Comment by stakhanov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stakhanov | Hacker News Reader

I used to live in Britain in 2005-2012. And, while the British "nanny state" had gotten on my nerves even back then, I was truly shocked when I returned for a short vacation this year.

I made a point of seeking out various sweet treats I remembered from back in the day that I can't buy where I live now, and discovered they all taste like shit now, having replaced sugar with artificial sweeteners. I went to a pub and ordered "a coke", and the bartender gave me something that vaguely looked like coke. I took a sip and discovered that it tasted like shit. I said "This is not coke. What is this?" He replied "This is Pepsi Max". "Well, Pepsi Max was not what I ordered!" -- I'm assuming that all of this is related to the sugar tax they introduced in the mean time [1].

When they discover the health implication of artifical sweeteners (many of them are already known, but I'm sure we will discover more and more as time goes by) Britain will probably be the country worst hit, and they will have their government to thank for it.

I think it's high time that we start acknowledging that people want access to some kind of a quick/easy/cheap source of gratification, and the nanny state can't just wage war on all of them: There's a tax now on alcohol, on tobacco, and on sugar.

But sugar is the odd one out in this listing, because there's no such thing as "passive consumption" of sugar (like there is on tobacco), and people "high on sugar" don't endanger others (as is sometimes the case with alcohol). The normal rationale when governments limit peoples freedoms is that they limit some people's freedoms, if that serves as a means to preserve other people's freedoms. But with sugar, I just don't see the harm that accrues to anyone except the person consuming the sugar, and so, a government trying to limit people's freedoms to enjoy sugar, is precisely crossing a line that no government of any free people should ever cross.

Also, by taxing alcohol, tobacco, and sugar, you've now weirdly "levelled the playing field". While sugar is clearly the "least bad" of the three, you now no longer have a tax incentive to prefer a Coke Classic to a beer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#United_Kingdo...

Why are you ignoring other changes in ingredients in your story?

Tons of well liked foods got bought out by mega corporations who then penny pinched the ingredient list to the point that while visually similar the taste was no where near as good.

And this is coming from the US one of the sugar capitals.

You also talk about taxes as being the same without acknowledging the quantity of tax. Certainly the 20p/liter sugar tax on soda isn't "leveling the playing field" compared to 16.5% of the retail price plus £5.89 on a packet of 20 tax on cigarettes...

> You also talk about taxes as being the same without acknowledging the quantity of tax.

I used Wikipedia [1] as a source for the sugar tax and this [2] as a source for alcohol.

According to that, its 18p per litre for a sugary drink above 8g per 100ml (like the Coke Classic I used for the example), and 19p per litre for a beer between 2.8 and 7.5 % ABV. Let's call the one penny a rounding error. Cigarettes can't really be compared, because you can't compare apples to apples quantity-wise.

> Why are you ignoring other changes in ingredients in your story?

Because I don't have savant-level memory and don't remember the entire ingredients list of treats I liked 10 years ago, and the reduced sugar levels were the thing that jumped out at me.

How much research do you expect someone to do, to throw out a quick opinion on something? If you're going to set the bar that high, and are then going to attack an argument on the grounds of "not enough research" without even presenting a counter-argument, you're not really creating an atmosphere that's very conducive to friendly conversation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#United_Kingdo... [2] https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-shopping/alcohol-tobacco

You didn't quote any numbers so I looked them up for you.

The first hit of "why do snacks taste different" would have answered your idea about snacks tasting bad. (While blaming a tax on sugary soda)

Your post was ranting about something you disliked without anything to back it up.

So, your way of forming your belief was to Google for "why do snacks taste different?" and then believe the first result that came up, which was a weird theory about penny-pinching big sugar megacorps. You then further perpetuated that theory by restating it, without giving your source.

You also threw in the statement "And this is coming from the US one of the sugar capitals" as if that made the weird theory any more credible. The fact that I had been discussing sugary drinks in the UK should make it more questionable whether anything that's happening in the US is even relevant to the discussion.

And my way of forming my belief was to attribute the difference in taste to the blinding obvious, namely that they've replaced the source of sweetness in a drink that's supposed to taste sweet as evidenced by the ingredients list on that particular drink's packaging.

Independent thought can sometimes be correct, and total bullshit can often be stated in a way as to include numbers and references.

Linguist oddity. Sweets is never used to refer to a drink in the US so your statements about "the war on sugar" appeared to apply to non-drinks.

If talking about non-drinks a tax on sugar in drinks is always not the answer. I didn't know why you made the leap and missed evaluating your phrasing to see why the expansion of complaint occurred.

I guess I assumed you were following the original post which was talking about sugar in general.

Honestly your independent thought was "I don't like Pepsi Max as much as a different drink" without listing the other drink or mentioning whether the store even offered alternatives.

Fundamentally I saw "I ordered a cola and didn't like that I got a low sugar one by default"

You then expanded on that independent thought to imply a lot of things that are not in fact dependant on that independent thought.

Remember you said "sugar drink = cigarettes" from a taxing standpoint

> When they discover the health implication of artifical sweeteners

No matter how bad any artificial sweetener may be found to be in the future, it won't be any worse than having consumed an analogous quantity of sugar. By all means, avoid the choice entirely and just drink water, but if you must choose between one or the other, the artificial sweetener will be the healthier choice in the long run, and it won't even be close.

Hmm to what extent is there harm done to others in the form of increased future healthcare expenses if this is the UK we’re talking about?

If you are going to permit "increased healthcare cost to a taxpayer-funded health system" as a line of reasoning, then you allow for a lot of absurd outcomes, like the government could forbid risky sports. This is not an "appeal to extremes" or a strawman argument, it's actually a valid reductio ad absurdum.

Opponents of public health care in the U.S. use precisely this as an argument: They say, if we're going to have taxpayer-funded health care, it gives the government a reason to start regulating aspects of our lives which we don't want any government to regulate.

There are only two ways out of that that I can see: The first is to agree with them and say: If we want to be a free people, we can't have taxpayer-funded healthcare.

The second (which I personally subscribe to), is to say that there's some kind of a "bar" that has to be met, and that "increased healthcare costs to the taxpayer" doesn't meet the bar of how much your freedoms need to be impeded by my actions, before it starts to justify government taking away my freedoms.

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