Your use of the "pretend ostrich" as an endgame tactic would've been more believable had you not been so obsessive earlier.

Why? I said "the smallest candidate get 100 parts of the money".

So childish. We both know I'm right, and that's good enough for me. I won't do a back-and-forth of "you lie, no you".

I think you did read - you're way to obsessive not to. I know my argumentation is effective when you aren't able to make a stand. You dish out abuse over me being insensitive to the poor, and then when I point out how that's all a figment of your imagination, you flee to safe ground by abusing me for not providing proof in the manner you demand (essentially you ask for the fallacy of "appeal to authority"), and when I answer that, you switch back again.

No surprise, really. Your combination of being abusive, wrong and dishonest can't ever prevail against calm, correct and honest opposition. The best you can hope for is getting the last word in before this thread is archived.

Btw, I mentioned my main takeaway from this thread earlier. The biggest laugh, however, was when you implied that you were big fish in this pond. You're a moderately good flame warrior, but you have issues that will prevent you from ever being great.

It would be easier to get that going when we really have confirmed a planet with life on it, so I propose we start with that.

I'd like to see crowdfunding of research like planet-finding. Let's say 100 million people give $1/month for planet-finding. Every month, the money is distributed according to these rules:
- All money is distributed within the highest category of planets that has any confirmed planets in it.
-The money is divided among the 100 smallest (radius) candidates (promoting resolution) with the smallest candidate getting 100 parts of the money, the next smallest 99 parts, and the last 1 part. (5050 parts in all, the smallest one gets almost $2 million per month).

Categories could be something like:
- any planet at all
- and around a star with suitable spectral class (F to mid-K) with low variability
- and within the habitable zone
- and directly imaged
- and whose images show surface- or atmospheric features or moons.
- and whose images show show signs of life (ie. green-blue or something).
- and has some kind of signs of intelligent life

Hopefully, this would create enough incentives to improve planet finding and imaging tech. (The Kepler life-cycle cost is estimated to a mere $600 million for 3.5 years, or $14 million per month.)

Of course, problems to be considered is confirmation of findings and false positives, and also how to create enough stability in crowd-funding. However, with a global GDP of some $60 trillion, it is a bit sad that most basic research in fusion/fission, astronomy, medicine and so on is based either on patent rights or on involuntary tax-based funding, and only some 2% of GDP in total. Crowd-funding should be able to supplant this to a great degree, if someone created a good enough system for it.

Now you lie, blatantly. I answered "sure, buy some carrots as well". I didn't say that nothing else is needed. The diet was intended as a base that would need little extra to close micro-nutrient gaps. I've told you so repeatedly, but you refuse to listen.

They obviously pick food as one of two, since else they'd die. Now if they pick M&C and french fries, as you suggested, instead of a rice based diet with some additions, then they don't do that for economic reasons. Why, then? One issue is how our evolutionary history set us up with regard to preferences of sweet and fat foods. Another issue is culture.

For me, the topic was your claim that poor people can't eat healthy food since it is too expensive. I think such falsehoods are destructive, and so I corrected it.

I think that focus is yours more than it is mine. I simply provided it as a counter-example to your false statement. You treat my example as were it normative for poor people - it isn't. Nowhere have I said poor people should eat that diet, and nowhere have I said they should be ashamed they don't.

Yes, I see that's where you're coming from, and what blinds you in this discussion. You hate people that have a specific attitude towards poor people, and then you make some kind of logical fallacy by assuming that anyone who contradicts you in your claims about the necessity of poor people's choices have that attitude. You simply trigger swiftly, jump to conclusions, and then you refuse to let go of them.

Sure, but don't you take the victim-of-circumstance thing a bit too far? If you say poor people can't help it and they need to eat crap and become obese, haven't you created a self-fulfilling prophesy? In reality, the likelihood of becoming or staying poor varies wildly with attitudes, culture and knowledge.

Tell me, how could I have told you that you were wrong about poor people not having the option of a healthy diet, without providing an example and thus have you go ape-shit? How should I have sugar-coated it?

Again, I point out that your idea of food-or-medicine is irrelevant, since healthy food isn't more expensive and so doesn't preclude medicine purchases any more than crap food does. And, of course, lots of medicine is used to fix symptoms of bad diets, smoking and alcohol use.

My priority is promoting correct information, and what we are talking about is you being wrong about the affordability of healthy diets. Have you seen the xkcd comic "somebody is wrong on the Internet"? That's me, while you're an irrational crusader that prefers falsehoods to admitting something that, in a later association step, could lead to someone thinking poor people should be ashamed of themselves.

If nutritional economics were trivial, I guess you wouldn't keep being wrong about it?

You seem to know a lot about trolling... My main take-away from this discussion is what I learned when I looked into minimalistic diets as a linear programming problem in preparation for one of my earlier comments. What's your take-away?

Thanks, I was a bit surprised that anyone else read this subthread. I think Barbara's rather, well, narrow perspective on how a discussion should be conducted made us lose sight of the big picture, and you lead us back to it. We seem to agree that there is no economic reason for people to have unhealthy diets, contrary to Barbara's original claims.

And yes, my intention was to supplement the diet with some cheap veggies to close any micronutrient gaps. But it was also the case that I got a bit caught up in the idea of how to construct a minimal healthy diet as a sort of linear programming problem. I did the math and now I know the idea holds water.

If you want to stop, then that's fine with me. I've done the maths and have proven my estimate to myself, and I've managed to abstain from going along with your attempts to reduce this to an insults-only shouting game, so I'm fairly pleased at where we're at. I can lead a horse to the water, and so on. Merry Christmas to you!

Did you, I must have missed that? I anticipate another deadlock: I propose we should do the math and compare with the RDAs, and you propose we should battle it out with appeals to authority (that are unlikely to have researched boorish minimalist diets). We won't agree on this, right?

These things aren't made in a vacuum. Their creators know people aren't going to go for very tedious designed diets, so they try to make nice rules of thumb that will allow people to eat some junk and empty calories, and some of this and some of that, but despite this get a complete diet without too much thinking.

Then show me the deficiency and unhealthiness. You can't back up your claims with facts, can you? (I'll try to get the time to post some numbers later.)

You're getting quite obsessive, you know, and you diverge further and further from a fruitful discussion on nutrition and costs - not that you ever seemed very interested in that. For the record, I fully stand by that quote on the American auto industry and the economic crisis. If you feel it is trollish, that's your problem.

Ah, that's the eight time. You are beginning to show some autistic traits here. You simply can't accept that there's another valid point of view, and you can't let it go, can you?

Please go ahead. (Btw, poor people have no different nutritional needs than other people, so let's make that "all that a person needs to live on".)

I see that your main interest lies in these kinds of judgements. Me, I don't care about that aspect. But I think you might be surprised at who would be labeled a SOB.

(Is this the seventh time?) There was a point in providing costs for two different types of packaging. (And again, it

Or milk.

Then explain what would kill you with the diet I proposed. (Shall we do a complete RDA listing to see if there are any deficiencies in my diet? You do one, I do one, and then we compare?)

Again, a carrot.

I never have.

Which, again, is wrong, since you can build a healthy diet very cheaply. Yes, it's less dull to have a healthy diet if you throw money at it because the money allows for tastier choices and more variety.

If they can afford to eat at all, they can afford to eat my healthy variety.

Upgrade your reading comprehension, please. I skip the rest of your medical tirade since it is based on your sloppy reading or intentional misreading.

I don't say that. I say that everybody needs to eat, or death will ensue. And you could just as well eat healthy food, since it is as cheap. This makes medical costs irrelevant to this argument.

Again, irrelevant, for the same reason.

Again and again, you say poor people can't do it for economical reasons. Again and again, you're wrong.

Yes, and you've always been wrong. My suggestion for a fruitful discussion is that you open up for delving deeper into this subject instead of trying to portray me as mean. How about it?

Don't know how I managed to post that anonymously.