Agreed, but if you're going to make it as low as $100k, it needs to be adjusted based on the local cost of living at the more expensive of your home address or your work address. If you don't adjust for that, your tax rate will bend over a barrel people who qualify as lower middle class in some areas, while failing to adequately tax the ultra-rich in other areas. I'll demonstrate the problem by example:
In Martin, TN, the median income is $38k, so if I were guessing, $100k per year would probably put you in the top 1–2%.
In Cupertino, CA, the median income is almost $130k, so $100k would probably put you in the bottom third, give or take.
Because of those differences, the cost of living in Cupertino is much, much higher. The cost of rental housing in Cupertino is more expensive by a factor of three or four. The cost of home purchases is more expensive by a factor of... probably twenty or so. The cost of gasoline ranges from 50 cents to a buck per gallon higher. Even food is more expensive, though not quite as extremely so.
Basically, when expressed through multiplication, the difference in median income between large cities in California and rural towns in the southern U.S. is greater than the difference in median income levels between the southern U.S. and China. Income-wise, we are not really one country in any meaningful sense of the word, and any sane tax scheme must take those differences into consideration.
It's also a fatally flawed concept in that there's no feasible way to avoid the taxation up front; you'll get it back later. This leads to inevitable binge spending on things that people don't need, rather than encouraging saving by doling the excess funds out a little bit at a time. (At least the Fair Tax does it monthly; some schemes go yearly, and that's just a disaster and a half.)
By contrast, with income tax, people making below a certain level avoid paying it up front (at least if they fill out their exemption forms correctly), which means they see more money in every paycheck, and it doesn't look like an extra check that they can spend, so psychologically, they're more likely to save it.
Also, the entire concept is flawed, because it operates under the mistaken assumption that the rich spend proportionally to the poor. The reality is that after someone's basic needs are met, most people don't spend that much of their income. People always imagine that rich people are constantly spending money on fancy boats, big houses, expensive cars, etc., but the reality is that they didn't become rich by spending their money. They became rich by saving it and investing it.
So any scheme that eliminates all taxes on stocks—where the rich spend the vast majority of their money—is basically a giant windfall to the wealthy. In effect, such a scheme would rapidly eliminate the middle class; anyone rich enough to spend most of their income on investments would get richer, and anyone below that magic fuzzy line would quickly become buried under the excessive sales tax rate and would join the ranks of the working poor.
The problem is not the 2% growth rate he speaks of, it's the unsubstantiated claim he makes that the historical return on capital was 4.5%. That's the basis of his claim that the growth at 2% causes inequity, and that claim about the return on capital is in question at best.
It was historically a lot higher than 4.5%.
When I was a kid, interest rates on loans were up around 15–17%, and we earned somewhere in the neighborhood of 10–12% on savings accounts. I don't foresee us ever returning to those sorts of rates in an era when most stock market funds average only 7% yield.
The real problem with lowering interest rates to boost the economy is that it disproportionately screws the people at the bottom. The rich can afford to float their wealth in the stock market. The poor need something more solid. And there's no longer any incentive for them to save money, because they can't earn revenue from it. This leads more people to spend all of their income instead of saving up for more expensive goods that could eventually provide them with a financial benefit, such as buying a house so they won't have to keep paying rent. As long as this gross inequality in ROI remains the norm, income inequality can only grow at an ever-increasing rate.
Want to fix the problem? Tax capital gains with the same progressive tax scheme as ordinary income. Then crank the prime rate up to 10%, but have the government provide small loans at low interest rates directly to individual consumers. This will immediately benefit people who have small amounts of money, and negatively impact people who have large amounts of money, thus rebuilding the middle class.
In other words, undo all the damage Reagan caused with his misguided trickle-down fantasy.
So the real problem is not identity theft at all, the real problem is vendors failing to properly identify the person, allowing a fraudulent transaction to occur and then pursuing the wrong person.
Exactly what I've been saying for years. There's no such thing as identity theft. You can't steal an identity, by definition, because an identity is who you are, not some arbitrary piece of information used to represent you. An SSN is an identifier, not an identity. (This is not precisely correct in the cryptographic sense of the term, but neither is an SSN in any way cryptographic, so that distinction is largely moot.)
With that said, identity fraud isn't entirely the fault of vendors. Much of the fault lies with the credit bureaus. Their business involves making claims about a person based on insufficient authentication, then charging money to consumers for "protection" against them making false claims when they fail to do their jobs correctly. Credit bureaus are the very definition of a protection racket (minus the physical violence).
The easy way to solve the problem is that when someone makes a false claim about you, sue the credit bureaus. Because you have no ongoing contractual relationship with them, they cannot compel you to binding arbitration, and because they are making false claims about you in writing, they are guilty of libel. It would only take a few thousand people doing this to force the credit bureaus to take authentication more seriously, such as providing call-back authentication at no cost to consumers—something that they should have been doing all along.
As I understand it, the flow rate is too low to inflate the bag on its own immediately. You provide most of the air to fill the bag by exhaling; it just replenishes some of the oxygen that you depleted. So eventually, it will inflate, but not immediately.
TSA also does some sort of screening for some Amtrak routes.
I seem to recall that the last time they tried that, the Amtrak Police escorted them off the premises. Nothing quite as much fun to watch as an interjurisdictional pissing match.
Wow. Why does a fifty-year-old, easily synthesized antibiotic that hasn't been under patent protection since the 1980s still cost $1,500? And particularly one that is getting less and less effective against real-world bacteria.... *sigh*
Acidophilus and Bifidus and Bulgaricus alone will not restore what you just killed with antibiotics, or what you lost through diarrhea.
No, but that's what your appendix is for. Besides, the last probiotic I took contained fifteen different kinds of bacteria, not just a couple. Granted, that's still less than a tenth of the predominant strains in a typical human gut, but the same techniques could just as easily produce a few hundred strains as fifteen.
And it is by no means crude. Crude is having someone poop in a jar, putting it in a blender, and giving yourself a poop enema. This method seems to be a simpler and cleaner way, as well as being possible to get it further into the intestines than you can do at home safely.
It's still a lot more crude than culturing all of the gut bacteria over an extended period of time, so that what you end up with is basically just the bacteria rather than dried crap.
IMO, the critical question that must be asked in determining whether the victim shares a portion of the blame is whether the victim's intentional actions or inaction actively made the situation worse than it otherwise would have been. If a drunk driver hits your car and you aren't wearing a seat belt, you'll be more seriously injured than if you are wearing one. Therefore, because everyone has been told for decades that they should wear seat belts, part of the blame for your injuries falls on you.
Dressing provocatively in a dangerous area is debatable, because although attire may have (slightly) raised the probability that a woman gets raped, it doesn't cause the rape, and it doesn't make the rape worse. Now you could argue that walking rather than taking a cab contributed to it, and if the neighborhood really is highly dangerous, that might be a reasonable argument, but because walking is not an unusual thing for people to do, and because it is difficult to avoid in many situations, that argument also falls flat. The victim in this situation, therefore, is not partially responsible.
However, taking nude pictures of oneself and sharing them with others is, IMO, not reasonably debatable. Photos that don't exist cannot be leaked. Therefore, the victim's actions were directly responsible for making the crime possible. That makes this more similar to deliberately choosing to leave your door unlocked and then complaining when a drug addict walks in and steals your stuff, rather than choosing what clothing to wear. Thus, IMO, the victim is partially responsible.
In much the same way, the guy wearing the gold made the crime possible by wearing it outside in a bad neighborhood. Had he been careful about when and where he wore it, it would not have gotten stolen. Therefore, he is partially responsible.
You could feasibly cut off the entire continent, if desired. It isn't hard to guard the tiny little border with the Indian subcontinent. Then ban flights in or out, and use RADAR and air cover to enforce it.
As I understand it, in humans, Ebola has a very low concentration in saliva, sweat, and mucus until the patient is quite sick, so although those methods of transmission are possible, they aren't highly likely.
I'm left wondering what is new here. For years, folks have taken probiotics, often in pill form, during antibiotic treatment to restore intestinal flora, and to combat systemic yeast infections. How is this not just a very crude version of the same thing?
There's not really a placebo effect when death is involved, a least as far as we know. So placebos aren't really relevant. As for a control group, we know the case fatality rate of the disease, so if you see a dramatic change in that, it was either caused by a mutation in the virus or by the treatment. You can't be absolutely certain, because viruses do mutate to become less fatal over time, but those mutations are more likely to cause a small change in the CFR than a big one. After all, Ebola hasn't weakened much over decades. In effect, you can consider those thousands of victims to be a control group.
That's simply not true. Non-placebo-controlled open clinical trials are used all the time to determine the efficacy of treatment. They aren't nearly as airtight as double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies (because of the placebo effect), but to say that they prove nothing is overstating things quite a bit, particularly in situations where success or failure is black-and-white (because the patient either died or didn't).
In vitro (test tube) tests of lamivudine showed zero efficacy, and the CFR for that doctor's patients is now reportedly up to 5/15, which isn't statistically significantly different from the CFR anywhere else with proper supportive care and no drug treatment. So unfortunately, it appears to have no effect.
However, favipiravir (an anti-influenza drug) shows promise in mouse trials, so it may start to be used in the not-too-distant future. They're also testing brincidofovir. And both of those treatments are readily available, unlike Zmapp. We'll see if either of those turns out to be effective in vivo.
1) Which drug? Do we have enough of it? Can we get it to where it is needed? Has it been previously tested in humans for toxicity? Is there any reason to believe it will work beyond mere hope?
5) Most drugs do not work. Do you REALLY want to spread already scarce resources even thinner on a long shot that probably will not work?
Nothing is being tested without success in animal models. That's not a guarantee, but AFAIK viruses in humans replicate in basically the same way that they do in animals, so odds are reasonably good that they will, assuming that they don't kill the patients or cause other harm, unless the human body filters them out of the bloodstream more efficiently. I wouldn't expect physiological differences to play nearly the same role in treatment for a virus that they would play in (for example) treatments for cancer or Alzheimer's, though I suppose it depends on the method used to disrupt viral replication.
2) We do NOT have particularly good information in the historical record. The medical records in the affected areas are quite certain to be of poor quality. So you lose a LOT of information that is relevant for making comparisons and you do not have a particularly good control group.
That's okay. The records in the test group are likely to be of poor quality, too, so it will balance out.:-D
But seriously, AFAIK, we have a pretty good idea of the CFR of people treated in hospitals/clinics/*. The real record problem is that lots of people avoid going to the hospitals, which means the total death rate may be grossly underestimated, and the total number of cases may also be grossly underestimated.
There's even a minute chance that 90% of people exposed don't get sick, and that the high CFR represents the fatality rate of the worst of the worst. The medical community is relatively certain that this is not the case, but there are no guarantees.
But none of that is really relevant, because they aren't talking about prophylactically treating the entire population; they're talking about treating people who are known to be sick with Ebola, and as previously noted, we have a pretty good idea of what the CFR is among that population.
3) Unless you can control for other variables like public health policies etc you may not know if it worked or how well.
Although that would have an effect on the spread of the disease, it is unlikely to have much of an effect on how likely the infected are to die, short of policies that force people to get treatment sooner (which can be controlled for trivially by comparing people in groups based on how bad their symptoms were when they arrived).
4) Rushing a drug to market can result in losing valuable information about WHY it worked (or didn't) which may be more valuable than IF it worked to future patients
If it is effective in only part of the population, then yes, that's true. But chances are, you can do something resembling meta-analysis after the fact to obtain the same information, as long as your records are good enough, and if they aren't... well, again, they're not likely to be good enough with a slower, more methodical study in those countries, so I'm not sure what difference it makes.:-)
You'd be a lot more convincing if you gave actual reasons that it won't work. But you can't, because you're wrong.
The type of trial that you're claiming has "been tried before and failed" is called an "open clinical trial". They are quite common in the medical field. Although they do sometimes show some bias towards success compared with placebos in situations where success is subjective, when the result of failure is death, there's no real risk of experimenter bias changing the outcome. Either the patient did or did not die. Therefore, your argument is crap (unless your test subjects are cats belonging to Austrian physicists, in which case all bets are off).
Besides, the main reason control groups are commonly used in tests is because most testing happens on a small group of subjects. The smaller the group of subjects, the more critical randomization is at minimizing the impact of small variations between individuals that could otherwise have a greater effect on the outcome than whatever treatment you're testing. When you treat a large enough population of sick people, however, any such variance is likely to get lost in the noise.
In this case, you have a potential test group that makes up a sizable percentage of the total number of people who have gotten Ebola throughout history. Those sick people mostly live under fairly similar conditions, with similar levels of medical care to the people who got it a few months ago. To the extent that this is not the case, you can typically control for those differences when analyzing the data. This makes Ebola a fairly ideal candidate for an open clinical trial.
Now that's not saying that a successful trial means that the treatment actually cured people with absolute certainty; most viruses tend to weaken as they spread, thus resulting in a steadily decreasing case fatality rate over time, so if the improvement is relatively small, there's still a chance of bias caused by differences in the disease over time. With that said, if you suddenly see the CFR drop to 5%, you can be pretty darn certain that the change wasn't caused by a random mutation. So although open trials aren't perfect, if a treatment appears to be highly effective in a large enough open trial, you can probably safely assume that it works, at least in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
The real problem is that what the CU decision effectively made legal were attack ads that mention a candidate by name, paid for by third parties. Although they are effectively in-kind contributions to the campaign, they aren't subject to any of the contribution limits that would normally apply to contributions, because they aren't actually given to the campaign.
In effect, the CU decision allows for unbounded campaign contributions in the form of advertising dollars from corporations, which are prohibited by law from making direct campaign contributions. And unbounded contributions are (effectively) bribes.
If your facts were correct, I'd agree with you, but they aren't:
This case had nothing to do with the movies themselves. Those are clearly protected speech, and were never in question. This case was about advertisements for the movies aired on TV.
The FEC did not reject CU's challenge to Fahrenheit 9/11 on first amendment grounds. They rejected it because Fahrenheit 9/11's ads did not mention a candidate by name within 60 days of an election, and thus did not violate the law in question.
By contrast, they found that CU's advertisements mentioned a candidate by name, and thus were in violation of the law.
CU's challenge was to overturn a law that their ads violated, but Michael Moore's didn't violate. It's as simple as that.
First, I'm not anti-gun. I am, however in favor of limited regulation of firearms to ensure public safety. Second, I'm well aware of everything you just said. However, to play devil's advocate once again, none of those things precludes a fully anti-gun interpretation. Here's why:
Mason's statements indicate what he considered the militia at the time, because the entire people were (at least to some degree) responsible for securing the nascent nation against its enemies. One could reasonably argue that, because the entire people are clearly no longer directly involved in the defense of our country today, his historical definition is no longer relevant.
Similarly, although you are correct that "well-regulated" does mean "properly functioning", as opposed to "controlled by the government", it is the government's responsibility to ensure that such a militia is, in fact, properly functioning; nobody else can do that job for them. Jefferson did not live in an era with automatic weapons, in which every couple of years, somebody snaps and uses them to shoot up a school full of kids. If you interpret "militia" based on that original meaning, then one could reasonably argue that the militia is no longer properly functioning (well-regulated), and that laws must bring it back into line so that it becomes properly functioning again.
In other words, if you want to interpret the second amendment to be absolute, rather than absolute only for people actively involved in service to their country, the onus falls on you to prove that it makes the country, on the whole, safer. Personally, I feel that it probably does, on the whole, except where convicted violent felons and the mentally ill are involved. And I feel that we need better screening to ensure that the mentally ill are not treated as part of that militia, in the interest of public safety.
Ah. They do have an update for that one. Apple didn't release the update through their normal Software Update mechanism because users aren't likely to be affected by it unless they're fairly advanced server users, but they did release a software update for it about two weeks ago. You can download it here.
OSX Yosemite is still waiting for a patch for Heartbleed...
Before they can ship a patch, Apple would first have to ship an affected version of OpenSSL. For binary compatibility reasons, Apple never moved its OpenSSL libraries off of the 0.9.x branch. Currently, Yosemite ships with version 0.9.8za. The first version of OpenSSL affected by Heartbleed was 1.0.1.
...which means I have to keep a large number of services I'd like to be running disabled for the time being.
In other words, unless you installed an affected version of OpenSSL (in which case you will have to install an update yourself), it is safe to turn those services back on, and it always has been.
Ebola would be a terrible bioweapon for the simple reason that it isn't airborne or waterborne.
Bear in mind that the CDC uses a very narrow definition of airborne that effectively limits the term to viruses that cause a lot of sneezing. With that said, any time you have a viral load of any kind in the sinuses or salivary glands, that virus can theoretically be spread through the air, and Ebola is no exception. It isn't very easily spread through the air by humans because humans don't get much of a viral load in their noses and salivary glands until they are extremely sick. With that said, that doesn't mean you can't get it through the air; it just isn't particularly likely unless you're sharing a confined space with someone who is infected.
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Agreed, but if you're going to make it as low as $100k, it needs to be adjusted based on the local cost of living at the more expensive of your home address or your work address. If you don't adjust for that, your tax rate will bend over a barrel people who qualify as lower middle class in some areas, while failing to adequately tax the ultra-rich in other areas. I'll demonstrate the problem by example:
Because of those differences, the cost of living in Cupertino is much, much higher. The cost of rental housing in Cupertino is more expensive by a factor of three or four. The cost of home purchases is more expensive by a factor of... probably twenty or so. The cost of gasoline ranges from 50 cents to a buck per gallon higher. Even food is more expensive, though not quite as extremely so.
Basically, when expressed through multiplication, the difference in median income between large cities in California and rural towns in the southern U.S. is greater than the difference in median income levels between the southern U.S. and China. Income-wise, we are not really one country in any meaningful sense of the word, and any sane tax scheme must take those differences into consideration.
It's also a fatally flawed concept in that there's no feasible way to avoid the taxation up front; you'll get it back later. This leads to inevitable binge spending on things that people don't need, rather than encouraging saving by doling the excess funds out a little bit at a time. (At least the Fair Tax does it monthly; some schemes go yearly, and that's just a disaster and a half.)
By contrast, with income tax, people making below a certain level avoid paying it up front (at least if they fill out their exemption forms correctly), which means they see more money in every paycheck, and it doesn't look like an extra check that they can spend, so psychologically, they're more likely to save it.
Also, the entire concept is flawed, because it operates under the mistaken assumption that the rich spend proportionally to the poor. The reality is that after someone's basic needs are met, most people don't spend that much of their income. People always imagine that rich people are constantly spending money on fancy boats, big houses, expensive cars, etc., but the reality is that they didn't become rich by spending their money. They became rich by saving it and investing it.
So any scheme that eliminates all taxes on stocks—where the rich spend the vast majority of their money—is basically a giant windfall to the wealthy. In effect, such a scheme would rapidly eliminate the middle class; anyone rich enough to spend most of their income on investments would get richer, and anyone below that magic fuzzy line would quickly become buried under the excessive sales tax rate and would join the ranks of the working poor.
It was historically a lot higher than 4.5%.
When I was a kid, interest rates on loans were up around 15–17%, and we earned somewhere in the neighborhood of 10–12% on savings accounts. I don't foresee us ever returning to those sorts of rates in an era when most stock market funds average only 7% yield.
The real problem with lowering interest rates to boost the economy is that it disproportionately screws the people at the bottom. The rich can afford to float their wealth in the stock market. The poor need something more solid. And there's no longer any incentive for them to save money, because they can't earn revenue from it. This leads more people to spend all of their income instead of saving up for more expensive goods that could eventually provide them with a financial benefit, such as buying a house so they won't have to keep paying rent. As long as this gross inequality in ROI remains the norm, income inequality can only grow at an ever-increasing rate.
Want to fix the problem? Tax capital gains with the same progressive tax scheme as ordinary income. Then crank the prime rate up to 10%, but have the government provide small loans at low interest rates directly to individual consumers. This will immediately benefit people who have small amounts of money, and negatively impact people who have large amounts of money, thus rebuilding the middle class.
In other words, undo all the damage Reagan caused with his misguided trickle-down fantasy.
Exactly what I've been saying for years. There's no such thing as identity theft. You can't steal an identity, by definition, because an identity is who you are, not some arbitrary piece of information used to represent you. An SSN is an identifier, not an identity. (This is not precisely correct in the cryptographic sense of the term, but neither is an SSN in any way cryptographic, so that distinction is largely moot.)
With that said, identity fraud isn't entirely the fault of vendors. Much of the fault lies with the credit bureaus. Their business involves making claims about a person based on insufficient authentication, then charging money to consumers for "protection" against them making false claims when they fail to do their jobs correctly. Credit bureaus are the very definition of a protection racket (minus the physical violence).
The easy way to solve the problem is that when someone makes a false claim about you, sue the credit bureaus. Because you have no ongoing contractual relationship with them, they cannot compel you to binding arbitration, and because they are making false claims about you in writing, they are guilty of libel. It would only take a few thousand people doing this to force the credit bureaus to take authentication more seriously, such as providing call-back authentication at no cost to consumers—something that they should have been doing all along.
As I understand it, the flow rate is too low to inflate the bag on its own immediately. You provide most of the air to fill the bag by exhaling; it just replenishes some of the oxygen that you depleted. So eventually, it will inflate, but not immediately.
I seem to recall that the last time they tried that, the Amtrak Police escorted them off the premises. Nothing quite as much fun to watch as an interjurisdictional pissing match.
That's a place where you order bite-sized food, right? A dim sumery?
Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. :-D
Wow. Why does a fifty-year-old, easily synthesized antibiotic that hasn't been under patent protection since the 1980s still cost $1,500? And particularly one that is getting less and less effective against real-world bacteria.... *sigh*
No, but that's what your appendix is for. Besides, the last probiotic I took contained fifteen different kinds of bacteria, not just a couple. Granted, that's still less than a tenth of the predominant strains in a typical human gut, but the same techniques could just as easily produce a few hundred strains as fifteen.
It's still a lot more crude than culturing all of the gut bacteria over an extended period of time, so that what you end up with is basically just the bacteria rather than dried crap.
IMO, the critical question that must be asked in determining whether the victim shares a portion of the blame is whether the victim's intentional actions or inaction actively made the situation worse than it otherwise would have been. If a drunk driver hits your car and you aren't wearing a seat belt, you'll be more seriously injured than if you are wearing one. Therefore, because everyone has been told for decades that they should wear seat belts, part of the blame for your injuries falls on you.
Dressing provocatively in a dangerous area is debatable, because although attire may have (slightly) raised the probability that a woman gets raped, it doesn't cause the rape, and it doesn't make the rape worse. Now you could argue that walking rather than taking a cab contributed to it, and if the neighborhood really is highly dangerous, that might be a reasonable argument, but because walking is not an unusual thing for people to do, and because it is difficult to avoid in many situations, that argument also falls flat. The victim in this situation, therefore, is not partially responsible.
However, taking nude pictures of oneself and sharing them with others is, IMO, not reasonably debatable. Photos that don't exist cannot be leaked. Therefore, the victim's actions were directly responsible for making the crime possible. That makes this more similar to deliberately choosing to leave your door unlocked and then complaining when a drug addict walks in and steals your stuff, rather than choosing what clothing to wear. Thus, IMO, the victim is partially responsible.
In much the same way, the guy wearing the gold made the crime possible by wearing it outside in a bad neighborhood. Had he been careful about when and where he wore it, it would not have gotten stolen. Therefore, he is partially responsible.
You could feasibly cut off the entire continent, if desired. It isn't hard to guard the tiny little border with the Indian subcontinent. Then ban flights in or out, and use RADAR and air cover to enforce it.
As I understand it, in humans, Ebola has a very low concentration in saliva, sweat, and mucus until the patient is quite sick, so although those methods of transmission are possible, they aren't highly likely.
I'm left wondering what is new here. For years, folks have taken probiotics, often in pill form, during antibiotic treatment to restore intestinal flora, and to combat systemic yeast infections. How is this not just a very crude version of the same thing?
There's not really a placebo effect when death is involved, a least as far as we know. So placebos aren't really relevant. As for a control group, we know the case fatality rate of the disease, so if you see a dramatic change in that, it was either caused by a mutation in the virus or by the treatment. You can't be absolutely certain, because viruses do mutate to become less fatal over time, but those mutations are more likely to cause a small change in the CFR than a big one. After all, Ebola hasn't weakened much over decades. In effect, you can consider those thousands of victims to be a control group.
That's simply not true. Non-placebo-controlled open clinical trials are used all the time to determine the efficacy of treatment. They aren't nearly as airtight as double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies (because of the placebo effect), but to say that they prove nothing is overstating things quite a bit, particularly in situations where success or failure is black-and-white (because the patient either died or didn't).
In vitro (test tube) tests of lamivudine showed zero efficacy, and the CFR for that doctor's patients is now reportedly up to 5/15, which isn't statistically significantly different from the CFR anywhere else with proper supportive care and no drug treatment. So unfortunately, it appears to have no effect.
However, favipiravir (an anti-influenza drug) shows promise in mouse trials, so it may start to be used in the not-too-distant future. They're also testing brincidofovir. And both of those treatments are readily available, unlike Zmapp. We'll see if either of those turns out to be effective in vivo.
Nothing is being tested without success in animal models. That's not a guarantee, but AFAIK viruses in humans replicate in basically the same way that they do in animals, so odds are reasonably good that they will, assuming that they don't kill the patients or cause other harm, unless the human body filters them out of the bloodstream more efficiently. I wouldn't expect physiological differences to play nearly the same role in treatment for a virus that they would play in (for example) treatments for cancer or Alzheimer's, though I suppose it depends on the method used to disrupt viral replication.
That's okay. The records in the test group are likely to be of poor quality, too, so it will balance out. :-D
But seriously, AFAIK, we have a pretty good idea of the CFR of people treated in hospitals/clinics/*. The real record problem is that lots of people avoid going to the hospitals, which means the total death rate may be grossly underestimated, and the total number of cases may also be grossly underestimated.
There's even a minute chance that 90% of people exposed don't get sick, and that the high CFR represents the fatality rate of the worst of the worst. The medical community is relatively certain that this is not the case, but there are no guarantees.
But none of that is really relevant, because they aren't talking about prophylactically treating the entire population; they're talking about treating people who are known to be sick with Ebola, and as previously noted, we have a pretty good idea of what the CFR is among that population.
Although that would have an effect on the spread of the disease, it is unlikely to have much of an effect on how likely the infected are to die, short of policies that force people to get treatment sooner (which can be controlled for trivially by comparing people in groups based on how bad their symptoms were when they arrived).
If it is effective in only part of the population, then yes, that's true. But chances are, you can do something resembling meta-analysis after the fact to obtain the same information, as long as your records are good enough, and if they aren't... well, again, they're not likely to be good enough with a slower, more methodical study in those countries, so I'm not sure what difference it makes. :-)
You'd be a lot more convincing if you gave actual reasons that it won't work. But you can't, because you're wrong.
The type of trial that you're claiming has "been tried before and failed" is called an "open clinical trial". They are quite common in the medical field. Although they do sometimes show some bias towards success compared with placebos in situations where success is subjective, when the result of failure is death, there's no real risk of experimenter bias changing the outcome. Either the patient did or did not die. Therefore, your argument is crap (unless your test subjects are cats belonging to Austrian physicists, in which case all bets are off).
Besides, the main reason control groups are commonly used in tests is because most testing happens on a small group of subjects. The smaller the group of subjects, the more critical randomization is at minimizing the impact of small variations between individuals that could otherwise have a greater effect on the outcome than whatever treatment you're testing. When you treat a large enough population of sick people, however, any such variance is likely to get lost in the noise.
In this case, you have a potential test group that makes up a sizable percentage of the total number of people who have gotten Ebola throughout history. Those sick people mostly live under fairly similar conditions, with similar levels of medical care to the people who got it a few months ago. To the extent that this is not the case, you can typically control for those differences when analyzing the data. This makes Ebola a fairly ideal candidate for an open clinical trial.
Now that's not saying that a successful trial means that the treatment actually cured people with absolute certainty; most viruses tend to weaken as they spread, thus resulting in a steadily decreasing case fatality rate over time, so if the improvement is relatively small, there's still a chance of bias caused by differences in the disease over time. With that said, if you suddenly see the CFR drop to 5%, you can be pretty darn certain that the change wasn't caused by a random mutation. So although open trials aren't perfect, if a treatment appears to be highly effective in a large enough open trial, you can probably safely assume that it works, at least in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
The real problem is that what the CU decision effectively made legal were attack ads that mention a candidate by name, paid for by third parties. Although they are effectively in-kind contributions to the campaign, they aren't subject to any of the contribution limits that would normally apply to contributions, because they aren't actually given to the campaign.
In effect, the CU decision allows for unbounded campaign contributions in the form of advertising dollars from corporations, which are prohibited by law from making direct campaign contributions. And unbounded contributions are (effectively) bribes.
If your facts were correct, I'd agree with you, but they aren't:
CU's challenge was to overturn a law that their ads violated, but Michael Moore's didn't violate. It's as simple as that.
First, I'm not anti-gun. I am, however in favor of limited regulation of firearms to ensure public safety. Second, I'm well aware of everything you just said. However, to play devil's advocate once again, none of those things precludes a fully anti-gun interpretation. Here's why:
Mason's statements indicate what he considered the militia at the time, because the entire people were (at least to some degree) responsible for securing the nascent nation against its enemies. One could reasonably argue that, because the entire people are clearly no longer directly involved in the defense of our country today, his historical definition is no longer relevant.
Similarly, although you are correct that "well-regulated" does mean "properly functioning", as opposed to "controlled by the government", it is the government's responsibility to ensure that such a militia is, in fact, properly functioning; nobody else can do that job for them. Jefferson did not live in an era with automatic weapons, in which every couple of years, somebody snaps and uses them to shoot up a school full of kids. If you interpret "militia" based on that original meaning, then one could reasonably argue that the militia is no longer properly functioning (well-regulated), and that laws must bring it back into line so that it becomes properly functioning again.
In other words, if you want to interpret the second amendment to be absolute, rather than absolute only for people actively involved in service to their country, the onus falls on you to prove that it makes the country, on the whole, safer. Personally, I feel that it probably does, on the whole, except where convicted violent felons and the mentally ill are involved. And I feel that we need better screening to ensure that the mentally ill are not treated as part of that militia, in the interest of public safety.
Ah. They do have an update for that one. Apple didn't release the update through their normal Software Update mechanism because users aren't likely to be affected by it unless they're fairly advanced server users, but they did release a software update for it about two weeks ago. You can download it here.
Before they can ship a patch, Apple would first have to ship an affected version of OpenSSL. For binary compatibility reasons, Apple never moved its OpenSSL libraries off of the 0.9.x branch. Currently, Yosemite ships with version 0.9.8za. The first version of OpenSSL affected by Heartbleed was 1.0.1.
In other words, unless you installed an affected version of OpenSSL (in which case you will have to install an update yourself), it is safe to turn those services back on, and it always has been.
Bear in mind that the CDC uses a very narrow definition of airborne that effectively limits the term to viruses that cause a lot of sneezing. With that said, any time you have a viral load of any kind in the sinuses or salivary glands, that virus can theoretically be spread through the air, and Ebola is no exception. It isn't very easily spread through the air by humans because humans don't get much of a viral load in their noses and salivary glands until they are extremely sick. With that said, that doesn't mean you can't get it through the air; it just isn't particularly likely unless you're sharing a confined space with someone who is infected.