The Quote

[Surlethe]

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

If you've found the relationship between proximity and diet after you've controlled for income differences, then you can't use it to say anything about the effect of income differences on diet.

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

Not really. I don't know what you mean by "external vs internal factors," but it seems to me that self-discipline is doing hard things instead of easy things, so when you say that eating a healthy diet is hard, and Conqueror says people who don't eat healthy diets don't have enough self-discipline, you guys are agreeing.

***

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.

What you're calling "logistics" is really just high cost tradeoffs. Willpower is what lets you bear those high costs. So again, I don't see a difference. If eating healthy food requires lots of sacrifices, it takes a lot of willpower. If poor people aren't willing to make those sacrifices, then they don't have the willpower to make healthy choices. Two sides of the same coin, no disagreement.

[Surlethe]

RE Black people and intelligence, you should be very surprised if black people were on average as intelligent as white people in the US, given three hundred years of brutal enslavement, apartheid, socioeconomic discrimination, and the resulting religiosity, lower nutrition, structural racism, urban decay, and anti-education cultural adaptations.

[HMS Conqueror]

Oh please. You make a ridiculously offensive blanket statement like that and you expect me to wave it off like it's nothing? You obnoxious turd.

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.

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

Come on, they're all incredibly gay.

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.

The manner intended wasn't derogatory, it was intended rather as a light-hearted joke about superheroes' ridiculous costumes, coupled with satire of all the people thinking it's a crazy suggestion that a superhero might be gay. You, however, are an overly-sensitive blowhard (that is intended to be derogatory, as you probably are too stupid to realise). In fact, that's not fair, I don't think you actually were even offended, you are just gleeful at the opportunity to twist something in such a way as you can pretend to take offence to it. I had thought this was a free-thinking board, indeed even taking it too far to the point where insulting people in a crude and idiotic manner seems to be actively encouraged. But no, it just has differently motivated dumb prejudices and sanctimonious thought police to the mainstream.

Goodbye.

[K. A. Pital]

Eating healthy food is just out of budget for the poor. No amount of "willpower" will increase the money available in your wallet.

[Surlethe]

In the US, income plus benefits doesn't generally fall below $15-20k. You can eat plenty healthy on that income (setting aside the question of whether agricultural subsidies food stamps encourage healthy eating), as long as you're willing to give up nice things. Hell, if you don't have any kids and you make the right ascetic consumption choices, you can live a healthy life on less than $10k/yr.

Poverty in the first world isn't about people being unable to afford their way out of it --- we're talking about people in the top 20% of a PPP world income distribution here, not $2/day poverty like in India or sub-Saharan Afrtica. No, first world poverty is about people being unwilling to give up the small, immediate, nice things in life for uncertain future rewards. It's about being faced with such difficult tradeoffs every day that you don't have any self-discipline left for immediate sacrifices in the name of long-term benefits. A lot of the time, it's about being unlucky enough to be born with the wrong skin color or accent, and about being unlucky enough to be born into a culture that doesn't value behaviors that lead to long-term financial success in life. It's about being an ordinary human being in an environment where having the proclivities, desires, and short-sightedness of an ordinary human being make you and keep you poor.

[Lord Zentei]

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.

Have you actually read any Marx at all? This is not his argument. The state does exist under the socialist system, it does NOT exist under the communist system. Which is infeasible and naive, but nonetheless your argument falls short. In criticizing Marx, you should at least ensure that your understanding of his ideas is solid, unless you want your arguments not to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you.

Your arguments are not intelligible otherwise.

Yes, they are. Try that one more time.

[Spoonist]

I thought that this was common knowledge, but I guess not.
http://www.aecf.org/upload/publicationf ... 22k560.pdf
google the cost of being poor you'll get hundreds of articles like this one
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02053.html

Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't often explain.

So we'll explain it here. Consider this a primer on the economics of poverty.

"The poor pay more for a gallon of milk; they pay more on a capital basis for inferior housing," says Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.). "The poor and 100 million who are struggling for the middle class actually end up paying more for transportation, for housing, for health care, for mortgages. They get steered to subprime lending. . . . The poor pay more for things middle-class America takes for granted."

Poverty 101: We'll start with the basics.

read the article for the rest...

[PainRack]

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

If you've found the relationship between proximity and diet after you've controlled for income differences, then you can't use it to say anything about the effect of income differences on diet.

So?I'm not. I pointing out that access matters,independent of income.

Its an additional statistical analysis they made outside of the zip code effect,which shows that access matters outsidr of income.

The study I quoted isn't the zip code study.

Not really. I don't know what you mean by "external vs internal factors," but it seems to me that self-discipline is doing hard things instead of easy things, so when you say that eating a healthy diet is hard, and Conqueror says people who don't eat healthy diets don't have enough self-discipline, you guys are agreeing.

You missed the meat of the disagreement. Conquerer argues that the reasons are instrinic. Obese poor people have poorer self control and etc. I pointing out that extrinsic factors such as the food environment plays a role.

Its a key scope. If Conquerer is right,health promotion strategies based on information and motivation would be most significant in improving health behaviours. If hes wrong,then a broader strategy and social engineering is needed. As of this moment,expert opinion in the States say he's wrong. Again,I would like to point out that several studies is of the opinion that the poor food environment plays a greater role in poor health behaviours in the States as opposed tothe UK or Europe,where similar evidence was found. We're not dealing witb a static picture here.
***

If poor people aren't willing to make those sacrifices, then they don't have the willpower to make healthy choices. Two sides of the same coin, no disagreement.

Only if rich and poor people were making the SAME decisions. They're not.

[Surlethe]

Insofar as there's a natural distribution of self-discipline, we should see a selection effect that makes poor people have worse self-discipline: if you have good self-discipline, you work your way out of poverty. If you have poor self-discipline and you're middle class or working class, you fall into poverty. But even an average level of self-discipline is sometimes not enough to get people out of poverty as well.

Let's also be more precise about who we're talking about when we say "poor." Are we including transient poverty, like college students or graduate students, who expect to move on and become middle- or upper-class? Are we talking about rural poverty? Urban poverty? People with incomes under $X? Just the working poor, who are caught in poverty traps?

[K. A. Pital]

In the US, income plus benefits doesn't generally fall below $15-20k. You can eat plenty healthy on that income (setting aside the question of whether agricultural subsidies food stamps encourage healthy eating), as long as you're willing to give up nice things. Hell, if you don't have any kids and you make the right ascetic consumption choices, you can live a healthy life on less than $10k/yr.

Poverty in the first world isn't about people being unable to afford their way out of it --- we're talking about people in the top 20% of a PPP world income distribution here, not $2/day poverty like in India or sub-Saharan Afrtica. No, first world poverty is about people being unwilling to give up the small, immediate, nice things in life for uncertain future rewards. It's about being faced with such difficult tradeoffs every day that you don't have any self-discipline left for immediate sacrifices in the name of long-term benefits. A lot of the time, it's about being unlucky enough to be born with the wrong skin color or accent, and about being unlucky enough to be born into a culture that doesn't value behaviors that lead to long-term financial success in life. It's about being an ordinary human being in an environment where having the proclivities, desires, and short-sightedness of an ordinary human being make you and keep you poor.

I guess my perception of First World poverty is not as... benigh, shall I say, any longer (now that I can witness some of it first-hand). Sometimes people live on less than 5000 EUR a year, and that's a budget quite tough for a First World nation, if you have a wife as well for example. Poverty is centered around the illegal migrants, people occupied in the lowest-paying jobs (the German minijobs for example) and so on. These aren't people who are getting upwards of $15 k, more like downwards of $7 k.

Not to mention that there is a relationship between those who are migrants and occupied in these lower circles of hell, and those who live on "$2 per day in Indonesia" and so on. Those who work sometimes have to send most of what they earn to their families back home, lest they die or go down to extreme poverty.

So the choices might be there for a priviledged part of the poor. But not for many others.

[Dalton]

Goodbye.

Cue violins! The great "HMS Conqueror" leaves this board because the tyrannical administration questioned him about his usage of terminology that has gotten others instabanned. Let it be known that he had a chance to state his case and refused to do so. If he had only swallowed his massive hubris, he may not be in this position today, but given his general board demeanor it comes as no surprise that a puffed-up wannabe got a spanking and sent home to whine about our oppressive board rules.

Boo hoo hoo! Everyone feel bad for HMS Dinghy, who was banned because he couldn't articulate what he meant when he said "they're all incredibly gay" and instead tried to pass it off first as a mere observation, then as a "light-hearted joke".

[Lord Zentei]

I can only wonder why certain people can't tell the difference between general insults on the one hand and derogatory comments on the other. Yes, this is a rough-and-ready board, but there are limits.

[PainRack]

Are you obtuse surlethe?Just what was the point of me sourcing the free text article for you?

Here are the facts. Proximity to supermarkets tend to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables,irregardless of income and education,2 other known variables.

We know from zip code studies that there exist food deserts and they're primarily either poor census tracts or rural regions.

Thus,environmental factors do play a role in the US in explaining why US poor are eating non healthful diets.

[Akhlut]

It is, in fact, almost certainly cheaper in terms of dollars to eat right than it is to eat poorly. Vegetables, pasta, rice - these things aren't expensive and are pretty good for you. McDonald's, greasy delivery pizza, chips, cookies - these things are. Very expensive.

You're forgetting availability. In a lot of urban regions, fast food joints are generally profitable regardless of exact location (thus, they can be built and still get a profit even if they are in low-income areas), while terrible microwavable stuff just needs a freezer and can be shipped in on refrigerated trucks with little problem. Fresh produce requires more careful shipping and much more space in a store.

There's also profit margins to consider; chips, cookies, and the like are all a lot higher on profit margins than fresh produce (especially due to the mechanization associated with making things like chips, cookies, pizza, and so forth, whereas most produce still must be handpicked by human labor), so smaller corner marts (which are often all a lot of urban poor people have to shop at on a frequent basis) are going to be geared more toward items with higher profit margins just to stay in business.

Also, for a lot of the working poor, there just may not be adequate time to properly cook a healthy dinner, whereas microwave dinners or fast food don't take that much time to make for those people who have severe schedule restrictions.

[K. A. Pital]

The time aspect is really daunting. Since we're crazy economizers, I can actually describe what the situation's like.

1. Fast food joint - cheapest and fastest way to eat. You only have to move out of your house once per day in the evening (provided that you have a lunch-at-workplace system of any kind). The food is prepared within several minutes and then it takes ca. 15-20 minutes to consume even the largest meal. 30-40 minutes per day spent on food is the likely maximum. IRL - 20-30.

2. Frozen "ready food" for microwave/oven - competes with the above, you have to move to the shop, then go home, prepare the food. All in all, 30-40 minutes IRL and 50 minutes a likely maximum.

3. Make you own healthy food (which we as Russians prefer) - 1,5 to 2 hours per day spent just on cooking itself, plus 20 minutes or so spent on going to the stores and buying all the necessary ingredients. IRL that's around 2 full hours per day spent to buy and cook something, sometimes 2+ hours.

So healthy food is a luxury. Time is money. Many of the working poor work overtime (and hell if they were not doing it - most of the US "gastarbeiters" and other working poor folks I met in 2005 were working like crazy). No time for luxuries. Hell, as some days I was working 10 h or so, I had to use McDonalds (and I'm a shitty cook as well, anyway).

[Akhlut]

Plus, even if one has the time, there's just personal energy/motivation to cook as well. I have a 4 year old, an 8 hour job with a half hour lunch break, and an hour commute each day. So, by come dinner time, I've already been up for 13 hours, of which I've been getting ready for work for one hour, working/driving for 10, and doing stuff with my son for the other 2. So, yes, theoretically I have time to chop up meat and veg and cook pasta/rice/whatever, but do I have the energy to do it properly? Not nearly. Especially if I want to enjoy time with my wife after my son goes to bed.

So, I try to compensate by cooking large meals on the weekends to last through a portion of the week and trying to cook something in the middle of the week or whatever too.

[Losonti Tokash]

Buying bigger requires a minimum amount of cash that someone scraping by isn't likely to actually have. I can't buy a week's worth of groceries if I have $30 in the bank and nothing to transport them in besides my arms.

[Losonti Tokash]

What on earth are you going to buy that's going to feed 2 people for a week that costs less than $30? Why is it reasonable to expect someone to spend a 2 hour round trip to the grocery store? It's great for you that you're wealthy enough to save an absurd amount of money on living, but you're also bugfuck crazy and hardly representative of most people.

[Akhlut]

What on earth are you going to buy that's going to feed 2 people for a week that costs less than $30?

Pasta and rice. :v

[Losonti Tokash]

Is this like that time years ago one of our members said food stamps being entirely replaced by bread and water rations was reasonable?

[K. A. Pital]

First mistake you're making is going to the stores each day. Stock up on one trip. I go about twice a week on foot. When I lived with my parents, we'd use the wagon and only went about once every two weeks. Buying bigger also is going to be cheaper than getting individual things too.

Before lecturing me, D13, think about the size of my fucking micro-fridge in a tiny 25sqm rented apartment (which is anyway a good deal). That fridge is full all the time and you still have to go to the shop almost every day. I'm sure that when you live with your parents in a huge apartment or home with a big fridge my problems sound funny to you. I also don't have a car. Yep. Call me poor, if you will.

The cooking itself doesn't have to take that long either. My mother would spend closer to 30-45 minutes making dinner for everybody. When I do it for myself now, I usually spend closer to 15 minutes since I do much simpler meals.

Simpler meals (like frying stuff for 15 mins) usually means unhealthy. In mother Russia one learns that poorly prepared food is the source of digestive tract infections, which you don't want to have. So meat has to be cooked for an hour at the very least.

I can understand someone who works all day being too tired to make something, but the time taken isn't that bad.

I don't think you fully understand that cooking from raw primary products (using no half-prepared foods, e.g. frozen fries, etc.) does take a lot of time and a lot of effort, too. Potatoes (mashed or boiled or fried, regardless) as a side? Be prepared to clean off the skin with a knife. Then cut them up. Mushrooms? Wash, cut. Don't forget to carefully sanitize the washer after dealing with raw meat and wash it. Clean up any surfaces which got dirty. Wash the dishes. You don't do all that at a fast-food place. You just eat.

[Akhlut]

I can understand someone who works all day being too tired to make something, but the time taken isn't that bad.

I can't afford good cutlery, so I'm stuck with either the properly sized knife that has a blade not quite good enough for the job (ie, my ultra-budget "chef's knife" that is serrated like a steak knife and therefore not properly designed for cutting raw meat) or my knife's with good blades that are too small. This means that cutting meats and vegetables takes at least 30% longer than it ought to, sometimes up to 100% when I'm making a dinner to last for 3 days. And cutting a primal cut of meat? Well, shit, that's even more of a pain in the ass to deal with because I have to use improper knives to cut around bones.

Being poor also usually means renting out a place with an improper kitchen. For instance, the last three kitchens of the apartments/duplexes I've rented have all had almost no counter space whatsoever. This means it takes a lot more time than it should to make something because I keep having to move stuff around in order to simply make my family some goddamn dinner.

And the thing is, when I have gone around to check out other apartments in my price range, they all tend to have kitchens that are similarly designed. And I've noticed that when I cook at my mom's house, which has a far better designed and larger kitchen, that it is exponentially easier to cook a damn meal because it is a lot easier to set up things properly to cook.

So the poor are conspired against at all times with regards to food.

[Akhlut]

Is this like that time years ago one of our members said food stamps being entirely replaced by bread and water rations was reasonable?

If you can't live on carbs, canola oil, and cockroaches alone, well, fuck you. More self-discipline and pulling yourself up by your bootlaces, fellow capitalist.

[Losonti Tokash]

Yes, and when I was a kid I went through people's garbage containers looking for bottles and cans to turn in for the deposit money so we could buy food. I don't hold either of these to be desirable or acceptable ways for people to be forced to live. Expecting people to just live on pasta and rice is ridiculous.

[Akhlut]

BTW the average food stamp amount is $135 / month. That's about $35 / week. People make that work.

Most people make that work because they use food stamps in addition to regular cash money.