Like alcohol or cigarettes there's no way they could ever be banned, but I think if society really pushed for it we could lump soda into the same category: Illegal to give to minors, warning labels, ID to purchase. The slippery slope argument is that people will argue that next comes targeting ice cream, pastries, etc.. while conveniently ignoring that drinking a soda with one or more meals a day is normalized yet eating a slide of pie at that rate would be alarming.
I doubt it will ever happen but it would probably help with our obesity rates among children.
Guilty. I don't feel strongly enough about this to really give anybody a hard time that uses their food stamps for it.. it's their choice, I'll roll my eyes and move on. It's just an opinion I have on the matter. I don't think what people buy with their food stamps is anywhere near a big enough problem to prioritize over most other things.
Soda isn't food. It's empty calories with no nutritional value. Obviously Coke/Pepsi don't care about this, they just like money, but from my perspective if I gave somebody money so they could stock their pantry and feed their family I would not be pleased to see soda on the receipt.
No drinks though. Looks like soda from a $2 2L bottle comes in at about 500cal/$, much lower than the leader in that list. Not sure how cheap one can get soda elsewhere though (from fountains etc).
Flour is at the top of the list with over 4000 calories per dollar, though obviously you need to bake it with something, and not coincidentally, white bread is next on the list with about 3000 calories per dollar. Bags of granulated sugar are also up there, and then the first things you can just boil and eat start to appear with rice, plain oats, ramen, and pasta providing about 1500-2000 calories per dollar.
In comparison, fast food like a 2-liter bottle of Coke or Pepsi provides about 450 calories per dollar, while a fast-food hamburger provides about 100. While the corn syrup lobby and fast food industrial systems are strong, they're not even close to being a cost-effective way to feed yourself.
You will survive significantly longer with plentiful calories and no nutrition than you can with very few calories but a "correct" nutrition profile.
Most of human history was lived by people with some amount of malnutrition. It's almost a default state of being alive. It's only since the broad cultivation of the Potato and after that, green revolution that allows us to grow enough food to technically feed everyone (and then throw half of it away because god forbid we help people survive rather than build a system that incentivizes dragon hording)
Obviously it's easy to speak from my perspective where I'm fortunate that I don't have to worry about accessing food.. but even when confronted with that my position remains unchanged. Maybe if you were arguing about healthy/neutral drinks I would feel different, but I've had enough people in my life develop obesity and diabetes from addiction to soda to regard it as marginally better for you than alcohol and tobacco.
I hope I live long enough to see society in this country start revolting against HFCS/sugar and excess sodium in our diets, it's death by diabetes and heart attacks/strokes.
The point of food stamps is to allow you to buy real food when you otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it. Somebody with food stamps doesn't need to survive off sugar water like an overgrown hummingbird because they can buy real food. Even in "food deserts" there are hundreds of better options than soda.
We already require labelling for added sugars. No SNAP for added sugar products seems reasonable. (More reasonable: no school lunch subsidies for that crap.)
If your use case allows for it there's nothing wrong with using the OS you find the most enjoyable to use. I find myself doing stuff on my PC frequently that either isn't practical or currently possible on an iPad (but in most cases would be on a Mac).
The only time I use my iPad over a laptop or something is for reading, watching videos or if I'm simply using it as a glorified ssh/rdp client to work on my other machines, but that's only if I want to consume media or read before I want to do anything else, which isn't often, and I don't generally put away my laptop to switch a tablet if the laptop can already do it.
Little things like the complete lack of multi-user support is why I don't ever hand it over to my kids or anything, they're insistent that it's a personal device and I find that unacceptable when they market it as a general computing replacement device that can't do something that has been available for decades everywhere else, even amongst their own products.. and that's without even going into having the ability to run software without Apple's blessing.. sideloading is not convenient and I've decided I'm no longer interested in buying a tablet or computer for myself that fights me on what software I can run on it.
It’s perhaps wrong of me to generalize but I’ve lived in Utah my whole life, some are clean and healthy others are unhealthy slobs, just like the general population. The whole ‘drank all the booze’ people are more often those pretending to believe in their faith because of the social repercussions of leaving it.
