I think you would be hard-pressed to find any human who has been 100 pounds overweight for any amount of time that doesn't have an obesity-related comorbidity.
Hypertension, sleep apnea, high cholesterol, etc are all common in the general population and exacerbated or even caused by the physical and lifestyle conditions that beget obesity.
A top "5 in the world" city is obviously an outlier.
It seems self-evident that simply turning off street lights in the vast majority of cities will not cause them to become world-leading bastions of calm and safety.
That's heavily dependent on regional/cultural factors. Among a younger and (mostly) gayer demographic, the once-feared "C-word" is very commonly used, especially in its adjective form.
Physics is the poster child of a discipline that knows its foundations are wrong. Basically every physicist understands that our current theories are full of holes and a new way of thinking is needed. So I don't really buy the idea that physics in particular is stifled by a rigid adherence to the status quo.
The charitable version of this is that to reconcile all the holes, we in fact need radically new and different mathematical underpinnings that aren't currently on the horizon. I don't know how that could be true; certainly any new foundation would have to reduce to something very like the current theories under already-studied conditions. If it is, though, we might be on a really big local maximum, and the path off of it might look really weird and nonsensical for a long time (which is why I can't quite bring myself to fully dismiss Stephen Wolfram, for instance :D).
> Many democratic countries have similar fundamental laws that are explicitly hard to change or bypass.
What exactly constitutes "hard to change"? In many countries, fundamental freedoms are regular legislation which can be overturned in the usual manner. Even a threshold of 2/3 or 3/4 to change is much easier to overcome than the federated constitutional amendment process in the US.
There are also countries that have a constitution that cannot be overturned like a regular legislation. It's not like the US is the only place that has it that way.
Right, I didn't mean to imply it was a US-only phenomenon -- plenty of countries have fundamental rights enshrined in their constitutions, with varying degrees of difficulty to amend. I was specifically responding to the claim about countries that instead have "hard to change" laws, since laws are typically much easier to repeal than constitutions.
> Even a threshold of 2/3 or 3/4 to change is much easier to overcome than the federated constitutional amendment process in the US.
This can go either way. If you can agree 3/4 of state legislatures to agree on an amendment, you can successfully ratify it (via convention if needed if Congress isn't amenable). But 3/4 of state legislatures can represent small states - so much so that it's possible to amend the US Constitution though legislatures that are nominally representing less than 25% of the country (and in practice even less than that when you consider the effects of FPTP).
I don't follow your objection. Banning books on sexuality from public schools threatens sexual education in those same schools. That is true even if individual parents can purchase such books for their children on the open market.
The point of universal education is to provide for all students, _especially_ those whose parents are unwilling or unable to provide a quality education independently.
The point is that decisions made by schools about which books they use or not are not equal to legally enforceable book bans for the general public. The article commingles these two ideas. That is the objection.
The snippet you quoted does not support that objection, though. It is clear from context that the "book bans" referred to are in the realm of public education.
Hypertension, sleep apnea, high cholesterol, etc are all common in the general population and exacerbated or even caused by the physical and lifestyle conditions that beget obesity.
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