[flatTheCurve]

One day coffee/caffeine (and alcohol) culture will be heavier scrutinized. Similar to nicotine.

My caffeine addiction has caused gastrointestinal problems and I can't stay off the drug. (This is already acknowledged scientifically)

But as long as authority figures consume caffeine, they will justify it.

[isoprophlex]

If you always make your own coffee at home:

- pick a number of cups you may drink each day, say four.

- brew your own coffee with a drip infuser, from ground coffee.

- get a container to hold, say, 90:10 caffeinated:decaf coffee grounds. After four days, move to 80:20. Etc.

Don't exceed your daily limit. You'll be cured in ~ a month. You can do it.

[nsl73]

That’s a method on how to get off caffeine. Staying off caffeine is something different.

The phenomenon of returning to an addictive substance is known colloquially as “relapse”

[noizejoy]

I’m genuinely happy for you, that you’ve figured out, that coffee was bad for you and that you were able to overcome using it.

However I also think it’s being unkind to your fellow humans, who’s metabolism may tolerate or even benefit from coffee (or whatever other substance) to extrapolate from your experience to our entire species.

And it seems maybe we’re not the only animals enjoying stimulants [0].

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=drug+use+in+animals+in+the+wild

[lhuser123]

I like these kind of comments. For some reason, in most discussions, We fail to address the fact that we all don’t react similarly to foods, drugs, etc.

[colechristensen]

You need somebody to ban it to make your own choices?

[badfrog]

> You need somebody to ban it to make your own choices?

It shouldn't be surprising that some people think that. Most people still feel that way about most narcotics.

[Ididntdothis]

I can’t see anything about a ban.

[colechristensen]

Plenty of people choose not to consume caffeine, they just don't make an issue of it, which is as it should be. Your personal choices don't have to be a cause.

[Ididntdothis]

To me the post sounded like there should be scrutiny of caffeine consumption as there was scrutiny of alcohol and nicotine. And I tend to agree with that. It’s a psychoactive substance that causes physical addiction so people should know the facts.

[colechristensen]

There aren't interest groups buying ad time for scaremongering or people beating the drum for moral superiority about the evils of caffeine... no. But energy drinks have gotten a bit of a bad wrap, and four loko with the caffeine and alcohol got banned... and if you have a heart condition or anxiety your doctor is going to advise you to lay off the coffee. Isn't that enough?

Or does it have to become a social evil for it to count?

[livre]

I think it's implied in:

>But as long as authority figures consume caffeine, they will justify it.

I may be wrong though.

[__blockcipher__]

I hope this comment of mine isn’t considered too low-quality, but is it any surprise that someone whose name is “flatTheCurve” would advocate compulsion over personal responsibility? :P

(And to avoid misinterpretation here, the original intent of flattening the curve to avoid hospital overrun I was fully behind. Now that we have more data, I find the people shrieking at their fellow citizens for going to the beach or public parks and demanding that they be prohibited from doing so to be detestable)

[thomaslord]

Interestingly, you've decided to conflate two completely unrelated situations here! I can only guess at whether this is due to spending insufficient energy analyzing the situation, or simply motivated reasoning.

Either way, it's important to recognize here that drinking coffee is a personal decision with personal consequences. Social distancing during a global pandemic has some personal consequences, but the majority of effects are on society (e.g. other people). By drinking coffee, flatTheCurve does no harm to people they come into contact with. By going into public, a hypothetical citizen exposes everyone they come into contact with to increased risk of infection. With infection comes risk of hospitalization, lifelong debilitating conditions (specifically permanent lung damage and strokes), and even death.

Going out in public for non-life-sustaining reasons during a global pandemic is more similar to tying your grandmother to a chair and forcing her to play Russian roulette than it is to drinking coffee.

[__blockcipher__]

Just curious, where do you draw the line on this reasoning? For example, would you feel the same way during a particularly bad flu season that did not have a novel virus like we are faced with currently?

Just trying to get a read to know how to best respond. Everything we do in society carries risks, particularly of spreading infection (influenza, meningitis, staph, strep etc), and generally historically we have not taken such a hard-line stance. Was that historic stance actually mistaken, and we should have always enacted these measures, or do you believe that this sars-cov-2 outbreak is such a different beast that it’s warranted now but wasn’t warranted previously?

BTW I agree drinking coffee is different in that the risk is entirely personal. I just wonder why we don’t view exposure to pathogens by venturing out into society through the same lens.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. And again as I told the other commenter I should not have posted my comment since I should have known it would just derail the discussion, but I am hopeful that our discussion and others might actually make it retroactively “worth it” if that makes sense.

[scubbo]

Can you elaborate on what data has led you to believe that socializing during a pandemic isn't contemptible and selfish?

[__blockcipher__]

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=22961835&goto=threads%...

See my previous comment here, that is a good starting point for my position. Happy to answer any questions. (BTW I made a statement in that post that covid is an order of magnitude less deadly than the flu for those under 30, I no longer stand by that statement because it’s been hard to get age-stratified influenza IFR data as well as the uncertainty of covid-related mortality data. I still think the statement is true for <18 due to the varying risk distributions that I explained in that post)

—

Incidentally, I should have listened to my gut and not posted in this thread originally since I fear I might be derailing this discussion. So, I’m sorry for that. But for now I don’t think deleting my comment in this thread is a good idea at this point since we might end up having a useful discussion.

[scubbo]

I must admit, this was a much more cogent and well-reasoned argument than I expected to receive - and, in fact, the only argument more coherent than "but muh freedoms/portfolio!" that I've heard in favour of ending quarantine orders. Thank you for that - and I apologise for prejudging you.

If I could summarize your argument, it appears to be that "a large segment of the population are at low-risk from infection, and unemployment (which quarantine often causes) and isolation have a larger negative impact on mental health"? That certainly hangs together.

The filthy European socialist in me naturally responds "Great, so have the government actually do its job and provide UBI or some other form of financial support, and permit going outside so long as safe distances are maintained, and you've solved a large chunk of the latter problems while still minimizing infections" - but I know that that's sadly unlikely.

[__blockcipher__]

> The filthy European socialist in me naturally responds "Great, so have the government actually do its job and provide UBI or some other form of financial support, and permit going outside so long as safe distances are maintained, and you've solved a large chunk of the latter problems while still minimizing infections" - but I know that that's sadly unlikely.

Haha, exactly that. I have issues with the ethics of the government "manufacturing" a problem and then riding in to solve it, even though I personally support UBI, so I'm against rolling it out under these conditions. But more broadly, echoing what you said, we know at least in the US that the government would completely fuck it up.

> If I could summarize your argument, it appears to be that "a large segment of the population are at low-risk from infection, and unemployment (which quarantine often causes) and isolation have a larger negative impact on mental health"? That certainly hangs together.

Exactly that. In particular I've been talking a lot about suicides and overdoses but the next thread for me to pull on is the mortality due to social isolation itself. We know that social isolation is heavily correlated with worsened outcomes for pretty much every disease, but it's probably hard to find research putting a number on it.

But anyway, I really do think the important point to decide on is basically: "Is containment feasible?". If it is, then theoretically lockdown _could_ be worth it, although I oppose it on constitutional and ethical grounds to such an extent that I would never support it for anything short of the zombie apocalypse.

If containment is not feasible, which I think in the US is a totally foregone conclusion, then nothing we're doing is decreasing covid mortality at all. So all we're doing is introducing a net new category of lockdown-related mortality , which as I've said previously is actually nnot a big overlap with the covid mortality since a huge chunk of those dying from covid aren't in the workforce or will only be in the workforce for a few more years anyway.

BTW, not sure if you've seen the Dr Erickson / Dr Massihi video floating around (the one that Youtube has just censored), but I think it's really worth watching. They absolutely butchered the statistics, making a ton of imprecise and/or outright wrong statements, yet everything else they say about immunology and social isolation is entirely valid. And it's really that whole philosophy that we need people to understand: hiding inside, preventing exposure to pathogens, these are things that decrease our ability to defeat infection.

[joefourier]

Caffeine is incredibly benign compared to alcohol and nicotine, and so far research has shown that it may actually be a net positive in moderate amounts in terms of cardiovascular health.

If you're worried about gastrointestinal problems, you can switch to tea. Much less acidic and harsh on the stomach, and some varieties have enough l-theanine to counter the negative effects of caffeine. If you're worried about the caffeine content not being concentrated enough, you can even drink matcha, which typically has more caffeine per ml than American filtered coffee.

[toomanybeersies]

Nicotine is also fairly benign, it's tobacco (especially smoking it) that's bad for you.

Chewing nicotine gum or using patches can give you the focus and clarity that smoking or vaping does without filling your lungs with shit.