Don't know about Numeracy - but numerology ruined my life. Fortune cookie told me 05 14 46 52 56 were my lucky numbers. I ran up huge credit card debt expecting to win the lottery with these numbers... then I found out fortune cookie didn't give me the powerball number.
I'd say the ruin came from the fact that you didn't realize that no matter how many times you buy the same numbers for a drawing, your chances of winning don't get better. And I won't bother pointing out that after the first time the numbers were wrong you probably should have realized it wasn't meant to be. Did the cookie REALLY need to spell out the fine print of "If you don't win these numbers on the first try, move on you idiot!"
IIRC there actually is a psychological, medically acknowledged, syndrome that has to do with giving up on prosperous concepts/enterprises. In layman's terms it describes optimism in a more elaborate language, though it also describes gambler's addiction at some point.
Can't remember where I have read about it though..
It could have been the 150 year old book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" which basically cited the many self-induced economic bubbles/busts up to that point in history, and has been a blueprint for every one of them since. What's interesting is how every time the pattern repeats we swear that a) we didn't "really" see it coming with enough foresight to stop it and that b) we are sure as hell never going to let it happen again. Those two complete fallacies are the cornerstone of our tragic existence.
Actually we don't know if it is the solar maximum... The sun is very periodic but it is still a bit unpredictable as to when exactly the periods start and stop. The only way to know is if in 2013 it shows the telltale slowdown of the decline cycle (that is, if we are still here...)
Interesting, this is the same strategy employed by economists. It seems most of them won't recognize an economic bubble when they're in one... but after the "telltale slowdown" is becomes extremely obvious in hind-sight.
It's a bit more complicated but yeah, sure. Some economists did know we were in a bubble, I remember listening to Marketplace over a year before the financial crisis and on a regular basis they had features on the housing bubble (directly calling it a bubble) and prognostication as to how long it would last and what it would look like when it unwinds. The thing about a bubble is, you are not *certainly* in a bubble until it pops, and you don't really know how big of a bubble it was until after you hit the bottom. Any system with fundamentally un-knowable but mildly predictable bounds (like the sun cycle) will work like this; the only people in the end who were "smart enough to see it" were really just the best guessers.
Higher than usual as 2012 is the year of solar maximum.
Actually we don't know if it is the solar maximum... The sun is very periodic but it is still a bit unpredictable as to when exactly the periods start and stop. The only way to know is if in 2013 it shows the telltale slowdown of the decline cycle (that is, if we are still here...)
Every single technology profession I have EVER communicated with, does not think electronic voting machines are a good idea. If EVERYONE is in agreement this is a BAD idea, why the FUCK are we still making these things?
That's just it, we took a vote on that and as it turns out about 190% of respondents said that they were in favor of electronic voting...
If you read the article, they didn't even have to guess really. The default root password for the HTTP admin interface was left intact. They then downloaded the etc/passwd file and cracked it in only 3.5 hours because, surprise surprise, the secondary administrator password was piss poor "cisco123"
Seriously. Who hired these clowns?
It gets even better. The guys attacking it decided to put in a *modicum* of security since there basically was none AT ALL... I can only hope that they actually wanted a really really really soft honeypot for this whole test, and that it wasn't just the E-voting system that they were testing. If it was, god help us all.
We realized that one of the default logins to the terminal server (user: admin, password: admin) would likely be guessed by the attacker in a short period of time, and therefore decided to protect the device from further compromise that might interfere with the voting system test. We used iptables to block the offending IP addresses and changed the admin password to something much more difficult to guess. We later blocked similar attacks from IP addresses in New Jersey, India, and China.
Re:I agree: nothing here in the Wikileaks Stratfor
on
Is Stratfor a "Joke"?
·
· Score: 1
A spy operation would imply that a certain amount of deception (or at least extreme covertness) was used to secure information that is considered proprietary to an organization
No it doesn't. The KGB used to count the cars in the Pentagon car park, the NSA/DIA used to listen for encrypted military radio traffic to gauge readiness levels. Everyone knew they did this, and there was only the most cursory attempts to conceal it.
Intelligence gathering is mostly far more prosaic than people assume. The real covert stuff, like using submarines to attach listening devices to Soviet undersea cables, is only a tiny part of what is going on. Mostly it is gathering a whole bunch of "newspaper clippings" and attempting to create an overall impression of what the enemy is up to (and this is why it was easy to "spice up" the Iraq and WMD intel to support an invasion).
And yes this is incredibly dangerous (as Iraq found out) and almost lead to Nuclear War in the 1980's when the Soviets relied on it to figure out if the US was going to pull a first strike.
Granted there are lots of really simple things that constitute useful intelligence, but was the KGB agent counting cars at the pentagon really wearing a soviet uniform with one of those fur hats, and peering through a pair of commie binoculars? He was no doubt in the US under a false identity, and deceptively "Americanized" so as to not arouse suspicion... This is where i would draw the line for a "spy outfit" especially with regards to the Internet... Unless you are doing something risky, unique, and private, you are really just another data miner.
Re:I agree: nothing here in the Wikileaks Stratfor
on
Is Stratfor a "Joke"?
·
· Score: 1
Wikileaks is exaggerating the importance of Stratfor. It isn't some spy operation, it is just news gathering and analysis.
That's what spy operations are, though.
A spy operation would imply that a certain amount of deception (or at least extreme covertness) was used to secure information that is considered proprietary to an organization (i.e. they don't publish it on the internet or give it to any one who calls and asks). Was either of these things true about Stratfor?
They don't get bonds every year, $2700 per seat (more like $2500, see below) is a pittance when you consider they probably have to account for the entire 4 year (or more) career of secondary students, who really do need decently performing computers if they are going to not only learn how to work with technology, but leverage technology in other areas of learning. And don't forget about the teachers and faculty (unless you think they should have to bring their own computers, too) which probably adds 1,500 or more users to the list. Laptops, advanced labs, network infrastructure, support staff, etc. all add up quick. But no, let's just look at one number and immediately throw away the idea. +5 insightful!!!
Two words, kind sir: George Foreman. Get yourself one of these small, cheap devices. Use it to cook chicken (or a lean meat of choice). It will not taste bad no matter what you do, unless your taste is really for shitty food...
The price of single parenthood or dual-(over)working parenthood is very high indeed (makes you wonder why so many are eager to have kids without any sort of stable 2 parent household).
It used to be considered a bad thing to have children outside of a stable two parent household. But nowadays we are much more enlightened and know that holding such opinions is horribly self-righteous and narrow-minded.
Until we bitch that "a single parent household below x income couldn't possibly provide healthy food for their kids, omg 2much2do!"
Go troll somewhere else, please. Sorry my opinion that kids should have healthy food is narrow minded to you.
He basically stated "I am so important that someone paid me $40 million just to put my name on their company's IPO!" and then was proven completely wrong when his shares were worth about 1/10th that much before he was allowed to sell them. $4 million is still a generous sum, don't get me wrong, but I doubt that he would have been nearly as full of himself back in December if he knew he was only netting less than $4 mil from the deal, and that in fact having his name on the board cost HIM a shitload of money (similar shareholders, people way below him at VA, sold out for certainly way more payout than he ever saw.)
Mysteriously, he did not do many public speaking gigs (paid or otherwise) after that.
It really only takes a double hand-full of networking engineers to deny access to the entire Internet. We're not where we were some moons ago when Saint Postel moved the DNS root servers to his home computers for a while, but we're not too terribly far.
If some engineers got together and decided to take down DNS, well, for most people that would be the end of internet access.
The end, until about 2 or 3 days later when those people who were responsible for taking it "back" were rounded up and (eventually) handed life sentences for a list of federal crimes too long to enumerate with a 32 bit integer. Then, the configs will be restored by the new admins, and life will go on (with the exception that now the politicians "were right" that the self-serving pro-piracy faction is in fact not trustworthy, and that the new laws are really there to protect us all.)
Don't think about taking the internet "Back" until you have somewhere to go with it that isn't down the shitter. Until there is literally a civil war between the two sides (and I doubt there will ever be one) then trying a stunt like that will result in nothing more than a backfire of epic proportions.
6 months later, when his stock was worth a tiny fraction of what it was at IPO time (and who knows how long/how far down he held it past the obligatory 6 months for IPO beneficiaries) we all chuckled and ESR faded into obsolescence.
A multi-vitamin and perhaps some OTHER form of food on a semi-daily basis (someone who tried to eat nothing but frozen meals would, admittedly, either go nuts or die) is a pretty good idea, too; I kind of hoped that went without saying (a foolish assumption, I know.) For this, the good Lord gave us Subway Sandwiches...
You must not have seen the aisle (in some stores two aisles) of frozen, low sodium, low fat, low sugar, high protein meals available (under brand names like healthy choice or lean cuisine) for often a price premium of only 20-25% over the standard fare. If the meals that were just a little bit cheaper, or perhaps just a little bit better tasting (thanks to the salt, fat, and sugar) are picked instead, whose fault is that?
Check out the "produce" section in a lower-income neighborhood's grocery stores. Chances it's pretty small and what food is there is wilty and not appetizing-looking. Now go look at the produce section in an upscale chain like Whole Foods or Central Market; produce kept fresh-looking, wilted stuff quickly taken away, perky looking un-bruised fruits and vegetables.
It's not just a "smarts" thing. If I were looking to buy apples or bananas, and all the apples in the bin were bruised and scrawny looking and the bananas looked like they'd been left to rot, I'd probably skip the produce section too.
You are right, but ask yourself this (this is not baiting, I want an honest answer:) Why is it that low income grocery stores have produce that wilts on the shelf, and otherwise have no incentive to offer a significant quantity? Food procurement, transport, refrigeration, etc. is not any different for those businesses than for places like Wal-Mart or the HUGE variety of regional grocery chains (leave Whole Foods or Central Market out of the discussion) that even (gasp) have locations in or near your local "low income zone" and manage to offer decent quality produce...
Yeah. All for the opportunity cost of one of those parents being at home to cook three square meals a day.
It is very, very important for people to read and understand the significance of this comment.
Many folks from the "middle"-class on up simply don't understand what life is like for single parents, or even or dual parents who must work multiple jobs to pay the bills.
Your tale is as sad as it is true. The price of single parenthood or dual-(over)working parenthood is very high indeed (makes you wonder why so many are eager to have kids without any sort of stable 2 parent household). Aside from that, there is a big difference between "lazy" (perhaps defined by you as how many hours/week are spent performing labor for money) and "non industrious" which is an unwillingness to recognize the difference between something like eating right and exercising, and eating poorly and allowing the body to deteriorate (which has huge external costs.)
The problem is that these really easy choices, like 1500 calories of fast food for $4.99 available at the corner on the way home from work, are just too hard to resist for so many people in that situation. I still have doubts that for all but a few people in that situation, that they really said "i literally have no time at all in my week to procure or prepare good food for me or my family" and did not instead say "wow how easy was that, i just got dinner taken care of in 5 minutes and it was cheap, too. now i can go home and enjoy some [insert xyz distraction] with my family."
Food (of all varieties) is SO very abundant in the US that excuses like "it was too hard to find, too expensive, or too time consuming" are really quite pathetic. "It was too easy to choose the (probably unhealthy) alternative" is something I will believe without a doubt.
OMG this is "informative" insofar as it informs the rest of us how sad life is for so many Americans... Cooking enough vegetables and whole grains for a small family is NOT out of reach to all but perhaps a very very small (and unfortunate) subset of our society. I admit, calories are generally cheaper to buy when they are of poorer quality (i.e. a 1000 calorie take-out pizza is probably cheaper than 1000 calories worth of long grain rice) but to say that you can't just get by on 500 calories of long grain rice instead (your body will thank you for feeling a little less "full") is complete garbage.
You are right that diet and exercise are key to living a full/fulfilling life, and in many cases are linked closely to personal success, but the real divide is not (and I don't think will ever be) the haves vs the have-nots, it is between the wills and the will-nots.
The climber has to have food, toilets, sleeping facilities if you are going to take a week to get to GSO, so it's going to have to be more like a mini-hotel (or at least a mini-space station) than an elevator car. As it happens, the Japanese have some experience with mini-hotels.
The "Station" isn't at GSO though, it's about 8,000 km short. Not that your conclusion is incorrect, but using the term GSO is wrong.
Simple solution: Don't give them any to take home. Make them come over to the clinic for their daily dose. Or use some simple syringe device with a counter built into it with replaceable needles that they can take home, but eventually have to return to the clinic. You don't finish the course in a country like France, you get fined a couple grand. In a place where fines wouldn't work, just don't give them the next course of drugs when they get sick again. Should remedy the situation rather quickly.
Stupid and irresponsible people make the world difficult to live in. Please stop with your irrational behavior.
Haaahohahahahaehehehahaha...
Let's see, in your world patients who didn't diligently follow the course (which is very important, don't get me wrong) will either end up poor and in need of government assistance (a large number of people *in the developed world* can't come up with more than $1000 USD or equiv on short notice) or they will be banned from antibiotics the next time, thus ensuring they will pass the disease to MANY MANY more people until it runs its course, and should it get worse they will be admitted to a hospital where the cost of the "cure" is now probably 100,000x what the pills were...
But never mind unintended consequences, let's go with your plan. Punishment sure will fix stupid.
There was no significant difference in symptoms between patients
Taking amoxicillin to those who took the placebo
Three days after starting the pills were administered.
It is obvious that this study was done on sinus infection patients who brought amoxicillin to people who were already on placebo for three days.
Each group started on their pills and they checked for effect 3 days later.
He is asking why the **** the sentence ends with the words "were administered". They are either superfluous ("taking pills" is synonymous with "administered medication" or was there supposed to be some additional meaning (such as, a specific test administered after 3 days.)
Yes, but the quoted figure for the the labels is $8 million out of $45 million. That's $37 million that went to "Other than labels" A lot more than the $8 million iTunes takes is left out of their pockets. They don't even take a majority of the money.
You're right, I can't believe they bothered paying the artist (for performing/writing) or the other songwriters, musicians, or anyone else involved with the work and creativity of making an album, publicizing it, and getting it into the hands of consumers...
In September [of 2010], California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) released a report that which states that since 2002 the state's largest health insurers rejected more than one in five medical claims. Data from the last half of 2009 shows the rejection rate has jumped to more than one in four (26 percent), with PacificCare leading the way, rejecting 41.7 percent of claims, according to the CNA/NNOC report.
An insurance company denying 41% of claims never really intended to deliver the coverage you're buying.
You missed the part where I exempted Health "Insurance" from the argument; there was never a deeper perversion of a word than trying to label as "insurance" what companies like Anthem, BCBS, UHC, etc provide. The packaging, sale, and delivery process for that product is so beyond fucked up that there isn't even any way to compare the two.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know about Numeracy - but numerology ruined my life. Fortune cookie told me 05 14 46 52 56 were my lucky numbers. I ran up huge credit card debt expecting to win the lottery with these numbers... then I found out fortune cookie didn't give me the powerball number.
I'd say the ruin came from the fact that you didn't realize that no matter how many times you buy the same numbers for a drawing, your chances of winning don't get better. And I won't bother pointing out that after the first time the numbers were wrong you probably should have realized it wasn't meant to be. Did the cookie REALLY need to spell out the fine print of "If you don't win these numbers on the first try, move on you idiot!"
IIRC there actually is a psychological, medically acknowledged, syndrome that has to do
with giving up on prosperous concepts/enterprises. In layman's terms it describes optimism
in a more elaborate language, though it also describes gambler's addiction at some point.
Can't remember where I have read about it though..
It could have been the 150 year old book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" which basically cited the many self-induced economic bubbles/busts up to that point in history, and has been a blueprint for every one of them since. What's interesting is how every time the pattern repeats we swear that a) we didn't "really" see it coming with enough foresight to stop it and that b) we are sure as hell never going to let it happen again. Those two complete fallacies are the cornerstone of our tragic existence.
Actually we don't know if it is the solar maximum... The sun is very periodic but it is still a bit unpredictable as to when exactly the periods start and stop. The only way to know is if in 2013 it shows the telltale slowdown of the decline cycle (that is, if we are still here...)
Interesting, this is the same strategy employed by economists. It seems most of them won't recognize an economic bubble when they're in one... but after the "telltale slowdown" is becomes extremely obvious in hind-sight.
It's a bit more complicated but yeah, sure. Some economists did know we were in a bubble, I remember listening to Marketplace over a year before the financial crisis and on a regular basis they had features on the housing bubble (directly calling it a bubble) and prognostication as to how long it would last and what it would look like when it unwinds. The thing about a bubble is, you are not *certainly* in a bubble until it pops, and you don't really know how big of a bubble it was until after you hit the bottom. Any system with fundamentally un-knowable but mildly predictable bounds (like the sun cycle) will work like this; the only people in the end who were "smart enough to see it" were really just the best guessers.
Higher than usual as 2012 is the year of solar maximum.
Actually we don't know if it is the solar maximum... The sun is very periodic but it is still a bit unpredictable as to when exactly the periods start and stop. The only way to know is if in 2013 it shows the telltale slowdown of the decline cycle (that is, if we are still here...)
Every single technology profession I have EVER communicated with, does not think electronic voting machines are a good idea. If EVERYONE is in agreement this is a BAD idea, why the FUCK are we still making these things?
That's just it, we took a vote on that and as it turns out about 190% of respondents said that they were in favor of electronic voting...
If you read the article, they didn't even have to guess really. The default root password for the HTTP admin interface was left intact. They then downloaded the etc/passwd file and cracked it in only 3.5 hours because, surprise surprise, the secondary administrator password was piss poor "cisco123"
Seriously. Who hired these clowns?
It gets even better. The guys attacking it decided to put in a *modicum* of security since there basically was none AT ALL... I can only hope that they actually wanted a really really really soft honeypot for this whole test, and that it wasn't just the E-voting system that they were testing. If it was, god help us all.
We realized that one of
the default logins to the terminal server (user: admin, password: admin) would
likely be guessed by the attacker in a short period of time, and therefore decided
to protect the device from further compromise that might interfere with the
voting system test. We used iptables to block the offending IP addresses and
changed the admin password to something much more difficult to guess. We later
blocked similar attacks from IP addresses in New Jersey, India, and China.
A spy operation would imply that a certain amount of deception (or at least extreme covertness) was used to secure information that is considered proprietary to an organization
No it doesn't. The KGB used to count the cars in the Pentagon car park, the NSA/DIA used to listen for encrypted military radio traffic to gauge readiness levels. Everyone knew they did this, and there was only the most cursory attempts to conceal it.
Intelligence gathering is mostly far more prosaic than people assume. The real covert stuff, like using submarines to attach listening devices to Soviet undersea cables, is only a tiny part of what is going on. Mostly it is gathering a whole bunch of "newspaper clippings" and attempting to create an overall impression of what the enemy is up to (and this is why it was easy to "spice up" the Iraq and WMD intel to support an invasion).
And yes this is incredibly dangerous (as Iraq found out) and almost lead to Nuclear War in the 1980's when the Soviets relied on it to figure out if the US was going to pull a first strike.
Granted there are lots of really simple things that constitute useful intelligence, but was the KGB agent counting cars at the pentagon really wearing a soviet uniform with one of those fur hats, and peering through a pair of commie binoculars? He was no doubt in the US under a false identity, and deceptively "Americanized" so as to not arouse suspicion... This is where i would draw the line for a "spy outfit" especially with regards to the Internet... Unless you are doing something risky, unique, and private, you are really just another data miner.
That's what spy operations are, though.
A spy operation would imply that a certain amount of deception (or at least extreme covertness) was used to secure information that is considered proprietary to an organization (i.e. they don't publish it on the internet or give it to any one who calls and asks). Was either of these things true about Stratfor?
They don't get bonds every year, $2700 per seat (more like $2500, see below) is a pittance when you consider they probably have to account for the entire 4 year (or more) career of secondary students, who really do need decently performing computers if they are going to not only learn how to work with technology, but leverage technology in other areas of learning. And don't forget about the teachers and faculty (unless you think they should have to bring their own computers, too) which probably adds 1,500 or more users to the list. Laptops, advanced labs, network infrastructure, support staff, etc. all add up quick. But no, let's just look at one number and immediately throw away the idea. +5 insightful!!!
Two words, kind sir: George Foreman. Get yourself one of these small, cheap devices. Use it to cook chicken (or a lean meat of choice). It will not taste bad no matter what you do, unless your taste is really for shitty food...
It used to be considered a bad thing to have children outside of a stable two parent household. But nowadays we are much more enlightened and know that holding such opinions is horribly self-righteous and narrow-minded.
Until we bitch that "a single parent household below x income couldn't possibly provide healthy food for their kids, omg 2much2do!"
Go troll somewhere else, please. Sorry my opinion that kids should have healthy food is narrow minded to you.
You are an AC so I wont bother with a long reply:
He basically stated "I am so important that someone paid me $40 million just to put my name on their company's IPO!" and then was proven completely wrong when his shares were worth about 1/10th that much before he was allowed to sell them. $4 million is still a generous sum, don't get me wrong, but I doubt that he would have been nearly as full of himself back in December if he knew he was only netting less than $4 mil from the deal, and that in fact having his name on the board cost HIM a shitload of money (similar shareholders, people way below him at VA, sold out for certainly way more payout than he ever saw.)
Mysteriously, he did not do many public speaking gigs (paid or otherwise) after that.
It really only takes a double hand-full of networking engineers to deny access to the entire Internet. We're not where we were some moons ago when Saint Postel moved the DNS root servers to his home computers for a while, but we're not too terribly far.
If some engineers got together and decided to take down DNS, well, for most people that would be the end of internet access.
The end, until about 2 or 3 days later when those people who were responsible for taking it "back" were rounded up and (eventually) handed life sentences for a list of federal crimes too long to enumerate with a 32 bit integer. Then, the configs will be restored by the new admins, and life will go on (with the exception that now the politicians "were right" that the self-serving pro-piracy faction is in fact not trustworthy, and that the new laws are really there to protect us all.)
Don't think about taking the internet "Back" until you have somewhere to go with it that isn't down the shitter. Until there is literally a civil war between the two sides (and I doubt there will ever be one) then trying a stunt like that will result in nothing more than a backfire of epic proportions.
Yeah, but then he wrote one of the stupidest, most self-aggrandizing things ever to grace slashdot: http://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-on-surprised-by-wealth
6 months later, when his stock was worth a tiny fraction of what it was at IPO time (and who knows how long/how far down he held it past the obligatory 6 months for IPO beneficiaries) we all chuckled and ESR faded into obsolescence.
A multi-vitamin and perhaps some OTHER form of food on a semi-daily basis (someone who tried to eat nothing but frozen meals would, admittedly, either go nuts or die) is a pretty good idea, too; I kind of hoped that went without saying (a foolish assumption, I know.) For this, the good Lord gave us Subway Sandwiches...
You must not have seen the aisle (in some stores two aisles) of frozen, low sodium, low fat, low sugar, high protein meals available (under brand names like healthy choice or lean cuisine) for often a price premium of only 20-25% over the standard fare. If the meals that were just a little bit cheaper, or perhaps just a little bit better tasting (thanks to the salt, fat, and sugar) are picked instead, whose fault is that?
Go further than that.
Check out the "produce" section in a lower-income neighborhood's grocery stores. Chances it's pretty small and what food is there is wilty and not appetizing-looking. Now go look at the produce section in an upscale chain like Whole Foods or Central Market; produce kept fresh-looking, wilted stuff quickly taken away, perky looking un-bruised fruits and vegetables.
It's not just a "smarts" thing. If I were looking to buy apples or bananas, and all the apples in the bin were bruised and scrawny looking and the bananas looked like they'd been left to rot, I'd probably skip the produce section too.
You are right, but ask yourself this (this is not baiting, I want an honest answer:) Why is it that low income grocery stores have produce that wilts on the shelf, and otherwise have no incentive to offer a significant quantity? Food procurement, transport, refrigeration, etc. is not any different for those businesses than for places like Wal-Mart or the HUGE variety of regional grocery chains (leave Whole Foods or Central Market out of the discussion) that even (gasp) have locations in or near your local "low income zone" and manage to offer decent quality produce...
Yeah. All for the opportunity cost of one of those parents being at home to cook three square meals a day.
It is very, very important for people to read and understand the significance of this comment.
Many folks from the "middle"-class on up simply don't understand what life is like for single parents, or even or dual parents who must work multiple jobs to pay the bills.
Your tale is as sad as it is true. The price of single parenthood or dual-(over)working parenthood is very high indeed (makes you wonder why so many are eager to have kids without any sort of stable 2 parent household). Aside from that, there is a big difference between "lazy" (perhaps defined by you as how many hours/week are spent performing labor for money) and "non industrious" which is an unwillingness to recognize the difference between something like eating right and exercising, and eating poorly and allowing the body to deteriorate (which has huge external costs.)
The problem is that these really easy choices, like 1500 calories of fast food for $4.99 available at the corner on the way home from work, are just too hard to resist for so many people in that situation. I still have doubts that for all but a few people in that situation, that they really said "i literally have no time at all in my week to procure or prepare good food for me or my family" and did not instead say "wow how easy was that, i just got dinner taken care of in 5 minutes and it was cheap, too. now i can go home and enjoy some [insert xyz distraction] with my family."
Food (of all varieties) is SO very abundant in the US that excuses like "it was too hard to find, too expensive, or too time consuming" are really quite pathetic. "It was too easy to choose the (probably unhealthy) alternative" is something I will believe without a doubt.
OMG this is "informative" insofar as it informs the rest of us how sad life is for so many Americans... Cooking enough vegetables and whole grains for a small family is NOT out of reach to all but perhaps a very very small (and unfortunate) subset of our society. I admit, calories are generally cheaper to buy when they are of poorer quality (i.e. a 1000 calorie take-out pizza is probably cheaper than 1000 calories worth of long grain rice) but to say that you can't just get by on 500 calories of long grain rice instead (your body will thank you for feeling a little less "full") is complete garbage.
You are right that diet and exercise are key to living a full/fulfilling life, and in many cases are linked closely to personal success, but the real divide is not (and I don't think will ever be) the haves vs the have-nots, it is between the wills and the will-nots.
The climber has to have food, toilets, sleeping facilities if you are going to take a week to get to GSO, so it's going to have to be more like a mini-hotel (or at least a mini-space station) than an elevator car. As it happens, the Japanese have some experience with mini-hotels.
The "Station" isn't at GSO though, it's about 8,000 km short. Not that your conclusion is incorrect, but using the term GSO is wrong.
Simple solution: Don't give them any to take home. Make them come over to the clinic for their daily dose. Or use some simple syringe device with a counter built into it with replaceable needles that they can take home, but eventually have to return to the clinic. You don't finish the course in a country like France, you get fined a couple grand. In a place where fines wouldn't work, just don't give them the next course of drugs when they get sick again. Should remedy the situation rather quickly.
Stupid and irresponsible people make the world difficult to live in. Please stop with your irrational behavior.
Haaahohahahahaehehehahaha...
Let's see, in your world patients who didn't diligently follow the course (which is very important, don't get me wrong) will either end up poor and in need of government assistance (a large number of people *in the developed world* can't come up with more than $1000 USD or equiv on short notice) or they will be banned from antibiotics the next time, thus ensuring they will pass the disease to MANY MANY more people until it runs its course, and should it get worse they will be admitted to a hospital where the cost of the "cure" is now probably 100,000x what the pills were...
But never mind unintended consequences, let's go with your plan. Punishment sure will fix stupid.
Here's another perfectly valid "parse":
There was no significant difference in symptoms between patients
Taking amoxicillin to those who took the placebo
Three days after starting the pills were administered.
It is obvious that this study was done on sinus infection patients who brought amoxicillin to people who were already on placebo for three days.
Each group started on their pills and they checked for effect 3 days later.
He is asking why the **** the sentence ends with the words "were administered". They are either superfluous ("taking pills" is synonymous with "administered medication" or was there supposed to be some additional meaning (such as, a specific test administered after 3 days.)
Yes, but the quoted figure for the the labels is $8 million out of $45 million. That's $37 million that went to "Other than labels" A lot more than the $8 million iTunes takes is left out of their pockets. They don't even take a majority of the money.
You're right, I can't believe they bothered paying the artist (for performing/writing) or the other songwriters, musicians, or anyone else involved with the work and creativity of making an album, publicizing it, and getting it into the hands of consumers...
There isn't an insurance company in the world that operates solely by taking in money and never paying it out in the form of claims.
There's a difference between the GP's claim of "never intend to deliver" and "never paying it out"
Insurance companies have been sued and investigated and settled multiple times in multiple states over denying claims.
This happens to be the first article I found: http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/02/26/california-investigating-7-health-insurers-for-denying-claims-hiking-rates/
In September [of 2010], California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) released a report that which states that since 2002 the state's largest health insurers rejected more than one in five medical claims. Data from the last half of 2009 shows the rejection rate has jumped to more than one in four (26 percent), with PacificCare leading the way, rejecting 41.7 percent of claims, according to the CNA/NNOC report.
An insurance company denying 41% of claims never really intended to deliver the coverage you're buying.
You missed the part where I exempted Health "Insurance" from the argument; there was never a deeper perversion of a word than trying to label as "insurance" what companies like Anthem, BCBS, UHC, etc provide. The packaging, sale, and delivery process for that product is so beyond fucked up that there isn't even any way to compare the two.