by ben_w | 2025-08-07 23:05:51+00:00
> hm really ? https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism

Yes really: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

And: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom

Saying of employment and big companies "oh no totes the same as feudalism" from such superficial similarities is historically laughable. It's like saying that the Romans and the USA and Mussolini are all "the same thing" because of the iconography of the fasces.

> Yes, now the main causes of death are literal sloth and gluttony.

Incorrect: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-by-risk-...

It might be as high as 23.4%… in the country of Cook Islands.

USA was 9.1% in 2021, but that was probably reduced due to the pandemic as it was a whole 10.8% in 2019.

> 50% of people are basically disabled by the age of 40 because of obesity

No, they're not. BMI ~30 doesn't have that strong an impact, and only three countries have that-or-higher (and even then marginally) as a mean BMI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_bo...

> You're conflating life expectancy at birth vs life expectancy, don't forget health-span expectancy either. The US life expectancy is going down, health span is going down in most of the west too:

Burden of disease Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) per 100,000 individuals from all causes. DALYs measure the total burden of disease – both from years of life lost due to premature death and years lived with a disability. One DALY equals one lost year of healthy life.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/dalys-rate-from-all-cause...

Burden of disease goes down until the pandemic, only then goes up.

Even with pandemic making things worse, the USA was back at 1992 levels of health.

Specifically life expectancy: even in the USA, what you're seeing is the impact of the covid pandemic.

> Anyways, if your argument is that we should be glad that 70% of people are overweight/obese because people died earlier 300 years ago idk how many people you will convince...

Much more recent than that. Try the 1960s, where 29.7 million died: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-from-famines-by-de...

I don't know what true hunger feels like. I never have, I hope I never will.

Currently ongoing famines due to war, according to Wikipedia:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip_famine

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_Sudan_(2024–present)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_northern_Ethiopia_(2...

And in any case, your previous argument was "Taking ozempic won't fix your stressful job that materialized into an compulsive eating", to which my snappy retort is: well, nothing else did that either, did it?

My real argument is: if you don't like the obesity epidemic, why are you opposed to people taking the magic weight loss treatment that actually works, and apparently has a whole bunch of surprising positive side effects such as the headline of this news story?

It's the solution, and you're complaining about the problem that it fixes as if it also causes it. Thinking of the asbestos example earlier, what you're arguing here is like saying "all fire-retardants must be bad because people are on fire a lot".