The author dilutes and weakens his argument by bringing up obesity. Whether a 80kg person is 40% fat or 10% fat doesn't matter; the central point is that a person who weighs more, consumes more, and thus ought to pay more. I wish he stuck more to that point instead of running off on the tangent about health and the environment.
Friends with whom I discuss this proposal often say that many obese people cannot help being overweight – they just have a different metabolism from the rest of us.
To expand on the author's take on why this argument is weak, take for example nearsighted people. Nearsightedness is partly hereditary; similar to obesity, it can be exacerbated by certain choices, but some people are just bound to be nearsighted. Nearsightedness means paying for glasses (at least the deductible) and often paying a huge premium for sunglasses. Simply put: life isn't fair, and people are already paying different expenses just because of conditions they were born with.
Tony Webber, a former chief economist for the Australian airline Qantas, has pointed out that, since 2000, the average weight of adult passengers on its planes has increased by two kilos. For a large, modern aircraft like the Airbus A380, that means that an extra $472 of fuel has to be burned on a flight from Sydney to London.
That said, is such an initiative necessary, cost-saving, or beneficial to the customer? An Airbus A380 holds about 600 passengers. That comes out to about $0.75 per passenger per 2 kilograms.
A pretty average American man weights about 85kg. A very light American man (bottom 5%) weighs about 65kg. A very heavy American man (top 5%) weighs about 115kg. (Pulling data from this chart). This means that the lightest 5% of men would pay about $7.50 less for a Sydney-London flight than average, and the heaviest 5% of men would pay about $11.75 more. On a shorter, domestic flight like Chicago-NYC, those figures work out to maybe a $5 difference in ticket price between a 65kg man and a 115kg man - and that's not even counting in the extra costs associated with spending time on weighing passengers!
So with that taken into account, I don't think that this is the best idea. Maybe extremely heavy people who are literally spilling over into the seat next to them should be forced to purchase two seats or upgrade to a roomier first class seat, because it's not fair for the poor guy sitting next to him. But the weight-to-fuel-price argument seems to not be strong enough. Maybe it'll be worth revisiting if fuel prices climb significantly.
"Maybe extremely heavy people who are literally spilling over into the seat next to them should be forced to purchase two seats or upgrade to a roomier first class seat, because it's not fair for the poor guy sitting next to him."
This! Every time I fly I'm nervous to see who I'll be sitting next to. I'm already cramped in my seat and I really don't need somebody else's fat (I don't mean to be rude here) taking my space. Not to mention invading my personal space. And then there's the matter of hygiene or lack there of. Airlines should really be doing what you are suggesting here.
Your point about arguing on weight is a good one, but what about the argument for seat size? Often the argument against obesity on planes is that they require some of their neighbour's seat, which the neighbour has paid for.
Weight of its 467 passengers ex luggage, assuming 80kg average: 37.3 metric tons.
That 442 tons has to move as a whole regardless of how lean your diet is. So when you're paying for your flight ticket, extremely little of it is about moving the meat in your body. After all the overheads (salaries, fees, whatnot), whatever's left of the ticket that's paying for jet fuel has less than 10% of it spent on shifting your meat.
Extra luggage is more work for the airline - handlers, check-in staff, tracking, lost baggage recovery. It also means much longer queues resulting in poorer service for everyone. Extra meat weight is a trivial amount of work for the airline to deal with - it moves itself around and consumes the same resources as the 'little people'.
> less than 10% of it spent on shifting your meat.
where does that figure come from?
> Extra luggage is more work for the airline
Extra pieces: maybe. Excess weight: nope.
I've been charged up to E100 for 3kg of luggage overweight (23kg allowed, my suitcase had 26kg). That didn't make sense to me when I looked at the guy behind me in the queue, who easily had 40kg more than me on his hips.
It's the pricing structure that is completely out of proportion and that needs to be brought back to something reasonable.
Really? It's the first two lines of my comment, specifically spaced out to make it clearer.
As for the other issue, excess weight is easy to convince the public about, especially now that they're doing more of the 'please standardise your luggage' where individual pieces also get weight limits (as you found).
"Extra luggage is more work for the airline". Here's one scenario I came up with: a student from Australia does a high school year abroad to the US, joins the school football team, which places first in state that year. With a growth spurt plus putting on muscle weight that student ends up 15 pounds heavier on the return trip 10 months later.
Does the student have to pay more money at the gate in order to return home? If that student does not have the money, does the student have to leave luggage behind in order to make up for the weight? Will that be bad publicity for the airline?
Or the other way: suppose someone has a round-trip ticket from Australia to Maine to fulfill a dream of hiking part of the Appalachian trail. During the hike, that person loses 20 pounds. Does the airline reimburse the person for lost weight? And if so, is it in dollars or euro? If not, is this rightly seen as a penny grabbing method by the airliners?
If someone buys three bottles of wine at duty free (about 12 pounds) before flying back to Australia, will the gate agent charge them for the extra weight?
All-in-all, it seems like a bad idea for the airlines, and for relatively little money per flight.
Plus you have the bad publicity when people learn that they are being weighed for the flight. For many people, it's a touchy subject (like obesity or an eating disorder) that can turn traumatic pretty quickly.
This right here. Also, storage space for cargo is quite limited and packed full in comparison to the space used in the passenger cabin and you can easily and more safely accommodate 35kilos more "meat bags" than a couple of 35 kilo big, heavy suitcase that don't fit under the seat or into the overheads.
There is a lot of evidence that obesity is not hereditary/predetermined, but is a choice (or a consequence of a weak mind/bad incentives).
I was in Vietnam 5 years ago. I didn't see any fat people. Look at photos/documentaries of Africa. No fat people.
To take it to the extreme, there were no fat people in Auschwitz. That is not to say that it was good in any way and that people should starve, but just that it is not impossible to be normal for anyone, you just have to try.
>There is a lot of evidence that obesity is not hereditary/predetermined, but is a choice (or a consequence of a weak mind/bad incentives).
There is a lot of evidence that obesity is mostly hereditary/predetermined and not a choice. That's the great thing in this area of science: Everybody proofs everything all the time. No one's wiser.
> To take it to the extreme, there were no fat people in Auschwitz. That is not to say that it was good in any way and that people should starve, but just that it is not impossible to be normal for anyone, you just have to try.
So, you state that one can be lean by being forcefully starved (Auschwitz), then state that you don't think this is a good idea and then state "but it is not impossible to be normal for anyone" - well: You didn't provide an example for "normal". This people in Auschwitz were starving. Food-related diseases (and all other diseases) were on an all-time high. People were dying all the time. This is not an example of "normal", this is an example that the human body is able to withstand many, many forms of abuse until it breaks.
You would help this discussion if you were able to provide examples of big groups of obese people (there are always outliers) which were able to get lean without starving (starving is really, really bad for your body). Thanks.
edit: I've missed the part about Vietnam/Africa before. If you didn't see any fat people in Vietnam then you probably didn't look hard enough. I was there and I've seen them. Africa: Documentaries on Africa usually focus on the really poor parts of Africa. People starve there too, so: See above. (Also: There is the case of hunger obesity where you get really obese because or starvation. Try Google, but beware of shocking results)
Actually that's choice between eating cheap food and not eating at all. Food rich in carbohydrates is usually cheap and that's what majority of people eat - but for majority of people that means gained weight.
As well your examples are very weak and can be beaten in minutes using google:
You fail to account for the variables involved in "calories out".
Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left. A diet that significantly increases blood sugar will, in many people, cause a high insulin response and cause fat to be stored and only glucose to be burned.
Essentially you're looking at this from the wrong way. For the body to grow in any manner, hormones are required (c.f. growth hormones during puberty). And for the body to have grown, excess calories must have been consumed. What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not. See Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes, Insulin Resistance, etc.
So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place.
Disclaimer: I've been eating Low-Carb/High-Fat diet that brought my steadily worsening weight issue to a much more healthy level (91kg to 75kg) through control of my blood sugar and appetite.
>You fail to account for the variables involved in "calories out".
The study didn't fail to do so, so therefore I didn't.
>Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left.
This is a myth as far as western society is concerned. No one in western society not near-death from anorexia needs to concern themselves with this.
> What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not.
This is not true, you've been reading too much keto literature on leptin.
I say this as someone who is a proponent of low-carb diets as a way of promoting satiety and controlling caloric intake.
>So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place.
I have a whole team of nutritionists working with us, as well as my own personal experience and research, I've gathered quite a bit of experience.
Let me lay out a few things for you.
Low-carb works, anecdotally (key modifier here), because it happens to push people into eating almost no empty calories. In a diet simply absent bread, sugar, and other empty calories, virtually everything you eat is contributing your satiety as well as your overall health.
That alone will allow you to eat far less and feel fuller. Taking it that much further and saying that the entire leptin hypothesis along with the keto diet usually associated with it is somehow responsible for weight-loss when that loss could be explained purely in terms of eating healthier in general, is unscientific and unproven.
Control for people who don't eat empty/junk calories versus people who stay strictly keto, and we'll have a better idea of what impact blood sugar and leptin have on the matter.
I don't deny that insulin resistance has a long-term impact on health, but I sincerely doubt it has much, if anything, to do with short-term weight loss.
Sarcasm ? I mean I'm not saying that people crying about genetics and how they can't help it aren't just wining but AFAIK it matters very much what kind your diet consists of and how physically fit you are ie. carbs, insulin sensitivity and muscle mass are crucial factors, calories in/out seem waay to simplistic.
It is too simplistic - the human body has all sorts of hystereses in it, and doesn't work on a linear scale with calories. That being said, improving diet and using appropriate quantities is a fairly common solution - if people can stick to it, they'll generally be better off.
I'm 100% serious, the deviation between the highest and lowest metabolisms save for people with specific conditions like hypothyroidism is not a significant contributor to obesity.
What about insulin sensitivity and different sources of calories. Surely you aren't suggesting that eating a 1k calories of pure protein, pure carbs or pure fat is the same ? Even proiten/carbs/fat branch and have different effects on the metabolism and are required in different amounts for a balanced diet to achieve some desired effect. What about muscle mass vs fat tissue, they burn calories at different rates and require different kind of food to build.
Calories in/out is just extreme oversimplification that doesn't help in the slightest and causes people to starve themselves needlessly because of bad intuition, also risking their health and ultimately achieving the opposite of the desired effect.
Our product accounts for a great deal of factors, don't conflate my over-simplistic agreement with the OP for a lack of dedicated research into how we actually plan to help others.
Macronutrients and their impact on satiety are core to our product and to helping people eat healthier.
Do you have any info on your startup? I'm way, way overweight (somewhere around 380lbs) and currently attempting to get myself into a healthy lifestyle. Anything that makes that easier would definitely get my money.
Generally, yes, you are technically correct. What I hate about where this train of thought often leads is: it is not human, at all. It ultimately makes all fat people look like lazy, greedy and stupid slobs because hey, the answer is sooo simple and totally obvious, right? 100% calories in vs. out!
What you completely fail to realize is the squishy human part that makes a lot of people eat way too much and not move around enough. Food and food addiction (mild or heavy) can be very powerful escape mechanisms for underlying psychological problems and once you are caught in that downward spiral, it can be very difficult to find a way out of e.g. depressions AND on top of that shedding all that excess weight with potentially life-long damage already done to your tissue and skin.
With fat shaming being a very widely accepted form of discrimination, it will take a LOT of courage and strength to lift oneself out of that hole, so I don't find it that surprising that a lot of people can ultimately not change and they hardly get any sympathy or healthy, positive encouragement, quite on the contrary, a lot of additional toxic shame.
Humans are maladapted for western diets and western surplus, it's not my goal to assign blame but rather to help people get around the natural limitations of day to day life.
It's unreasonable to expect every human being to possess the knowledge of a nutritionist just to manage their own diets.
Hopefully the product I'm working on will level the playing field.
3: If there are multiple valid solutions to an exercise, list them. If some solutions are better than others, explain why. If there are solutions which are technically invalid but commonly thought up by new programmers, explain what they did wrong.
I would also add a forth point: "Overdoing the 'lol im not like those nerdy others programmers, im a regular normal person like you' rhetoric. Instead of mentioning an old cliche (and then trying to distance themselves from it), why not just not mention it at all?
