I’m wondering if California proves that humans have limited attention and shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. Public health nerds say that clean running water and vaccinated children are the only ways to move the needle on life expectancy. Californians spend more time thinking and talking about health than anyone else in the U.S. except possibly Manhattanites yet they are running out of both of these items.
What did Californians spend their energy on instead? They put signs in all of their restaurants warning patrons that microwave ovens were in use… just in time for the mobile phone revolution and nearly every Californian deciding to hold a microwave emitter up to his or her head. They required all furniture makers to inject upholstery and slather children’s products with fire retardant chemicals (story). Then they decided that these chemicals were toxic and, after four decades of debate, undid the law that had kicked off the nationwide chemical festival.
While draining their reservoirs and ground water, Californians fretted about hazards from gluten, genetically modified foods, childhood nut exposure (what could be worse than a nut rash?), plastic bottles containing BPA, etc. Then they wasted more time, energy, and mental attention reading articles debunking these concerns.
The US has had sanitation for a while now, while vaccination could stand better enforcement and free vaccines for poor children.
The single measure that would help life expectancy would be a crackdown on the excessive amounts of sugar added to practically every item in the American diet, including things like bread, soup, and so on.
As for water in California, there isn’t a real shortage, just overconsumption and inefficiency due to underpriced subsidized water for farmers distorting incentives.
I realize you didn’t intend to make a comprehensive list of all Californian idiocies but don’t forget Proposition 65.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303848104579308393984123358
http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_california-legislature.html
@Majid: It isn’t the farmers causing the water shortage. It’s that in the 1970s (when Governor Brown was governor for the first two times!) wealthy San Francisco and Los Angeles “greens” decided water projects were bad and stopped building them. California’s population has nearly doubled since then but instead of finding more water/bringing more in they deliberately let it flow to the sea to save the immensely important and terribly significant delta smelt, which played a major role in the initial building of California in the gold rush days and has had an honored place in the hearts of all Californians since. (Well, not really, the entire species is worthless actually and nobody would miss it if it was gone, but to the greens in California it was a handy way to kill progress and farming.)
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_california-drought.html
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/cjc0402vdh.html
I was in a grocery store recently in a less prosperous part of town. In front of me was a morbidly obese man. His purchases consisted entirely of things like ice cream, cookies and potato chips. He then added a couple of candy bars from the impulse buying display near the checkout. Then he paid for it all with his EBT card. Apparently, the Food Stamps program does not attempt to distinguish between actual food and stuff that is basically poison. I’m not saying that the poor should subsist only on rice and dried beans (though that would be a lot healthier than what this man was eating) but how hard would it be to impose a limit on certain categories (e.g. no more than 10% of the food stamp allowance could be spend on junk food) to keep people from killing themselves?
By the way, don’t forget that it was only 2 1/2 years ago that the brilliant green thinkers in San Francisco placed on the ballot a measure to get rid of Hetch Hetchy reservoir – San Francisco’s primary water source. In order to “restore it to nature”. Which would have been a sweet deal for some birds and bears in Yosemite National Park. But not so hot for people living in the San Francisco Bay area.
Fortunately, the ordinary citizens of San Francisco (and, it must be said, most of their politicians) weren’t as remarkably stupid as the greens, and they voted it down.
But, Phil, the idea that they were seriously considering blowing up the dam that blocks Hetch Hetchy and got that proposal on the ballot (!!) goes beyond “limited attention” and onto something much more malevolent. Do you agree?
I can’t wait for the all the idiots harping on about sugar to be shut up. It’s saturated fat all over again. Sugar is harmless, and often helpful.
People get fat and have health problems because they over-eat. People eat something like 300 more calories a day than they did 40 years ago. That’s pretty much the end of the story. Exercise doesn’t even enter into it.
How about the petition going around that is trying to stop California’s bottled water companies?
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/13/3646220/nestles-ups-and-downs-in-california-and-oregon/
After all bottled water accounts for accounts for something like .002% of California’s water usage
I don’t consider myself a “green” but I’m quite disturbed by the sentiment in David-2’s first comment. To paraphrase: “Humans used to get some direct benefit from delta smelt but we no longer do, so now they’re worthless and can all die because no human will miss them.” Do you have to be a “green” to believe that we shouldn’t destroy entire species for our convenience?
Toby, do you believe that the needs of the delta smelt should outweigh the needs of millions of Californians or do only the needs of the smelt count?
Perhaps if Californians didn’t want to increase their water needs, they should have tried to enforce the border better and prevented millions of people from moving north. But I’d bet that the same people who favor saving the smelt also favor the admission of “undocumented” (i.e. illegal) aliens, but they fail to see the contradiction. Oh well, let’s just ban bottled water and all will be well.
Toby –
What if the species is the Polio virus?
Sam
@sammysamsam, if you knew how your liver metabolizes sugar, then you would know that sugar, when consumed without necessary amounts of fiber, directly triggers fat cell production. It is by this process that most fat is produced by the body. Lack of fiber in a diet is key to understanding fat production! Observe any fat person’s diet and you will notice two things, lots of sugars and low, or non-existent, fiber consumption. So although sugar is not inherently bad, it is detrimental when consumed above the energy demands of your body, and especially so when fiber is lacking.