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There's a big difference between someone who doesn't get vaccinated for measles and someone who doesn't get a yearly flu vaccine.

You're also ignoring the fact that some vaccines are harmful, albeit to a small number of people. Guillain-Barre syndrome is real and people who received the flu shot in the 2008-2009 season possibly at greater risk of H1N1.

It's just as misleading to claim all vaccines are totally safe as it is to claim they cause things like autism.

Perhaps Japan can or is sharing some of theirs: http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news...

(we consume more sugar per capita than anyone else, and we're almost 25% higher than the next country)

This is actually kind of funny because, per capita, Cuban sugar consumption is through the roof. It's actually more than the average American, but Cuba is usually not included in those "top 10" list type things. See https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/b...

Anyway, there's actually a reason for this. Before the fall of the USSR, Cuba had a deal with the Soviets where they would produce sugar in exchange for just about everything that Cuba wanted / needed -- meat, cars, televisions, you name it. They ramped up their sugar production and this worked, for a while, until the USSR collapsed and the trade stopped. They were left with huge amounts of sugar and a people who knew how to cultivate sugar. When your food supply dwindles and you have a lot of sugar, the obvious thing happens and people eat the sugar. I was told, while I was there, that people piled sugar on mango and pineapple to this day because they had grown used to eating such massive amounts of sugar.

They are very active, though, which certainly puts them at an advantage over the average American.

Removing violent offenders from the population is part of the government's duties:

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." -- Amendment V

Bitcoin is now leftist libertarian? Back in 2016 it still was not merely right, but "extreme right": The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

(No, I haven't RTFB either. With a title like that? Pfft.)

Implicit in the idea of uniform naturalization and control and disposition of federal lands, and in conducting international relations (also a power of Congress) and having a military is the idea that you have a border and you guard it.

Uh, no. Naturalization is citizenship. You're not "naturalized" if you have a green card; you're authorized to be present. Ask CIS:

Naturalization is the process by which U.S. citizenship is granted to a foreign citizen or national after he or she fulfills the requirements established by Congress in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

Emphasis mine. Requirements for naturalization:

You May Qualify for Naturalization if:

You have been a permanent resident for at least 5 years and meet all other eligibility requirements, please visit our Path to Citizenship page for more information.

Permanent resident (green card: you can stay here forever) but you're not naturalized.

Green Cards are issued as a stepping-stone to naturalization and are part of naturalization laws passed by Congress under Article I, Section 8, Clause 4.

You mean the Immigration and Naturalization Act?

If Congress had no authority to make naturalization law, it would not have the authority to make laws about issuing green cards or work visas, nor would it have the authority to pass laws directing the executive to kick people out for not having those documents.

Actually, the laws prohibit people from giving immigrants jobs and housing (affecting commerce), and give the Executive the authority to remove dangerous unauthorized immigrants.

Let's ask a lawyer, since I'm just making shit up here and really have nfc what I'm talking about.

The Supreme Court’s basis for action is clear when the area regulated is naturalization. Article 1, 8, clause 4, of the United States Constitution specifically grants Congress the power to establish a "uniform Rule of Naturalization." By expressly allocating this power to Congress, the Constitution prevents the confusion that would result if individual states could bestow citizenship. The Constitution does not, however, explicitly provide that the power to deny admission or remove non-citizens rests with the federal government as opposed to state governments. Hence, in the early immigration cases the Supreme Court faced the problem of identifying the source of the federal government's exclusive and plenary power over immigration. Later cases found the plenary power to be an inherent sovereign power.

Inherent sovereign power...makes sense.

In the earliest cases, the Court looked to the federal power over foreign commerce. The Commerce Clause in Article I, 8, clause 3, of the United States Constitution provides Congress with the power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States." The Supreme Court in the Passenger Cases (Sup.Ct.1849) invoked the Commerce Clause to ban the levy of fees upon foreigners wishing to disembark at state ports. The Court invalidated state immigration fees even though Congress had yet to implement any relevant federal regulations.

Interesting. State fees to control immigration are unconstitutional.

The Naturalization Clause in Article I, 8, clause 4, has served as an argument for federal control over immigration. The dissent in the Passenger Cases rejected this argument. Passenger Cases (Sup.Ct.1849). As mentioned earlier, the Naturalization Clause's granting of power to "establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization" concerns decisions about citizenship rather than immigration generally.

Specifically

Or try this edress from http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/peace...
wyden@teleport.com

They only respond to constituents in Oregon.

Sadly, comedian and senator Al Franken, D-MN, who is tech savvy, is no longer able to speak for justice on the Hill.

You may want to research things a little instead of being a Humpty Dumpty about what means what. Just Google “examples of microaggressions” and see what comes out. The first is some Buzzfeed article, but for the sake of everyone involved I will link you to the second hit from a somewhat more reputable .edu address.

Is this you understanding of “being a dick”? Half of these are things I have never heard anyone say in a ten mile radius of a college campus, the other half are so benign that you have to have very special interpretative skills to qualify that as being anything close to a dick. QED: I believe the most qualified person should get the job. and Why do you have to be so loud / animated? Just calm down. Christ, I am certain that by many definitions your whole post is a major microaggression because you are not letting dicks express themselves or something like that.

Not exactly. Fertilizer isn't just nitrogen. First chart I came to:

http://www.extension.umn.edu/a...

ummm... RTFA I said "50,000 people in the US alone have died from Cdiff in the last 10 years." In my more recent post, I point out that in 2011 alone, there were 500,000 cases of CDI, so in 10 years, that would be 5,000,000 cases of CDI. So my ballpark number of 50,000 deaths was a fatality rate of about 1%. Put down your crack pipe and step away from the keyboard... http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news...

Furthermore, I know that in 1999 there were very few CDI, but the cases and fatalities rose dramatically over the last 17 years, and between 2006 and 2016 the deaths were between 8,000 and 29,000 per year, see here: http://slideplayer.com/slide/3... This easily adds up to over 50,000 deaths between 2006 and 2016, so again, I think you need to leave off whatever you have been smoking for a while.

Furthermore, you might want to educate yourself a bit instead of talking out of your ass about things which you are clearly ignorant "If infections had a 60% death rate I would be probably dead 20 times now." NO RTFA, PRE ANTIBOITCS MOST SERIOUS INFECTIONS WERE FATAL...

Quoting from this article: https://www.healthychildren.or...

"Before antibiotics, 90% of children with bacterial meningitis died. Among those children who lived, most had severe and lasting disabilities, from deafness to mental retardation.
Strep throat was at times a fatal disease, and ear infections sometimes spread from the ear to the brain, causing severe problems.
Other serious infections, from tuberculosis to pneumonia to whooping cough, were caused by aggressive bacteria that reproduced with extraordinary speed and led to serious illness and sometimes death."

For more fun reading, you can see how mideval medicine was during WW1, which was pre antibiotics https://www.omicsonline.org/op...

In 2011, the CDC pegged almost 500,000 cases of CDI with 29,000 deaths. It is deadly shit (sorry for the pun), especially for the elderly. The only reason pneumonia is not as deadly is because of antibiotics. It used to kill a much higher percentage of those infected.

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news...

The fact you see a contradiction between these two comments is a spectacular admission of idiocy. Sigh. I will spell this out for you seeing as you are too dumb to get it all by yourself. The article is about the ability of solar and storage to replace gas peaker plants. The post to which I responded said "but winter daytime weather makes solar useless", ignoring the fact that the article discussed not solar alone but solar and storage. Then you chipped in with your trump card of "but winter daytime weather means you'll be using not generating" and I pointed out that this would be true if we were talking about a domestic system, but isn't true for peaker plant replacement solar-and-storage. That's because:
1. Peaker plants (and thus any replacement solar-and-storage) typically only operate for a few hours in a day (morning or afternoon peak) and a few days in a year, so there is still plenty of generation time. Indeed if you go back to the original report and dig into the modelling assumptions, it's working off a 4 hour minimum per day use case ("the MISO definition of a Use Limited Resource") and "MISO historical peak hours typically correspond with HE15 through HE18 during summer months". Note *summer*, not winter. On slide 172 of the Stratagen report, they even have a handy-dandy graphic that shows quite clearly how peak demand hours mainly come immediately *after* a solar-and-storage system is charged.
2. Peaker plants (and thus any replacement solar-and-storage) are supplementing baseload only (and charging a pretty penny for doing so)
3. Solar-and-storage that replaces peaker is on a big enough scale to warrant maintenance, including keeping solar panels free of snow and ice, unlike a domestic system. So while generation will drop in the winter, it won't go close to zero (and in any event, that's not where peak demand occurs for this model, see #1 above)

http://energytransition.umn.ed...

It's beyond irritating that people like you expend all your (feeble) intellectual efforts trying to win rhetorically (including such pathetic playground devices as copying my phrasing), rather than actually learning about what is being proposed. And that it's so obviously beyond you to admit that a significant effort has been made to get the details of this rights, and that yes that does actually include accounting for the fact that snow falls in winter and irradiance drops, thank you very much.

I can think of one thing that would be useful for self driving cars that would benefit greatly from low latency. The use of RTK for getting highly accurate positions using the CORS network that the US has and supplementing with state CORS networks if available. I know it is being used by some MnDOT and MetroTransit vehicles but can't find the article that I read stating as such but did find a paper from the University of MN when they were doing some trials.

Then again for something like that maybe having a dedicated system that continuously broadcasts the current (last few seconds) of data to all would be better as it would be even lower latency and wouldn't require massive amounts of bandwidth.

Hire some experts to write text books under a creative commons licence

Check

sell hard copies at cost

Check

electronic copies free as .epubs, .pdfs

Check

They have math, from pre-algebra to calculus plus statistics. Physics, chemistry, astronomy. biology, microbiology, economics, psychology, U.S. history

There are quite a few efforts along the lines of what you are suggesting, but Openstax is my favorite because they are well funded (Gates Foundation and Hewlett Foundation, among others), they produce a consistent, high-quality product, they don't try to suck you into their ecosystem - they just write and give away the textbooks.

The Open Textbook Network is also very good, but they are more curators of all free textbooks and not so much producers.

Places of higher learning (including community colleges) should just band together nationally or state level and go after all the primary subjects ...

They are doing exactly that. I give you the Open Education Consortium.

But there are lots of others. The University of Minnesota runs the Open Textbook Network.
Of course Openstax is producing lots of curriculum.

There are so many free textbook programs out there that the real challenge is paring down the list. Openstax seems to be emerging as the big, reliable repository.

My news site, for lack of a better word, about free textbooks.

This software has been written in Ada: http://www-users.math.umn.edu/...

The lack of accuracy was due to inaccurate calculation of time since system boot.

http://www-users.math.umn.edu/...

At literally no point in US history was this the norm.

You're wrong. Multigenerational homes were quite common until the 1950's.

In the old days, the old-age assistance problem was not so great so long as most people lived on farms, had big families, and at least some of the children stayed on the farm. It was customary when the old people got too old to do their share of the work they would stay on the farm and the sons or daughters would keep them there in the home. That pattern changed slowly but continuously from the early part of the century as more and more of the young, rural population left the farms. The three generation household (aged parents, children, and grandchildren), perfectly common 50 years ago, had begun to become very rare indeed. By the time people got old, the children had already left and gone to the city. There was no one to take care of them. Hence, an increase in the problem of the needy aged.

http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/multigenerational.pdf

https://www.physics.umn.edu/ou...

Perhaps you need to relearn some basic physics? Yes, moving air has a lower pressure than still air.

Politifact is biased.

  "By levying 23 Pants on Fire ratings to Republicans over the past year compared to just 4 to Democrats, it appears the sport of choice is game hunting - and the game is elephants."
http://editions.lib.umn.edu/smartpolitics/2011/02/10/selection-bias-politifact-rate/

The Tampa Bay Times just endorsed Clinton for President. Why is this relevant? They own Politifact.
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/45ml0p/the_tampa_bay_times_just_endorsed_clinton_for/

Agreed. In practice, viruses have a tendency to never go away. Just take a look at the people who have been "cured" of ebola. Months or years later, some of them start showing symptoms again, because the virus found a reservoir inside an eyeball or some other random part of the body where the immune system is not as effective.

Also, the claim that smallpox can only infect humans is naïve. It can, in fact, infect other primates. So the fact that it is no longer found in humans does not mean that it can't come back on its own. It is unlikely, but not impossible. In fact, it is highly likely that the initial smallpox epidemics were caused by the virus making its way into humans from some other animal species. If it happened once, it could happen twice....

So the assertions upon which the author built the argument against smallpox are somewhat dubious, IMO. With that said, that doesn't mean that the conclusions are wrong. The important question is whether we can continue to manufacture smallpox vaccines indefinitely without the actual virus. If the answer is yes (and I believe that it is), then destroying the most likely way for the virus to end up spreading among the population does make sense.

Any recurrence of the virus, whether natural or artificial, would either be different from the known smallpox strains in meaningful ways or it wouldn't. If it is different, then the current smallpox virus probably won't be of any real benefit in developing a vaccine for the new variant; they would need samples of the new virus instead. If it isn't different, then the existing vaccine will "just work", and we don't need the current smallpox virus.

Either way, the only plausible future use for smallpox would be as a biological weapon, and IMO, we owe it to future generations to destroy it.

And as I post this, I'm struggling to avoid laughing. Because of a bit of over-editing, that last sentence almost ended with "... and IMO, we owe it to future generations to do so." Yikes!

Take seeds from your standard non GMO and try to grow tomatoes from it. It will probably work, but be rather anemic.

This idea is itself a myth propagated by seed/plant companies to encourage you to keep buying from them. The seeds from grocery-store tomatoes will grow fine and produce strong plants that produce fruit heavily. I do this routinely (with tomatoes, peppers, melons, etc.).

The fruit you will get may not be exactly like the parent fruit, because the parent was likely a hybrid and the genetics will be reassorting in the F2 generation that you grew, but they will generally be plenty tasty. (If you're interested in breeding your own vegetable varieties, it is really helpful to start with the seeds from such a hybrid.) The bigger problem is that the store varieties of tomatoes have long been bred for industrial production, so they're full of traits that might not be useful in the home garden. The most basic of these traits is called determinant growth, which results in the whole crop of fruit ripening at about the same time. This is great for the farm, but can produce a feast-or-famine effect in the home garden if you don't plan for it.

If this is happening in the US, the decision will probably be made on grounds of the sensibilities of someone's imaginary friend

Ireland, Germany, Poland, Italy, and other countries like that are much more into "imaginary friends" as the basis of research legislation:

http://www.mbbnet.umn.edu/scma...

http://www.techinsider.io/what...

jonwil the "Charles Babbage Institute Center for the History of Information Technology University of Minnesota" Martin Hellman Interview 22 November 2004 might have some info.
pdf at: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bi...
".... involvement with and the broader context of the debate about the federal government’s cryptography policy—regarding to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) early efforts to contain and discourage academic work in the field"

You mean this College? http://cla.umn.edu/academics-e... (note those are only the majors in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota) But, as someone who does not suffer from Autism, I understand what you are trying to say. You mean "arts/humanities" but are saying "Liberal Arts." And you are correct, not everywhere uses the term "Liberal Arts" to include their physics program. "Liberal Arts" isn't a political term. It's the idea that to be a free thinker you need an exposure to a broad training. English majors having to take math and science, physicists needing to take life sciences and art, and cs majors needing to take physics.

> If you take out the liberal run towns with the highest gun violence, you'll find that gun deaths are indeed fairly rare.

Ah, there it is, that's the real reason for your argument. See I was missing how you were equating identity theft (which while a headache is less of a headache than death) with getting shot, but then I realized that this was your opportunity to take a jab at liberals.

You're twisting information to suite your narrative. You've also neglected to mention that (based on whatever uncited source you're claiming to get your information about gun crimes from) that Republican led states have much higher levels of crime than Democrat states. This information was based off of the analysis of the 2008 Uniform Crime Reports. You can find that analysis here: http://editions.lib.umn.edu/sm...

Of course there's also more recent studies (seen here: https://www.americanprogress.o...) that show a link between lax gun laws and higher gun crime rates. More directly it shows that states with the highest gun crimes (which are typically conservative states) have the highest crime rates. In fact Alaska, Louisiana, Montana, and Alabama rank higher (per capita) in firearm deaths than Democratic states. For comparison while all of the above states were at least 4 points above the national average of 10.26 deaths/100,000 people Illinois was ~2 points LOWER than the national average.

I suppose it's easier to just throw out random uncited sources and half-baked facts without researching the overall data. Especially when your entire goal is to slander a political view that you apparently disagree with. But the short of the long is that none of the above discussion is a valid answer on why everything should be black and white. I personally think you're just trolling -- even if it's not a conscious decision to troll.

"An early September assessment of burial practices in some of Sierra Leone's Ebola hot spots revealed a host of problems that were probably helping fuel ongoing virus transmission in the country" ref

Disclamer: I will not research how well they keep their promises, or acts they voted for and against or sponsored. I do not endorse or oppose any of these candidates.

I looked at their website, mayday.us It referred me to a different site, repswith.us describing five proposals they support. The plan of Democrat Mr. Sarbanes was first. His site seems to directly address various issues, with little double-speak. The Government By the People Act is its own section of his site, listed under "issues", but in its own section. The plan hinges on a tax credit for political donations to encourage small donors. Also this:

"Allow candidates to earn additional public matching funds within 60 days of the election so that citizen-funded candidates can combat Super PAC"

which doesn't explain how superpac donations won't apply to the matching funds. To be fair I didn't look into it.

Next is Democrat David Price. His site isn't as straight-forward, but does present mostly solid stances on the issues. I couldn't find the Empowering Citizens Act(pdf warning) without using the search function, which tells me he's not staking his reputation on it. This one is more complicated but the main theme seems to be limiting per-donor donations. Obviously loopholes that allow present donors to give more than they need to declare (such as giving bonuses to employees who promise to donate most of the bonus) remain. It also limits total public funds available to candidates, which my intuition tells me will have the opposite effect. This plan looks pretty slimy to me. Your opinion may vary.

Republican Jim Rubens plan, Political Money Reform Proposal" isn't on his site at all, so the link is back to repswith.us. It involves a larger tax rebate for donations and "Require searchable, realtime online reporting of contributions above $200" and removes all political spending and contribution limits.

Republican Richard Painter literally wrote the bookon ethics reform. His site is his university's site, so wouldn't naturally have details on supported initiatives. According to repswith.us the Taxation Only With Representation Act involves a $200 tax rebait for private donations and nothing else.

The some of the increase in tuition at state schools is directly the result of the state legislatures pulling money out. The legislators then turn around and claim there is a crisis in higher education with ever higher costs for the average person.

So how much is enough? For example in Minnesota the State provides the University of Minnesota about $600,000,000 which across all of it's campuses looks to have about 62,000 students enrolled. This works out to almost $10,000/per year per student. This ignores out of state students, people who are just taking a class for shits and giggles, and international students who either don't get a subsidy or don't get the full benefit of it so the actual number is actually better for full-time instate students. So where is all of this money being pissed away?

The some of the increase in tuition at state schools is directly the result of the state legislatures pulling money out. The legislators then turn around and claim there is a crisis in higher education with ever higher costs for the average person.

So how much is enough? For example in Minnesota the State provides the University of Minnesota about $600,000,000 which across all of it's campuses looks to have about 62,000 students enrolled. This works out to almost $10,000/per year per student. This ignores out of state students, people who are just taking a class for shits and giggles, and international students who either don't get a subsidy or don't get the full benefit of it so the actual number is actually better for full-time instate students. So where is all of this money being pissed away?

Since you originally brought up AA, though:

The only mentions of blur on Wikipedia's AA Page relate to photography (near the top of the page) and an separate operation done before resampling an image (in a comparison against proper AA).

But, Wikipedia is a horrible source, so I won't leave you with just that. So, here's another, along with an explanation of the Nyquist–Shannon Sampling Theorum, and one more not from Wikipedia (PDF warning). I didn't cherry pick these, these were top results for simple searches on the subject (and also all items I've already read and understood at points far preceding this argument).

Clearly, having read and understood any factual materials on the subject, AA is, as it relates to digital signals, not a form of blur. Your link (which is very basic and dumbed-down for the graphics card consumer; a poor choice for an actual technical argument) doesn't disagree with that stance, either.

driven by Big Agrochem trying to make shitloads of money,

You mean like every other conventionally bred seed they also sell? Better take a stand against conventional breeding. Or maybe you mean Golden Rice, developed by the International Rice Research Institute, or the Rainbow Payaya, developed by the University of Hawai'i, or any number of other GMOs I could mention that have bugger all to do with corporations and are developed by independent university, public, or NGO scientists (who nonetheless are likewise opposed while anti-GMO people ignore them or have the gall to accuse them of being corporate or even vandalize publicly funded GMO research).

acquire copyrights and patents on key food crops

You mean like conventional breeding already does and has been for a long time? You mean the patents that expire and are used in public domain works? By the way, do you have a fair alternative?

'bundle' their own special seeds with their own special pesticides and weedkillers.

Like conventional breeding? Also, selling two products that go together is immoral now? Really? Guess Nintendo must be absolutely abominable for selling gaming systems and the games that go with them for decades, those monsters. By the way, are you referring to the special herbicide (not insecticide as you wrongly imply) that went off patent in 2000? And furthermore, did it ever occur to you that maybe farmers have adopted the herbicide tolerant crops in such large number for a good reason?

You don't even want to take a tiny, tiny risk of killing off pollinating insects or having 'terminator' genes or antibiotic markers jump species.

The refusal to accept any risk at all is a flawed ideology. That's the kind of thought that leads people to refusing vaccines on a 'risk aversion basis.' When one considers your rational of terminator genes (never even been used) and horizontal gene transfer (common only on an evolutionary time frame, and no more or less likely to happen to a transgene than any other gene; maybe I say we ban conventional breeding because I don't want rice sd-1 to jump species hmm? What risk do you see the NPTII gene you refer to having anyway?), your argument falls apart completely.

only if you own shares in big agro (unless you think buying expensive seed and complimentary chemicals from multinationals and not being able to re-plant harvested seed is somehow going to cure third world hunger).

You forgot increased yield, decreased insecticide, safer for farmers and consumers, lower environment impact by replacing harsher herbicide and soil degrading tillage, and saving an entire industry from a devastating virus. You mean beside those benefits you conveniently neglected to mention? And even if none of that were the case, you'd still be wrong because you'd be saying that the present use of a technology is not good therefore there is no good use for it. That's completely absurd, and made all the mor

William Norris, the founder of the company behind PLATO, was ahead of his time in other ways, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner cities and disadvantaged communities."

See also:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedp...
http://www.amazon.com/William-...

Thanks for the links to Norris's papers. I had attempted to gain access to those when I visited the Twin Cities a few years back -- as they were part of the UMN Norris archives -- but they kept worse than bankers' hours so I wasn't able to gain access to them during that visit.

In particular the long-lost paper "Back to the Countryside Via Technology" by William C. Norris, then CEO of Control Data Corporation, January 1978, was what I recalled. It delves into some of his vision for the PLATO network as a way of preserving the Nation of Settlers against the onslaughts of urbanization (and what has turned out to be a resulting demographic catastrophy in loss of total fertility rates among the baby boom generation).

Norris was one of my inspirations for county currency, as well as my early promotion of mass market computer networks. Sadly, perhaps even tragically, I did not get through his middle management at CDC to Norris about the mass market version of PLATO a group of us young engineers had demonstrated right under his nose at CDC circa 1980. The world might have been a very different place. It is my greatest professional regret that I didn't just barge into his office and chain myself to a door to get his attention.

Jim, thanks for the reply. It is a pleasure to be corresponding with someone with such a knowledge of computing history (having lived it). My first computer (other than playing with IBM punched cards and building my own circuits) was KIM-1 with 1K of memory in the late 1970s, and I've been working with them ever since. I started networked computing in high school in the 1970s on a TOPS-10/Lyrics DEC PDP-10 system on Long Island, even eventually getting a Commodore PET to dial in (but I could not afford as a teenager the US$10 an hour phone non-local charges -- probably US$40 an hour in today's money -- although at some point we got a local dial-in as I was leaving high school). I was later for a time on AppleLink and BIX and the Well and IGC, but still generally restricted by US$10 an hour long distance charges until the late 1990s. We perhaps both draw from many of the same pool of ideas and interests and likely even sci-fi stories informing our outlooks (even if they are not identical) -- although with my experiences lag yours by a decade or two, and I was never in the kind of communities doing the kind of really new work you were fortunate enough to be in. My father was a merchant mariner, then a machinist, then a manufacturing engineer, so I also has a somewhat more mechanical focus in some of my aspirations (like interest in self-replicating hardware leading to self-replicating space habitats, which overlaps seasteading and some other exponential ideas you talk about for environmental cleanup); but my mother's work as a social worker / welfare caseworker for twenty years and more also is an influence as to bigger picture issues. Due to that lag, compared to you, I also saw and lived in much more of the Personal Computer aspect of the industry compared to PLATO and (to me then unaffordable, even for two decades) computer networking, even if I did use networked computer early on in high school. I put some rambles below on ideas in your essay and other historical links, plus a big quote at the end from Bill Norris hat applies to the main topic of automation and jobs. Anyway, got to get back to "work" or I would make this better and shorter. :-)

=== Ramble mode on

I corresponded with Bill Norris briefly in the late 1980s (when my graduate advisor at Princeton suggested I talk to him), then again in the early 1990s. I had hoped to work with him somehow at his foundation developing software to support flexible manufacturing and information exchange, even hoping to move as a summer volunteer/intern to MN (he said he had no money to hire new staff). However, I met my wife around then and so those hopes ultimately fell apart. My own ideas on that became "OSCOMAK", but it has not really gone far, and it has been eclipsed by other ideas of lesser scope but better social networking. It's a shame he and I never worked together back then, as I feel it would have been a great match with my interests and abilities, and I would have learned so much from him. I can envy you a chance to bask in that environment.

Bill Norris sent me a copy of his biography as well as copies of many of the pamphlets he wrote for Control Data (like "back to the Countryside via Technology"). I scanned and OCR'd some of the pamphlets and had hoped to put them on the internet and we had some correspondence about that too, but the licensing issues remained unclear so I did not put them up. Glad someone else did though:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedp...

Of Bill Norris' talks there, the most relevant there is this HBR story on robots taking all the jobs may be: "Technology and Full Employment [Nov. 1978]". I quote at length from one of them at the end. However, as much as I respect Bill Norris, and as much as what he said about full employment and technology may have been true in the 1970s, I feel it is a lot less true now that robotics, AI, and other forms of automation, along with better design, better materials, expanded infrastructure

I might worry about this shortly before I start to worry about the heat death of the universe. If we look at one of the largest lakes on earth which contains about 3,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water and extracted water out of it for the purposes of using the hydrogen in it for fusion reactors at the average rate we have been extracting oil out of the ground for the last 100 years it would take about 5000 years to drain the thing assuming no new water entered it. Now add in that this is one lake representing about 10% of the available fresh water and that most of the water on earth by a very substantial margin is sea water and we should be good for at least the next half a million years or so. This also assumes that we would extract the water at the rate we do for oil even though fusion would be providing orders of magnitude more power for the same volume of fuel. So that pushes it off for at least a few 10s of millions of years. If in that time we haven't managed to get off this rock, I say fuck it we all deserve to die.

WHO is already looking at stepped wedge trials

Given that the disease HASN'T spread outside of West Africa to any extent yet, that information that we all already know is worse than useless, it just spreads fear.

Why not forget your personal safety for a moment? The fact that this is spreading in a here-to-unforseen manner should be cause for alarm. Even if it remains confined to Africa this time, it's still a HUGE disaster in the making, and we don't know how bad it will get there. We just know that at this point in time it will get worse.

If I could go help, I would. Unfortunately, I don't have the required skills.

Excellent. Thanks for the link.

COMMENTARY: Health workers need optimal respiratory protection for Ebola

@DrLang21: "I did read the article and I don't see where the researchers accounted for socio-economic background" ..

Educational achievement does not equate to intelligence, does anyone here seriously think management got where they are because they're smarter? I would have thought that a more useful study would be the effects of growing up poor has on educational achievement. Something like the Linda Tirado article and book.

"When studies of separated Monozygotic Twins are examined .. environment also has a role."

See also

Researching the "Rape Culture" of America
by Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/facul...

If you are worried about running out of water by doing this on large scale industrial process then you have far too few concerns in your life. Seriously we have use about 1 trillion barrels of oil in all of human existence, or about 55 trillion gallons. Assuming that all 1 trillion barrels of oil were used in the last century and if we used water at the same rate it would take somewhere around 5000 years to completely drain Lake Superior and by volume there are bigger lakes and on top of that there is still the oceans which I gather are rising so it might solve that problem as well.

> They aren't called "Arabic numerals" for quaintness.

Actually, they are. Literally.

"It should be noted that the Arabic numerals were neither invented by nor used by the Arabs. They were developed in India by the Hindus around 600 A.D"

http://www.mediahistory.umn.ed...

Sure there is!

One problem is that people will typically read the Wikipedia article first, and allow it to colour their perception. Big mistake if the article is biased to begin with, and a sort of kafkaesque situation for the victim. Wikipedia has known problems in this area, see e.g. Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia by Andrew Leonard; The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose – A false and malicious identity is admitted by David Allen Green; the story of Taner Akcam, Any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocent, by Robert Fisk (originally published in The Independent); or that of Philip Mould, Mayfair art dealer Mark Weiss in disgrace after admitting poison pen campaign against rival Philip Mould, by Gordon Rayner.

Tech Times headlines this as "Climate change prompts Emperor penguins to find new breeding grounds" The researchers press report is titled like this: "New research using satellite images reveals that emperor penguins are more willing to relocate than previously thought" The reporter from Tech Times basically lied to create a headline. If you read the original press release it says nothing about global climate change. The researchers did not make this conclusion- the fiction writer that wrote the article made it up. http://cse.umn.edu/admin/comm/...

I did read the article and the original article from which the linked article got its information.

You are making the same point I was, in different words. But my comment was about OP, in particular.

The original article does not even contain the word "climate", much less "climate change".

Your numbers don't work. If we have a vaccine that's 80% effective 33% of the time, and absolutely worthless otherwise, it's still 26.4% effective, not 16%. If I get to skip the flu once, that'll make a whole lot of vaccine injections worth it.

The numbers are a stab in the dark. The 80% figure is actually higher than the efficacy in the general population - it was based on studies in the 1950s and 1960s using military personnel, all given the vaccine as a requirement. Per-year studies show closer to 40-60% for specific years based on various strains.

I actually had it backwards. There's a rather complicated process to select the strains to use in the vaccine, that starts with the WHO, and the CDC uses its own criteria to select the strains. But they don't use 1-of-3, they use 3-of-many (flu vaccines are trivalent, meaning they protect against 3 specific types).

I posted a link in this thread to some information on the process. There are some good data on efficacy for specific years and geographic areas, but I couldn't find any, even meta-studies, that came up with a rate for a decade or range of years.

The report from the University of Minnesota's CIDRAP has some good information in it, but it's focus is to promote research into a new way to combat flu. They still make a compelling case that the current methods are not working like advertised, in that while there is a slightly lower infection rate in the immunized population, the number of hospitalizations and deaths are no different from using no vaccines.

Not sure why you're so indoctrinated on this issue you feel compelled to not just ignore factual information, but to launch personal attacks against anyone that would point them out.

Others have already posted the issues with the H1N1 / H1N2 interactions, so I won't bother repeating that. I would point you to some information from the CDC

:

What do recent vaccine effectiveness studies show? CDC conducts studies each year to determine how well the flu vaccine protects against flu illness. These estimates provide more information about how well this season’s vaccine is working. Recent studies show vaccine can reduce the risk of flu illness by about 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are like the viruses the flu vaccine is designed to protect against.

And from a very large study in Europe for 2012 / 2013:

Our results suggest an overall low to moderate AVE against influenza B, A(H1N1)pdm09 and A(H3N2), between 42 and 50%.

And, finally, this report from the University of Minnesota:

On the basis of our review, we conclude that the currently licensed influenza vaccines can provide moderate protection against virologically confirmed influenza, but such protection is greatly reduced or absent in some seasons. It also supports the conclusion that, Based on a track record of substantial safety and moderate efficacy in many seasons, we believe the current influenza vaccines will continue to have a role in reduction of influenza morbidity until more effective interventions are available. However, evidence for consistent high-level protection is elusive for the present generation of vaccines, especially in individuals at risk of medical complications or those aged 65 years or older.

That's probably because people receiving the vaccine were far more likely to work in healthcare settings, and therefore be exposed to infection, not because the vaccine weakens one's resistance to influenza. In controlled studies, the inactivated vaccine cuts your chance of being infected roughly in half, and shortens the period of clinical symptoms. The live vaccine is even more effective.

No, it had nothing to do with higher exposure risk, it was a very large study. And the results were replicated in a controlled experiment on pigs, which showed that vaccines that target the N2 strain causes worsened respiratory issues in those infected with N1.