Zentei, you're doing my job here. But anyway, not just the "state" was going to be an intermediary condition, that state was supposed to rely on democratic, not autoritarian, procedures of government, embodying a mix of representative and direct democracy.

^
You see what's going on here? I of all people am being forced to play a defensive role for Karl fucking Marx.

ME!

FUCK you, HMS Conqueror.

Originally,I wished to berate Ahklut for assuming that you,a Briton would know the challenges the US poor faces which isn't universal. For Singapore,the challenge would be more on time and money spent for kitchen equipment,issues which are greatly aggravated in the states by US food deserts.

Then you decided to be an idiot.

OKAY,mind explaining WHY obesity is predicted by socio economic status and ZIP codes? The classic example held up by US health experts is summarised as this.

Poor access to healthful foods. Dispersion of foodstuff by the desert syndrome means relative long drives to purchase fresh foods.Time that poor people working shift work cant expend.

Complicate this with prep time m equipment. How long does it take to bake a potato?how much does it cost to buy a microwave oven?

Now,neighourhood stores carry simple,processed food which is rapidiy cooked,but happen to be caloric dense while nutrient poor. What happens then?

Its a much more complex issue than just poor are eating too much. Lack of access,in the Statea complicated by geoeconomic factors make any meaningful changes to diet difficult.

Before that issue can be addressed,a whole slew of structural problems need to be addressed first.




Nearly as many being less than as many, not more.[/quote]
They also need more access to calcium amd other trace nutrients,which in the free markets is more expensive than soda and more perishable. Again,the states is NOT the UK.


Support the claim that it would be easy to make this switch despite the structural problems involved.

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Let him land on any Lyran world to taste firsthand the wrath of peace loving people thwarted by the myopic greed of a few miserly old farts- Katrina Steiner

You neglect to mention time,a just as important prenium,if not more so. Food prices in the States isn't uniform.
There more of course. There is this Iowa Senator claim that if everyone were to consume their RDA in fresh fruits and vegetables,the supply wont be enough to meet demand.

No ideas on the veracity of such claims,but the distortion of subsidy and the issues with labour,transport and profits are worth highlighting.

Maybe if we point out the consequences of living in places like Midlands or other semi abandoned towns,he might understand the similarity...well,perhaps a UK folk like Vendetta might know better.
Its a bit surprising to find out that some cheap bread isn't enriched with calcium or etc in the States. Broomstick had some excellent posts on how she used to supplemnt her diet and I wont be surprised if she starts a hijack soon.

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Let him land on any Lyran world to taste firsthand the wrath of peace loving people thwarted by the myopic greed of a few miserly old farts- Katrina Steiner

To whom do you think it is offensive? If to gays, why do you think it is bad to be a superhero? And if to superheroes, why do you think it is bad to be gay?

I suspect you are simply type of person who enjoys finding ways to take offense to things, so as to feel morally superior to others without the trouble of actually doing or sacrificing anything yourself.


This is nonsense. No one is fat because they 'lack access to healthful foods'. They're fat because they eat too much of whatever it is they eat.

Suppose my diet consisted solely of Big Macs. If I had 0 Big Macs/day, I would starve to death and die. If I ate 10 Big Macs/day, I would become a human blimp like many of the US poor. If I ate 1 Big Mac/day... a Big Mac contains 490 calories, which is much less than 2,500 cal/day recommended intake for a man, so I would lose weight. More generally, equilibrium weight is a continuous function of calorie intake, and this can be applied to "unhealthy" foods too. Here is a graph to illustrate:



Of course such a person who lived entirely on Big Macs would not have an ideally healthy diet, but there is absolutely no necessity for them to be obese, and the trace minerals are far far less important for health than being a normal weight.


Because poverty and excess eating have similar causes: ignorance, lack of self-discipline, low time preference, etc.


How long have you lived in the UK to conclude that there is not a free market here, or that calcium can be produced more cheaply? (actually calcium is one of the cheapest nutrients, being plentifully supplied by full fat milk which is also one of the cheapest and most nutritious foods per price)

This is treated in the very first post of mine on this subject. Marx's "anarchism" is just another dialectical dodge, whereby he plays with definitions to argue it's not really a state if everyone likes it and it's run by the proletariat, since a state is defined (by him) as one class exercising power over another.


Your arguments are not intelligible otherwise.

You're really dumb, HMS C. There's no proletariat in the future. All classes are destroyed, including the proletariat. Only a classless society may have no state. "A state everyone likes" is still a state. In fact, there wasn't even meant to be any "socialist state" (Marx never used the term "socialism" as any intermediate period). There was meant to be a lower stage of communism and a higher. A state is not defined as "one state exercising power over another" but rather as one of the many instruments of class dominance.

So in one sentence, not a single correct piece of knowledge. Amazing.

Nitpicking over Marxist terminology is somewhat less interesting to me than building a scale model of a 100ft matchstick out of regular sized matchsticks, and about as useful to humanity. I also am aware it is what Marxists spend all their time doing, so what the hell, I concede all your points.

The fact remains that Marx explicitly favoured authoritarian interventions and never stated he thought any of it would disappear, only that they "lose their political character".

So ... your argument is that poor are poor because of reasons they themselves can affect?
That ... poor are more ignorant and less self-disciplined, etc?

Are you saying that no one who is poor is capable of self-improvement? Like for srsly?


But I am certainly not making the different claim that all poverty can be self-corrected. For instance, ignorance is also related to IQ, which is heritable.

Why this stalling attempt?
You were talking genericly about poverty and poor people, thus you were not talking about a minority of the poor, instead you were talking about generic traits/abilities of the poor, as in most of them.
So stop trying shift the focus please. Instead just answer the questions.
Do you consider poor people to be more ignorant? Do you consider poor people less self-disciplined?
If so then WHY do you think that is?
If your theory was correct then adopted children who usually come from poorer circumstances (and thus lower IQ) would have IQ more like their biological parents instead of like their adoptive parents.
That is obviously wrong. So your theory cannot be correct.
Instead IQ is more related to education than it is to inherent talent. This is also proven by the general public education in the industrializing 19th cen as a net profit for the states who rolled out such reform.

Given that self-discipline and ignorance are presumably normally distributed, and people who are at the bad end of the distribution of these traits are less able to make good decisions or do well in employment, does it not stand obviously to reason? Before we go on, do you seriously dispute that poor people are less self-disciplined and more ignorant on average than middle class people, whatever the reason for that may be? Or do you deny that people who are ignorant or lack self-discipline even exist?


Twin studies show that IQ is mostly heritable. Do you have a source, or did you think it was too obvious for that?


Education has been demonstrated not to raise long-term IQ. Instead IQ is used as a predictor of educational outcomes.

Why these attempts to circumvent the question? I don't get it, why would you want to weasel away from your own opinion on a topic you obviously have strong feelings about? It just looks bad and is counter productive to any kind of dialog.
Then to show good form and answer your questions here:
1) Yes I do think that ignorance exist, I believe such evidence is right before my eyes.
2) Yes I do think that lack of self-discipline exist, that is why I'm chatting here instead of doing what I'm supposed to.
3) Do I think that ignorance and lack of self-discipline is inherent traits of poor?
Nope, when I'm looking for ignorant people with a lack of self-discipline I would look among spoiled rich kids. Or reality show contestants, definately those. Whenever they have combined those two factors there have definately been some zingers. Like "the Simple life" and whatever that show on MTV with Jessica Simpson and her then husband was called. My oh my, that is ignorance and lack of self-discipline in a tight package.
Just because you are uneducated doesn't necessarily correlate with being ignorant unless you are religious.
First note that I made no such claims, instead I showed why your theory couldn't be true. You see it's usually so that it is customary for the one proposing a theory to provide backing evidence while to disprove a theory all you need to do is show any discrepancy to it. In that passage you were defending a claim that ignorance is related to IQ which in turn is related to poverty. I say that is wrong and give examples. So if we back up, do you dispute that kids adopted will have an IQ more closely resembling their adoptive parents than their biological ones? If you do not dispute that then how do propose to change your theory? Same thing for general public education in the industrializing 19th cen.
Then secondly, are we talking about the same IQ?
As in the MENSA IQ tests which you consistently score better at if you study for them?
As in the IQ tests where if you give kids candy for performing well then they will consistently score higher?
Did you miss the lesson on the Flynn Effect?
Are you one of those who think that africans scoring lower than euros on IQ tests are more related to their genetical heritage than it is due to their living environment?

Reality contestants are usually poor, as are celebs before they become famous (which, of course, is not to deny they became rich, but it's only a tiny fraction of the sample). And yes I also will grant you that many rich kids become ignorant or lazy because they don't need to know anything or work to maintain their lifestyle, but again only a tiny sample of the not-poor population.

I simply do not see how anyone can deny that bad social norms, low IQ, etc. would lead to poverty, and that therefore one would expect these traits to be more common (not universal) in the impoverished population.


Yes. So does the empirical evidence. This is one instance where even wiki is a good reference: "Estimates in the academic research of the heritability of IQ have varied from below 0.5[2] to a high of 0.9.[5]" These results come from twin studies.

2 - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v3 ... 468a0.html

"Maternal effects, often assumed to be negligible, account for 20% of covariance between twins and 5% between siblings, and the effects of genes are correspondingly reduced, with two measures of heritability being less than 50%. "

NB: This is only a low estimate of genetic contribution to IQ, claiming that some is due to conditions in the womb. It isn't disputing that IQs end up in line with biological rather than adoptive parent IQs, only the proportion of this that can be assigned to genetics. And despite this genetics remains the largest single factor.

5 - http://www.springerlink.com/content/t08 ... 43/?MUD=MP

"The powerful quantitative genetic design of identical and fraternal twins reared apart (112 pairs) and matched twins reared together (111 pairs) was employed to assess the extent of genetic influence on individual differences in cognitive abilities during the last half of the life span. General cognitive ability yielded a heritability estimate of about .80 in two assessments 3 years apart as part of the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging."


Be careful: the most we can say in absence of evidence is that we don't know, since both are positive claims. It's like saying that in absence of evidence that the sky is blue, we must assume it to be composed of a spectrum of every colour except blue.


Short term IQ increases have been demonstrated from educational training, but they almost always revert over a period of months or years.

No one claims the Flynn effect is due to state education. It has been observed in populations that have already graduated from school. The most plausible education-related explanation is increase in 'teaching to the test' which somewhat increases familiarity with IQ test-type questions.


This is possible. People who think strongly otherwise do so for political reasons - the evidence is currently inconclusive.

Let's have a review of the comment that provoked my response:



Your ad-hoc bullshit handwaving aside, the fact that you're backpedaling furiously while trying to build up a strawman here to make me look like some sort of sanctimonious overly-sensitive blowhard for calling you out makes me want to bring down the banhammer on your stupid ass. We don't use "gay" in a derogatory manner here, ever. You get two warnings and a sudden-death instaban. Next boo-boo, you go bye-bye.

So dumb,undisciplined people tend to live in the same streets?
Are you seriously so ignorant of the zipcode effect in America and why the term food deserts come about?

Last chance HMS conquerer. why is it that obesity is determined by sociorconomic status and zip codes in the US if poor access,Theory of reasoned action doesnt hold true?


As for calcium,check out enriched orange juice,milk prices vs soda or water and the availability of calcium foods within the poor diet n access in place like Detroit. Go on you smartass.

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Let him land on any Lyran world to taste firsthand the wrath of peace loving people thwarted by the myopic greed of a few miserly old farts- Katrina Steiner

Conqueror, is it your actual opinion that whites score better on IQ tests than other ethnicities because they are inherently more intelligent than non-whites?

To be fair,its would be too simplistic to say environmental determination is the most important factor in obesity,but I doubt that this is what Ahklut means,when he justified US household spending on food.

Its annoying however to see Conquerer simply ignore twenty years of studies,in which environmental factors do play a role and assert that inherent characteristics trump all. we learnt that rural Indians have lower serum levels of calcium than urban Indians,despite India bring in a mostly tropical country. We learnt that adjusting the variable of a supermarket presence increases fresh fruits n vegetables consumption.
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/ab ... 92.11.1761
The data amply shows that Conquerer assertion that Americans are fat simply because they eat too much is too simplistic.

Why is it that after controlling for income and education, the fact that living near accessible veggies and fruits increase the likihood of having a more healthful diet?

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Let him land on any Lyran world to taste firsthand the wrath of peace loving people thwarted by the myopic greed of a few miserly old farts- Katrina Steiner

It's a complicated as hell problem is what it is. Obesity in America stems from a lot of places, though in a lot of middle class people with decent access to healthy food and leisure time for exercise, then, yeah, a very large proportion of obesity in that class is due simply to eating too much and not exercising enough.

For a lot of poor people, though? That's a lot more complicated; if the only food one has is shit that has high caloric value per dollar but is very low in nutrients, well, that's a problem.

Also, as the USDA shows, low-calorie, healthy foods cost more than high-calorie, low-nutrient foods: http://www.nifa.usda.gov/newsroom/impac ... rices.html

So, poor people are exposed more to foods that are very calorie dense and not very healthy, leading to situations where it is much easier to get obese (especially if leisure time is a premium and isn't spent doing exercise).

Her Majesty's Shithead also completely ignored that 1 in 6 Americans go hungry on a consistent basis in the US, highlighting the fact that the US isn't a nation solely of lard-filled behemoths, contrary to his highly stereotypical and stupid worldview.

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SDNet: Unbelievable levels of pedantry that you can't find anywhere else on the Internet!

Hey no fair,you did HMS homework for him. next you be uploading food desert locater and stuff:)


Anyway,noticed the link is a mobile url so here the study name.

The Contextual Effect of the Local Food Environment on Residents’ Diets: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study Kimberly Morland, PhD, Steve Wing, PhD, and Ana Diez Roux, MD, PhD [...] American Journal of Public Health Vol. 92: 1761-1768 (Volume publication date: November 2002) DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.92.11.1761

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Let him land on any Lyran world to taste firsthand the wrath of peace loving people thwarted by the myopic greed of a few miserly old farts- Katrina Steiner

Do you see why the bolded makes your point irrelevant?

HMS Conqueror says that poor people are fat because they don't have the self-discipline to eat well. You guys are saying that poor people are fat because it's hard to get healthy food. I don't see a contradiction there.

Wtf.... how on earth do you parse that?

As for the contradiction, I would again echo Aklut that its more complicated than this. The USDA report argues that it is easy access to cheap food,not poor access that explains obesity rates amongst Americans although the report includes all Americans. For particpants in the SNAP,limited access to supermarkets as defined by distance/time influenced the purchase of fruits and vegetables negatively,and is statistically significant for fruits.


It doesnt take a genius to use common health behaviours models like Theory of Reasoned action to explain why this is so. Assuming a normal distribution of desire to eat healthily,negative factors that push away from good health behaviours and push factors towards bad health behaviours such as cheap,easily available junk food increases adoption of poor health behaviours.(albeit,tra isnt a good fit as the model discusses internal motivation,and Ip javent sourced articles to show that there is a causative link here.)


Again,the belief that the poor obesity is entirely motivated by inherent characteristics can easily be debunked. The same USDA report on food environment reports how 30% of SNAP participants will purchase food outside of their neighourhoods,motivated by desires to buy fruits and vegetables.

While the true picture is more nuanced than external vs internal factors,your inability to see there is a difference is shocking.

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Let him land on any Lyran world to taste firsthand the wrath of peace loving people thwarted by the myopic greed of a few miserly old farts- Katrina Steiner

It's a matter of interpretation.

To some extent, going out of your way to get healthy food is a matter of willpower.

To some extent, it's a matter of logistics.

Can you travel two miles farther on each grocery trip to get to a store that sells the good stuff? Can you do it on foot? Can you do it while working two jobs? Can you keep track of your diet while the rest of your life is going to shit, or will you say "fuck it" and eat whatever you can afford? When you are living paycheck to paycheck, is it worth paying a premium of X dollars a month to eat better? Is it worth taking more time to exercise instead of working more hours?

If the answer to some of these questions is "no," then it is not entirely a question of self-discipline. It is also a question of living conditions. By trying to chalk it all up to self-discipline, Her Majesty's Ship ignores the logistics problems, which PainRack and Akhlut and so on are saying is pretty important.

Theoretically, if everyone were a paragon of self-discipline and austerity, there would be very few fat people.

Theoretically, if everyone were above average, we wouldn't need a lot of things.

It's not going to happen, so the question is:

Suppose a plausible distribution of willpower among the population. Can we avoid deliberately arranging our society to give health problems to normal people living in bits of that society?

I note that you didn't answer the direct questions again. Why is that?
So you are lucky enough not to know the shows that I referenced, good for you, they were a detriment to humanity. But just for clarity Jessica Simpson, Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton was from high SES.
Then most reality show contestants are not poor. Usually this myth comes out of people not realising how many poor there are as a % of the pop and how few you usually meet. So while a reality show might have more poor than you are used to they usually have less than the pop. The overrepresentation are usually from the middle class. Lets google top 10 reality shows and pick the first option, OK I got eonline so UK which is where you're from if I'm not mistaken?
http://uk.eonline.com/news/watch_with_k ... _of/281119
The voice - good sampling of the population, overrepresentation of the middle class and underrepresentation of the upper class.
The glee project - good sampling of thepopulation, overrepresentation of the middle class and underrepresentation of the upper class.
The x factor - good sampling of thepopulation, overrepresentation of the middle class and underrepresentation of the upper class.
Jersey shore - middle class, almost exclusively.
Amazing race, overrepresentation of the middle class.
Real housewives - overrepresentation of the upper class (or really movers from low SES to high SES)
Top chef - overrepresentation of the lower and middle class.
Dancing with the stars - overrepresentation of the middle and upper class.
Kardashians - middle class.
SYTYCD - good sampling of thepopulation, overrepresentation of the middle class and underrepresentation of the upper class.
See?
Same thing with most celebs, they usually come from middle class background, its just that you hear more about the poverty to riches thingie because it makes a better story. Maybe you only listen to metal or gangstarap? Where indeed the poorer SES were overrepresented in the beginning. However just like with most such celebrity slowly but surely that is no longer the case. You see we know this from looking at older youth culture. Jazz and rock did the same class migration. So did punk for a while until it was outcompeted by grunge. Becoming mainstream does correlate with the middle class taking over the making and shaking of the celeb culture.
This because getting good at music, acting, etc takes effort, time and you guessed it - usually some money. So you are more likely to have that due to parental support and SES conditioning. Which means middle class. If the middle class embrace a culture then they can outcompete the poor because the poor can't afford the equip and/or training that takes you up a notch.
Because chavs are not representative of the poor? Because british and american "poor and proud of it" white trash counter culture doesn't really translate that well to the rest of the world? Because rich can have bad social norms and low IQ and still remain rich or even increase their wealth? Because hitting someone hard over the head with metal while also wearing metal has been the staple standard qualification for the very rich in the UK for at least a thousand years?
I gotta ask if you are religious at this point, because these types of views usually stem from christian and hindu dogma. That the poor should be poor because they "deserve" it.
Ah, I see. So does your view comes from a misunderstanding of those studies then? Have you read them? Or any other studies in the field from the last decade?
Let's bring you up to date shall we? I'll respond to the rest of your post first, then I'll make another post with the studies and discoveries, OK?
What? Uhm, its your words not mine, so it should follow that it should have been you who should have been careful. Let's review shall we? You said:
"Because poverty and excess eating have similar causes: ignorance, lack of self-discipline, low time preference, etc."
See? Not careful at all with your statements. Instead a pretty straightforward CAUSE>EFFECT statement.
Then you replied with this:
"For instance, ignorance is also related to IQ, which is heritable."
See? Not careful at all with your statements. Instead another straightforward X CORRELATE WITH Y statement.
So do you stand by those statements? Or do you have an ERRATA for what you reall meant? Otherwise you did actually claim that "ignorance is related to IQ which in turn is related to poverty" so do you agree with yourself that such a statement is the same as saying the sky is a spectrum thing? (Which funnily enough is closer to the truth of light passing through the atmosphere creating the appearance of different colors).

So again, why do you try to weasel away from your straightforward statements? Why do you try to shift this away from what you actually said to something else?
And again, such tactics only make you look worse and puts doubt to your claims.
Let's see if I can sum this up in an easily digestibly short lesson.
The flynn effect has been observed in INFANTS so the INFANTS education does not matter. Instead its thought to relate to nutrition etc. (Can you see where I'm going? Pause and think before moving to the next sentence...)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 9608000998
That's right, better nutrition correlates with SES aaaaaand with? Yupp, that's right, education of the mothers. Wow you could almost see that one coming from miles away, couldn't you?
So higher SES statistically correlate to higher education. Higher education correlate to better informed mothers. Higher SES correlate to better nutrition during/after pregnancy.
So let's see if we can bring you onboard.
What do you think would happen if we educate would be mothers and give them and their infants better options when it comes to nutrition? (It should be an easy question).
Revert? Do I detect a misunderstanding of what IQ is and what it predicts?
You can train for IQ tests. Who do you think will train most for IQ tests and when? ....
That's right, higher SES like academics is more likely to train their offspring, during the years when IQ "matters" ie before and during school. So of course that effect will wear off with time when your parents influence isn't as "strong".
Nope, people who think otherwise does not do so for political reasons. You see scientists try to exclude all other factors before jumping to conclusions. But the reverse is true. Nationalists and racists want there to be such a correlation and thus intrerpret the data into their world image.
Lets take your sky analogy as an example.
Lets assume we have people who claim the sky is blue, lets call them daytimers.
Then we have people who claim the sky is black, lets call them nighttimers.
Then we have people who claim the sky is gray, lets call them brits.
When collecting evidence we get inconclusive data, we get data that the sky is blue, black, gray but also red, orange and to everyones startlement sometimes the sky contains strange phenomena like TWIN RAINBOWS omg omg omg omg.
Now the nighttimers come out and say they were right all along because their data said that mostly the sky was black, same with daytimers and brits. But something about lovely weather this time of a year and umberellas was mentioned as well.
So what would a scientist conclude from this?
The first conclusion is that daytimers, nighttimers and brits were all wrong. The sky isn't blue/black/grey instead it shifts colors depending on many factors.
The second conclusion would be that each such factor should be explained by itself.
Weather gets its own explanation to satisfy the brits. Solar and planetary movement gets its own explanation to satisfy the night and day people. Then light reflection and spectrum gets its own explanation to satisfy parts of the data related to colors etc.
That is how science works.

So right now lets start with the first step.
Anyone claiming that africans are less intelligent than euros because the do less on IQ tests is wrong. Instead there are plenty of factors involved.