iriyan

Kids in the US not only abuse alcohol more than any other place in the channel they are used as traffickers for illegal substances due to their less severe criminal treatment. Of course this weight is carried by the lower economic class. In anonymous interviews there was consensus though, it was easier for them to get drugs and guns than alcohol and cigarettes. That's because they had to pay an adult to get it for them, because they are selling everything else.

All this is a structural part of stability of capitalism as you very well state. Unfortunately the formula of that stability is imposed on all other "dependent" states, and in some cases in extremes (Brazil, Phillipines, ..).

Smoking became disgusting when the campain against smoking became effective. In previous decades when people smoked more nobody ever called smoking disgusting. We haven't evolved that much since the 70s/80s. So what many people perceive as a disgusting habbit today is the effect of conditioning and propaganda. Smokers also had long lasting relations with non-smokers, now it is unthinkable a smoker and a non-smoker to even go out for a coffee together.

I am also surprised this discussion has gone so far so long and nobody has mentioned sugar and its bi-products (soft drinks, candy, sweets, ...) Is there such an addiction recognized and known as dangerous? Type-B diabetes has become common even for kids, especially in the west. The sweetest thing you will find in China doesn't even taste sweet, and if you offer a middle eastern pastry to a Chinese person they put half a spoon in their mouth and think they are about to die.

Super-Size it PLEASE!!!

You will not get very far with calling people stupid. It takes months sometimes for me to have a glass of beer or wine, and very rarely anything stronger, I don't need it, never liked the feeling of having too much of it.

When I lose my concentration and trying hard to figure something out half a cigarette make my mind work again .. I don't think it is the nicotine though, because vaping with high content of nicotine did nothing other than keeping me from going outside to smoke. I wouldn't generalize though because the effects can be different for different people, even with tea. I can drink 20 cups of coffee a day, and fall asleep with half a cup next to my pillow, I can drink chamomile and some other herbal teas they say they relax and calm you down, and I'll be up all night. Black tea has a higher hit than caffeine for me, maybe my caffeine blood content never drops low enough to notice :)

I may not live in Nebraska, and haven't been there for years, but living in a relatively active agricultural country in Europe, nearly 90% of food in the grocery store is now owned by US subsidiaries. When I first came I remember experts bragging that GMOs will never be allowed or enter the EU. Now Monsanto is a native EU corporation, based in Germany with the excuse Bayer (ex Nazi corporation) bought Monsanto, not the other way around. Being so large now, together with BASF and a couple of other giants, you think politicians in Germany will stop them and turn against them, and what becomes OK in Germany is mandated all over the EU. Then we have the leading laboratory of hybrids and GMOs called the Netherlands who make tulips smell like onions and onions smelling like roses, and garlic looking like an apple.

The whole world is so doomed because of capitalism nobody has a clue anymore what we can do and how it will ever stop.

yes it will, it will criminalize the poor while there will be more profitable legal alternatives for the rich ..

The father of history I believe 4th century BC writes about some Greek mercenaries returning from an expedition in Persia, where one brother wanted his brother killed so he can become the king of Persia, and while walking North they came up on an #Armenian town where they were given food and shelter. He describes the hosts having some large ceramic containers with wine and "straws", where each drunk from the container.

Alcohol is pretty old, and so is its abuse. There is a difference though when a community collectively make wine for their own consumption and pleasure, and an industry mass producing something with toxic chemical additives to preserve and modify taste/flavor, and have an interest in "pushing" it to a larger and larger market. Same with drugs, and just about anything else. Just examine a woman's shampoo commercial, the movement, the background, the joy, of using it and tell me they are not resembling the experience to an LSD trip. The woman sudenly is out of her ugly apartment in smokey Chicago in the middle of winter and is running in slow motion in a field full of flowers in the sun, with colors flashing everywhere, her smiling with no reason ... purple haze ...

Reforming capitalism to be humane and environmentally friendly is just as much an illusion as it is toxic as a political agenda. It is not possible. You can't just slap warning label on grenades and then hand them off to kids to go play, then ask them to ship to Iraq to kill natives for the good of their "country". It is too risky to sell anti-inflamatory medication without prescription but it is ok to be paid 1/3 of what a marketing associate makes to go and repare lines during a hurricane .. because the elec.company needs to keep its record up of providing service 99.99% of the time. Or its stock price may drop!

WHO needs to go work on ebola epidemics and contain them, but also work on hunger, thirst, bacteria in wells and creeks, shelter, children vaccination, and stop teasing alcohol and tobacco companies for bribes and pocket support.

Most people can't think they can only reproduce propaganda. No sense in debating with parrots. Many people in the US advocates of health care, keep saying "in Europe they have this and that", no most countries in Europe have/had state sponsored health "insurance" which is very different than socialized health care. So a government administed fund pays for health care, even the one provided by state owned hospitals. Service, product, by product, billed, charged, and paid. Huge administration cost, huge corruption possibilities, all you do is provide the ones with authority to accept the charge and the commission is paid. Brits fought literally in a war against government before ww2 to get this and they got it. The rest fought in a variable degree to get something so they got less. Sweden and Finland being the showcase of capitalism against the SU got something then, quickly begun to have it dismantled after 1990. So the last few socialized health care systems are the NHS, Cuba's health care, (#2 highest health indicators in the Americas after Canada) ..... and the US armed forces, which is also being chewed and dismantled and converting to an insurance model. US mil and dependents just showed an ID and got health services, exams, medicine, operations, nothing charged anywhere, just working people serving working people. Such hypocrisy, where capital really needed health care to be effective they adopted a pure socialist model.

Einstein said "the universe and human stupidity are the only known infinite quantities, and I am not really sure about the universe".

Yes, at 900hp 750KW, I can imagine a farmer using 2MWh of charging to get 3-4 hrs of work done and this would be by providing this power all the way out to each farm, or remote mining site, or rural road construction.

I've written this example before to those that get it: Take a 6hp engine produce electricity at 3KW, power your bike at 3KW, instead of powering it with the 6hp engine. Now take this power send it through two thick copper wires 200mi away and back (it takes 2) and on its way back charge two 4KWh batteries, to power your 3KW bike, and then go riding for an hour. This is your clean efficient power. The myth is the powerplant burning coal/diesel/nat.gas is so efficient that its 6hp motor makes 10KW power ( :) ) and there are no losses of power using cables over hundreds of miles, no losses due to heat charging, and 100% of the charge is put to work in your vehicle. And this will save the environment.

It doesn't work that way and if you had high-school physics you should have known better.

you are such an ignorant troll, this is like saying Julian Assange was never in prison, I just saw him yesterday walking on the beach!

I am sorry for over-reacting on something so common, but I feel very strongly about such things. If I write something, post a picture of an alien, print some data and publish them, they are no longer my private property, they are public. I shouldn't have the right to take it away, especially when people used it as a base to discuss that object, despite of its value. It also adds to the confusion, a third person comes by wondering what's wrong with those that made a comment on something that doesn't exist.

We should encourage discussion, we should fight those who prevent it. For ages we shut passively in front of a tube receiving and not being able to react or discuss. One way brainwashing without the sound of resistance. Now we can screen out everything by discussion, and each can judge what is right and wrong, what sounds rational and what is.

At least you still have a publicly accessible ER and ICU ... because in the US people prefer to die on the street than be billed 4 times life long earning for getting their gull-blotter removed.

Long live the NHS ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t39BdxudF9U