Like smoking, we don't need to completely ban air travel. The equivalent would be severely limiting it (for example, prohibiting business flying).
I'm seeing a lot of communication and alignment issues because people can't get into one room and hash things out.
People fly to go on holiday and experience cultures other than their own which is something we should be encouraging rather than discouraging. I strongly agree with reducing needless business travel but if doing so also limited vacation travel I think it'd be a net negative.
Talking about taking away things that people like, like airplanes and red meat and gas stoves just get people up in arms. Start with the low-hanging fruit: crypto has no value except to speculators and criminals and tax evaders. Concrete is like 10% of our energy use, and we use way too much of it for temporary structures. No one likes leaf blowers, just ban the gas-powered ones.
Certain people will get up in arms regardless, partly due to certain people making up threats like 'someone is going to take away your ...!' But nobody here said that.
What distinction are you drawing here? Both flying and crypto have a handful of rabid fans who use them a lot (and seem to enjoy it) while most regular people barely think about them at all, except to get vaguely irritated when they hear them passing by.
(I'm in favour of punitively high taxes on both, FWIW)
5-10% of people take a flight every year. For the US and Australia, it’s roughly half of all people. [1] is from a climate interest group.
Supposedly 3.9% of people worldwide own cryptocoins. Thought that stays would support my argument more but I suspect lots of hodling and not much trading.
[1]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d30896202a18c0001b49...
Zero emissions technologies are great where they're practical. Aircraft are one of those places where the energy density and overall density of your fuel source is very, very important.
You don't help people climb a ladder by chopping off the top and declaring the ladder climbed.
Sounds like public schooling in the USA for the last 25 years :(
I'm sorry but I don't buy that. Business flying has obvious benefits including, perhaps obviously, enabling businesses to be run efficiently.
Similarly with clients. It's much easier for people to go on attack-mode when they are displeased when it's only through email or a video conference where people have their cameras off. Unhappy clients can be placated and turned towards working together to a solution much more easily in person, and happy clients can be turned into long term partners more easily over dinner and friendly chats. This is especially true of customers in Asia.
Many people seem to unrealistically demand scientific recommendations to be "guarantees." However, scientific conclusions are very precisely made best guesses, built on humanity's knowledge.
It's good that the supply chain of science is traceable, but it doesn't guarantee truth by any means. Their are many non-scientific human endeavors that have traceability, take software development for instance.
I think the distrust comes from many fields having fairly obvious political trends, in particular social sciences. Another source of distrust is overextrapolation of science by authorities. For instance, science might say that certain drugs are harmful if abused, and politicians may use that to claim the war on drugs is based on science, which obviously is not true. Lastly, some fields struggle producing consistent and falsifiable results, such as economics and psychology.
58% (quite high, higher than a lot of biology related field) are positive replications.
But! some of those use the same datasets, with different time bases, and most are narrow replication of high impact studies.
Also, economics now is not a singular field, and I'd bet gp was talking about macroeconomics. You could be more charitable.
You can get a pretty good estimate of how many lives would be saved if we smoked less, or drank less, or did any number of other things, but ultimately that's an input into a public policy decision making system that doesn't have a provably right answer unless everyone involved agrees on what the desired outcome is.
Addiction and blood pressure are really the only downsides if you were to consume it in the form of, say, gum (and boy does the addiction suck).
1991: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1670208/
> The risk of Alzheimer's disease decreased with increasing daily number of cigarettes smoked before onset of disease (relative risk 0.3 in those smoking greater than 21/day v 1 in non-smokers). In six families in which the disease was apparently inherited as an autosomal dominant disorder, the mean age of onset was 4.17 years later in smoking patients than in non-smoking patients from the same family (p = 0.03).
There is also ongoing research on this topic funded by the US government.
https://www.alzheimers.gov/clinical-trials/memory-improvemen...
Either way, that's super interesting.
Ritualistically, as an exercise in getting out of one's 'normal' consciousness, it can present useful information for self study. In habitual form, it is of course very destructive.
Both are very tiny self-reported effects that are close to non-observable for outsiders. Why would one outweigh the other, if you allow self-reported epsilon effects at all?
You mean sleep (as in, night time bed activity)? I'm not talking about sleep. I am discussing getting out of normative modes of being but not going to sleep.
>> that is the relaxation experience
This is not the only experience resulting from tobacco use. There are more subtle effects as well.
>> worthless
I haven't declared a value judgment against the habit. I am saying it is destructive to the body. Do you believe that to not be a fact?
>> helpful
Again, I'm not presenting value judgments here. I am saying it can present useful information. It sounds to me like you have taken offense somewhere for some reason. I am not putting weight on one or the other.
*edit: clarity
These accusations are a common way to tear down democratic institutions, handing power to corporations and powerful individuals. Do you have evidence of it? I've seen none, other than some things attempted by political appointees during the Trump administration.
You may not think it's appropriate, but many doctors disagree. There's nothing in that indicating it's politicized; people may want to politicize gun control, Coronavirus, and lots of other health issues, but that doesn't make the health institutions political for dealing with it. (They also want to politicize the CDC and every other democratic institution (the Post Office, etc.).)
One example of many:
Meanwhile, all they've tried to do is research gun violence, not "enter a debate".
The same is true about recreational travel. People expose themselves to high levels of radiation and travel risk purely for recreational purposes. Smokers inhale carcinogenic substances for recreational purposes.
I stopped smoking for months or years many times and I never ever had any side effect except maybe I'm a bit tired the first days. I don't even put up extra weight or anything like that. I feel like an adult baby being treated like I need financial punishment to help me be a healthy person.
Really? Where do you live? Because I'm not aware of any country that does this (other than with sin taxes on tobacco).
Also except executives no one is above 60, which is where one would argue that if you are a smoker you may actually needing to tap heavy into health insurance money for smoking related conditions. There's even research that if you quit before 40 your smoking related cancer risks go down 90% https://www.healio.com/news/hematology-oncology/20211228/qui...
Of course I can drink a bottle of wine per day, not exercise, eat processed meat and not consume a gram of fiber and I don't have to pay extra health insurance. It doesn't make any sense.
By federal law, you cannot be charged more for smoking a cigarette every four months. You can be charged more for smoking with more regularity. There is a binary cutoff, but the level isn't zero (feds have a minimum level, but states can impose higher ones.). You may want to consult a lawyer if this is something that is really happening and concerns you. Plus, you certainly should consult a lawyer before you change your answer on a the form, in case you are in a grandfathered plan or some other special case.
https://www.kff.org/faqs/faqs-health-insurance-marketplace-a...
https://www.kff.org/faqs/faqs-health-insurance-marketplace-a...
Now, it is binary. But US federal law puts "an afterdinner cigarette once every four months" very much in the "nonsmoker" category.
Which is the tobacco equivalent of classifying someone as a heavy drinker because they're using red wine as a trace ingredient in cooking several times a week, and considering that the same as consuming 4 vodka bottles over a span of 4 evenings every week.
Or, to bring this back to the example that started this thread, and which you seem to be thoroughly missing, to regulate numbers of radiation exposures per week. Without taking into account whether that's from standing outside in the sun for 10 minutes, eating a banana, or standing next to an unshielded nuclear reactor.
It's not some pedantic theoretical concern. There's an astronomical difference in the health risks between smoking a pack of cigarettes 4 times a week, using E-cigarettes 4 times a week, or applying a nicotine patch 4 times a week.
I find it hard to believe that smoking could be less dangerous than flying even for people who work as airline pilots or flight attendants.
OTOH, I would make the differentiating point that air travel has positive benefits to society and costs and one has to weigh those against each other. You can’t make the blanket statement “earth would be better off if air travel went away completely.”
It’s hard to find any benefit to smoking, first hand or second, so it’s easy enough to just shit on it. The ROI on whatever ills aviation may have is a topic of discussion, there’s 0 ROI on smoking.