[CalRobert]

I agree with you, but people shouldn't really have to put in the effort to change diet or exercise or lifestyle habits. But the environment that produces those habits SHOULD change.

I lost a bunch of weight when I moved to Dublin and started walking everywhere. Then I moved to the Netherlands and lost even more, and got stronger. I didn't particularly try, I just lived somewhere where I used my own body to get around and the "normal" portion sizes were actually somewhat sane (a bag of Doritos here is maybe a third the size of one in the US).

I was 280 pounds when I lived in suburban California. I'm 180 pounds now.

Build bike lanes and public transport, put schools where kids can walk to them, and maybe don't sell a thousand calories of chips in a personal-sized and marketed bag, and it should get better.

As an added bonus you get a lot less air pollution (and noise pollution, etc.) and less people being run over!

[stavros]

Sure, but if I'm overweight and unhealthy now, taking medication is a better bet for weight loss than lobbying for rezoning my entire city.

[vincnetas]

why not do both. But yes, after taking a pill it's very easy to forget about the need to improve environment. Until you need to take another pill again, and again...

[philistine]

It's literally the point of Brave New World. The whole populace is hooked on beneficial drugs so they don't want to improve themselves and their society.

[toomuchtodo]

Would you feel differently if instead of being hooked on drugs, we deployed gene therapy at scale to patch the dysfunctional pathways Western society and economies have taken advantage of? What if patching the genome is helping people so that they have capacity to contribute more to improving society? Consider not only the metabolic changes a GLP-1 agonist encourages (a vaccine against Western diet, if you will), but also inhibits addiction.

GLP-1 pharma intervention is breadboarding the human, next step is a permanent fix. Adversarial bioengineering, if you will.

[philistine]

Then you get into Iain Banks' The Culture where every citizen is basically an artificial creation. I have no problem with any specific solution to our societal problems, I take issue with their externalities.

Regarding your proposed gene therapy, would this gene therapy be available to anyone? Could it be refused? Is it reversible? Who would pay for it? The beauty of The Culture is that it is not monolithic, has no border, has godlike AI that takes care of all the problems, and can be abandoned or joined by anyone.

[toomuchtodo]

I think we are quite a bit away from that future, but I can understand the concern and moral hazard, the future is hard to predict. In the near term, if we can fix this specific reward and metabolic pathway with gene therapy, the therapy is safe, and can be made broadly available, I think it should be done.

[stavros]

I think the cost of the pill is a pretty strong incentive to want to stop taking it. If the pill is cheap and harmless, then that's just great, there's no need to spend effort improving your environment at all, you've solved the problem already.

[hollerith]

>you get a lot less air pollution

I know what you meant, but according to a comment here once, European city streets actually have worse air pollution than US ones because Europe went hard for diesel engines (to reduce CO2 emissions) for its cars, and diesel produces a lot of very small carbon particles, which turned out to be more harmful than most people suspected back when the diesel decision was made.

[twiss]

Amsterdam has banned most diesel vehicles [1], so at least this is not universally true (anymore).

[1]: https://www.amsterdam.nl/en/traffic-transport/low-emission-z...

[CalRobert]

Indeed, and I’m worried about the same old mistakes being made with EV’s. They produce lots of tyre particulates thanks to being so heavy, which then get in to our brains.

Of course, Volkswagen lying about their diesels and killing people in the aggregate didn’t help.

What we need is car-free or low-car cities, not just different cars.

[bryanlarsen]

Due to it being a common anti-EV talking point, tire longevity has been a strong selling point for EV tires. Longer lasting tires produce less particulates, so this natural pressure should also produce fewer particulates.

Popular EV's aren't significantly heavier than ICE vehicles. A Tesla model 3 and a BMW model 3 are both about 3500 pounds. Range is a huge selling feature for EV's and weight has a significant impact on range, so there is strong evolutionary pressure to lighten EV's. Crappy EV's like the Hummer are heavy; but popular EV's like Tesla's and Hyundai's have weight comparable to normal cars so that they can have impressive ranges without too many expensive and heavy batteries.

EV's increased tire wire is due to their massive torque at low range. If you want your tires to last, just don't drive like a hooligan. We got 70,000 km out of our first set of EV tires.

Tire particulates are an "all cars a bad" issue. EV's are not significantly worse than petrol vehicles vis a vis tire particulates. Their lack of exhaust particulates means that an EV produces about ~half the total number of particulates.

[CalRobert]

Well this was interesting to me, thanks for sharing. Looking at https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/do-no-harm it looks dependent on what you're optimizing for (and not driving like a hooligan helps, hard acceleration and braking wears tires more).

Even so, I still find that the fewer cars there are, the easier it is for me (and my kids) to walk and bike places safely, helping us be healthier (and not reliant on drugs like Ozempic) which was the real point of my comment.

[bryanlarsen]

That is a very strange article. The Model 3 and Niro are not comparable cars, the Model 3 is much larger and much more powerful.

[thefz]

> but people shouldn't really have to put in the effort to change diet or exercise or lifestyle habits

Everyone is directly responsible for their own health and nobody else is. The insanity of this statement is baffling.

[Earw0rm]

The logic of public health and product design applied to urban/spatial planning basically. And, unsurprisingly, it works wonders.

[CalRobert]

And it’s a happier, less lonely life!