(I hope I didn't just start a save-the-bugs movement.)
No, that's the movement started by MS and several other major software vendors who don't like having their bugs publicized before they've had a chance to ignore them for a year or two.
If spider webs clogged up the screening then I'd say your turbines weren't getting too much wind in the first place.
Have you ever driven through this particular wind farm, or one much like it?
For one thing, as much wind as these things get, they don't get wind ALL the time. Some spiders are pretty darn fast. (We used to end up with webs across the path to our back gate all the time, even though we walked through there every day.)
For another thing, some of the turbines are usually turned off. I'm not sure why, but you'll look out and see a patch that are busily whirring away, and another patch right next to them still as stone. Maybe maintenance, efficiency, or bird preservation... but it happens.
Huh? How is it better because the animal was tortured and imprisoned before it was killed.
I think the poster's point was that the chickens killed by KFC and McDonald's aren't quite precious natural resources in the way that eagles and hawks are. So whatever your sympathies on commercial animal husbandry, it seems you could agree that the birds dying to wind turbines aren't exactly comparable to the birds (being born and) dying for our fast food nation.
So far I've been attacked for notifying the public about known, unpublicized, issues with breastfeeding and because I've been able to counter the "Forumla is strychnine!" rants with personal experience.
What a world. I thought information wanted to be free;)
Here's some free information:
- Some people have health problems. Everyone has health problems at one time or another.
- Some nursing mothers have health problems. These problems sometimes make it more difficult, impossible, or a very bad idea for them to breastfeed.
- Breastfeeding has clinically verified health benefits that formula feeding does not. In addition, there are some problems with bottle feeding that come up even if the baby is fed breast milk.
- Formula is not strychnine, but it is generally not as good for babies as breast milk.
- YMMV.
We all make dietary decisions, all the time. We know that certain things are better for us than others, and different people make different choices. But if spinach gives you horrible, painful gas, would you go around telling people that spinach *isn't* really that great compared to iceberg lettuce (which is nearly devoid of nutritional value)? Or would you think that silly?
Asserting that your personal experience with breastfeeding one child means that breastfeeding isn't really preferable *in general* to formula is a fairly similar concept.
But at the same time, lack of knowledge and the fundamental flaws of the pursuit of breast feeding has made it more of a public health issue than it really is.
In what way?
Is it a public health issue when a particular lot of formula is found to have contaminants in it?
Is it *more* of a public health issue if that same formula is distributed more widely, and available to more people? What if it's being given out for free?
Therefore... if the one way of feeding babies that's available to almost everyone (with exceptions as noted in other posts of mine) is found to be consistently contaminated, isn't that a pretty serious public health issue? Especially if it so happens that this particular feeding method has health benefits that other methods have been unable to duplicate?
Also, I never said don't use breast milk, I merely said that you will not hear about the 'bad' things until they happen to you. Conspiracy? I have no idea.
You will not typically hear about the 'bad' things until you do a tiny bit of research. Then you find out all sorts of stuff...
IMHO, you're reply is typical of someone who never had a problem, and is blissfully unaware because of the lack of information from the medical community.
No, my response is probably not typical (rarely is anything about me typical), but comes from the point of view of someone who is currently pregnant and planning to breastfeed. I've got three books plus a ton of pamphlets which range from the informal and light-hearted to the overbearingly medically jargonized. One of the books and pretty much all of the pamphlets have come directly out of my doctor's office. Just the other day, I picked one up about the tests that newborns are supposed to get, including those for galactosemia and phenylketonuria. Even that sheet of paper mentioned that these disorders can rule out breast feeding.
Most of my info, however, comes from good ol' "What to Expect When You're Expecting," which urges women to consider or try breastfeeding if possible, but details many reasons why it may be problematic or impossible.
I don't know how old your fourth child is, or where you live, or any of the factors that might lead to my having gotten more complete information about breastfeeding than you and your wife. But I can reassure you that in Los Angeles, right now, it's entirely possible to get all kinds of info on what can go wrong with breastfeeding.
As for your wife not having any liver problems... didn't you say that her liver couldn't clean up her blood enough to create good milk for the baby? It seems to me that that's either a liver problem or a toxin problem of some kind. It seems evolutionarily unlikely that this would just be "how it is" for most, or even many, women. What's often the case is that husbands pick up fewer of the details of this sort of situation than ideal for relating the situation for others; perhaps your wife can log on and explain the situation in a manner that makes a little more sense.
Looking at "National health expenditures as percent of GDP" (a measure that somewhat takes into account inflation and increased standard of living) there has been a 276% (4.1% vs 15.1%) increase in medical spending.
Yep, sure enough. During the same 40 years, we gained only 10% longer life spans measured from birth, and our 50-year-old gained only 6.3%. Slight correction to your numbers, though: I think you transposed the 5 and the 4 (increase from 5.1% to 14.1% is shown in the data) and then there's some other weirdness... anyway, I get a 176% increase.
Still, that's about a 17% increase in cost for every 1% increase in life span. Yeouch! Trouble is, you can't put a price on life, though... we'll keep paying it as long as it's theoretically possible. (Ick, disturbing sci-fi world image flashes into my head: 200-year-old slaves in thrall to a health care system that rules the planet.)
No - Breastmilk doesn't naturally have ENOUGH Iron. The mother has to take supplements.
Erm, that sounds like *the mother's diet* not having enough iron. Which is generally the case in industrialized nations. Women who *aren't* breastfeeding can get anemic relatively easily. Iron deficiency isn't some naturally-occuring phenomenon.
Breastfeeding isn't easy. In some ways, it's easier than formula feeding... no mixing, measuring, sterilizing, or shopping to do. But it's not simple to learn to do, either, and it does demand that the mother take the same precautions with her diet that are recommended for a healthy pregnancy. On the other hand, it also strengthens the baby's immune system (because as the mother develops immunities to pathogens in her environment, she passes them on to the baby via the milk), and improves brain development. So, for those who can (obviously, your wife isn't one someone who can), it's a better option. Mothers of children with galactosemia or phenylketonuria similarly can't breastfeed, because the milk sugars or proteins they produce are toxic to the baby.
As Mark Twain said, "It is possible to learn too much from experience. A cat that has once sat on a hot stove lid will never again sit on a hot stove lid. Trouble is, he'll never sit on a cold one, either." Your experience with breastfeeding doesn't mean that contamination of breast milk isn't a public health problem. Heck, for that matter, maybe if your wife didn't live in an industrialized society with all those pollutants floating around, her liver would have been able to keep up with the job.;-) (No, I don't actually think that's likely, but I'll grant that it's within the realm of possibility.)
Ah.. You've been drawn into the "Mother's milk is best for the baby" campaign. It might be, and it might not be. It all depends. For example, my 4th child was breast fed, and was jaundice the whole time. Why? Because my wife's body doesn't sufficiently clean her blood. This is not uncommon. Nor is the lack or Iron in breast milk, and a laundry list of other issues that might crop up.
Yes, there's a laundry list of issues that can crop up. Not every woman can breastfeed. Some women can't produce enough milk, and have to supplement with formula; others can't because of health problems for either the mother or the child. It sounds like in your case, your wife had liver problems that made her a bad candidate for breast feeding, and this wasn't properly diagnosed by the doctors until it caused problems for the baby.
Taking your example, I think I'll go and preach to the masses that sulfa shouldn't be prescribed as an antibiotic, because it causes me to break out in hives. If I'm allergic to it, then it's usefulness as a drug must be hype.
After that, wash well just with water (and leave them for a while in water before that if you wan't) to remove all the soap. Soap can also harm your health.
Or use a soap specifically designed for washing vegetables... Envrionne (I think it's called) is $2.99/bottle at Trader Joe's.
Oh, come on, man, Everquest will take years off your life! Just ask the mother of that schizophrenic, epileptic 21-year-old who killed himself because of EQ...
But, seriously. You're not living that much longer than your forebears. Especially if you're male, and over 30 or so. Maybe you're getting another 20% more lifespan for being born 100 years later, but you're paying for it through the nose. At the very least, if you quit smoking you can save a bundle of money (not just on cigarettes, but on health, life, and sometimes even car insurance), and use it to enjoy that 20% more!
Likewise it's probably equally impossible for one to understand what ADD is unless you have it and have received good medication for it. It's not speculation or junk science. It's factual science based on controlled study.
The fact that ADD is a real, and serious, disorder that can be diagnosed via brain imaging in addition to psychiatric observation, and that it responds to medication, doesn't mean that it can't be misdiagnosed.
Unfortunately I can't quote a source for this, since I just heard it from my mother over the holidays (though she's a pretty good critical thinker so I generally trust her information) but apparently last year, 70% of white males who took the SAT had learning disabilities that qualified them for extra time.
I have a good friend who is severely dyslexic (she can read, technically, but it takes her so much effort she can't comprehend what she's read), and my husband's cousin is severely ADHD. I know what these syndromes look like, and they can be scary. But the current diagnosis rates demonstrate that either (a) there is a SERIOUS public health disaster going on, and we need to get to the bottom of it RIGHT NOW, or (b) children are being misdiagnosed by doctors who can bill insurance for treatments and medication that kids don't need, and this is allowed by parents who want their kids to have every advantage possible in a competitive world. (Teachers have relatively little to do with it... at most, they can recommend that a parent take a child to a psychiatrist for diagnosis. Often having kids in their class with these diagnoses means more work for them, so they really don't have a motivation to suggest it when it's not an issue.)
ADD is a real disease, but it's become as fashionable and overused as Prozac was in the early '90's. Older parents who have hazier recollections of what it was like to be a kid may be more inclined to think something is wrong when junior doesn't want to sit still for an hour or so. Further, overscheduled children who have to live by the demands of their parents' lives may find that there's no reward to becoming engrossed in a task, since they may be pulled away from it at a moment's notice. (Anyone else remember asking for five more minutes when mom came to pick them up at kindergarten? My mom always had those five minutes to spare, but plenty of parents don't these days.)
The fact that you have personal experience with the disorder puts you in an excellent position to call BS on those who abuse it. Consider looking into this further.
Maybe I can't do math, but here's what Excel and the US Census tell me:
US Population in 2000: 281,421,906 Rate per: 100,000 Factor: 2814.21906 (pop/rate)
Year: 1973 Incidence: 180 Cases: 506,559.43
Year: 2000 Incidence: 200 Cases: 562,843.81
Difference: 56,284.38
So that would be over 56,000 more cases in the US alone, rather than 2500. The world population is more than 20x the US population, but even if we're generous and assume that your 5-6 times the rate worldwide is correct (since the developing world sees relatively little cancer), that's about 280,000 - 340,000 more cancer cases.
Yeah, not all are deaths. In fact, most aren't. But they all pretty much can be counted on to increase pain, suffering, and medical costs for individuals, insurance companies, and government agencies. And given how much these costs have gone up, you'd think we'd get a little decrease in those numbers, rather than an increase.
Believe me, if these numbers weren't for the 20-54 age group, I'd be skeptical too... after all, the longer we live, the more likely we are to get cancer. But the fact that more and more young and middle-aged adults are getting cancer is a sign that we're not doing the right things.
First of all, to be fair, let's use the same marker as the parent post: life expectancy at age 50. For that, the numbers from your link are 80 years for someone who is living in 2000, vs. 71.26 for someone living in 1900-1902. This is an increase of only 12.25% in life expectancy over a period of 100 years. Yeah, I'll take it, but given that medical care costs have increased by gigantic orders of magnitude in that same time span, we're not getting that much for our dollar.
The dropoff in extra years as you look at older people is what's most interesting. From the same table, a newborn in 2000 can expect to live 76.9 years, while their 1900 counterpart gets only 49.24 years on the clock. This is an increase of 56%. (Your 20-year-old gets an extra 24% more life by being born 100 years later.)
Basically, our health care improvements have a severe case of diminishing returns. As we get older, it costs much more to keep us alive longer, but we get much smaller increases for it.
What's more: men have benefitted a lot less from the past century of health care than women. Your 50-year-old guy is getting only 10% added onto his life for being 100 years later, while women get another 14%. And this is even though women live longer anyway! (Author once again thanks Random Chance for blessing her with a husband who is four years younger than her.)
Statistics are wonderful, but should always be used with caution.;-)
As can certain psychadelic drugs. Just ask Leah Betts.
(Of course, it's important to note that this girl died of a *water* overdose, not an ecstasy dose. Indirectly, it's a lack of good information about the drug that killed her. Not that dropping X is good for you or anything, but the more misinformation we spread about drugs, the more dangerous they are.)
Do, a beer, a real good beer, Re, the guy that buys the beer... Mi, the girl he buys the beer for, Fa... the distance to the bar So, I think I'll have a beer... La, la la la la la la... Ti, no thanks I've got a beer, and that brings us back to Do!
Maybe if we started to realize that in nature, species die off. It happens all the time and hasn't been just recently b/c of humans. Yes, we've caused our share of destruction but has it ever been analyzed against prior species domination?
Hm... yes, I think it has.
Here's a short item on mass extinction vs. background extinction rates. This guy talks about the background rate of extinction of entire marine families; other articles I ran across talked about background extinction rates of individual species, and estimated at around one per decade. We manage at least ten times that now.
Um, so they just guessed that the code was six times better. Okay.
Erm....57 /.09 = 6.33333, rounds to 6. I'm not guessing; I used a calculator.
Granted, their numbers are based on a self-selected sample of only 200 projects. That's still not a guess, it's actual information. Furthermore, there's nothing that implies that their numbers would be unreliable indicators, unless they're too *low*... I would think that companies that contract Reasoning to analyze their code probably have better coding habits to begin with.
I don't understand why this is -- I'm sure that we're not the first folks to walk in there with a Word Document, and most of my friends who've gotten jobs at Kinko's have been pretty sharp.
I could tell you... but I'd have to kill you.;-)
Seriously though, I worked at Kinko's for five years, mostly running Computer Services departments at my store. And I was the person that the other folks running CS departments called when things went wrong. And the person my regional called when a store needed help with something (like reinstalling every machine in a store because they were switching server OSes).
And the biggest problem is a disconnect between the people making up the policies and the people trying to carry them out. They have all these training programs, and the idea is, they can hire people at $7-8 an hour and teach them to do digital output, and it's all good. In theory, that's true. In practice, the stores are chronically understaffed, so they can never send anyone to training. You never can get caught up enough to send folks for training because those untrained people are messing up every job, so the managers are working 12 hours a day redoing everything for them. Then, the managers get chewed out by the regionals for clocking all that overtime.
But there are places it works. There's one store I will go to around here... coincidentally it's the one I started out in, but basically they just know what they're doing. They have some of the same folks working there that I was with in 1996. And this is because they do a ton of business, so folks with high school diplomas (and sometimes less) take home fat profit-sharing checks every month, and have a nice middle-class lifestyle. In return, they keep it working by making sure they know what they're doing and keep people happy.
My advice for the original poster was going to be that Kinko's might be a good place to get some promo stuff done, but definitely not where he needs to go for any big runs. He needs an offset printer for that, and there, volume is king. Getting 2000 items printed with offset is only a fraction of the cost more than 1000, since a lot of the cost is creating the plates (which, by the way, you should make sure you get... pay the extra cost for metal plates, and have them in hand when you're done). Also, if you keep it to two or three colors rather than going full-color, you'll save a bundle. Try to lay things out with at least.125" border, and you'll avoid full-bleed charges too.
Mostly, find someone who speaks with confidence about what they do. Someone who makes suggestions about ways to do things (because there's ALWAYS more than one way to do things). Someone who insists on seeing the job before they quote you any price, but after seeing it knows right away what needs doing. Don't rely on them being big or small or anything... just see who has the time and information you need.
You see, as you couldn't find the article about the IE problem, what I did was humorously imply that MS was using IE to block your access to the information.
Yes, but it was humor that implied that I voluntarily used IE. Which I simply couldn't let lie.
The store can tell you what you're most likely to buy next, and print out coupons for those items.
I dunno about that. The coupons they usually give me are for products that vaguely compete in the same arena as what I buy, but are inferior quality. Like, I'll buy "Healthy Choice" canned soup, and get a coupon for "Chef Boyardee" canned pasta.
Plenty of times I've handed the coupon back to the checker in disgust.
I think until such simple things are realised we can forget such machines ever becoming even the slightest bit intelligent and say use your name to greet you.
I've seen several ATMs greet me by name.
The funniest thing is, I saw this once or twice after I changed my name with the bank, before I got my new card... so I know that they weren't getting my name off of the bank records, but off of the raised plastic letters on the card (or possibly the magnetic stripe, but those usually carry little else than an identification code).
You can turn that off in Mozilla (including Firebird) so that nothing can change the status bar. A Mozilla user who doesn't know about this particular hole would have a false sense of security that everything in the status bar is real.
Until they noticed that the status bar and the location bar don't agree... then this hypothetical status bar zealot would probably believe that the location bar was wrong, I guess?
Slashdot Mirror
He's an environmentalist who actually thinks about the issues rather than following the herd. We need more people like him.
;-)
Yes! We need a whole herd of them!
(I hope I didn't just start a save-the-bugs movement.)
No, that's the movement started by MS and several other major software vendors who don't like having their bugs publicized before they've had a chance to ignore them for a year or two.
Just encase the fans in glass.
No, no, no. Then the birds would kill themselves flying into the glass, a la sliding glass doors.
If spider webs clogged up the screening then I'd say your turbines weren't getting too much wind in the first place.
Have you ever driven through this particular wind farm, or one much like it?
For one thing, as much wind as these things get, they don't get wind ALL the time. Some spiders are pretty darn fast. (We used to end up with webs across the path to our back gate all the time, even though we walked through there every day.)
For another thing, some of the turbines are usually turned off. I'm not sure why, but you'll look out and see a patch that are busily whirring away, and another patch right next to them still as stone. Maybe maintenance, efficiency, or bird preservation... but it happens.
Huh? How is it better because the animal was tortured and imprisoned before it was killed.
I think the poster's point was that the chickens killed by KFC and McDonald's aren't quite precious natural resources in the way that eagles and hawks are. So whatever your sympathies on commercial animal husbandry, it seems you could agree that the birds dying to wind turbines aren't exactly comparable to the birds (being born and) dying for our fast food nation.
So far I've been attacked for notifying the public about known, unpublicized, issues with breastfeeding and because I've been able to counter the "Forumla is strychnine!" rants with personal experience.
;)
What a world. I thought information wanted to be free
Here's some free information:
- Some people have health problems. Everyone has health problems at one time or another.
- Some nursing mothers have health problems. These problems sometimes make it more difficult, impossible, or a very bad idea for them to breastfeed.
- Breastfeeding has clinically verified health benefits that formula feeding does not. In addition, there are some problems with bottle feeding that come up even if the baby is fed breast milk.
- Formula is not strychnine, but it is generally not as good for babies as breast milk.
- YMMV.
We all make dietary decisions, all the time. We know that certain things are better for us than others, and different people make different choices. But if spinach gives you horrible, painful gas, would you go around telling people that spinach *isn't* really that great compared to iceberg lettuce (which is nearly devoid of nutritional value)? Or would you think that silly?
Asserting that your personal experience with breastfeeding one child means that breastfeeding isn't really preferable *in general* to formula is a fairly similar concept.
But at the same time, lack of knowledge and the fundamental flaws of the pursuit of breast feeding has made it more of a public health issue than it really is.
In what way?
Is it a public health issue when a particular lot of formula is found to have contaminants in it?
Is it *more* of a public health issue if that same formula is distributed more widely, and available to more people? What if it's being given out for free?
Therefore... if the one way of feeding babies that's available to almost everyone (with exceptions as noted in other posts of mine) is found to be consistently contaminated, isn't that a pretty serious public health issue? Especially if it so happens that this particular feeding method has health benefits that other methods have been unable to duplicate?
Also, I never said don't use breast milk, I merely said that you will not hear about the 'bad' things until they happen to you. Conspiracy? I have no idea.
You will not typically hear about the 'bad' things until you do a tiny bit of research. Then you find out all sorts of stuff...
IMHO, you're reply is typical of someone who never had a problem, and is blissfully unaware because of the lack of information from the medical community.
No, my response is probably not typical (rarely is anything about me typical), but comes from the point of view of someone who is currently pregnant and planning to breastfeed. I've got three books plus a ton of pamphlets which range from the informal and light-hearted to the overbearingly medically jargonized. One of the books and pretty much all of the pamphlets have come directly out of my doctor's office. Just the other day, I picked one up about the tests that newborns are supposed to get, including those for galactosemia and phenylketonuria. Even that sheet of paper mentioned that these disorders can rule out breast feeding.
Most of my info, however, comes from good ol' "What to Expect When You're Expecting," which urges women to consider or try breastfeeding if possible, but details many reasons why it may be problematic or impossible.
I don't know how old your fourth child is, or where you live, or any of the factors that might lead to my having gotten more complete information about breastfeeding than you and your wife. But I can reassure you that in Los Angeles, right now, it's entirely possible to get all kinds of info on what can go wrong with breastfeeding.
As for your wife not having any liver problems... didn't you say that her liver couldn't clean up her blood enough to create good milk for the baby? It seems to me that that's either a liver problem or a toxin problem of some kind. It seems evolutionarily unlikely that this would just be "how it is" for most, or even many, women. What's often the case is that husbands pick up fewer of the details of this sort of situation than ideal for relating the situation for others; perhaps your wife can log on and explain the situation in a manner that makes a little more sense.
Looking at "National health expenditures as percent of GDP" (a measure that somewhat takes into account inflation and increased standard of living) there has been a 276% (4.1% vs 15.1%) increase in medical spending.
Yep, sure enough. During the same 40 years, we gained only 10% longer life spans measured from birth, and our 50-year-old gained only 6.3%. Slight correction to your numbers, though: I think you transposed the 5 and the 4 (increase from 5.1% to 14.1% is shown in the data) and then there's some other weirdness... anyway, I get a 176% increase.
Still, that's about a 17% increase in cost for every 1% increase in life span. Yeouch! Trouble is, you can't put a price on life, though... we'll keep paying it as long as it's theoretically possible. (Ick, disturbing sci-fi world image flashes into my head: 200-year-old slaves in thrall to a health care system that rules the planet.)
No - Breastmilk doesn't naturally have ENOUGH Iron. The mother has to take supplements.
;-) (No, I don't actually think that's likely, but I'll grant that it's within the realm of possibility.)
Erm, that sounds like *the mother's diet* not having enough iron. Which is generally the case in industrialized nations. Women who *aren't* breastfeeding can get anemic relatively easily. Iron deficiency isn't some naturally-occuring phenomenon.
Breastfeeding isn't easy. In some ways, it's easier than formula feeding... no mixing, measuring, sterilizing, or shopping to do. But it's not simple to learn to do, either, and it does demand that the mother take the same precautions with her diet that are recommended for a healthy pregnancy. On the other hand, it also strengthens the baby's immune system (because as the mother develops immunities to pathogens in her environment, she passes them on to the baby via the milk), and improves brain development. So, for those who can (obviously, your wife isn't one someone who can), it's a better option. Mothers of children with galactosemia or phenylketonuria similarly can't breastfeed, because the milk sugars or proteins they produce are toxic to the baby.
As Mark Twain said, "It is possible to learn too much from experience. A cat that has once sat on a hot stove lid will never again sit on a hot stove lid. Trouble is, he'll never sit on a cold one, either." Your experience with breastfeeding doesn't mean that contamination of breast milk isn't a public health problem. Heck, for that matter, maybe if your wife didn't live in an industrialized society with all those pollutants floating around, her liver would have been able to keep up with the job.
Ah.. You've been drawn into the "Mother's milk is best for the baby" campaign. It might be, and it might not be. It all depends. For example, my 4th child was breast fed, and was jaundice the whole time. Why? Because my wife's body doesn't sufficiently clean her blood. This is not uncommon. Nor is the lack or Iron in breast milk, and a laundry list of other issues that might crop up.
Yes, there's a laundry list of issues that can crop up. Not every woman can breastfeed. Some women can't produce enough milk, and have to supplement with formula; others can't because of health problems for either the mother or the child. It sounds like in your case, your wife had liver problems that made her a bad candidate for breast feeding, and this wasn't properly diagnosed by the doctors until it caused problems for the baby.
Taking your example, I think I'll go and preach to the masses that sulfa shouldn't be prescribed as an antibiotic, because it causes me to break out in hives. If I'm allergic to it, then it's usefulness as a drug must be hype.
After that, wash well just with water (and leave them for a while in water before that if you wan't) to remove all the soap. Soap can also harm your health.
Or use a soap specifically designed for washing vegetables... Envrionne (I think it's called) is $2.99/bottle at Trader Joe's.
Oh, come on, man, Everquest will take years off your life! Just ask the mother of that schizophrenic, epileptic 21-year-old who killed himself because of EQ...
But, seriously. You're not living that much longer than your forebears. Especially if you're male, and over 30 or so. Maybe you're getting another 20% more lifespan for being born 100 years later, but you're paying for it through the nose. At the very least, if you quit smoking you can save a bundle of money (not just on cigarettes, but on health, life, and sometimes even car insurance), and use it to enjoy that 20% more!
Likewise it's probably equally impossible for one to understand what ADD is unless you have it and have received good medication for it. It's not speculation or junk science. It's factual science based on controlled study.
The fact that ADD is a real, and serious, disorder that can be diagnosed via brain imaging in addition to psychiatric observation, and that it responds to medication, doesn't mean that it can't be misdiagnosed.
Unfortunately I can't quote a source for this, since I just heard it from my mother over the holidays (though she's a pretty good critical thinker so I generally trust her information) but apparently last year, 70% of white males who took the SAT had learning disabilities that qualified them for extra time.
I have a good friend who is severely dyslexic (she can read, technically, but it takes her so much effort she can't comprehend what she's read), and my husband's cousin is severely ADHD. I know what these syndromes look like, and they can be scary. But the current diagnosis rates demonstrate that either (a) there is a SERIOUS public health disaster going on, and we need to get to the bottom of it RIGHT NOW, or (b) children are being misdiagnosed by doctors who can bill insurance for treatments and medication that kids don't need, and this is allowed by parents who want their kids to have every advantage possible in a competitive world. (Teachers have relatively little to do with it... at most, they can recommend that a parent take a child to a psychiatrist for diagnosis. Often having kids in their class with these diagnoses means more work for them, so they really don't have a motivation to suggest it when it's not an issue.)
ADD is a real disease, but it's become as fashionable and overused as Prozac was in the early '90's. Older parents who have hazier recollections of what it was like to be a kid may be more inclined to think something is wrong when junior doesn't want to sit still for an hour or so. Further, overscheduled children who have to live by the demands of their parents' lives may find that there's no reward to becoming engrossed in a task, since they may be pulled away from it at a moment's notice. (Anyone else remember asking for five more minutes when mom came to pick them up at kindergarten? My mom always had those five minutes to spare, but plenty of parents don't these days.)
The fact that you have personal experience with the disorder puts you in an excellent position to call BS on those who abuse it. Consider looking into this further.
Erm...
Maybe I can't do math, but here's what Excel and the US Census tell me:
US Population in 2000: 281,421,906
Rate per: 100,000
Factor: 2814.21906 (pop/rate)
Year: 1973
Incidence: 180
Cases: 506,559.43
Year: 2000
Incidence: 200
Cases: 562,843.81
Difference: 56,284.38
So that would be over 56,000 more cases in the US alone, rather than 2500. The world population is more than 20x the US population, but even if we're generous and assume that your 5-6 times the rate worldwide is correct (since the developing world sees relatively little cancer), that's about 280,000 - 340,000 more cancer cases.
Yeah, not all are deaths. In fact, most aren't. But they all pretty much can be counted on to increase pain, suffering, and medical costs for individuals, insurance companies, and government agencies. And given how much these costs have gone up, you'd think we'd get a little decrease in those numbers, rather than an increase.
Believe me, if these numbers weren't for the 20-54 age group, I'd be skeptical too... after all, the longer we live, the more likely we are to get cancer. But the fact that more and more young and middle-aged adults are getting cancer is a sign that we're not doing the right things.
Hmm....
;-)
First of all, to be fair, let's use the same marker as the parent post: life expectancy at age 50. For that, the numbers from your link are 80 years for someone who is living in 2000, vs. 71.26 for someone living in 1900-1902. This is an increase of only 12.25% in life expectancy over a period of 100 years. Yeah, I'll take it, but given that medical care costs have increased by gigantic orders of magnitude in that same time span, we're not getting that much for our dollar.
The dropoff in extra years as you look at older people is what's most interesting. From the same table, a newborn in 2000 can expect to live 76.9 years, while their 1900 counterpart gets only 49.24 years on the clock. This is an increase of 56%. (Your 20-year-old gets an extra 24% more life by being born 100 years later.)
Basically, our health care improvements have a severe case of diminishing returns. As we get older, it costs much more to keep us alive longer, but we get much smaller increases for it.
What's more: men have benefitted a lot less from the past century of health care than women. Your 50-year-old guy is getting only 10% added onto his life for being 100 years later, while women get another 14%. And this is even though women live longer anyway! (Author once again thanks Random Chance for blessing her with a husband who is four years younger than her.)
Statistics are wonderful, but should always be used with caution.
As can certain psychadelic drugs. Just ask Leah Betts.
(Of course, it's important to note that this girl died of a *water* overdose, not an ecstasy dose. Indirectly, it's a lack of good information about the drug that killed her. Not that dropping X is good for you or anything, but the more misinformation we spread about drugs, the more dangerous they are.)
Ah, this parody works much better for girls...
Do, a beer, a real good beer,
Re, the guy that buys the beer...
Mi, the girl he buys the beer for,
Fa... the distance to the bar
So, I think I'll have a beer...
La, la la la la la la...
Ti, no thanks I've got a beer,
and that brings us back to Do!
Maybe if we started to realize that in nature, species die off. It happens all the time and hasn't been just recently b/c of humans. Yes, we've caused our share of destruction but has it ever been analyzed against prior species domination?
Hm... yes, I think it has.
Here's a short item on mass extinction vs. background extinction rates. This guy talks about the background rate of extinction of entire marine families; other articles I ran across talked about background extinction rates of individual species, and estimated at around one per decade. We manage at least ten times that now.
Um, so they just guessed that the code was six times better. Okay.
.57 / .09 = 6.33333, rounds to 6. I'm not guessing; I used a calculator.
Erm...
Granted, their numbers are based on a self-selected sample of only 200 projects. That's still not a guess, it's actual information. Furthermore, there's nothing that implies that their numbers would be unreliable indicators, unless they're too *low*... I would think that companies that contract Reasoning to analyze their code probably have better coding habits to begin with.
I don't understand why this is -- I'm sure that we're not the first folks to walk in there with a Word Document, and most of my friends who've gotten jobs at Kinko's have been pretty sharp.
;-)
.125" border, and you'll avoid full-bleed charges too.
I could tell you... but I'd have to kill you.
Seriously though, I worked at Kinko's for five years, mostly running Computer Services departments at my store. And I was the person that the other folks running CS departments called when things went wrong. And the person my regional called when a store needed help with something (like reinstalling every machine in a store because they were switching server OSes).
And the biggest problem is a disconnect between the people making up the policies and the people trying to carry them out. They have all these training programs, and the idea is, they can hire people at $7-8 an hour and teach them to do digital output, and it's all good. In theory, that's true. In practice, the stores are chronically understaffed, so they can never send anyone to training. You never can get caught up enough to send folks for training because those untrained people are messing up every job, so the managers are working 12 hours a day redoing everything for them. Then, the managers get chewed out by the regionals for clocking all that overtime.
But there are places it works. There's one store I will go to around here... coincidentally it's the one I started out in, but basically they just know what they're doing. They have some of the same folks working there that I was with in 1996. And this is because they do a ton of business, so folks with high school diplomas (and sometimes less) take home fat profit-sharing checks every month, and have a nice middle-class lifestyle. In return, they keep it working by making sure they know what they're doing and keep people happy.
My advice for the original poster was going to be that Kinko's might be a good place to get some promo stuff done, but definitely not where he needs to go for any big runs. He needs an offset printer for that, and there, volume is king. Getting 2000 items printed with offset is only a fraction of the cost more than 1000, since a lot of the cost is creating the plates (which, by the way, you should make sure you get... pay the extra cost for metal plates, and have them in hand when you're done). Also, if you keep it to two or three colors rather than going full-color, you'll save a bundle. Try to lay things out with at least
Mostly, find someone who speaks with confidence about what they do. Someone who makes suggestions about ways to do things (because there's ALWAYS more than one way to do things). Someone who insists on seeing the job before they quote you any price, but after seeing it knows right away what needs doing. Don't rely on them being big or small or anything... just see who has the time and information you need.
I know, it was a joke.
You see, as you couldn't find the article about the IE problem, what I did was humorously imply that MS was using IE to block your access to the information.
Yes, but it was humor that implied that I voluntarily used IE. Which I simply couldn't let lie.
The store can tell you what you're most likely to buy next, and print out coupons for those items.
I dunno about that. The coupons they usually give me are for products that vaguely compete in the same arena as what I buy, but are inferior quality. Like, I'll buy "Healthy Choice" canned soup, and get a coupon for "Chef Boyardee" canned pasta.
Plenty of times I've handed the coupon back to the checker in disgust.
I think until such simple things are realised we can forget such machines ever becoming even the slightest bit intelligent and say use your name to greet you.
I've seen several ATMs greet me by name.
The funniest thing is, I saw this once or twice after I changed my name with the bank, before I got my new card... so I know that they weren't getting my name off of the bank records, but off of the raised plastic letters on the card (or possibly the magnetic stripe, but those usually carry little else than an identification code).
You can turn that off in Mozilla (including Firebird) so that nothing can change the status bar. A Mozilla user who doesn't know about this particular hole would have a false sense of security that everything in the status bar is real.
Until they noticed that the status bar and the location bar don't agree... then this hypothetical status bar zealot would probably believe that the location bar was wrong, I guess?