To further illustrate my point: the highest suicide risk in the world today are transgender teenagers whose parents don't accept them. More than 40% of them commit suicide which is massive !
We also know that for those whose parents DO accept them as trans the suicide rate is exactly the same as the national average for their age group.
So we have a clear way to establish cause and effect here. We can save ALL those lives, because we can remove the REASON they want to die. If we educate parents properly on the subject we'll save a lot. Maybe we should even go further and declare that NOT accepting a transgender teenager's gender expression is child neglect with a high risk of death. I'm not sure, you should always think 3 times before using the law as a blunt instrument so I wouldn't rush to supporting that, but in principle it seems sound.
But that cure would make ZERO difference to any OTHER suicides, most of them do not have such clear-cut cause and effect patterns. Most of them does not have such an obvious way to completely remove the cause and cure the condition. Other suicide cases should be investigated, scientificaly, as distinct and treated in distinct ways.
Like I said, suicide is much more like cancer than like TB - it's not A disease - it's a whole cluster of diseases that just happen to have a symptom in common. You can't cure a cluster with one treatment, you have to take every single type of it and find it's own unique cure and accept that, maybe, for some of them there are no cures.
Then you are off-topic, since such a person has nothing to do with the discussion or the article. The point of the article is that scientifically those cases are very, very rare - and the suggestions in the article wouldn't make one iota of difference for them anyway. Maybe we need some sort of legal assisted suicide path to let them have their wish, I don't know - but that is an ENTIRELY unrelated issue.
This discussion is about the 90% of suicidal people who are only suicidal once, for a very brief period, and will be very happy if they survived that.
Should we deny medical care to somebody who gets in an accident when it was clearly their fault ? No, we generally hold that - as far as possible - we do not let people die because they had a momentary lapse of judgement. Why should THIS kind of lapse be any different ?
Those who are determined to die are not PART of this discussion at all, they are a distinct group - much smaller and there is absolutely NO logical reason to include them. Trying to find a cure-all for suicide is just as impossible as a cure-all for cancer. You can't find ONE cure for a whole bunch of diseases that only have one thing in COMMON and everything else different. The same goes for suicide, now if we can help 90% of them not to die - why the hell are you freaking out because it won't help the other 10% ? Why do you care that there may be side-effects on that 10% that they would consider worse than no treatment ? If we get a treatment that saves 90% of colon cancer patients, do we refuse to use it because in the other 10% the side-effects make their final months even MORE painful ?
Erm - you were literally just presented, in the article, with PROOF that the vast majority of suicidal states are temporary - that those people DO end up grateful if they survive.
There is nothing we can do to prevent the permanently and devotedly suicidal from success and maybe there is something to your argument that nothing SHOULD be done. But if you think that you would rather die from a single moment of bad judgement then that makes you the incredibly rare exception, not the rule. We cannot base society on the rare exceptions. That would be like saying "Until the 1980's we taxed the super-rich at up to 90% and they were still rich, so it makes sense to tax EVERYBODY at 90%"
Sensible societies don't base their responses on the outliers but on the majority - and the science is clear, the majority of suicides, if they are intervened with - have no recurrence. Most people do not really want to die - they just wanted it in THAT moment.
>You don't think that libertarians "care" about their families, friends and other human beings in general?
Oh I think some do, not all, but some. Ayn Rand sure didn't - she explicitely stated that there is NO relationship between ANY people that is NOT monetary, and ANY relationship WITHOUT monetary advantages should be ended as it's taking time away from those that are profitable. Yes, she sincerely thought that sex partners, lovers, spouses and even children should be chosen based on their ability to contribute to your financial wellbeing AND ONLY that.
But even the ones who do still lack true empathy, true understanding of the idea of "caring" - we see the pattern over and over over and over. Dick Cheney vehemently opposed gay marriage his whole life - until his daughter came out as a lesbian and wanted to get married. When it happens to them - they suddenly understand, they suddenly want to see a change, but in all the decades other people suffer while they are sheltered -they never do, then it's easy to blame the suffering on the sufferers.
Caring is the ability to feel somebody else's pain and thus a desire to help relieve it WITHOUT you or somebody you love going through it. It's the ability to feel sympathy and empathy for a perfect stranger and those who are capable of it are always and entirely incapable of condescension, cannot look down on others and never blame those in dire straights for the straights they are in - because they CAN imagine it happening to them. The ability to realize that line between billionaire and homeless is often just one bad day. Those who can care does not look at a homeless person and wonder what he did wrong in his life to end up that way, he wonders what terrible tragedy befell him to. If you care, you stop assuming other people's choices led to their situations - because you come to realize how much of our lives are not really in our control, how little our choices really matter. Because you can imagine how easily a particularly bad set of circumstances could put yourself there as well.
That is caring. Caring for family and loved ones is nothing special. Even Hitler probably cared for Eva. That doesn't make you a good person, it doesn't even make you human - DOGS do that. The ability to care for strangers BEFORE you even MET them -THAT makes you human.
> allowing the government to mandate what we can and can't do in our own homes, right? Actually - that hasn't come up at all. It didn't come up in the article, or the summary and was only very vaguely alluded to in the comments. I don't think that would be the most practically efficient way to develop solutions from the scientific data with which we've been presented. I think making this data widely available, along with practical advice on implementation to teachers and parents and nurses and therapists and similar people would be a much better approach. If you suspect somebody, especially a minor in your care, may be suicidal, one of the things you should do is to (even if just temporarily) remove high-risk suicide options from your home. Stuff like that.
Building a police state wouldn't help - historically that drives suicide rates UP so why you would jump to the bizarre conclusion that anybody was advocating for one to bring them down I have no idea.
None of those things are, in fact, similar to caring about people. All of those came from the same fundamentally flawed thinking: that some people are lesser beings, not fully human.
You know, what libertarians think.
And I am damn sure that if on the spur of the moment I was about to kill myself I would WANT somebody to intervene and save my life, because I've BEEN there, twice in my life. And I am really glad that both times there WAS somebody who intervened. There was somebody to stop me. Because the next day, I was so happy to be alive. And that is the vast majority of suicides - split decisions, a moment of very bad judgement when life is too much or you're really depressed. It can take years to overcome and learn to manage depression, it takes just one bad moment to lose that chance.
Only somebody who has no understanding or empathy of the reality of the situation would think that the vast majority of suicides would NOT ultimately be greatfull if they were saved.
>and those that care about them The trouble with that argument, although it's incredibly valid, is that it has no impact on libertardians because they don't know what "care" means.
I'll help them out: it's when somebody feels about another person the way you people feel about money.
Of course the same republicans who decry this today, would never let THAT happen. "The government controlling the only line that all the ISPs now HAVE to use"
Face it, they will fight anything that doesn't help big campaign donors fuck consumers harder.
The GOP: proudly defending the freedom of big corporates to not waste money on lube before they rape you since Reagan.
Nobody moo'd at you, nobody said you had to agree with anybody else. You however have NOT considered expert opinion. You declared something bad science despite many expert scientists defending it. You didn't offer any supporting evidence for why your view should be more valid than their expert opinion, you didn't offer any data to debunk the grounds for their defence.
You just ignored them - and then you claim to "consider" their views. You haven't ACTUALLY considered ANYTHING unless you have look at the supporting arguments and evidence and considered counter arguments and evidence and had the expertise t(whether by yourself or acquired through another expert) to actually compare which set of evidence is more accurate or valid.
That's exactly the fallacy that drives the climate-change denial movement. Somebody makes a convincing sounding argument, presents what he thinks is evidence and people are fooled by it because they don't go the next step to see how that supposed evidence have held up to scrutiny - which would quickly show that it's all been thoroughly debunked by numerous independent studies.
Scepticism does not elevate one above expertise, and citing expertise is NOT an appeal to authority fallacy.
Except when it's not... if a sudden surge of gold increase does happen - then there are no systems in place to counter inflation through things like interest hikes, instant hyper-inflation. Exactly what destroyed the Spanish empire. Too much gold and silver from the Americas - instant riches, collapse of the gold based currency.
Not to mention... how long do you think it will take to scrub the identities of people out of a 30 year study involving tens of thousands of individuals ? 5 years ? 10 years ?
Now ask yourself, how much will all this cost ? The reps only gave them 1 million a year to do it - despite the congressional budget office saying this law would cost 250 million a year to implement and THAT figure requires the EPA to cut it's annual studies in HALF.
I would rather have as many studies as possible informing research, not cut the number in half. And this law would make it zero, that's exactly what this law is DESIGNED to do - it's designed to destroy the EPA without having to go through the difficulties of getting people to accept it being disbanded entirely. It completely neutralizes them however. You will never see another regulation about anything harmful ever again if this passes.
And what about all the existing studies that were done before this law, with good solid scientific result but confidential patient information in it ?
Oh we can't use those anymore ? We have to redo them. Many of them were longitudinal studies spanning decades. I'm sure the republicans would love us to have to do them over, and scrap all the good regulations they led to and not be able to regulate them again for 3 or 4 decades while we redo solid scientific studies that got thrown out for no other reason than having been done before this law passed.
If you hate secret science so much, lobby to have trade secret laws removed from pharmaceutical companies - we have a current deluge of medicine studies that are utterly impossible to reproduce because ACTUAL INGREDIENTS in the medicine given are not included on the bases of "trade secrets" - yet we're expected to trust the results of studies by commercial entities who WANT a specific outcome when they don't have to give us the information needed to do a similar study of our own ?
You don't NEED patient data to be reproducible, you DO need ingredient data.
So why is the republicans trying to block science without patient data while PROTECTING companies that refuse to reveal ingredient data ?
Every major science group in the country has opposed this bill, all the scientists oppose it. Considering that they all love and live the scientific method, if this law was what it says it is, they would be supporting it.
You should reconsider judging a law by what republicans claim it does.
>What's weird about making the data from scientific studies publically available? Frankly, I think the data from all government funded research should be public domain.
My first instinct was the same, until I read the article (I know I know). The data in question is MEDICAL data, covered by confidentiality laws.
That is critical for environmental regulation - you can't just SAY the stuff hurts people or don't hurt people - you need science. But medical data cannot be publicly disclosed in general.
You can require opt-in but that gets very limiting and automatically introduces bias in the results - it actually makes the data LESS rigorous and verified - this is what the republicans are proposing while furthermore limiting the budget for IMPLEMENTING these regulations to just one million dollars a year - the CBO estimates it would cost at least 250 million dollars and even then only if the EPA cuts the number of studies it does in half.
In short, the "secret science" thing is a lie, this law is nothing but an attempt to kill the EPA without having to actually get rid of it. It's the equivalent to a law that says "police investigating crimes may not speak to witnesses, collect evidence or arrest anybody who doesn't confess".
Of republicans declaring that science isn't science if it's "secret" and this makes the bills good because they haven't actually read the article and has no idea what "secret" MEANS in this context.
Refunding the remaining money and making the work they managed to get done available to the community is a decent way to act here. In a bankruptcy case your remaining assets would go to your creditors. In this case they are giving those assets back to the people who paid for them.
That means the product could still come into existence or form the beginnings of other even better designs.
All in all, that was actually quite decent of them.
Does that even exist ? Lifelong liberal and I have never been there nor heard of it.
So assuming it does, it doesn't actually matter if a site filled with complete bullshit (but with a leftwing slant) actually dissapears since nobody was using it anyway.
>The 6) if false, even if a common predecessor, that of human was not an ape.
The common ancestor of all homo species was an ape. So was the earlier common ancestor of humans AND chimps. It was the chimplike ancestor of man, and at the same time the man-like ancestor of chimps.
It was a primate without a tail - it was an ape. Even further back we shared a common ancestor with gorrillas, further than that with orangs and much further than that with monkeys.
You do that already. Unless you spend your days in a Faraday cage in the dark. You do KNOW that light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum right ?
Not to mention the fact that the earth itself generates a massive magnetic field ? You are aware that this magnetic field is actually electromagnetic right ?
You may as well ask if it's "really a good idea to spend 8 hours a day at the bottom of a large gravity well".
Well if you're going to try argue that then actually so far we're pretty much following exactly the path that Roddenberry predicted. He believed that we would have several terrible wars first, including more than one world war before reaching that point. That, in fact, before we could be our best - we would have to learn the hard way what happens at our worst.
So things being bad now, and getting worse - is, in fact, exactly what he predicted. If you watch the trial scene in the pilot for TNG it gets spelled out in explicit detail by Q as part of the accusation that humanity is not civilized enough to be allowed to explore the galaxy further.
Just saying "x is dangerous" doesn't make it so. You need to provide proof.
But what did I expect from somebody called "RightwingNutjob"... rational response ?
Either way it DOES matter because the topic of discussion is not and never WAS whether that number is too high or not, the topic is whether Romney told the truth - and since he utterly misrepresented what that number even MEANS he clearly did not.
Slashdot Mirror
To further illustrate my point: the highest suicide risk in the world today are transgender teenagers whose parents don't accept them. More than 40% of them commit suicide which is massive !
We also know that for those whose parents DO accept them as trans the suicide rate is exactly the same as the national average for their age group.
So we have a clear way to establish cause and effect here. We can save ALL those lives, because we can remove the REASON they want to die. If we educate parents properly on the subject we'll save a lot. Maybe we should even go further and declare that NOT accepting a transgender teenager's gender expression is child neglect with a high risk of death. I'm not sure, you should always think 3 times before using the law as a blunt instrument so I wouldn't rush to supporting that, but in principle it seems sound.
But that cure would make ZERO difference to any OTHER suicides, most of them do not have such clear-cut cause and effect patterns. Most of them does not have such an obvious way to completely remove the cause and cure the condition.
Other suicide cases should be investigated, scientificaly, as distinct and treated in distinct ways.
Like I said, suicide is much more like cancer than like TB - it's not A disease - it's a whole cluster of diseases that just happen to have a symptom in common. You can't cure a cluster with one treatment, you have to take every single type of it and find it's own unique cure and accept that, maybe, for some of them there are no cures.
Then you are off-topic, since such a person has nothing to do with the discussion or the article.
The point of the article is that scientifically those cases are very, very rare - and the suggestions in the article wouldn't make one iota of difference for them anyway. Maybe we need some sort of legal assisted suicide path to let them have their wish, I don't know - but that is an ENTIRELY unrelated issue.
This discussion is about the 90% of suicidal people who are only suicidal once, for a very brief period, and will be very happy if they survived that.
Should we deny medical care to somebody who gets in an accident when it was clearly their fault ? No, we generally hold that - as far as possible - we do not let people die because they had a momentary lapse of judgement. Why should THIS kind of lapse be any different ?
Those who are determined to die are not PART of this discussion at all, they are a distinct group - much smaller and there is absolutely NO logical reason to include them. Trying to find a cure-all for suicide is just as impossible as a cure-all for cancer. You can't find ONE cure for a whole bunch of diseases that only have one thing in COMMON and everything else different.
The same goes for suicide, now if we can help 90% of them not to die - why the hell are you freaking out because it won't help the other 10% ? Why do you care that there may be side-effects on that 10% that they would consider worse than no treatment ?
If we get a treatment that saves 90% of colon cancer patients, do we refuse to use it because in the other 10% the side-effects make their final months even MORE painful ?
Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Erm - you were literally just presented, in the article, with PROOF that the vast majority of suicidal states are temporary - that those people DO end up grateful if they survive.
There is nothing we can do to prevent the permanently and devotedly suicidal from success and maybe there is something to your argument that nothing SHOULD be done.
But if you think that you would rather die from a single moment of bad judgement then that makes you the incredibly rare exception, not the rule. We cannot base society on the rare exceptions.
That would be like saying "Until the 1980's we taxed the super-rich at up to 90% and they were still rich, so it makes sense to tax EVERYBODY at 90%"
Sensible societies don't base their responses on the outliers but on the majority - and the science is clear, the majority of suicides, if they are intervened with - have no recurrence. Most people do not really want to die - they just wanted it in THAT moment.
>You don't think that libertarians "care" about their families, friends and other human beings in general?
Oh I think some do, not all, but some.
Ayn Rand sure didn't - she explicitely stated that there is NO relationship between ANY people that is NOT monetary, and ANY relationship WITHOUT monetary advantages should be ended as it's taking time away from those that are profitable.
Yes, she sincerely thought that sex partners, lovers, spouses and even children should be chosen based on their ability to contribute to your financial wellbeing AND ONLY that.
But even the ones who do still lack true empathy, true understanding of the idea of "caring" - we see the pattern over and over over and over. Dick Cheney vehemently opposed gay marriage his whole life - until his daughter came out as a lesbian and wanted to get married.
When it happens to them - they suddenly understand, they suddenly want to see a change, but in all the decades other people suffer while they are sheltered -they never do, then it's easy to blame the suffering on the sufferers.
Caring is the ability to feel somebody else's pain and thus a desire to help relieve it WITHOUT you or somebody you love going through it. It's the ability to feel sympathy and empathy for a perfect stranger and those who are capable of it are always and entirely incapable of condescension, cannot look down on others and never blame those in dire straights for the straights they are in - because they CAN imagine it happening to them.
The ability to realize that line between billionaire and homeless is often just one bad day. Those who can care does not look at a homeless person and wonder what he did wrong in his life to end up that way, he wonders what terrible tragedy befell him to.
If you care, you stop assuming other people's choices led to their situations - because you come to realize how much of our lives are not really in our control, how little our choices really matter. Because you can imagine how easily a particularly bad set of circumstances could put yourself there as well.
That is caring. Caring for family and loved ones is nothing special. Even Hitler probably cared for Eva. That doesn't make you a good person, it doesn't even make you human - DOGS do that. The ability to care for strangers BEFORE you even MET them -THAT makes you human.
> allowing the government to mandate what we can and can't do in our own homes, right?
Actually - that hasn't come up at all. It didn't come up in the article, or the summary and was only very vaguely alluded to in the comments. I don't think that would be the most practically efficient way to develop solutions from the scientific data with which we've been presented.
I think making this data widely available, along with practical advice on implementation to teachers and parents and nurses and therapists and similar people would be a much better approach. If you suspect somebody, especially a minor in your care, may be suicidal, one of the things you should do is to (even if just temporarily) remove high-risk suicide options from your home.
Stuff like that.
Building a police state wouldn't help - historically that drives suicide rates UP so why you would jump to the bizarre conclusion that anybody was advocating for one to bring them down I have no idea.
None of those things are, in fact, similar to caring about people. All of those came from the same fundamentally flawed thinking: that some people are lesser beings, not fully human.
You know, what libertarians think.
And I am damn sure that if on the spur of the moment I was about to kill myself I would WANT somebody to intervene and save my life, because I've BEEN there, twice in my life. And I am really glad that both times there WAS somebody who intervened. There was somebody to stop me. Because the next day, I was so happy to be alive.
And that is the vast majority of suicides - split decisions, a moment of very bad judgement when life is too much or you're really depressed.
It can take years to overcome and learn to manage depression, it takes just one bad moment to lose that chance.
Only somebody who has no understanding or empathy of the reality of the situation would think that the vast majority of suicides would NOT ultimately be greatfull if they were saved.
>and those that care about them
The trouble with that argument, although it's incredibly valid, is that it has no impact on libertardians because they don't know what "care" means.
I'll help them out: it's when somebody feels about another person the way you people feel about money.
Of course the same republicans who decry this today, would never let THAT happen.
"The government controlling the only line that all the ISPs now HAVE to use"
Face it, they will fight anything that doesn't help big campaign donors fuck consumers harder.
The GOP: proudly defending the freedom of big corporates to not waste money on lube before they rape you since Reagan.
Nobody moo'd at you, nobody said you had to agree with anybody else.
You however have NOT considered expert opinion. You declared something bad science despite many expert scientists defending it. You didn't offer any supporting evidence for why your view should be more valid than their expert opinion, you didn't offer any data to debunk the grounds for their defence.
You just ignored them - and then you claim to "consider" their views. You haven't ACTUALLY considered ANYTHING unless you have look at the supporting arguments and evidence and considered counter arguments and evidence and had the expertise t(whether by yourself or acquired through another expert) to actually compare which set of evidence is more accurate or valid.
That's exactly the fallacy that drives the climate-change denial movement. Somebody makes a convincing sounding argument, presents what he thinks is evidence and people are fooled by it because they don't go the next step to see how that supposed evidence have held up to scrutiny - which would quickly show that it's all been thoroughly debunked by numerous independent studies.
Scepticism does not elevate one above expertise, and citing expertise is NOT an appeal to authority fallacy.
But only an idiot refuses to consider expert opinion before making up their mind. You're not a unique rebel, you're just an ignorant fool.
> The increase of gold is negligible.
Except when it's not... if a sudden surge of gold increase does happen - then there are no systems in place to counter inflation through things like interest hikes, instant hyper-inflation.
Exactly what destroyed the Spanish empire. Too much gold and silver from the Americas - instant riches, collapse of the gold based currency.
That is not, in fact, always possible to do.
Not to mention... how long do you think it will take to scrub the identities of people out of a 30 year study involving tens of thousands of individuals ?
5 years ? 10 years ?
Now ask yourself, how much will all this cost ? The reps only gave them 1 million a year to do it - despite the congressional budget office saying this law would cost 250 million a year to implement and THAT figure requires the EPA to cut it's annual studies in HALF.
I would rather have as many studies as possible informing research, not cut the number in half. And this law would make it zero, that's exactly what this law is DESIGNED to do - it's designed to destroy the EPA without having to go through the difficulties of getting people to accept it being disbanded entirely. It completely neutralizes them however. You will never see another regulation about anything harmful ever again if this passes.
And what about all the existing studies that were done before this law, with good solid scientific result but confidential patient information in it ?
Oh we can't use those anymore ? We have to redo them. Many of them were longitudinal studies spanning decades. I'm sure the republicans would love us to have to do them over, and scrap all the good regulations they led to and not be able to regulate them again for 3 or 4 decades while we redo solid scientific studies that got thrown out for no other reason than having been done before this law passed.
If you hate secret science so much, lobby to have trade secret laws removed from pharmaceutical companies - we have a current deluge of medicine studies that are utterly impossible to reproduce because ACTUAL INGREDIENTS in the medicine given are not included on the bases of "trade secrets" - yet we're expected to trust the results of studies by commercial entities who WANT a specific outcome when they don't have to give us the information needed to do a similar study of our own ?
You don't NEED patient data to be reproducible, you DO need ingredient data.
So why is the republicans trying to block science without patient data while PROTECTING companies that refuse to reveal ingredient data ?
Every major science group in the country has opposed this bill, all the scientists oppose it.
Considering that they all love and live the scientific method, if this law was what it says it is, they would be supporting it.
You should reconsider judging a law by what republicans claim it does.
>What's weird about making the data from scientific studies publically available? Frankly, I think the data from all government funded research should be public domain.
My first instinct was the same, until I read the article (I know I know).
The data in question is MEDICAL data, covered by confidentiality laws.
That is critical for environmental regulation - you can't just SAY the stuff hurts people or don't hurt people - you need science. But medical data cannot be publicly disclosed in general.
You can require opt-in but that gets very limiting and automatically introduces bias in the results - it actually makes the data LESS rigorous and verified - this is what the republicans are proposing while furthermore limiting the budget for IMPLEMENTING these regulations to just one million dollars a year - the CBO estimates it would cost at least 250 million dollars and even then only if the EPA cuts the number of studies it does in half.
In short, the "secret science" thing is a lie, this law is nothing but an attempt to kill the EPA without having to actually get rid of it. It's the equivalent to a law that says "police investigating crimes may not speak to witnesses, collect evidence or arrest anybody who doesn't confess".
Of republicans declaring that science isn't science if it's "secret" and this makes the bills good because they haven't actually read the article and has no idea what "secret" MEANS in this context.
Refunding the remaining money and making the work they managed to get done available to the community is a decent way to act here. In a bankruptcy case your remaining assets would go to your creditors.
In this case they are giving those assets back to the people who paid for them.
That means the product could still come into existence or form the beginnings of other even better designs.
All in all, that was actually quite decent of them.
Does that even exist ?
Lifelong liberal and I have never been there nor heard of it.
So assuming it does, it doesn't actually matter if a site filled with complete bullshit (but with a leftwing slant) actually dissapears since nobody was using it anyway.
>The 6) if false, even if a common predecessor, that of human was not an ape.
The common ancestor of all homo species was an ape. So was the earlier common ancestor of humans AND chimps.
It was the chimplike ancestor of man, and at the same time the man-like ancestor of chimps.
It was a primate without a tail - it was an ape.
Even further back we shared a common ancestor with gorrillas, further than that with orangs and much further than that with monkeys.
I did actually. Websites DEBUNKING pseudo-scientific nonsence shouldn't be getting downgraded !
When you can't find a page about antivaxxing or climate denial, you'll know it worked.
You do that already. Unless you spend your days in a Faraday cage in the dark.
You do KNOW that light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum right ?
Not to mention the fact that the earth itself generates a massive magnetic field ? You are aware that this magnetic field is actually electromagnetic right ?
You may as well ask if it's "really a good idea to spend 8 hours a day at the bottom of a large gravity well".
On the other hand, a hacker who actually gave her child a SQL injection as legal name... now that's some funny shit right there !
Just as long as my kids don't have to go to Zefram Cochrane highschool.
Well if you're going to try argue that then actually so far we're pretty much following exactly the path that Roddenberry predicted. He believed that we would have several terrible wars first, including more than one world war before reaching that point.
That, in fact, before we could be our best - we would have to learn the hard way what happens at our worst.
So things being bad now, and getting worse - is, in fact, exactly what he predicted. If you watch the trial scene in the pilot for TNG it gets spelled out in explicit detail by Q as part of the accusation that humanity is not civilized enough to be allowed to explore the galaxy further.
Just saying "x is dangerous" doesn't make it so. You need to provide proof.
But what did I expect from somebody called "RightwingNutjob" ... rational response ?
Either way it DOES matter because the topic of discussion is not and never WAS whether that number is too high or not, the topic is whether Romney told the truth - and since he utterly misrepresented what that number even MEANS he clearly did not.