self-regulation is a fairy tale told by the ignorant.
Not so, it's a fairy tale told by the informed who have a vested interest in continuing to operate without regulation. Unfortunately, they've also now learned about regulator capture, so the choice is often between ineffective regulation and no regulation.
The thing about regulatory capture, is that the populace can capture the regulators back, if they weren't so busy at Trump rallies.
the tobacco industry is a GREAT example.
or early food processors.
or DuPont's legacy involving C8, using in making Teflon, a chemical now so prevalent that there is no place on earthNOT contaminated by it.
or lead, something most of the rest of world had reduced usage of by the 1920s, but the US went along putting in everything, everywhere, for another 60 years, blatantly ignoring, at the behest of the companies dependent on it, all the science pointing to its ill effects.
the fact is that damages to the business have never scared companies from poisoning customers, destroying the environment, or any other possible harms. they are amoral institutions that know exactly what the value of a human life is to their bottom line. and the math frequently comes out to "we can afford to harm X number of people before profits suffer", and then they operate as such.
self-regulation is a fairy tale told by the ignorant.
Indeed. The whole idea of a corporation is to insulate the individual or individuals making the decision from any negative consequences. Oh, 200 people died as a result of the CEO's decision? Well, he will definitely get fired for that, with his golden parachute. And, not only that, but the value of his stock options will definitely go down as the company pays the price. That will keep any other CEOs from doing the same thing.
What's often surprising in the news from China is how one corporate executive after another is imprisoned or executed for doing things that hurt people, which in America would get the company slapped with a petty fine and probably not even get the guy booted.
Then you are just doing what he's doing, being a vigilante.
If he wanted the fruit vendors gone and they were truly unauthorized, then call the police on their non-emergency number. It's that simple. If the fruit vendor were authorized, then take it up with the city. Going there and destroy people's produce is destruction of property, which is vandalism or malicious mischief in California punishable by up to a year in prison.
He could probably afford to buy all their fruit @ six AM and send them home. Then he could sell the fruit in the company cafeteria. Or hire the vendors for the rest of the day to be human targets while he hurled the fruit at them, which would probably be more to his liking.
"And that's why when you hear anyone spout "responsibility" or "no more handouts", it's really code for "I'm rich, f**k you, lower my taxes"."
That's a very limited view of what it means. You should enlighten yourself for the spoutings, "responsibility" or "no more handouts", means different things to different people.
1. The USA Federal Government, via the Constitution, has no right to provide Healthcare, Welfare, Education to anyone (with the exception of their employees).
2. Taxpayers should not be forced to support those who do not need support (recognizing that USA people have always supported folk who actually needed help).
3. Private endeavors, both profit and non-profit, work better than Federal Government endeavors.
4. Lots more...
I have seen the effects of USAID (USA Taxpayer money in the form of grants) in Africa. When handled by charitable, international concerns, a tremendous amount of work can be accomplished by starting the people on the road to self-sufficiency. It works in Africa because the Governments don't care about PC stuff. I have also seen the waste of USAID when run by Government agencies. There, like in the USA, the money is a route to corruption and continuing squalor for those the USAID is suppose to help.
In the USA, private organizations can follow the same principles and achieve similar results. But when the Governments intervene, the Tax Money is wasted -- corruption and squalor remain. "Letting George [Washington, i.e., the Federal Government] do it" -- community development is an exercise in futility because the USA Federal Government cares more about itself than it does its citizens or its responsibilities.
I have seen the alluded to examples with my own eyes and by interviewing people who participated before I did, while I did and after I did.
The fact that there are individuals in need of help is de facto evidence that charity isn't working in that case. (And I hasten to add that in cases where charity is working, you don't see the needy people, so the only evidence you get is in the cases where it doesn't work, because the cases where it does slip below the radar).
Given that, however, the charitable impulse would be to focus primarily on the person who needs help and getting them help via whatever means necessary, rather than evaluating the pluses and minuses of charity vs government and writing government assistance off on a philosophical/theoretical basis (and I don't mean that as a putdown).
He's factoring them in at the appropriate level. I.e., negligible in the course of any sane discussion of public policy.
Now maybe you were jockeying for a 'funny' mod, and it's whoever modded you 'insightful' that's the idiot here, but I've grown to appreciate the full range of pseudo-libertarian pseudo-thought on here, and can imagine that you really think pointing to sadists will somehow justify prisons as a solution to poverty. "All lives matter" bro. Right on!.
You are living through an era when approximately 50% of the voting population believe we need to get rid of all the workers who are willing to pick fruit and vegetables at the current low rate of pay; and simultaneously believe that raising the mandated minimum wage in general will destroy businesses and hurt the economy.
You can have a sane discussion of public policy, but that bears no relation to actual public policy and how it gets decided.
It is unfathomable to me that an electorate can't recognize the conflict of interest that exists if prisons have a profit motive. Americans are very good at marketing. Americans have for profit prisons. American has by far the highest per capita incarceration rate. Do the math.
Wait'll we get a real waiting list for replacement organs for transplants.
I feel like my brain just got dumber reading that list. The Wii? Fit bit? Oculus rift? Nest Thermostat? Roku Netflixs?
None of those things should even make the top 10,000 let alone the top 50. Initially I thought they were limiting it to post 1970s stuff and then they throw in an 1850s record player.
Flint, that started fire. Best gadget ever. Also the fire starting kit made of a couple of sticks and piece of string.
aha, a subset of my entry: the big rock for smashing things. the mother of all technology. why do dolphins have no technology despite their supposed brains? No rocks to smash things with.
How about the can opener?
Made canning food practical, hence ability to store food, without refrigeration (which needs power, which needs...)
Originally, the "canning" process was developed in France around 1800, to provision Napoleon's army, and used wide mouth bottles and corks. Tin cans came along a few years later; but.... can openers didn't arrive until the 1850s. Must have made a lot of hungry people happy.
The electric motor is not strictly necessary. Automotive air conditioners rely on power taken from the crankshaft to turn the compressor.
It probably has never been built, but it should be possible to build pneumatic-start into a mechanical-injected diesel truck, with a full-time, clutchless, belt-driven AC compressor, and with a belt and shaft-driven cabin fan, with a belt-driven compressor to recharge the compressed-air tank to drive the starter.
Obviously there isn't a benefit in doing this, electrical technology is ubiquitous enough to where we generally can get away without having to go nuts to avoid it, but we could if we really, really wanted to.
Oh heck, you don't need any kind of motor as long as you have a source of energy. You can use a flame, believe it or not. Popular in RVs and remote cabins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
a small mechanical device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.
Both the gun and (my first choice) hammer qualify.
The knife beats both. Self-defense and attack, killing and skinning and cutting supper into bite-size chunks, It would later be lengthened into short swords and incorporated into rifles (bayonet). The needle is right up there, allowing for piercing animal skins so they could be laced or sewn together, allowing humans to spread much further than would have been possible with just loose animal furs, and making the first boots.
Definitely hammer, or its ancestor the big rock. The big rock was the gun of its time, of course. And technology begins with banging the rocks together.
People voting the iPhone in this reminds me of a similar poll for the worst film of all time. They came up with ones like "The War of the Worlds" (Tom Cruise version), "Terminator", "Forest Gump" etc. In other words they voted for films they had seen recently and did not happen to like themselves. They showed their complete ignorance of just how bad films can really be, such as "Plan 9 from Outer Space", "Manos, the Hands of Fate", and "The attack of the 50 foot Woman". These iFans have got their noses too close to their little screens.
Not even close. http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/the-room-10th-anniversary-history.html https://youtu.be/w59fZNDTMAg
This entire controversy is about a small group of elitist pricks trying to hijack a meaningless award away from another small group of elitist pricks. The only difference between the Hugo inner circle for the last couple of decades and the Puppies (of either variety) is which books they're hawking. None of them want general participation on the part of the book buying public.
It's been decades since there was any detectable connection between what the sf buying public is buying and either the Hugos or the Nebulas.
The more meaningless and unimportant the cause, the greater the controversy.
Plenty of swashbuckling fun in Heinlein, at least in the 90% of his work that was somewhat schlocky (mostly metaphorical swashbuckling, but some actual swashes were buckled along the way).
Also, educational. Learned a lot about planning revolutions and such as a young Heinlein fan.
That description doesn't really seem to fit Heinlein's works.
That's why there weren't no Mean Puppies in Heinlein's day. The reason they're here today is to return us to those glorious days of yesteryear, when men were men and women swooned and aliens had bugeyes. Including human aliens, legal or illegal.
That's why I stopped reading certain authors. Their books were "this poor guy is picked on because he's gay, and that's not fair, so let's make him the hero fighting for the girl -- oh, I mean the boy -- oh, wait, I mean... uh... for.. uh... justice. Yeah, that's it, he's fighting for justice with his boyfriend... uh... I mean his companion".
One book I read a while ago handled "the gay issue" much better. There was a group of people on a ship/research station. One was gay, and liked to give blow jobs. Another guy was not gay, but liked getting blow jobs. No big deal, and no cause for fight for, just the way people are.
As distinct from every other SF book, where "this poor guy is picked on because he's a nerd, and good in school, and bad at sports, and interested in science, but discovers that he (or rarely she) is really the Prince of Space with Special Powers and save the planet and everybody is sorry then, you betcha"
I don't see any conflict. It's the old Voltaire position on free speech: I may not agree with your decision, but I believe it must be your decision to make.
I find it very frustrating that the pro-life side generally opposes contraception and sex education, even though these are the best mean we have to reduce the need for and number of abortions. I think it's because they have such a strong religious element - almost all of the major pro-life organisations and leaders are explicitly Christian and devoutly so, which means they must regard their mission as not only to eliminate abortion, but to eliminate the evil of non-marital sex too.
Babies are God's punishment for having sex. See Genesis.
Translation: Women are breeding machines. Oh, and because it's all so very Libertarian, pregnant women shouldn't get any publicly-funded health care either.
Not at all. Conservatives simply don't believe in infantilizing women by pretending they simply have no way to avoid pregnancy.
And yes, people should pay their own way. They only people who should get publicly funded health care are people who can't afford it.
Fucking Jesus, who died and made you God, that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes? What makes you so fucking special? Considering the numbers of actual babies who die or suffer every year, even in the US, due to poverty and a lack of decent health care, why not show some fucking compassion for them, rather than fetuses.
Fucking Jesus, who died and made you God...
That's pretty funny coming from someone who spends his time thinking up new ways to spend my money.
... that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes?
Aren't we forgetting someone?... a woman, her doctor, and the baby, right? The woman had ways to avoid the situation. So did the doctor. The baby? Not so much.
Considering the numbers of actual babies who die or suffer every year, even in the US, due to poverty and a lack of decent health care, why not show some fucking compassion for them, rather than fetuses.
More horseshit. Infant mortality rates aren't any higher in the US than they are anywhere else. In a lot of places babies are counted as stillborn if they die within 24 hours. That's the benefit of socialized medicine - you don't get better care, but you do get comforting statistics from the medical bureaucracy.
Beyond that, if you want a kid, have a kid. But taking care of that kid is your responsibility, not mine. I'm under no obligations to see that your kid is fed and clothed and has proper medical care. That's your job as a parent, and if you can't swing it don't have kids.
But I have questions for you, Mr freedom-loving guy. Why is your party so intent on taking away my freedom to defend myself, and my freedom of speech?
"Infant mortality rates aren't any higher in the US than they are anywhere else. In a lot of places babies are counted as stillborn if they die within 24 hours." See, that's why some of us trust scientists and professionals and academics and so on, rather than just repeating the assertions of places like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, who invented that particular lie; you know, people who spend a lot of time and effort doing vigorous research on things, rather than just seeing something that says what they want to hear and never even bothering to idly google anything to see if there is any truth. You're obviously just spluttering "What the heck is this idiot talking about?" at this point, your ignorance of the entire field being a badge of honor, but anybody who has any interest into why this is a lie can certainly look up things like perinatal mortality, a notion that occurred to the folks who have the data to show that our infant mortality is third world quality, even accounting for stillbirths, decades before it ever occurred to some WSJ rightwing editorial writer to just make something up about a field he knew nothing about. The good question here, is why? What purpose does it serve the rightwing to deny that we kill more babies by neglect after they are born than any other first world country? I can see why it's unpleasant for the layperson to discover that, but the folks who actively deny it without bothering to check it out? That counts as a falsehood and one wonders what's the point? It's certainly not helping the babies at all. As a footnote, let me refer you to the large body of research sh
Slashdot Mirror
self-regulation is a fairy tale told by the ignorant.
Not so, it's a fairy tale told by the informed who have a vested interest in continuing to operate without regulation. Unfortunately, they've also now learned about regulator capture, so the choice is often between ineffective regulation and no regulation.
The thing about regulatory capture, is that the populace can capture the regulators back, if they weren't so busy at Trump rallies.
rank utter ignorance.
research some actual corporate malfeasance.
the tobacco industry is a GREAT example. or early food processors. or DuPont's legacy involving C8, using in making Teflon, a chemical now so prevalent that there is no place on earth NOT contaminated by it. or lead, something most of the rest of world had reduced usage of by the 1920s, but the US went along putting in everything, everywhere, for another 60 years, blatantly ignoring, at the behest of the companies dependent on it, all the science pointing to its ill effects.
the fact is that damages to the business have never scared companies from poisoning customers, destroying the environment, or any other possible harms. they are amoral institutions that know exactly what the value of a human life is to their bottom line. and the math frequently comes out to "we can afford to harm X number of people before profits suffer", and then they operate as such.
self-regulation is a fairy tale told by the ignorant.
Indeed. The whole idea of a corporation is to insulate the individual or individuals making the decision from any negative consequences. Oh, 200 people died as a result of the CEO's decision? Well, he will definitely get fired for that, with his golden parachute. And, not only that, but the value of his stock options will definitely go down as the company pays the price. That will keep any other CEOs from doing the same thing.
What's often surprising in the news from China is how one corporate executive after another is imprisoned or executed for doing things that hurt people, which in America would get the company slapped with a petty fine and probably not even get the guy booted.
Then you are just doing what he's doing, being a vigilante. If he wanted the fruit vendors gone and they were truly unauthorized, then call the police on their non-emergency number. It's that simple. If the fruit vendor were authorized, then take it up with the city. Going there and destroy people's produce is destruction of property, which is vandalism or malicious mischief in California punishable by up to a year in prison.
He could probably afford to buy all their fruit @ six AM and send them home. Then he could sell the fruit in the company cafeteria. Or hire the vendors for the rest of the day to be human targets while he hurled the fruit at them, which would probably be more to his liking.
"And that's why when you hear anyone spout "responsibility" or "no more handouts", it's really code for "I'm rich, f**k you, lower my taxes"."
That's a very limited view of what it means. You should enlighten yourself for the spoutings, "responsibility" or "no more handouts", means different things to different people.
1. The USA Federal Government, via the Constitution, has no right to provide Healthcare, Welfare, Education to anyone (with the exception of their employees). 2. Taxpayers should not be forced to support those who do not need support (recognizing that USA people have always supported folk who actually needed help). 3. Private endeavors, both profit and non-profit, work better than Federal Government endeavors. 4. Lots more...
I have seen the effects of USAID (USA Taxpayer money in the form of grants) in Africa. When handled by charitable, international concerns, a tremendous amount of work can be accomplished by starting the people on the road to self-sufficiency. It works in Africa because the Governments don't care about PC stuff. I have also seen the waste of USAID when run by Government agencies. There, like in the USA, the money is a route to corruption and continuing squalor for those the USAID is suppose to help.
In the USA, private organizations can follow the same principles and achieve similar results. But when the Governments intervene, the Tax Money is wasted -- corruption and squalor remain. "Letting George [Washington, i.e., the Federal Government] do it" -- community development is an exercise in futility because the USA Federal Government cares more about itself than it does its citizens or its responsibilities.
I have seen the alluded to examples with my own eyes and by interviewing people who participated before I did, while I did and after I did.
The fact that there are individuals in need of help is de facto evidence that charity isn't working in that case. (And I hasten to add that in cases where charity is working, you don't see the needy people, so the only evidence you get is in the cases where it doesn't work, because the cases where it does slip below the radar).
Given that, however, the charitable impulse would be to focus primarily on the person who needs help and getting them help via whatever means necessary, rather than evaluating the pluses and minuses of charity vs government and writing government assistance off on a philosophical/theoretical basis (and I don't mean that as a putdown).
He's factoring them in at the appropriate level. I.e., negligible in the course of any sane discussion of public policy.
Now maybe you were jockeying for a 'funny' mod, and it's whoever modded you 'insightful' that's the idiot here, but I've grown to appreciate the full range of pseudo-libertarian pseudo-thought on here, and can imagine that you really think pointing to sadists will somehow justify prisons as a solution to poverty. "All lives matter" bro. Right on!.
You are living through an era when approximately 50% of the voting population believe we need to get rid of all the workers who are willing to pick fruit and vegetables at the current low rate of pay; and simultaneously believe that raising the mandated minimum wage in general will destroy businesses and hurt the economy.
You can have a sane discussion of public policy, but that bears no relation to actual public policy and how it gets decided.
It is unfathomable to me that an electorate can't recognize the conflict of interest that exists if prisons have a profit motive. Americans are very good at marketing. Americans have for profit prisons. American has by far the highest per capita incarceration rate. Do the math.
Wait'll we get a real waiting list for replacement organs for transplants.
Banging rocks together = fire starter. Sounds pretty influential.
Exactly. And, banging rocks together = sharp pieces of rock. Also influential.
the chromosome, or the mitochondrion.
The big rock to smash things with. That started everything. Without it we'd still be lemurs.
I feel like my brain just got dumber reading that list. The Wii? Fit bit? Oculus rift? Nest Thermostat? Roku Netflixs?
None of those things should even make the top 10,000 let alone the top 50. Initially I thought they were limiting it to post 1970s stuff and then they throw in an 1850s record player.
nobody mentioned the nose hair trimmer.
Flint, that started fire. Best gadget ever. Also the fire starting kit made of a couple of sticks and piece of string.
aha, a subset of my entry: the big rock for smashing things. the mother of all technology. why do dolphins have no technology despite their supposed brains? No rocks to smash things with.
How about the can opener? Made canning food practical, hence ability to store food, without refrigeration (which needs power, which needs...)
Originally, the "canning" process was developed in France around 1800, to provision Napoleon's army, and used wide mouth bottles and corks. Tin cans came along a few years later; but.... can openers didn't arrive until the 1850s. Must have made a lot of hungry people happy.
Yes, the wheel. Or maybe the pointy stick.
I never did find out how to defend myself from a pointy stick.
Whoa!! Look out for that pineapple.
Don't forget the poo stick, the weapon against which our technology has the fewest defenses.
Yes, the wheel. Or maybe the pointy stick.
The pointy stick is just an extension of the concept of poking somebody.
The electric motor is not strictly necessary. Automotive air conditioners rely on power taken from the crankshaft to turn the compressor. It probably has never been built, but it should be possible to build pneumatic-start into a mechanical-injected diesel truck, with a full-time, clutchless, belt-driven AC compressor, and with a belt and shaft-driven cabin fan, with a belt-driven compressor to recharge the compressed-air tank to drive the starter. Obviously there isn't a benefit in doing this, electrical technology is ubiquitous enough to where we generally can get away without having to go nuts to avoid it, but we could if we really, really wanted to.
Oh heck, you don't need any kind of motor as long as you have a source of energy. You can use a flame, believe it or not. Popular in RVs and remote cabins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You need to look up the definition of gadget:
a small mechanical device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.
Both the gun and (my first choice) hammer qualify.
The knife beats both. Self-defense and attack, killing and skinning and cutting supper into bite-size chunks, It would later be lengthened into short swords and incorporated into rifles (bayonet). The needle is right up there, allowing for piercing animal skins so they could be laced or sewn together, allowing humans to spread much further than would have been possible with just loose animal furs, and making the first boots.
Definitely hammer, or its ancestor the big rock. The big rock was the gun of its time, of course. And technology begins with banging the rocks together.
People voting the iPhone in this reminds me of a similar poll for the worst film of all time. They came up with ones like "The War of the Worlds" (Tom Cruise version), "Terminator", "Forest Gump" etc. In other words they voted for films they had seen recently and did not happen to like themselves. They showed their complete ignorance of just how bad films can really be, such as "Plan 9 from Outer Space", "Manos, the Hands of Fate", and "The attack of the 50 foot Woman". These iFans have got their noses too close to their little screens.
Not even close.
http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/the-room-10th-anniversary-history.html
https://youtu.be/w59fZNDTMAg
"Oh hai, Lisa"
It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.
But, how does it know?
They don't work. I put a popsicle and a cup of coffee into mine and it didn't do the job for either.
This entire controversy is about a small group of elitist pricks trying to hijack a meaningless award away from another small group of elitist pricks. The only difference between the Hugo inner circle for the last couple of decades and the Puppies (of either variety) is which books they're hawking. None of them want general participation on the part of the book buying public.
It's been decades since there was any detectable connection between what the sf buying public is buying and either the Hugos or the Nebulas.
The more meaningless and unimportant the cause, the greater the controversy.
Plenty of swashbuckling fun in Heinlein, at least in the 90% of his work that was somewhat schlocky (mostly metaphorical swashbuckling, but some actual swashes were buckled along the way).
Also, educational. Learned a lot about planning revolutions and such as a young Heinlein fan.
That description doesn't really seem to fit Heinlein's works.
That's why there weren't no Mean Puppies in Heinlein's day. The reason they're here today is to return us to those glorious days of yesteryear, when men were men and women swooned and aliens had bugeyes. Including human aliens, legal or illegal.
That's why I stopped reading certain authors. Their books were "this poor guy is picked on because he's gay, and that's not fair, so let's make him the hero fighting for the girl -- oh, I mean the boy -- oh, wait, I mean ... uh ... for .. uh ... justice. Yeah, that's it, he's fighting for justice with his boyfriend ... uh ... I mean his companion".
One book I read a while ago handled "the gay issue" much better. There was a group of people on a ship/research station. One was gay, and liked to give blow jobs. Another guy was not gay, but liked getting blow jobs. No big deal, and no cause for fight for, just the way people are.
As distinct from every other SF book, where "this poor guy is picked on because he's a nerd, and good in school, and bad at sports, and interested in science, but discovers that he (or rarely she) is really the Prince of Space with Special Powers and save the planet and everybody is sorry then, you betcha"
Trump went five for five today so expect their control of our lives to only increase.
It is highly unlikely that Trump has a SF plank in his platform.
I don't know; he's clearly some sort of alien. Even those odd cilia topping his cranial protrusion.
I don't see any conflict. It's the old Voltaire position on free speech: I may not agree with your decision, but I believe it must be your decision to make.
I find it very frustrating that the pro-life side generally opposes contraception and sex education, even though these are the best mean we have to reduce the need for and number of abortions. I think it's because they have such a strong religious element - almost all of the major pro-life organisations and leaders are explicitly Christian and devoutly so, which means they must regard their mission as not only to eliminate abortion, but to eliminate the evil of non-marital sex too.
Babies are God's punishment for having sex. See Genesis.
Not at all. Conservatives simply don't believe in infantilizing women by pretending they simply have no way to avoid pregnancy.
And yes, people should pay their own way. They only people who should get publicly funded health care are people who can't afford it.
That's pretty funny coming from someone who spends his time thinking up new ways to spend my money.
Aren't we forgetting someone? ... a woman, her doctor, and the baby, right? The woman had ways to avoid the situation. So did the doctor. The baby? Not so much.
More horseshit. Infant mortality rates aren't any higher in the US than they are anywhere else. In a lot of places babies are counted as stillborn if they die within 24 hours. That's the benefit of socialized medicine - you don't get better care, but you do get comforting statistics from the medical bureaucracy.
Beyond that, if you want a kid, have a kid. But taking care of that kid is your responsibility, not mine. I'm under no obligations to see that your kid is fed and clothed and has proper medical care. That's your job as a parent, and if you can't swing it don't have kids.
But I have questions for you, Mr freedom-loving guy. Why is your party so intent on taking away my freedom to defend myself, and my freedom of speech?
"Infant mortality rates aren't any higher in the US than they are anywhere else. In a lot of places babies are counted as stillborn if they die within 24 hours."
See, that's why some of us trust scientists and professionals and academics and so on, rather than just repeating the assertions of places like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, who invented that particular lie; you know, people who spend a lot of time and effort doing vigorous research on things, rather than just seeing something that says what they want to hear and never even bothering to idly google anything to see if there is any truth.
You're obviously just spluttering "What the heck is this idiot talking about?" at this point, your ignorance of the entire field being a badge of honor, but anybody who has any interest into why this is a lie can certainly look up things like perinatal mortality, a notion that occurred to the folks who have the data to show that our infant mortality is third world quality, even accounting for stillbirths, decades before it ever occurred to some WSJ rightwing editorial writer to just make something up about a field he knew nothing about.
The good question here, is why? What purpose does it serve the rightwing to deny that we kill more babies by neglect after they are born than any other first world country? I can see why it's unpleasant for the layperson to discover that, but the folks who actively deny it without bothering to check it out? That counts as a falsehood and one wonders what's the point? It's certainly not helping the babies at all.
As a footnote, let me refer you to the large body of research sh