[inglor_cz]

Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.

BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.

[nkrisc]

> Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You have to dig a little deeper with your numbers, because everyone is going to die from something. Deaths from cancer would probably go down without modern medicine because most people wouldn’t be living long enough to die from cancer.

[inglor_cz]

GP seems to prefer the 1960s, which would mean that the "not living enough to die from cancer" would likely be off the table.

[toasty228]

And how many people suffer/die from obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle disease (lookup the main causes of deaths in the US, and their causes) ? All I'm saying is that there is a middle ground between "living in huts made of cow dung and dying at 35" and "75% of your population is obese and die from literal over consumption and lack of physical activity"

> but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.

Trump was elected twice, the voters are brain dead cattle anyways

> BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago

At what scale? People could go to the US in 1700 too, it doesn't mean that commercial airlines are sustainable at ANY rate

[inglor_cz]

At scale lucrative enough to stage coups in Latin America. Read up upon this.

Let us not even go deeper to the Age of Sail. Large-scale trade and consumption of sugar, tobacco and cotton fueled slavery operations from Virginia down to Brazil, long before a lightbulb was even a thing.

[Windchaser]

I mean, the better point there would be "we could scale back on our cost of living, if we wanted to". That is what I figured the "we don't have to ship fruit around the world" was trying to get at, even if bananas are actually pretty cost-effective. (Still usually the cheapest fruit in $/lb)