It's revealed at the end of this article (published today, March 30, 2024) that the subject of the article died in a memory care facility in... 2017.
His son, in a blog post easily Googled using the names in the article, indicates that his father had been in a facility to treat his Alzheimer's (and, we assume, as the article states, free from alcohol) since 2011 - and had likely not had a sip of alcohol since that time, over 12 years ago.
(The article itself indicates that the son has been free from alcohol since hearing about his father's initial hospitalization 13 years ago.)
Alcohol abuse is a real thing, but this is some seriously bad reporting that does not seem to have much to do with the specific state of things in 2024.
What a weird comment. Yes, the article is mostly talking about how this is a trend that's been building over the last 25 years or so. Most of the specific research it cites is from pre 2020. It's like you are arguing against some imaginary article that claims to be talking about things specific to the last few years when the main point of the article is completely not that.
I mean even the subtitle describes that: "The pandemic played a role in increased consumption, but alcohol use among people 65 and older was climbing even before 2020"
The word "are" is used, both generally and in the headline, to indicate the present tense. Similarly, the gerund "drinking" is a present participle. The article isn't titled "Why Do Older Americans Drink So Much?" and if it were, leading and focusing on a story from many years ago would not seem nearly as odd. Similarly, I'm quite sure they could find plenty of anecdotes about older Americans who currently drink too much that would better match the headline as written. As it stands, it's incongruous and misleading in a strange or perhaps lazy way.
It’s almost like our entire society was not designed to support human flourishing, but rather is an elaborate mechanism for extracting the maximum amount of labour in exchange for the least amount of all source support.
Human societies are in a constant game of evolution against each other, since time immemorial. The ones that are incapable of defending themselves militarily are invaded and subdued by those who can. This unpleasant fact of life doesn't care about our ideology.
Just because both X and Hitler say y, X doesn’t become a Nazi sympathizer. It is only possible if y is only derivable from the Nazi theory but not derivable from any other theory. Next time, when both X and Hitler are found to be said that Berlin is capital of Germany or that sum of three angles in a triangle is 180 degrees or that putting hands in hot water burns hands, start proclaiming that these claims are derivable from the Nazi theory or X is a Nazi sympathizer.
Hitler said a lot of common sense, otherwise the masses wouldn't agree with him. You mix common sense with common nonsense and you get convincing nonsense.
Well that might be the case but I am not sure why that would preclude designing your society for human flourishing rather than siphoning resources to an unelected few.
Society isn't to blame. It's more like society is a multi-cellular organism. The reason it exists in the first place, is because individuals find that working together is typically better than not, but at times, it's possible for cancer to happen. Functionally, cancerous cells are those which take more from the society/organism than they give back to support it. If it gets too bad, there's not enough resources going to those who support the society/organism, and so those that support it die off, along with the cancer/society.
> Functionally, cancerous cells are those which take more from the society/organism than they give back to support it
That definition encompasses significantly more than half of the population, at least measured in terms of lifelong taxes paid vs social services received.
For example, minimum wage workers, stay-at-home parents, etc. They receive social services, such as roads and education, that are substantially more costly than what could be supported with the taxes they will pay in their life. Those services are paid by a small percentage of workers, something like the top quintile or the top decile.
That said, I would argue that e.g. the work performed by stay at home parents is on the whole positive to society, since at the very least older generations (retirees) need the goods and services provided by the younger generation of workers, and somebody needs to have raised them. But it is still interesting to think about how our societies economically rest on the shoulders of a snall fraction of the population.
it is interesting to think about, but this analysis leaves out too much useful work to draw any meaningful conclusions from. as you point out, raising and caring for children is important work that is mostly uncompensated. the quality of care is also important (doing a bad job at it can easily be a net negative contribution) and hard to measure.
there's also the issue that compensation doesn't actually track contributions to society very well. I build things at huge scale that are at least somewhat useful. I now make about 10x what I made heating up $2 slices of pizza, which seems about right. but I could get paid the same or possibly more to optimize ad clickthrough, which doesn't seem quite right. a lot of money gets spent on trying to win red queen races. I don't really fault the individuals involved for following the local incentive gradient, but they're essentially getting paid to break each other's windows and then fix them. there's no net value there.
But that is my point: societies are not as much "designed" as they have evolved through the natural selection process of war. What you see is not the outcome of a design process, but an evolutionary process that maximizes survivability of the society, not "flourishing" of the individual.
From the perspective of our skin cells, which constantly live and die to protect the rest of the organism from outside threats, our own biological evolutionary process has not led to their flourishing. And yet here we are hunans, a society of cells, rather fit to survive yet abother day in the real-world evolutionary environment.
Human flourishing works as long as it solely depends on the individual. However if flourishing depends on others, selfishness of others becomes the first priority. Question: is it possible to flourish without depending on others?
Also, responding to the racism (embedded in American culture, in a sense, through the propaganda of big businesses chasing profits in, shall we say, agricultural interests) of the white American middle class. As with lebensraum, the American suburban experiment doesn't make a whole lot of sense outside of a hysterical need to ethnically cleanse one's neighborhood.
Older people who live in cities and planned, theme park-like communities - which facilitate car-less, low-distance daily social activity outside the home - tend to do better.
I'm glad it worked for you but I'd be hesitant to recommend it to people with substance abuse issues. It's also anecdotal on my end but when kratom first started taking off and getting big I knew more than one person who switched from drinking/smoking to taking kratom recreationally before getting addicted to it and having to go through opiate like withdrawals, and another person who got addicted to it and graduated to harder opiates after a few months.
I don't think they would have ever gotten addicted to heroin otherwise, too far out of their comfort zone to just jump into, but the lack of stigma around kratom and way it was marketed online gave them a taste for it and made it easier for them to take a more lax approach to opiates in their own mind.
It's like recommending someone take morphine or codeine to cure themselves of alcohol addiction.
I noted there were caveats. I also know that others have used it with similar success.
My brother got addicted to heroin when previously he had only used alcohol and cannabis (it killed him). My mother drank herself to death. How about those for counter anectdata?
Most brain altering chemicals come with risk. Doctor prescribed anti-anxiety and anti-depressants have long lists of warnings (including death).
Your last line is disingenuous -- there's a significant difference.
And let's go back to alcohol, the socially accepted and celebrated form of "taking the edge off"
I'm not claiming alcohol is (physically) less dangerous than kratom. I'm well aware of how damaging alcohol is despite its prevalence.
Brain altering chemicals do come with a risk but there's a big difference between being prescribed a drug by a doctor and deciding to use it yourself without supervision. You mentioned in another post of yours that you ended up abusing kratom as well, that's where the "risk tolerance" you railed against another poster for bringing up comes in. I'm very glad it worked out for you, I just said that I personally would not recommend replacing one substance with potential abuse for another as a means to quit, because I personally think it can have adverse effects in sidetracking people into harder drugs (and new addictions).
I don't think comparing and opiate to an opioid is disingenuous at all. Kratom may be "safer" than morphine or codeine at first glance but it produces comparable effects, induces a comparable addiction, and we also don't have the thousands of years of feedback through history of people taking it the way they take it now to compare to like we do with alcohol or traditional opiates. The full safety profile just isn't there yet. For example, it's wasn't unheard of for people to develop issues with their liver, or other physical problems after months/years of use though it's not very clear to me if it's from the kratom alkaloids themselves or that some of the early suppliers had issues with heavy metals / pesticides in their crops. And that's not something we tended to see recently or historically with traditional opiates being used by long time patients in moderate doses, but it pops up in kratom after just a few years of it blowing up and becoming more commonly used at recreational doses.
You moved to shame me on my coping mechanism. Kratom worked quite well for me and I simply shared that fact, along with the fact that it has caveats and is not for everyone.
Now you shift the goal posts to be about social acceptance. Your moralizing on your superiority of drug choice has only demonstrated that you have nothing to offer in this conversation accept your smugness.
Harm reduction can still be a valuable first step if the substitution is indeed less harmful.
I know people who switched to cannabis and found good success with it. They've since gotten help with the underlying addiction issues, and are in a much better place.
Probably not a good idea to see substitution as a long term solution though.
Substitution can be a valid part of a harm reduction approach, if it allows someone to begin a process that otherwise feels impossible. Or if it is simply less damaging to the individual and those around them than what they're using now. It can be a step, if not a solution.
But I hope no one is trying to roll their own addiction recovery program out of the HN comments today. If anyone thinks they might need it they should get competent help.
I thought I was quite reasonable in my comment: I spoke about what worked for me, noted that it's not without concerns, and that it's not for everyone (aka YMMV).
And while it is technically an opioid, the safety profile is significantly different than traditional opiates. I used (and at time abused) it for years and am now taking a break as it has significant trade-offs. Getting off of it was way, way, way, easier then quitting cigarettes.
It is. But I'd argue it's a net win in that alcohol is far worse for you.
I'm doing quite well in this regard. I have low-level chronic pain and it did wonders there too. Took it for years and only recently have stopped to do a reset/reevaluation. Tapering/quitting was rapid with the only impact of sleep issues for a week. It was definitely worth it.
Can't speak for the OP but having watched family deal with addictions before, my answer to that question whenever it came up became "So what?". A dependency on something might be bad an and of itself, but usually the real reason why an addiction is bad is because of the negative effects it has on your life beyond just being dependent on the vice. If someone went from a dependency on alcohol to a dependency on coffee, no one would blink an eye because coffee's other problems aren't nearly as bad. In my opinion, anything that's even a little less bad than whatever addiction you're trying to break is a step in the right direction. You can worry about not having an addiction at all later when just having an addiction is the worst thing you're dealing with.
It’s always going to be a bunch of different things, this was one of the more interesting ones:
One proposal for combating alcohol misuse among older people is to raise the federal tax on alcohol, for the first time in decades. “Alcohol consumption is price-sensitive, and it’s pretty cheap right now relative to income,” Dr. Humphreys said.
That's funny, you'd think they'd have figured out historically that this probably isn't going to work very well. It's easy to place a sin tax on tobacco because it's a pain in the ass for people to grow and process it themselves at home.
But it's significantly harder to raise taxes high enough to discourage people from using a product if they can just make it at home in a five gallon jug with water, sugar, and baking yeast.
> discourage people from using a product if they can just make it at home in a five gallon jug with water, sugar, and baking yeast.
That’s not really the goal. Getting the person drinking a bottle of hard liquor a night to cut back even 10% makes a difference. Forcing people to constantly make more to keep up with a serious alcohol problem is a larger barrier than the kind of taxes we had 20 years ago.
Essentially, across millions of people even seemingly small changes can have significant impact in aggregate. Or at least that’s the argument.
That's fair, I completely didn't take into account how much some people tend to drink and how much space it would take up if you're planning on brewing enough for daily drinking indefinitely.
I guess it depends on how much they're planning on pushing the taxes up. I can't see Australia style taxes working out because of how easy it is to brew relatively strong and still palatable alcohol just about anywhere. Someone will pick up the slack. Legalized marijuana didn't kill off the black market in some states because it's still significantly cheaper to purchase quality and quantity outside of a dispensary due to tax costs.
Not one drop of alcohol for over 18 years, just quit cold turkey. Silly reason is because of a band I grew up listening doesn’t drink. But it’s effective, music can move mountains.
Congrats on your feat of strength! To others looking to quit, I've read[1] that it's dangerous to quit cold turkey. Ease yourself out, and save yourself from possible complications.
Thanks, I was also a chain smoker and for me quitting smoking is much more difficult. You get to experience hallucinations, depressions and severe withdrawals. Alcohol is just more about losing your social activities, and being weird around your drinking buddies, but eventually time will make them understand.
I stopped drinking last January. I got a concussion and then went home and drank a 6 pack of a high abv IPA. I had the worst hangover of my life and intense concussion symptoms for a couple of weeks. Since then, I've had no desire to drank.
It's been great. No more hangovers. No more having to worry about getting a sober ride home.
I love the taste of beer and now there are so many good NA beers I can still enjoy one and not have to worry about effects of alcohol. Guinness, Blue Moon, Sierra Nevada, Athletic, Stella Artois, etc.
probably something to do with the fact we have isolated basically everyone with lockdowns, remote work, addictive social media, then inflated the price of basically everything without raising wages, so people have even more challenges eating healthy, going out to meet new people, and maintain a low stress life.
It’s true though I wanted to add that the first three are new phenomena, and while they certainly don’t help, this trend has been going on since the 1950’s, as discussed in this book from 2000, based on a 1995 essay:
I enjoy brewing some loose leaf* green tea with varying ratios (leaf, water, temperature, time). Others might enjoy it! I think it's a fantastic replacement beverage that helped me cut soda.
I like doing 4g of Japanese sencha leaves, 80-100mL of water, at 60-70C for 30s to a minute. Second steep 10 seconds, and third 30-40 seconds. But honestly the fun is in experimenting! (plus at lower temperatures you can drink it right away!)
> Dean Nordman never sought treatment for his drinking, but after his emergency surgery, his sons moved him into a nursing home, where antidepressants and a lack of access to alcohol improved his mood and his sociability. He died in the facility’s memory care unit in 2017.
Is it just me or does drinking oneself to death at 77 not sound that bad when its compared to spending 6 years in a facility (for god knows how much money)
As someone who has struggled with alcohol in the past, it really doesn't. Alcohol contributes to a general sense of malaise, and to insular thinking that serves to protect drinking rather than building a life.
These replies are pretty wild lol. "Dooms Day is imminent so chug poison you naive fool! Only if you knew what was really happening you'd be chugging poison to prepare!"
What's wild is there are alleged adults navigating the world that simply refuse to acknowledge the current state of play globally, which in turn guarantees most if not all of the worst outcomes folks who are actually paying attention are concerned about.
Here's a thought. The fact that the two candidates for the most important role in the world are so bad tells you that the role is in fact, not very important.
It isn't that important because there is "deep state" (entrenched bureaucracy), but what were trumps first actions? To install kiss the ring loyalists into as many positions of power as possible and bleed the diplomatic corps out. There was a mass exodus of the "deep state" you are now claiming is what is actually important.
His first presidency was a resounding success for him. He found that he only has a few hurdles left to successfully become a dictator. He neutralized the press with the gish gallop and "lügenpresse"[1], he neutralized his party with the big lie[2], he neutralized the supreme court by installing loyalists and letting them take bribes, he neutralized congress through gridlock. The only real hurdle trump has left is the joint chiefs of staff and you can guarantee his first action as president will be to clean house of people who swore an oath to the constitution and replace them with people willing to ring kiss.
If he is installed we get either a military "coup" to protect the constitution from a domestic enemy or the constitution becomes just a piece of paper in exactly the same way the bible is just a book, venerated but not understood.
You're inferring too much from my comment. I think the bureaucracy and big business have a huge inertia that effectively limits the presidents power. At least domestically.
Big business is easily won over with tax cuts and cheap labor. I don't think there is any question that big business prefers the "lax" regulatory environment the GOP offers.
You hope the deep state and big business can limit Trump's power, but it doesn't take a lot of effort to find historic precedence that those are hopeful limits rather than practical ones, thinking otherwise is American exceptionalism.
I appreciate your scepticism towards hope, however the USA is exceptional in the sense it has never had a dictator or monarch - at least since the War of Independence.
"Hope is not a strategy" is exactly meant to disarm this type of blithe thinking.
Global warming is unaddressed and China is actively building a military to confront the US promising WW3. We have at least 2 major active genocides, one of which might succeed.
If you were to graph corruption, it is clearly increasing. Income inequality is increasing. Congress members are still trading stock. Supreme court justices are still taking bribes... Wages (measured in ability to purchase goods) are decreasing.
I'll happily engage in the thought exercise of thinking about some systemic graphs with a slope that inspires hope.
If America or the world had a dashboard, what graphs would you show me to make me think the world was "fine" or that I should feel positively about the future?
> If America or the world had a dashboard, what graphs would you show me to make me think the world was "fine" or that I should feel positively about the future?
I think if I were living in the third world those would give me hope that if I had a child they would have a better life than I had, not very compelling for a privileged white American.
I think for the world at large, more people, means more consumption, means more pollution and fewer resources per person. Those improvements are likely largely found in pre-industrial societies, and industrialization is environmentally expensive too.
I am willing to believe that while the velocity of global warming is positive, the acceleration of it might be negative. That would be hope inducing, but that's generally not the sense I've gotten.
When someone says the world is on fire, I think they are literally referring to the world being on fire, global warming, or the general rise of authoritarianism/strongmen across the world and the conflict they require to stay in power.
If the only thing you're bringing to the table is the notion that, in the midst of several interrelated threats to global civilization, more people globally experience what a pakistani brickmaker might consider prosperity, you should consider spending a bit more effort towards staying informed of current events.
The thing you scoff at in your racist quip lots of mothers would kill to give their children, still today. Real peoples lives are improving at a great pace, the fact you have so much more doesn't make less deaths at birth any less positive. When I was younger to hear someone speak like this of reducing world hunger would get you labeled with whatever the most evil label would be.
It's telling that you claim racism in a comment that underlines the ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE that is manual labor in Pakistan. I think we've established you aren't actually paying attention.
Fun Fact: one of that topsoil came back and we've been leaning on non-renewable inputs to paper over the damage. So yeah, there's a tie-in to at least two of the existential threats we're dealing with (fossil fuels and agricultural issues). Back to the issue at hand, how many marine fisheries had we wiped out completely at that point?
Don't stress, don't strain. In 30 years, everything will still be ok and you will still be stressing about the future, unless you choose not to. Regardless, I don't see any benefit in idle pessimism.
What benefit could come to China by starting WWII? Absolutely none, even if they won(which they wouldn't).
This is exactly the problem with this hopeless viewpoint. just like those wearing rose colored glasses, your shit colored glasses are preventing you from accurately understanding what is going on in the world.
China will attempt to take Taiwan (they’ve even given their military a deadline for getting ready). US probably wants that not to happen and will probably try to stop it. Things will escalate rapidly and we’ll be lucky to live through it. Rand did a good study on the dangers of escalation during a conflict over Taiwan. It doesn’t look good.
Which is why the US is will leave Taiwan hanging. Taiwan sees what happened to Ukraine, the writing is on the wall. Hong Kong style gradual reunification will happen in the next 10 years.
Everyone thought Russia wouldn't invade Ukraine until they did. Everyone thought two countries having a McDonalds meant peace between them until they didn't.
Denial and delusions are the most basic of mental health defense mechanisms, but society cannot work if everyone is in denial or experiencing delusions. It is better for the individuals, but not better for the whole.
I'm not a proponent of being hopeless, but if everyone is living in la la land thinking nothing bad can happen until it does... I don't think that is a good way to conduct society. We have very real unaddressed problems. I think wanting to escape from that is at least understandable if not rational.
I, personally, do not feel hopeless when there are problems, I feel hopeless when other people do not recognize those problems. I feel hopeless when problems are not being addressed.
Historians at ivy league colleges are saying that the forces that made Russia Russia (increasing wealth inequality and decline of rule of law), and the forces that put Hitler into power in Germany (rampant nationalism, stoking the public with a desire for quick solutions, and appealing to the German aristocracy's greed) are both active in America.
So you can moralize about my shit colored glasses, but what if there is actually shit on those glasses, wouldn't they be shit colored?
A ton of people thought Russia would or at least could invade Ukraine. Though I do recall when those people were made fun of by our President 2 years before the first stage of their invasion - "the 1980s called - they want their foreign policy back".
> but if everyone is living in la la land thinking nothing bad can happen until it does... I don't think that is a good way to conduct society
Except that is not at all where American society is at. People (especially those chronically online or in front of 24 hour news programs) are expressing some of the most negative views towards the future as they ever have.
Yes, if the world is actually shit then you aren't wearing shit colored glasses. I don't think it is, so I will just laugh at and feel sad for those people who are so down in the dumps. Obviously I might be wrong about this, I guess we will have to wait and see.
Incorrect. Shit like global warming and collapsing marine fisheries will absolutely resolve one way or another. The question is do we brick the planet's ability to support our society before the resulting massive reduction in human population permits ecosystems to restabilize.
