The part where sex is exchanged for another valuable.

Here's a free pro hint for next time: Read, comprehend, comment - in that order.

Still works that way, in a way.

When the government dramatically raised university feeds in my country, several commentators were half-jokingly commenting that politicians voted yes mostly in order to ensure a steady stream of young student prostitutes.

Money for sex usually also means money flowing from an older generation that had time to acquire it to a younger generation.

Yeah, it's a bit sad.

You just said it did, because when you break a leg, you get a temporary handicap placard.

Still my point remains. Even if you broke your leg yourself, you can't will it to heal and it will magically do so. But you can lose weight by behaving in the correct way (diet and excercise).

Or, in other words, it is your choice to remain in that state. I don't care how you got there, for all I know you could've been captured by a lunatic with a fat fetish and force-fed seven times a day for half a year.

I don't blame anyone for being fat. I do blame everyone who remains so. And that's the difference. I can't blame someone with one leg for not growing the missing one back. It's simply not within his powers to do so. Losing weight absolutely is within your power.

Those aren't "facts", those are idiocities.

The human body changes over time. You don't expect a 5 year old to eat and drink the same things as a 5 month old, do you? So why do you expect that the same diet for a lifetime will have the same effect all the time?

When you're 40, your body is not the same as it was when you were 20. You can see it in sports, if you're competitive it is very clear. In many sports you can still compete with the youngsters, because experience and training compensate for changes in biology, but I don't think anyone actually active will deny the basic fact that the body changes. So you need to change your training regime and your diet with it.

Change. It's really the most basic fact of the universe. Why is our brain so stupid that it treats the world as constant, when the only constant phenomenon in it is change?

And the fact that we make fatties comfortable, that the public agenda is "don't be ashamed of your body" instead of "get to the fucking gym you loser" is a primary reason, even if they nicely call it "social factors" in that research.

There's nothing new there. We've known for basically as long as nutritional studies as a field exists that the human body is designed to store away extra food, because it evolved in a time of scarcity and still thinks that the plenty won't last.

We've known for hundreds if not thousands of years that people who have enough food to eat constantly will put on weight. For hundreds of years being overweight was a status symbol.

However, it is very recent that the combination of constant food full of fat and sugar and a lifestyle with very little physical effort has allowed people to grow far beyond anything nature has ever imagined.

And it is just as simple that when natural pressure drops away, you have to do the work yourself, you need motivation and discipline and some information on the right food and sports.

No, I reject your conclusion and that research, for semantic terms. "It is quite hard" is very different from "not possible". Of course it's possible. Most people just lack the motivation, energy or discipline to do it.

And that's why we should work on the social factors, because in the short run, we can't change the biological ones. Shaming along is not enough. But imagine that - somehow - we turned society into a motivational factor, where people would tell you to not accept your body, but eat better and exercise more, with the right combination of shaming and positive feedback.

Wanna bet most fatties would not look like overfed elephants anymore?

That's true, and one of the reasons I avoid places where they allow smoking - I smell horribly when I come home and there's no way I can stand myself without a shower.

But there's a marked difference between a non-smoker whose cloths and hair picked up the smell and a smoker, who practically oozes it from every pore. It's true. I've stopped hooking up with smoking girls after I noticed that even if they hadn't had one for a whole day, I could still smell it coming from their skin.

Exactly. The 0.1% or so of fat people who are so because of a medical condition already have a medical diagnosis. They don't need a second one.

For almost everyone who is fat, the medically correct terminology for their condition is called "laziness". Not just to not excercise, but more importantly to not spend the effort on eating right, and on finding the right mix between diet and sports.

There's no excuse for being fat. If you are fat, it is because of choices you made and keep making every day.

The difference is that you can't put your leg back. You can lose weight.

Sign me up.

I own a small company. Very small, but I have hopes. If this ruling gets through, I'll make it inofficial company policy to not hire fat people, just like I'll never hire a smoker (and trust me smokers, we non-smokers smell it as soon as you enter the room, if you've had one in the past few hours).

I know that many small companies have reservations hiring women because if they get pregnant, you've lost 10% (or so) of your team. But at least that's something that is temporary.

So judges - yes, please, turn more people into liabilities. I've been on both sides of the fence, working for employee rights as well as on the employer side. Giving disadvantaged people special rights has one effect in the real world - pushing them further out and making them less desireable as employees.

So... thinking about it... yes, please make it a disability with all the special rights that come with it. That'll make sure fatties have a harder time finding a job, which just might provide motivation for some of them to finally get their life together.

While there are elements of a mild addiction, it's not a disease. It falls into the same category as, say, a shopping habbit, or a strong sex drive - things that you are quite capable of having under control, and some control can be expected from an adult.

At the most, yes.

99% of the cases, at the very least. There are one or two actual bodily malfunctions that cause obesity, but they are extremely rare.

I do agree with everything else you've said.

Yeah, obesity is a disease... affecting about 0.1% of the obese people. For everyone else, it's called not having your life under control.

We need to get back to a time where fat people are ridiculed in school, not accepted as the standard. But we need to add another message as well: That it's something you can fix. Eat right, exercise and you can stop being fat.

And that's why it is not a disease. Because people don't need medicine or treatment or anything, they just need to get their priorities right. Or not, frankly I don't care. Wait, I do care. Fatties are more expensive on the medical system, meaning I already pay for their lifestyle choice.

I have a very simple principle in life that has gotten me far: I don't feel pity for things that people do to themselves. Obesity falls into that category. Sure, if you grew up badly, thinking pizza and McD are normal food, blame your parents. But as soon as you're an adult, you can take care of yourself, you can learn to cook, you can do sports. Maybe it's tough, but that's life.

Hm, I already have full control over ads on Facebook. It's called AdBlock Edge.

I wasn't referring to that scheme in particular, because there are many such and I was referring to them in general.

Because once you're super-rich, the rules of the game change. From what I gather from friends working in various industries that serve the 0.01%, these people have more ways of hiding their money then you and I have of making money.

It's a PR stunt, nothing more. That, or design-by-manager, which is about twice as bad as design-by-committee, because with a committee, you have a small chance that there's someone on it who knows a thing or two.

That's an old thought, but won't work. The reason is that people who have these insane amounts of money don't need to draw it as income. They can purchase things with stocks they own, for example. They can keep it "invested". Your tax gain would be much less than you anticipate, and of course there would be some exceptions and loopholes and they would be abused.

If you want to return the world back to a different age where humans matter more than corporations, you have to tax the corporations high and the humans low, so that taking the money out of the corporations is the better way for the super-rich. Make it so that drawing that income is profitable to them, and re-investment happens not inside the corporate circle but through shareholders adding more capital.