great to consider as unacceptable in 50 years? Slavery. There are more slaves today than at the height of the colonial slave trade era.

>>There are some surprising places with very low ages of consent.

The fact that the age of consent is so variable raises another question; if a person has been fully sexually mature for some years but is still under 16, aren't we restricting their rights when we disallow them from doing what nature has compelled them to want to do? If they were over the age of consent, then state interference in their fertility would be considered utterly loathsome.

"You say that as though there's some complex mystery at work. There's not. Eat less. Exercise more. That's the entire secret of maintaining a healthy body weight in four words." [Hoovooloo]

You sound like my father. He takes that line . I don't try to argue with him, nor do I want to argue with you. Scientists don't even have all the genetic clues for appetite and metabolism yet. Maybe they'll have them 50 years from now, maybe they'll never have them. On the psychological side, some people want to be skin and bones [It's called anorexia. For some reason, my mother is inclined in that direction], some want to maintain a healthy body weight, and some feel an urge to overeat. It's a big world, and there's no lack of variety.

There was an extremely heavy man who used to live across the street from me. He had a good career in computer development. Computer work is ideal for heavy people, as they can do it while sitting down.

"you credit people with too much empathy and wit"

That is true. I'm proud of it.

Computer work is ideal for CREATING heavy people. I know. Being sedentary is deadly. I'm stuck at a computer for 10 hours a day. Add to that, the silly portions most people think is normal these days and WHOOMP!

I now make it a point to take a 30 minute walk each morning and more importantly step away from my desk and do a couple of laps around my building, up and down flights of stairs 4 times, every two to three hours.

My doctor insisted that I exercise for an hour every day. He also gave me some guidelines for limiting [but not eliminating] carbohydrates. The combination seems to be working. I'm not obese, and my weight is stable.

My sister and I have to work at weight control. My brother has been slim all his life. Same parents, same upbringing, different results. None of us is particularly crazy. Genetics doesn't explain everything, but sometimes it's all that's left after you've factored out the rest. In my grandfather's family there were four thin children and four fat ones. That's the reason why I don't agree with the idea that getting thin is simple. Paul Dudley White, the noted cardiologist, said that some people are designed to be heavier than others. I still haven't seen cogent scientific proof that White was wrong.

"Scientists don't even have all the genetic clues for appetite and metabolism yet"

Possibly true.

What they do have, though, are some fairly robust things to say about conservation of energy. And several thousand years' worth of data about what happens when people have their food rationed, rather than being free to gorge themselves stupid on whatever junk they can lay their pudgy hands on. Among the many health issues facing those in concentration camps, obesity was, interestingly enough, not top of the list. Whatever motivational psychobabble you may wish to apply to it, the depressingly and non-profit-making truth is - if you eat too much and/or don't do enough exercise, you will get fatter. If you do not eat too much, you will not. Feed a man 500 calories a day, and prevent him by whatever means necessary from eating anything more, and watch him lose weight (I'm constantly surprised that there are fat people in prison - in any prison run by me the induction process would include a body mass index measurement and any customer presenting as overweight would be immediately placed on restricted rations until they weren't any more. I'd regard it as a violation of their human rights to contribute to their likely early death by feeding them too much. Nobody would leave my prison overweight.)

The crucial point here is that the desperate simplicity of this fact is diametrically opposed to what people want to think. They want to think the issue is complex, difficult to understand, and most importantly, out of their control and therefore not their responsibility. "It's my metabolism". "It's my glands". Never "it's because I like chocolate and don't see any reason not to basically eat as much as I'm able." And there is a multibillion dollar worldwide industry doing its level best to assure them that this lie is, in fact, true, because that industry wants to sell them weight loss plans, books, supplements, treats, shakes, and XXXXXL sized clothing. The very last thing the people in that industry want is for the hideously fat to accept responsibility for the state they're in and make the choice to do something positive about it.

I'd say that it's not EASY, but I do agree with Hoo, that the simple formula of "eat less, exercise more" is effective.

" there is a multibillion dollar worldwide industry doing its level best to assure them that this lie is, in fact, true, because that industry wants to sell them weight loss plans, books, supplements, treats, shakes, and XXXXXL sized clothing. The very last thing the people in that industry want is for the hideously fat to accept responsibility for the state they're in and make the choice to do something positive about it" [Hoovooloo]

The food industry in the U.S. has done its utmost to get people to eat more in the last 30 years. That much is true. Other industries have conspired to make physical activity less and less necessary in daily life. Computers have revolutionized the workplace. That being said, where do we go from there? Losing weight is certainly possible. You're perfectly correct in saying that moving more and eating less will do that. In perhaps 90% of all cases, however, the weight comes right back on. Nature has some nasty tricks up her sleeve. Would it be so terrible if scientists figured out ways to undermine these tricks so that people who have slimmed down can stay slim?

Never said it was easy. Said it was simple.

It's the diet industry that tries to pretend it's complicated, because if it's complicated then the solution must be complicated, and they can make the solution easy but complicated and charge the earth for it ("eat this, but not that, at this time, combined with that, but never that" etc.).

Whereas telling it like it is - that it's not hard to understand, it's just possibly might require some discipline to DO, and you have to really want to - won't make you any friends or any money. The reason is that truth - that if you want to, you can lose weight simply by eating fewer calories and doing more exercise - has an important corollary: if you're fat, it's because you eat to much and do too little, and both those things are your choice, your responsibility. Nobody wants to hear that, especially if the microwave has just gone >ping< on their second deep pan pizza of the evening.

Be very careful about agreeing with Hoo in any sort of way
that might lead to a general acceptance of his more insane
ideas... such as:

>> only way to combat obesity is to make food harder to get
hold of for the poor <<

He later speaks of running prison farms to slim people down
with parole release being possible only for the thinned.



Perhaps we should inform him of the great life-saving
public service Fatties are performing. They absorb toxins.

Yes, toxins, including the industrial pollutants and carcinogens,
are absorbed and stored in fat cells. So every time you see a
Chubbie, thank them for taking so much poison out of the whirled.
They absorb and store more than their share of life-threatening
chemicals and make the whirled safer and cleaner for us all.


~jwf~

"In perhaps 90% of all cases, however, the weight comes right back on"



If you continue to eat less and exercise more, explain how the weight can "come right back on"? Where does the weight come from? The air?

If you have a lifestyle where you consume 1000 calories and expend 3000 per day, you will lose weight. You can't help it.

If you then go back to a lifestyle where you consume 3000 calories and expend 1000, well hey, the weight wil "come right back on".

Cutting down what you eat and doing more exercise is something which, if it's going to work at all, is something you keep doing for the rest of your life. In perhaps 90% of cases, people get bored of not being able to eat rubbish or spend all day lounging around, and they stop sticking to their diet or give up going to the gym. And yes, in such cases, the weight, entirely predictably, "comes back on".

This isn't a "nasty trick" that Nature has "up its sleeve", it's an entirely predictable consequence of a voluntary change in lifestyle.

"Would it be so terrible if scientists figured out ways to undermine these tricks so that people who have slimmed down can stay slim? "

Would it be so terrible if scientists figured out ways to make it so people don't have to take responsibility for their choices? Since I support the provision of the morning-after pill on demand, I'd have to say not.

Hheh... a "chubbie"... hehhehhehhehheehhehhehh


[/Beavis]

"He later speaks of running prison farms to slim people down
with parole release being possible only for the thinned"

Nope. Didn't say that. Then again, if you can't spell a simple five letter English word like "world" correctly, I can't be surprised that your reading comprehension is poor.

My point was that if people are sent to prison for having committed an offence, if I were in charge of that prison I'd regard it as one of my duties to keep prisoners healthy - and that means limiting their access to food if they're overweight.

Also, I'm not sure why you think it an "insane idea" that obesity is partly a result of the availability of cheap food to those in relatively rich nations with generous social security. I never said I'd want to price them out of the market - quite the opposite in fact. I find that eating healthily is expensive and time consuming, compared with the alternative of simply grabbing ready made things off the shelf and sticking them in the microwave. That it can be cheaper to buy less healthy food is the really insane thing.

I can't help but think of the Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman book Good Omens and one of the Four Horsemen, famine being ever so pleased with himself in the modern world by finding a way to have people dying of malnutrition while simultaneously being morbidly obese.

Processed packaged meals full of fat and sugar but with no nutritional value. That'll do it.

Sorry, that needs to be capitalized, "Famine".

Wasn't that book, the correct predictions of Angus Nutter, Witch? Quite an amusing read...


The 'diet commercial industry', has a ventured interest in convincing people dieting is complicated, so they can charge people for it, whilst the food industry, has a vested interest in just selling as much as they can, with as high a prophet margin as possible...
I'm not exactly doing it at any great spead, but I'm now somewehre between 3 and a half, and 4 stone lighter than wehn my weight got wildly out of control, due to a force-feeding of high fat low taste food where I was living

Close: "The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch".

[Relevant] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19910888

>> "He later speaks of running prison farms to slim people down
with parole release being possible only for the thinned"

>> Nope. Didn't say that. <<

Oh pardon me.
Your words ending Paragraph 2 of Post 47 actually said:

"Nobody would leave my prison overweight."


How could I have possibly misinterpreted that.



And how many times do I have to insist that my spelling of
whirled makes more sense than yours on a spinning planet in
a revolving solar system of a circling galaxy in a turbulent
universe?


~jwf~