I have made a lengthy comment on the burden of obesity on our healthcare and people in general.

I have a radial nerve injury (and no text-to-speech) so I cannot find it right now nor re-write it.

I absolutely agree with you and your conclusions.

I made my reply here, from a slightly different perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43749123

Personal liberty is fine, until it starts infringing on my own, which these include. You don't want to vaccinate? You being infringing on my ability to stay healthy while participating in society. Vaccines aren't fully effective, not everyone can be vaccinated, etc., so to eradicate disease we rely on the majority of people getting vaccinated.

You not using my preferred pronouns or name is simply a rude thing to do. If we remove the bizarre political fixation on it, if I tell you my name is John and you call me Joanna just because you think I look more like a Joanna, you're an asshole. I'm not in favor of making being an asshole illegal, but I will call you one.

I'm actually fully OK with there being consequences to being overweight! It does put a large burden on the healthcare system. Right now the healthcare system is largely privatized so, well, it's not like public health is the primary concern for it anyway, but if it were, sure I believe that there should be actions taken to reduce obesity. We have a lot of promising anorectic medications right now, primarily in the form of the GLP-1 and related medications, and I'd be in favor of overweight and obese people needing to also go on these if they want access to public healthcare for issues that are related to metabolic disorder, etc. But we're in a privatized system, so...

You're starting to really stretch the argument thin with the gay bit, though. Disease transmissions here still requires the informed consent of both parties - I'm not going to get HIV from a gay person without having some form of consensual sex with them, outside of behaviors that are already criminal - rape, contaminating something I'm eating with their semen, etc. This isn't the same as refusing vaccination and then participating in society for diseases that are transmissible like covid or ebola or similar. For birth rate/GDP, we do not enforce actions on straight couples when it comes to childbirth (or STDs, which while transmission rate is generally lower for some STDs for heterosexual intercourse it's obviously not exclusively limited to homosexual intercourse) so these suppositions seem to be targeted based not on the general outcome but simply on the fact the person is gay. If we started mandating child birth for straight people for whatever reason, then we can start having this conversation - but even in a fairly dystopic world where we are requiring married couples have kids, we can still provide options for gay people. Require them 'sponsor' an additional child for a straight couple, require them adopt, require surrogacy and them raising a child, etc. But targeting them just because of their sexual orientation would be quite obviously bigoted.

> social contract overrides personal liberty

Not signing the contract simply means having no right to the protections that it affords. I have no responsibility to treat you with respect if you don't go out and vaccinate yourself. I have no responsibility to entertain traditions that you value, if you don't value the traditions of others.

You have attributed a loss of liberty to it, from the comment that you are replying to:

> You are free, of course, to not "sign" that contract - but that means that those who have are not obligated to apply it to you.

Participate in the social contract, or don't, your choice.

Traditions have nothing to do with it. In America we have liberty and your worldview is not compatible with our constitution. Wars have and will continue to be faught to preserve my version

So I am not free to engage in a contract with like-minded people? The constitution demands that I don't use pronouns?

That sounds like limiting speech.