On NPR yesterday, I heard a discussion about a program where overweight people are paid money to lose weight. They said it was very effective, offering obese people (they were workers at large companies they were talking about, or at least, that’s the impression I got) an immediate monetary reward to lose weight. But is this really a good idea? And is this simply another form of discrimination that will backfire? What the hell am I talking about? Well, here’s what I mean:
If you’re paying fat people money to lose weight, then everyone will want to be fat so they can get the extra money, right? So everyone will stuff themselves with lard and Twinkies (saving Hostess from bankruptcy: yay!) so they can get fat, and all so they can get paid money to lose weight. And then they'll all get the horrible diseases they're trying to prevent in the first place with this program! But then people may challenge this program for discrimination, since it only pays fat people to lose weight, which is clearly unfairly discriminating against thin people and dumping cash on overweight people just for being obese, and that’s just wrong.
So after this challenge, skinny people will win the right to be paid to lose weight too, and then they will all die of malnutrition, having all become bulimic and anorexic, murdered by this evil bribe program! Plus, it will get overweight people so used to being paid to lose weight, they will refuse to ever lose weight without being bribed to do it ever again! So when this program comes to an end, all obese people will eat extra food and be extra slovenly to gain more weight faster than ever before to protest not getting any more free money for losing weight, and this will cause them all to die of heart attacks and diabetes, and all because of this horribly lethal program! Either way, everyone will die horribly, due to this wrong-headed plan.
Plus, like with most programs of this sort, normally healthy people will get no reward for doing the right thing, and out of protest, they will all overeat, smoke cigarettes, eat Baconators all day, avoid exercise, etc., until they all die, to show how wrong this whole plan is for rewarding the wrong people all along! And then there will be nobody left to protect us all from the alien invasion, and we’ll all be vaporized by laser ray guns! (If we’re not eaten first by mutant giant ants and dinosaurs created from all the overheated nuclear reactors that melt down because of everyone dying in protest of this bigoted program!)
See? They’re just out to kill us all! I told you!
Here’s the scale-stepping story (This is all that’s on NPR’s website, but I thought they were talking about more than this. If it’s just this, then it’s not as much of a threat, since it’s just Colorado, and of course they’re all fat, since skiing is just sliding downhill on sticks, requiring no fitness whatsoever. Plus, it helps to be fat, so you can be pulled down the hill by gravity, right?):
(I know, I know: skiing requires fitness: I'm only joking about that! But everything else is true!!)
