Actually the good news is further down the article. Due to removal of checkpoints where a bribe had to be paid, the daily produce is now much cheaper. Also fear of being raided is gone.
You can make jokes on sugar or cancer, but this is life changing and how positive is to the people there.
jimt1234 23 days ago [-]
I would think that most people view this as positive, but not without downsides. For example, I've been traveling to China (from the US) since the late-90's, when the economy in China had just started to open up. The effects from that hadn't really impacted most people yet; most people were still pretty poor. Back then, obesity was unheard of. Telling someone they looked "fat" was a compliment, meaning you could afford to eat. Since then, over the years, China got flooded with Western-style junk food, like Pepsi/Coke, KFC, McDonalds, and so on. And now, obesity is an actual thing in China, not the same level as the US, but the fact that 25 years ago it didn't even exist, and now it's becoming a public health issue - well, I think that's what most people are making jokes about, the inevitable and unfortunate consequences that never seem to get attention.
dralley 23 days ago [-]
Ask the average Chinese person whether life was better for them in the late 90s or the late 2010s.
I'm pretty sure the rates of hunger and malnutrition dropped significantly over that timeframe. I have no doubts that obesity is higher now, but also a lot less people are starving.
hulitu 22 days ago [-]
> I'm pretty sure the rates of hunger and malnutrition dropped significantly over that timeframe.
Being fat does not mean being sat or good fed.
JumpCrisscross 23 days ago [-]
> Since then, over the years, China got flooded with Western-style junk food, like Pepsi/Coke, KFC, McDonalds, and so on. And now, obesity is an actual thing in China
China also got rich in that time. Do we have counterfactuals with which to disentangle Western food from wealth?
cadamsdotcom 23 days ago [-]
This is a valid point but lacks proportionality.
If some high% of people have a life improvement, a smaller % don’t, and an even smaller % end up obese.. that’s an overall improvement - even though some lives are worse than they’d have been without the “improvement”.
Of course if the majority became obese or otherwise became worse off, that’s a bad thing overall. But from what is reported it sounds like opening the Chinese economy has been net good, ie. good for most people.
In both situations one obesity case is too many. But it needs to be proportionally considered alongside the benefit it hitched a ride with and never in isolation.
It takes having numbers to know how much weight (sic) to place on that counterpoint of “some obesity happened”.
badRNG 23 days ago [-]
I'd rather worry about eating too many Calories than too few.
mort96 23 days ago [-]
Yeah why is this news obscured by a joke/disingenuous title about soda and snacks? Is the Pepsi angle really the most important here?
And thanks to their subscription wall, the nonsense title is the only thing I get to read...
ahwelitif 23 days ago [-]
I am ethnically Syrian. The Syrian people are feeling the first glimmers of hope and happiness in 50 years. People are still starving and without food and water, but they have hope again. If you are American or European, please reach out to your local representatives to ask for their easement of anti-Assad sanctions so that Syrians like the ones you see here can finally start to rebuild.
One of the first things I noticed when I started traveling internationally was that Pringles had penetrated all the way down to the smallest ramshackle closet-sized store in the boonies in Thailand. Good business if you can get it I guess.
segasaturn 23 days ago [-]
Functionally it makes sense. Pringles chips being in a can instead of a bag means the chips can travel farther without being damaged or broken.
shagie 23 days ago [-]
They're also low pressure inside. This makes it possible to take them to otherwise difficult places.
> The second time—they struggled with potato chips. You see, they had packed regular potato chips in small bags, like Lays. It turns out when you’re at 15,000 feet, the air pressure makes the bags (and the chips) explode. Just picture climbing one difficult step at a time, in freezing weather, under the most treacherous of conditions, and having little bombs going off in your backpack. Terrifying. Not to mention the chips were impossible to eat. Pringles, on the other hand, are vaccuum packed. They keep their shape, and as Jamie says, “They have great karma because they’ve been spooning inside the can since they were made!”
Most bags of potato chips that I've seen show near failure at about 9000 feet.
> I got loaded, and it was time to sign the bill of lading. Everything looked normal at first until I read that this load cannot be exposed to elevations higher than 6,000 feet because the bags of chips may pop. That would result in a carrier claim. I didn’t like that at all, especially because I didn’t know — and had never needed to know — anything about measuring elevation.
> I managed to take a large plastic jar of cough drops, empty it into another jar, and cut it down to a size that would hold the vials. Some padding and duct tape and we were good to go. In the mean time, Scott found two lids from some Pringles cans (a major food item) and he created a large circular holder with the Nugget in the middle. He held the pieces together while I applied duct tape and presto, we had a Nugget Containment Device.
(I'm certain that I read that story on HN long ago... but I can't find it)
byw 23 days ago [-]
Similar for Ferraro Rochers I think. Like Pringles, they are definitely not the cheapest options, even in rich countries. But there's always a market for the occasional splurges.
Btw, Thailand is solidly upper middle-income. I think you'll find them even in low-income countries.
“Juvenal does not say is that the panem et circenses are either how the Roman people lost their power or how they are held under the control of emperors. Instead first the people lose their votes (no longer ‘selling’ them), then give up their cares and as a result only wish for panem et circenses, no longer taking an interest in public affairs.
…
I don’t think we get the sense – as is often how the phrase is used today – of the people being bribed to give up their votes. Indeed, that’s the thing: the people stopped being able to sell their votes and so could only wish for bread and circuses (rather than buy them with their votes). Instead, the People weren’t bribed from their freedoms but broken and subjected to the lash by men like Crassus and Pompey and this one fellow we’re not going to name because Juvenal is a giant hypocrite who doesn’t want to get in trouble with the emperor either. They were thus reduced by violence to merely wishing for panem et circenses (which Juvenal, in appropriately Roman fashion, views as a cowardly abdication of duty).”
Oddly enough, panem et circenses fits. The Syrians lost their democracy in 1963 [1]. (“The coup was carried out without violence, as the politicians were too demoralized to resist. The coup was met by indifference in the population at large.”) Come half a century later and millions can only wish for enough food [2].
I agree it's remarkably (depressingly) fitting for Syria in its more nuanced interpretation.
I linked it because I thought it was an interesting read and provides a lot more context to the saying than wikipedia article. Since I read it, I am more suspicious of the typical, dismissive use of "bread and circuses."
Well it was either sugar water or democracy and... you know.
LeafItAlone 23 days ago [-]
Can you finish the sentence? I don’t understand.
This isn’t me being tongue in cheek, I am just dumb.
steveBK123 23 days ago [-]
Cycnical job at the unbridled optimism from the Arab Spring era where people were mostly overthrowing one type of absolute ruler for another, when the main driver was inflation/food&energy costs.
RandallBrown 23 days ago [-]
Well it was either sugar water or democracy and we can't have democracy.
nojvek 22 days ago [-]
sugar water & potato chips vs democracy?
it's a modern marvel though how readily available sugar water and potato chips are at almost every grocery store.
s1artibartfast 23 days ago [-]
You are incorrectly assuming there is a coherent thought or sentence that was cut off.
There is a fairly common communication trend of presenting incomplete cynical statements without a logical conclusion. I think they trade more on sentiment and vibe than fact or logic.
deadbabe 23 days ago [-]
If you don’t know, you don’t want to know.
pinkmuffinere 23 days ago [-]
+1, very curious what completes the phrase
louisjharold 19 days ago [-]
[dead]
louisjharold 19 days ago [-]
[dead]
starluz 23 days ago [-]
[dead]
emptiestplace 23 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Jtsummers 23 days ago [-]
This has been discussed here for years. There are workarounds, so they're allowed.
These links should be in the main post. Could maybe automatically added. I didn't know about it and the person who posted the comment also did not and so many more... saying "it's been discussed for years" does not bring anything else than showing that you have some knowledge that some does not have...
JumpCrisscross 23 days ago [-]
> These links should be in the main post
That goes against the guideline of submitting the original source.
> you have some knowledge that some does not have
Sounds like a good reason to comment!
bastard_op 23 days ago [-]
[flagged]
constantcrying 23 days ago [-]
Please, without looking it up, guess what the current Syrian rate of obesity is.
p00dles 23 days ago [-]
I mean, I love pringles
tennerw 23 days ago [-]
In the 1950s it was Lucky Strike and chewing gum in Europe. Let the cultural erosion begin!
How can the population afford this? This must be subsidized. It is also interesting that no one talks about the Al Qaeda roots of the apparently compliant new rulers any more.
Assad was obviously horrible, but can there be some kind of a middle ground?
JumpCrisscross 23 days ago [-]
> How can the population afford this?
Industrially mass-produced food is cheap.
> Assad was obviously horrible, but can there be some kind of a middle ground?
Ideally, yes. In practice, you play the cards you’re dealt. (And HTS, irrespective of their origins, are looking like a fair gift horse so far.)
s1artibartfast 23 days ago [-]
What are you advocating for? A regime with a greater totalitarian emphasis on cultural control and repression?
Oh you are so wise, hovering over every thread and bullying non-mainstream opinions!
23 days ago [-]
lbrito 23 days ago [-]
We're in a society where narratives need to be simple enough to grasp in 6 seconds. Any further thought or discussion is automatically antagonized or labelled "whataboutism".
Narratives must be clean-cut good versus evil. Assad evil (indeed he was), so logically any opponent must be the opposite of evil. Therefore Tahir al-Sham is now Good.
Tahir al-Sham/Al Nusra being classified as a terrorist organization[1] complicates that clean-cut narrative. Hence the downvotes you got.
To the extent there is black-and-white thinking here, it’s in reflexively dismissing HTS due to its links to Al Qaeda. (Or thinking their roots are some secret.)
PieTime 23 days ago [-]
Instead of rushing to judgement, maybe let Syrians decide for themselves. No one wants a return of ISIS. But if Israel keeps occupying territory and undermining HTS rule then we don’t know what will replace them. Destroying the military assets that might have assisted in that fight may be seen as shortsighted in the future.
JumpCrisscross 23 days ago [-]
> maybe let Syrians decide for themselves
What does this mean? From the outside the choices are work to reduce sanctions and increase commercial and diplomatic ties or keep the Syrian economy in a stranglehold.
> if Israel keeps occupying territory and undermining HTS rule then we don’t know what will replace them
Israel is like problem number eight billion for Damascus right now. (Keep in mind that without Israel neutralising Hezbollah, HTS would have had a tougher fight with Assad. Damascus and Tel Aviv may have more to coöperate on than fight over.)
s1artibartfast 23 days ago [-]
The real threat to HTS is the USA.
One of the primary reasons Assad fell is something like 40% of Syrian national funding came from oil revenue denied by US backed Kurdish separatists.
The US will have to make the hard choice between HTS success or sacrificing Kurdish autonomy.
JumpCrisscross 23 days ago [-]
> US will have to make the hard choice between HTS success or sacrificing Kurdish autonomy
Could an Iraq-style autonomous subnational government that pays some tax to Damascus not work? Does Syria fundamentally not work without those revenues?
What if we took over the lease at Tartus?
s1artibartfast 23 days ago [-]
All good questions and I would be lying if I said I knew. My assumption is that Syria does not work without the revenue, as evidenced by the fall of Assad and many other poor petrostates when the tap is cut off. Most states cant survive a 40% budget shortfall, let alone a fledgling one trying to bind together many armed factions.
HTS & Ahmed al-Sharaa is reportedly not open to national partition [1], but the SDF is unwilling to integrate into the national military structure.
It might work as an uncomfortable trupple if the US and HTS are willing to be bedfellows, but it is unclear if that is attractive or even viable for either. Everything we know about Ahmed al-Sharaa indicates they they should be a ideological enemy, and the only thing that hedges against this is that it would be really convenient if they wern't. Maybe this will be shown in time, but military trust building is measured in terms of years or decades, while payroll is due weekly.
In general, I think Syrian Kurdistan is a fascinating example cognitive blindness, where the US public and media simply memory holes anything that happens there because creates too much cognitive dissonance. This was true when the US was fighting Russia for the oilfields, and is happening again now, as NATO allied Turkey is bombing Kobani cement factories to impede US base building. [2]
So long as the Turkish and Kurdish nationalists are at odds, an independent Kurdish state is nonviable without foreign backing from the US to keep the Turks out.
There's a decent chance that they'd be better off working with HTS to carve out some concessions about their position within a consolidated Syrian state than relying on continued foreign support, especially seeing how things went last "T" was in office.
dralley 23 days ago [-]
It's enough to simply say that HTS is much better than what came before them, and they are.
s1artibartfast 23 days ago [-]
Time will tell, but I hope so.
IG_Semmelweiss 23 days ago [-]
Very interesting natural experiment for researchers who can start a study now and formulate strong links to cancer causes, diabetes, and all other ailments of modern westerns society
Do you really need a study like that for diabetes? Is it not kind of well known in the general case?
seafoamteal 23 days ago [-]
Wouldn't they need consistent, reliable data from before the influx of imports as well? I can imagine Syria's hospitals have been too busy with casualties and injuries to have as good a record of lifestyle-linked illnesses as you'd need.
jncfhnb 23 days ago [-]
Wouldn’t mean much. Civilians from Syria are hardly a representative sample of “normal”. I wouldn’t count on the country being “normal” going forward either.
Rendered at 19:09:10 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
You can make jokes on sugar or cancer, but this is life changing and how positive is to the people there.
I'm pretty sure the rates of hunger and malnutrition dropped significantly over that timeframe. I have no doubts that obesity is higher now, but also a lot less people are starving.
Being fat does not mean being sat or good fed.
China also got rich in that time. Do we have counterfactuals with which to disentangle Western food from wealth?
If some high% of people have a life improvement, a smaller % don’t, and an even smaller % end up obese.. that’s an overall improvement - even though some lives are worse than they’d have been without the “improvement”.
Of course if the majority became obese or otherwise became worse off, that’s a bad thing overall. But from what is reported it sounds like opening the Chinese economy has been net good, ie. good for most people.
In both situations one obesity case is too many. But it needs to be proportionally considered alongside the benefit it hitched a ride with and never in isolation.
It takes having numbers to know how much weight (sic) to place on that counterpoint of “some obesity happened”.
And thanks to their subscription wall, the nonsense title is the only thing I get to read...
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u-u6-6VsxUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c15e4MhJLpg https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZXsGSi0Vc28
Thank you!
https://cferenac.blogspot.com/2010/06/toilet-paper-and-pring...
> The second time—they struggled with potato chips. You see, they had packed regular potato chips in small bags, like Lays. It turns out when you’re at 15,000 feet, the air pressure makes the bags (and the chips) explode. Just picture climbing one difficult step at a time, in freezing weather, under the most treacherous of conditions, and having little bombs going off in your backpack. Terrifying. Not to mention the chips were impossible to eat. Pringles, on the other hand, are vaccuum packed. They keep their shape, and as Jamie says, “They have great karma because they’ve been spooning inside the can since they were made!”
Most bags of potato chips that I've seen show near failure at about 9000 feet.
Specifically related to shipping them... My Worst Load Ever: Hauling Oregon Potato Chips to Texas - https://www.dat.com/blog/my-worst-load-ever-hauling-oregon-p...
> I got loaded, and it was time to sign the bill of lading. Everything looked normal at first until I read that this load cannot be exposed to elevations higher than 6,000 feet because the bags of chips may pop. That would result in a carrier claim. I didn’t like that at all, especially because I didn’t know — and had never needed to know — anything about measuring elevation.
---
Late edit about Pringles on Everest - https://spaceref.com/science-and-exploration/playing-with-mo...
> I managed to take a large plastic jar of cough drops, empty it into another jar, and cut it down to a size that would hold the vials. Some padding and duct tape and we were good to go. In the mean time, Scott found two lids from some Pringles cans (a major food item) and he created a large circular holder with the Nugget in the middle. He held the pieces together while I applied duct tape and presto, we had a Nugget Containment Device.
(I'm certain that I read that story on HN long ago... but I can't find it)
Btw, Thailand is solidly upper middle-income. I think you'll find them even in low-income countries.
"Good news, everybody! Democracy just kicked in!"
https://youtu.be/N_ClsQsZ9uI?si=zGzxssHJwNmvDKyl
…
I don’t think we get the sense – as is often how the phrase is used today – of the people being bribed to give up their votes. Indeed, that’s the thing: the people stopped being able to sell their votes and so could only wish for bread and circuses (rather than buy them with their votes). Instead, the People weren’t bribed from their freedoms but broken and subjected to the lash by men like Crassus and Pompey and this one fellow we’re not going to name because Juvenal is a giant hypocrite who doesn’t want to get in trouble with the emperor either. They were thus reduced by violence to merely wishing for panem et circenses (which Juvenal, in appropriately Roman fashion, views as a cowardly abdication of duty).”
Oddly enough, panem et circenses fits. The Syrians lost their democracy in 1963 [1]. (“The coup was carried out without violence, as the politicians were too demoralized to resist. The coup was met by indifference in the population at large.”) Come half a century later and millions can only wish for enough food [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_Syrian_coup_d%2527%C3%A...
[2] https://www.wfp.org/emergencies/syria-emergency
I linked it because I thought it was an interesting read and provides a lot more context to the saying than wikipedia article. Since I read it, I am more suspicious of the typical, dismissive use of "bread and circuses."
This isn’t me being tongue in cheek, I am just dumb.
it's a modern marvel though how readily available sugar water and potato chips are at almost every grocery store.
There is a fairly common communication trend of presenting incomplete cynical statements without a logical conclusion. I think they trade more on sentiment and vibe than fact or logic.
https://on.ft.com/4j6J2gl - gift link, not sure how long they last for FT
https://archive.ph/7CZfn - archive.ph, may not work well if you use Cloudflare DNS
That goes against the guideline of submitting the original source.
> you have some knowledge that some does not have
Sounds like a good reason to comment!
How can the population afford this? This must be subsidized. It is also interesting that no one talks about the Al Qaeda roots of the apparently compliant new rulers any more.
Assad was obviously horrible, but can there be some kind of a middle ground?
Industrially mass-produced food is cheap.
> Assad was obviously horrible, but can there be some kind of a middle ground?
Ideally, yes. In practice, you play the cards you’re dealt. (And HTS, irrespective of their origins, are looking like a fair gift horse so far.)
I’ll quote a wise person [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42686696
Narratives must be clean-cut good versus evil. Assad evil (indeed he was), so logically any opponent must be the opposite of evil. Therefore Tahir al-Sham is now Good.
Tahir al-Sham/Al Nusra being classified as a terrorist organization[1] complicates that clean-cut narrative. Hence the downvotes you got.
[1] https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/ntnl-scrt/cntr-trrrsm/lst...
What does this mean? From the outside the choices are work to reduce sanctions and increase commercial and diplomatic ties or keep the Syrian economy in a stranglehold.
> if Israel keeps occupying territory and undermining HTS rule then we don’t know what will replace them
Israel is like problem number eight billion for Damascus right now. (Keep in mind that without Israel neutralising Hezbollah, HTS would have had a tougher fight with Assad. Damascus and Tel Aviv may have more to coöperate on than fight over.)
One of the primary reasons Assad fell is something like 40% of Syrian national funding came from oil revenue denied by US backed Kurdish separatists.
The US will have to make the hard choice between HTS success or sacrificing Kurdish autonomy.
Could an Iraq-style autonomous subnational government that pays some tax to Damascus not work? Does Syria fundamentally not work without those revenues?
What if we took over the lease at Tartus?
HTS & Ahmed al-Sharaa is reportedly not open to national partition [1], but the SDF is unwilling to integrate into the national military structure.
It might work as an uncomfortable trupple if the US and HTS are willing to be bedfellows, but it is unclear if that is attractive or even viable for either. Everything we know about Ahmed al-Sharaa indicates they they should be a ideological enemy, and the only thing that hedges against this is that it would be really convenient if they wern't. Maybe this will be shown in time, but military trust building is measured in terms of years or decades, while payroll is due weekly.
In general, I think Syrian Kurdistan is a fascinating example cognitive blindness, where the US public and media simply memory holes anything that happens there because creates too much cognitive dissonance. This was true when the US was fighting Russia for the oilfields, and is happening again now, as NATO allied Turkey is bombing Kobani cement factories to impede US base building. [2]
https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-reportedly-setting-up-...
https://hawarnews.com/en/renewed-bombing-by-turkish-occupati...
There's a decent chance that they'd be better off working with HTS to carve out some concessions about their position within a consolidated Syrian state than relying on continued foreign support, especially seeing how things went last "T" was in office.
The amount of confounders at play here seems so large that I highly doubt anything meaningful could be learned from it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Nauru