It's not a stupid study at all. The goal was to find out why Americans think their health care is the best when measurably it is not. It is an interesting question. And it's not just because "it's American" as you suggest, it's because they like that doctors give them the freedom to try tests and treatments everyone knows are ineffective. That is actually a useful thing to have learned. Over time that understanding can help shape health policy, though it will probably take decades.
I just read a pretty compelling study about how Americans consistently rate their health care as "the best in the world", however by virtually any meaningful metric it is factually not the best healthcare in the world. We have measurably higher infant mortality rates than most highly developed nations, but most people will dismiss that as a poverty related problem that doesn't affect them. However the mortality rates for diabetes and heart disease, and IIRC cancer are also higher.
The thing that sets the American medical system apart seems to be an amazing willingness to perform tests and treatments that have been proven to be superfluous or ineffective. And it is this very tendency that makes Americans think they're getting great health care when in fact they are not. Sick? Here, we'll run a bunch of needless MRI's so you're convinced you've got super high-tech medicine on your side. May not achieve a damn thing, but you'll rate your satisfaction higher.
A lot of people base their debt payments upon the salary level with out much gap between them.
And there, my friend, is the problem. From individuals, to corps and banks, to the government itself.
People seem to love debt spending. People seem to think a cushion is waste. But it's insurance. It blows me away that this isn't usually figured into things.
The rendering and javascript seem fine -- at least as fast as before and possibly faster. But _every_ UI change they've made sucks. And I don't say that about all UI changes that come down the line.
1. tabs in the title bar turn it into a minefield: grabbing the window to move it (something i do a lot) is now a button-dodging exercise 2. spread out tabs in the title bar means the close buttons move around more erratically than they used to when closing multiple tabs 3. the stop/refresh button has been moved away from all the other navigation buttons, requiring extra mousing 4. the new spinner progress meter gives less information and requires a precise visual scan, unlike the previous blue bar meter that gave some indication of progress and could be seen without having to specifically look at it
Why would they do all that? I can't think of any advantage to any of those changes. Sigh.
Casinos don't need to cheat. The games are designed so that over time they always come out well ahead. It's just simple probability. And that is all out in the open, so no cheating is required.
There are only two reasons to gamble: you enjoy the game and you can afford to lose some money, or you're an idiot.
That's what makes them conspiracy folks: they can twist everything into a conspiracy. It's like seeing faces in clouds... or grilled cheese sandwiches.
I'm sure the reason GKS is doing this is for business reasons, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. When I am generous I do it with the selfish motive of feeling good. Enlightened self interest is what makes the world go around.
If sex were allowed on TV it wouldn't be the only thing on TV. I have access to porn whenever I want it for free and a very small percentage of my time is spent watching porn. And that's coming from someone who likes porn quite a bit. (I'm 35, by the way)
Also, despite my liking porn, and despite having first discovered dirty magazines at maybe 8 and dirty movies by 12, I doubt anyone who knows me would call me a drooling ape.
I understand completely your desire to protect your children, and I'll support ratings on movies, games, etc. for that reason. However, I honestly think the kids are far less fragile than you imagine, and far more able to exercise judgment.
My parents were pretty modest about this kind of thing and tried to protect me from it. When I did see such things as a kid, I thought they were funny and maybe a bit embarrassing and that was about it. It wasn't a major point in my life. I sort of wish my parents hadn't made such a big deal out of it so that I would have felt a little more comfortable talking to them about it. As it was, even when they eventually wanted to talk about the birds and the bees (when I was age 16 or so) I had already decided they were the last people in the world I'd want to talk to about such a thing because they seemed so positively terrified by it.
As to the objectifying and devaluing, that is a common thing in nearly all humor, sexual or not. Were you as offended at the snow globe being thrown at the boss for example? Or any of the other non-sexual dehumanizing content? That is all over television already, in much higher doses than sexuality. Kids learn (or don't) how to muck through it. It's just part of life.
I always try to get my media through a legitimate source first, for example I'll watch TV shows with ads on one of the official sites if available. But I've gotten to the point where if I encounter any bullshit I just go get it via some other source and that means copyright infringement.
I do want to support the content creators, but I'm just so tired of waiting for them to get with the program. I can't believe that sites like hulu can only offer the last few episodes of the show... where is the logic in that? I'm not paying for DRM'd material either. It's like they're actively trying to make life more difficult for their customers.
I have some ethics, but they've slipped to the point where I'm willing to infringe copyright if there's no convenient way for me to get the goods. The longer they do stupid shit like this to maintain "control" the more people are going to slip away.
I sense there's some hand waving going on here because some materials are finite while manhours are not. Yes, I'm playing fast and loose with the term "finite", but I think the point stands. All the manhours in the world won't be worth much when we run out of some critical resource. At which point manhours suddenly become finite too, if you understand my meaning.
Unfortunately most people don't see a distinction between "more than I can imagine" and "infinite". Thus we have no need to worry about our atmosphere, water supply, arable land, etc.
I think "waste not want not" is still a very useful value. I promise it will come into play again someday after we've run this course.
I haven't tried LED yet but I hear you and I have had similar experiences with CFLs.
I'm a green minded guy, but I think that pushing some of these green technologies while they're still, ahem, green, is a bad move. Most people I know hate CLFs because they a) don't come on immediately b) aren't as bright as they claim to be and c) have lousy color.
I know that you can find high quality CFLs that do not have these problems, but it's not easy and most people will just mentally mark CFLs as being annoying environmentalist crap and move on.
I firmly believe that we can live very well and sustainably by advancing technology. However pushing out environmental products that suck next to normal products just cements in people's minds that green tech is annoying.
I most assuredly did not. I specifically said "correlation" in my post. I am just showing a source for that correlation. The original disputed claim was "It's a pretty well known fact that poor people have a tendency to have more children". The link I provided makes the case for that. No causation was discussed.
I understand that it does not necessarily follow that if those same people were not poor that they would have fewer children. Or that if they had fewer children they would be less poor. Either of those would be implying causation, which was not even discussed. In fact, I don't even know which direction of causation you think I was implying.
On the other hand, a secondary fallacy would be to assume that correlation never means causation. If you have theories about why these data are correlated other than a causal relationship (in either direction), let's hear it.
You'll probably recognize the relative wealth of those nations by name, but if not you can find plenty of lists of per capita GDP online. You'll see an amazing correlation between poor nations and birth rate. This is a very well established observation.
First, because when you're poor and malnourished, the only enjoyment you may have in life is sex with your partner. It's all very well and good to tell them to stop fucking, but when that's all you've got it's a hard rule to keep.
Second, (and related) because in _every_ situation where the death rate is high, people have more babies. This is an evolutionary mechanism to encourage survival. Birth rate always increases with death rate. What you're asking is that they basically lay back and let their genes be pruned from the tree. Genes don't do that generally, they fight to survive. Breeding is how.
In the larger picture, it's very easy to sit back in amazing comfort and power and criticize these situations. It is much harder to figure out any way to actually improve them. This is true from where they're sitting as well.
According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7.
Though the experts were certainly wrong, let's not imply we're doing anywhere near a decent job of providing food for all mankind. Some 50,000 people die each day from starvation. Countless more live in a chronically malnourished state. True, this is not because of an inability to grow the food (probably what the experts predicted) but because of myriad other reasons from politics to economics to logistics.
Thanks. This is actually why I love slashdot -- I actually still learn things here pretty regularly. This description has helped me understand the concept of a low-mass black hole, something I couldn't conceive of just a few days ago.
This is actually new to me -- so thanks very much for posting it. I'll have to read up on the topic because it sounds incredible to me that if you compress a small amount of matter enough the escape velocity could increase to the point where it is significant, let alone increasing it all the way to the speed of light.
Of course, much of physics is incredible and yet well demonstrated.
Then you're paying for your friends and neighbours when they get sick and you're healthy!
Yeah, I hear that all the time, and it makes no sense because: that's how insurance works. The whole point of insurance is to play the law of averages. The larger the group, the better the law of averages works out. This is part of why group health insurance is so much cheaper than individual.
It's worse than that: any captcha system can be cracked by humans. You can either pay lots of low wage workers or offer some reward (porn) for cracking captchas. I came up with a whole bunch of captcha-tech ideas that would require hard AI... and then realized it's a dead end tech anyway. There are plenty of people in the world willing to crack captchas for next to nothing. There's no way to tell a real user from a person who is just trying to abuse the system.
Something like recaptcha will stop lazy attempts. Nothing will stop serious attempts.
Thanks for that comment. I've been wondering (with my limited understanding of physics) how creating a black hole was possible in this context. I understand that they're likely to create some amazingly dense matter... but I thought the gravity of a black hole was a feature of its mass as much as its density. What gravitational pull can a handful of particles have no matter how dense they are?
To my understanding, black holes aren't magical rips in the space-time continuum, they're just amazingly dense collections of huge quantities of matter. To make one, you need an enormous amount of matter, which the LHC does not have. There's no way I can see that we could jump-start a black hole formation here on earth.
But if I'm completely misunderstanding, let me know!
Good point -- I had three MBP batteries fail on me in the past two years by swelling up like that. With a removable it was no biggie, just drop it off and keep using my backup battery. (It was covered under warranty) If I'd have had to leave the whole laptop it would have been a much bigger hassle.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a stupid study at all. The goal was to find out why Americans think their health care is the best when measurably it is not. It is an interesting question. And it's not just because "it's American" as you suggest, it's because they like that doctors give them the freedom to try tests and treatments everyone knows are ineffective. That is actually a useful thing to have learned. Over time that understanding can help shape health policy, though it will probably take decades.
Cheers.
I just read a pretty compelling study about how Americans consistently rate their health care as "the best in the world", however by virtually any meaningful metric it is factually not the best healthcare in the world. We have measurably higher infant mortality rates than most highly developed nations, but most people will dismiss that as a poverty related problem that doesn't affect them. However the mortality rates for diabetes and heart disease, and IIRC cancer are also higher.
The thing that sets the American medical system apart seems to be an amazing willingness to perform tests and treatments that have been proven to be superfluous or ineffective. And it is this very tendency that makes Americans think they're getting great health care when in fact they are not. Sick? Here, we'll run a bunch of needless MRI's so you're convinced you've got super high-tech medicine on your side. May not achieve a damn thing, but you'll rate your satisfaction higher.
Pretty sad.
Cheers.
A lot of people base their debt payments upon the salary level with out much gap between them.
And there, my friend, is the problem. From individuals, to corps and banks, to the government itself.
People seem to love debt spending. People seem to think a cushion is waste. But it's insurance. It blows me away that this isn't usually figured into things.
Cheers.
The rendering and javascript seem fine -- at least as fast as before and possibly faster. But _every_ UI change they've made sucks. And I don't say that about all UI changes that come down the line.
1. tabs in the title bar turn it into a minefield: grabbing the window to move it (something i do a lot) is now a button-dodging exercise
2. spread out tabs in the title bar means the close buttons move around more erratically than they used to when closing multiple tabs
3. the stop/refresh button has been moved away from all the other navigation buttons, requiring extra mousing
4. the new spinner progress meter gives less information and requires a precise visual scan, unlike the previous blue bar meter that gave some indication of progress and could be seen without having to specifically look at it
Why would they do all that? I can't think of any advantage to any of those changes. Sigh.
It would be a poorly managed casino that didn't ask you to leave long before your card-counting winnings were $200,000.
Cheers.
Casinos don't need to cheat. The games are designed so that over time they always come out well ahead. It's just simple probability. And that is all out in the open, so no cheating is required.
There are only two reasons to gamble: you enjoy the game and you can afford to lose some money, or you're an idiot.
Cheers, from Las Vegas :)
That's what makes them conspiracy folks: they can twist everything into a conspiracy. It's like seeing faces in clouds... or grilled cheese sandwiches.
I'm sure the reason GKS is doing this is for business reasons, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. When I am generous I do it with the selfish motive of feeling good. Enlightened self interest is what makes the world go around.
Cheers.
If sex were allowed on TV it wouldn't be the only thing on TV. I have access to porn whenever I want it for free and a very small percentage of my time is spent watching porn. And that's coming from someone who likes porn quite a bit. (I'm 35, by the way)
Also, despite my liking porn, and despite having first discovered dirty magazines at maybe 8 and dirty movies by 12, I doubt anyone who knows me would call me a drooling ape.
I understand completely your desire to protect your children, and I'll support ratings on movies, games, etc. for that reason. However, I honestly think the kids are far less fragile than you imagine, and far more able to exercise judgment.
My parents were pretty modest about this kind of thing and tried to protect me from it. When I did see such things as a kid, I thought they were funny and maybe a bit embarrassing and that was about it. It wasn't a major point in my life. I sort of wish my parents hadn't made such a big deal out of it so that I would have felt a little more comfortable talking to them about it. As it was, even when they eventually wanted to talk about the birds and the bees (when I was age 16 or so) I had already decided they were the last people in the world I'd want to talk to about such a thing because they seemed so positively terrified by it.
As to the objectifying and devaluing, that is a common thing in nearly all humor, sexual or not. Were you as offended at the snow globe being thrown at the boss for example? Or any of the other non-sexual dehumanizing content? That is all over television already, in much higher doses than sexuality. Kids learn (or don't) how to muck through it. It's just part of life.
Cheers.
I always try to get my media through a legitimate source first, for example I'll watch TV shows with ads on one of the official sites if available. But I've gotten to the point where if I encounter any bullshit I just go get it via some other source and that means copyright infringement.
I do want to support the content creators, but I'm just so tired of waiting for them to get with the program. I can't believe that sites like hulu can only offer the last few episodes of the show... where is the logic in that? I'm not paying for DRM'd material either. It's like they're actively trying to make life more difficult for their customers.
I have some ethics, but they've slipped to the point where I'm willing to infringe copyright if there's no convenient way for me to get the goods. The longer they do stupid shit like this to maintain "control" the more people are going to slip away.
This is why I love slashdot... smart and civil people! No apology necessary, but thanks for the note back.
Cheers.
You might want to read this comment.
I sense there's some hand waving going on here because some materials are finite while manhours are not. Yes, I'm playing fast and loose with the term "finite", but I think the point stands. All the manhours in the world won't be worth much when we run out of some critical resource. At which point manhours suddenly become finite too, if you understand my meaning.
Unfortunately most people don't see a distinction between "more than I can imagine" and "infinite". Thus we have no need to worry about our atmosphere, water supply, arable land, etc.
I think "waste not want not" is still a very useful value. I promise it will come into play again someday after we've run this course.
Cheers.
I haven't tried LED yet but I hear you and I have had similar experiences with CFLs.
I'm a green minded guy, but I think that pushing some of these green technologies while they're still, ahem, green, is a bad move. Most people I know hate CLFs because they a) don't come on immediately b) aren't as bright as they claim to be and c) have lousy color.
I know that you can find high quality CFLs that do not have these problems, but it's not easy and most people will just mentally mark CFLs as being annoying environmentalist crap and move on.
I firmly believe that we can live very well and sustainably by advancing technology. However pushing out environmental products that suck next to normal products just cements in people's minds that green tech is annoying.
Cheers.
I most assuredly did not. I specifically said "correlation" in my post. I am just showing a source for that correlation. The original disputed claim was "It's a pretty well known fact that poor people have a tendency to have more children". The link I provided makes the case for that. No causation was discussed.
I understand that it does not necessarily follow that if those same people were not poor that they would have fewer children. Or that if they had fewer children they would be less poor. Either of those would be implying causation, which was not even discussed. In fact, I don't even know which direction of causation you think I was implying.
On the other hand, a secondary fallacy would be to assume that correlation never means causation. If you have theories about why these data are correlated other than a causal relationship (in either direction), let's hear it.
Cheers.
Source?
National Birth Rates
You'll probably recognize the relative wealth of those nations by name, but if not you can find plenty of lists of per capita GDP online. You'll see an amazing correlation between poor nations and birth rate. This is a very well established observation.
Cheers.
At least two reasons:
First, because when you're poor and malnourished, the only enjoyment you may have in life is sex with your partner. It's all very well and good to tell them to stop fucking, but when that's all you've got it's a hard rule to keep.
Second, (and related) because in _every_ situation where the death rate is high, people have more babies. This is an evolutionary mechanism to encourage survival. Birth rate always increases with death rate. What you're asking is that they basically lay back and let their genes be pruned from the tree. Genes don't do that generally, they fight to survive. Breeding is how.
In the larger picture, it's very easy to sit back in amazing comfort and power and criticize these situations. It is much harder to figure out any way to actually improve them. This is true from where they're sitting as well.
Cheers.
According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7.
Though the experts were certainly wrong, let's not imply we're doing anywhere near a decent job of providing food for all mankind. Some 50,000 people die each day from starvation. Countless more live in a chronically malnourished state. True, this is not because of an inability to grow the food (probably what the experts predicted) but because of myriad other reasons from politics to economics to logistics.
Cheers.
Thanks. This is actually why I love slashdot -- I actually still learn things here pretty regularly. This description has helped me understand the concept of a low-mass black hole, something I couldn't conceive of just a few days ago.
Cheers.
No: middle class people will still crack captchas for porn.
This is actually new to me -- so thanks very much for posting it. I'll have to read up on the topic because it sounds incredible to me that if you compress a small amount of matter enough the escape velocity could increase to the point where it is significant, let alone increasing it all the way to the speed of light.
Of course, much of physics is incredible and yet well demonstrated.
Cheers.
Then you're paying for your friends and neighbours when they get sick and you're healthy!
Yeah, I hear that all the time, and it makes no sense because: that's how insurance works. The whole point of insurance is to play the law of averages. The larger the group, the better the law of averages works out. This is part of why group health insurance is so much cheaper than individual.
Cheers.
It's worse than that: any captcha system can be cracked by humans. You can either pay lots of low wage workers or offer some reward (porn) for cracking captchas. I came up with a whole bunch of captcha-tech ideas that would require hard AI... and then realized it's a dead end tech anyway. There are plenty of people in the world willing to crack captchas for next to nothing. There's no way to tell a real user from a person who is just trying to abuse the system.
Something like recaptcha will stop lazy attempts. Nothing will stop serious attempts.
Cheers.
Thanks for that comment. I've been wondering (with my limited understanding of physics) how creating a black hole was possible in this context. I understand that they're likely to create some amazingly dense matter... but I thought the gravity of a black hole was a feature of its mass as much as its density. What gravitational pull can a handful of particles have no matter how dense they are?
To my understanding, black holes aren't magical rips in the space-time continuum, they're just amazingly dense collections of huge quantities of matter. To make one, you need an enormous amount of matter, which the LHC does not have. There's no way I can see that we could jump-start a black hole formation here on earth.
But if I'm completely misunderstanding, let me know!
Cheers.
Thanks, at least there is some option. Expensive, though: $400 instead of $130. Even if it lasts twice as long that's not a great deal. Ah well.
Good point -- I had three MBP batteries fail on me in the past two years by swelling up like that. With a removable it was no biggie, just drop it off and keep using my backup battery. (It was covered under warranty) If I'd have had to leave the whole laptop it would have been a much bigger hassle.