I can't find a specific source right now, but I remember reading that RFK's war on mRNA vaccines only applies the ones used for flu/Covid. They haven't gone after cancer vaccines.
He is, and he's publicly admitted to both mercury poisoning (which leads to cognitive impairments and potentially insanity) and having part of his brain eaten by a worm[1].
- Reduced demand on emergency rooms and other limited medical resources
- Decreased insurance claims, which are paid for by other patients in the form of premium increases
- Prevented burdens on taxpayers from illness or premature deaths of workers (welfare payments, orphanned children, lawsuits, etc.)
No one in a developed, Western society is an island. They borrow from society in childhood and pay society back as an adult. And they use common resources like drugs, hospitals, and (in the case of insurance) risk.
If we made everyone over 300lbs lose 100lbs, we’d also see those benefits.
Same if we limited the amount of cigarettes or alcohol people purchased.
Certainly the same if we enforced our drug laws around things like fentanyl (although ODing in a Waffle House parking lot at 32 might actually save the taxpayer some money in the long run).
> If we made everyone over 300lbs lose 100lbs, we’d also see those benefits.
> Same if we limited the amount of cigarettes or alcohol people purchased.
We already attempt to do these things through public health campaigns and laws against the purchase of cigarettes/alcohol by minors.
You're actually making my point for me, because public interventions to reduce smoking have saved tens of millions of lives and many billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
> Certainly the same if we enforced our drug laws around things like fentanyl (although ODing in a Waffle House parking lot at 32 might actually save the taxpayer some money in the long run).
In what universe is the US not trying to enforce laws around fentanyl?
Sure, and I'm saying that under that same justification, we should extend the same requirements to these other public health crises that President Biden tried to create for COVID vaccination.
Private sector business with 100 more employees? Nobody is allowed to smoke on premises because of the risk of second hand smoke, just like the OSHA justification for vaccination requirements.
>In what universe is the US not trying to enforce laws around fentanyl?
Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalizing heroin, methamphetamine, and fentanyl, only backtracking because the policy was so bad. California has Prop 47, knocking possession down to misdemeanors on par with jaywalking. New York has safe injection sites, and I'm going to guess this isn't for safe injection of insulin.
Your point being ? That we should not do anything unless we do everything with no exception (that's an absurd way to view things and not a counter argument whatsoever), or that those things should be done (which is probably true but doesn't change his point at all) ?
Funny how bodily autonomy is all that important when it comes to right wing fear of vaccines, but completely irrelevant when it comes to abortions, womens rights in general, sexual abuse, trans rights and generally rights of anyone disliked by this admin.
> any vaccine that predominately helps old people actually increases costs to society in the long run
I think that big difference between the political sides is that one of them does not see "kill all old people" as ethical strategy.
> ok for the government to take away peoples bodily autonomy, as long as it benefits the economy
No. That's a straw man and you know it. I'm against forced vaccinations. No one in the US was forced to be vaccinated.
However, most of the people against vaccination in the US are against abortion rights, so how could this debate really be about bodily autonomy? Forced birth is actually forced by the government, unlike vaccination programs. There is no situation where you could be put in jail for refusing a vaccine.
> No one in a developed, Western society is an island
And you know the anti-vaxxers know this because they also intersect heavily with the set who get very mad/judgemental about unemployed people or about people who don't eat well and exercise.
> After all, the appeal of biggest cities was always, at least to me, the availability of white collar, highly paid jobs
You are definitely unusual.
Since remote work became more common because of Covid, remote workers have moved within the same city or moved to smaller cities. Only 4% relocated to rural areas[1].
Cities are appealing to most people because they have entertainment, variety, walkability, and many other benefits that rural places don't provide. The urbanization of America isn't only because work has changed, but because people generally prefer urban or suburban living over rural living.
I don't think he's arguing for rural, just expressing concern about the *biggest* cities.
> entertainment, variety, walkability, and many other benefits that rural places don't provide
I appreciate all of this as well, but at the end of the day, I moved to a city with 80x the population of my hometown because of a (specific) job. Rent is also significantly higher, and if I had to consume my savings to survive here, I'd surely move out. Entertainment and walkability have secondary importance compared to putting food on the table and saving for retirement.
> ‘Smaller cities’ in the US are what most of the world calls ‘rural’.
What? No it's not. In the study I linked and also for most people's purposes, "smaller city" is something like Milwaukee or Pittsburgh, a place with an urban center, a real downtown, some skyscrapers, and probably a few corporate headquarters.
To somebody that lives rurally in the US, a town of 10,000 is where you go to get groceries. 100,000 gets you a movie theater and shopping. Pittsburgh? That's basically a megacity.
For the more rural states you need to take a zero off each of these numbers. A town of 1,000 in North Dakota would have shops, a town of 10,000, which would be the tenth most populous in the state, would have a cinema, and Fargo, with 250k people living in its vicinity? That's your megacity.
We were discussing your belief that everyone in the world has a city slicker inside struggling to get out.
The views of rural people can be disregarded in favor of the superior City Person viewpoints, since that's what we're all secretly striving to become. Before long there will be nobody living in the country at all, because why would anyone want that?
No more fresh air or clean water for me. Nope, I'm moving to some city somewhere so I can enjoy living in a 300 sq. ft. luxury apartment with a pet cockroach. The only people still living out in the countryside will be my backwards hillbilly cousins, like in Hunger Games.
Is this where you believe things are headed? Because we all want to be you so much?
I can find data that points out two trends right now.
1. Decentralized growth into exurbs and rural markets. This is further driven by USDA home loans into those markets, where people can not only afford to live but buy homes 90min or less away from a metropolitan area (but living outside the metro). This move into exurbs and rural markets is reversing a 40 year trend!
2. Movement from major top-5 us cities into smaller cities with a university or two (Knoxville, TN; Boise, ID; and Tulsa, OK are seeing the highest inbound-to-outbound ratios). Major cities like New York and Los Angeles are still seeing net domestic outflows in 2026.
In fact the Yankees, Californians, and city slickers of all sorts are FLOODING into the southeast USA, and have been since they suddenly decided all at once in 2020 this is where they need to be for some reason. I've never seen so many foreigner plates in my life here in Alabama. (New York, California, etc.) Between them and the half of Mexico/Guatemala who already lives here, it's getting pretty crowded out here in rural nowheresville these days.
At least I can be thankful it's not as crowded here as East Tennessee, North Carolina, etc are getting to be. Yet. The very bad reputation of Alabama among a certain crowd seems to keep more of those types away.
The big reason people were in the cities was because of jobs. When remote work happened, all those people were still making big city pay, but could now move and live in lower cost areas (with fresh air, less crowding, etc.).
They started working on humanoid robots because Musk always has to have the next moonshot, trillion-dollar idea to promise "in 3 years" to keep the stock price high.
As soon as Waymo's massive robotaxi lead became undeniable, he pivoted to from robotaxis to humanoid robots.
Apple has a tv service and Apple also has exclusive content, which they brand with “Apple TV”…so it’s kind of both.
Same for the other big streaming services. Some of them (Netflix, Prime Video) are more involved in content production, up to and including having production facilities and an in house staff. But a lot of the “exclusive” branded content is made by semi-independent production companies.
Literally every source (including the tobacco companies themselves, who have been cowed by legal pressure) say that no cigarette is safer than any other. It's the tobacco itself that's the problem.
This is the settlement that Natural American Spirit had to agree to because they couldn't provide evidence that additive-free cigarettes are any safer:
> It's likely safer but not meaningfully enough to make much difference, as it's still obviously very bad for you
There's no evidence that it's safer at all. Reynolds lost a big lawsuit over its American Spirit brand implying that their cigarettes are safer. If they could have provided evidence to the contrary, they would have.
I doubt it's likely at all. The thing that makes tobacco dangerous is high temperature combustion and nicotine. You get BOTH in natural tobacco.
The thousands of "chemicals" from cigarettes are not put in there. They come from combustion. Setting shit on fire makes chemicals turn into other chemicals, some of them very harmful. That's why many survivors of 9/11 later died from lung cancer.
> In pure form, nicotine is a colorless to yellowish, oily liquid that readily penetrates biological membranes and acts as a potent neurotoxin in insects, where it serves as a antiherbivore toxin.
The problem is when someone makes a profit from your use of that tobacco, especially if they aren't covering the enormous costs of your premature illness or death
What's your point? We regulated cigarettes and now they have a tiny fraction of their former customer base, saving millions of lives. These are solvable problems.
Regulated but did not ban and the trick is to keep the availability far enough above the profitability of the criminal enterprise versus demand and your law enforcement potential.
Which technically isn't hard because criminal enterprise is pretty damn inefficient!
Cigarretes are an interesting example. Its way more about general society attitude, without doing a full baning. And that's likely what we need for other stuff.
We litearlly can't ban everything that is bad in the large. That would simply be to many things.
More like banning was applied to advertising and indoor smoking in lots of places.
>without doing a full baning.
This is why it worked, as good as it did.
That was enough regulation of the prominent, growing hazard & risk, for the vast majority to experience how much better it was than before, and usage snowballed downward as much as it could.
reply