The fact that he himself still has anything to do with determining the flow and popularity of new films. Seriously, the man is artistic poison. I used to like his reviews until I realized he gives 4 out of 5 big-budget films an automatic pass; it takes something as awful as the Transformers sequels to drag an F rating out of him. Roger Ebert reviews are the film equivalent of payola, I'm almost certain of it. I'm not saying he needs to be a pretentious, judgmental ass, but seriously: can he even remember back to the time when he had standards?
And that whole vintage review thing? I get that it's cute when video game magazines or music rags do it, but they make it a weird little back page bit - often with some self-mockery thrown in there. I continue seeing dead serious reviews of things like Gone With The Wind when I look up his work. News flash, Bob: even you, old and outdated as you are, were still egg #37 back up in your mom's ovaries when Gone with The Wind came out. Yes, the Wizard of Oz, too. Quit spewing your bullshit about old movies; we don't care.
And speaking of video games, I'm sure you've all read plenty about his pretentious screed(s) that video games are not, and can never be, an art form. If the jackass was born 40 years earlier I'm sure he'd have said the same thing about film. He looks at passing media coverage of crap like Saints Row, chooses to consider that the apex of the art form, and concludes it will never be Art at all. Never mind that Saints Row, Streets of Rage, or Halo are our equivalent to Chris Tucker movies: no one ever said those were high art, they're just mindless fun.
Anyway, I should probably stop validating him with so much attention. He's a self-involved tool with no sense of perspective or irony whatsoever, he can't critique his way out a paper bag these days, and hopefully he'll retire soon.
The salary is for a "Graduate Assistant to Stephen Hawking".
Most Graduate Assistants don't make 38k...
Not to mention graduate assistants generally put up with anything and everything that will get them better connections and research experience, typically with little regard to pay, and Stephen Hawking is a big frickin connection. I'm sure there are dozens of graduate students who would pay him to get that job, even take on loans to do it. Hell, I'd do that for this job and I don't give a rats ass about engineering or physics.
I finally get to join the club! The elite and ever whiny "I read this on an obscure technology/politics blog two months ago and slashdot is just posting it now?" club.
But seriously, this made serious rounds pretty quickly in medical and sociological circles, and even I read it more than a month ago. I'm actually astonished such an active submitter as Pickens didn't get it through till now. It's pretty much talked to death everywhere else (pardon the unintentional pun), and it's not exactly an old conversation to begin with. Most doctors feel pretty similarly to Dr. Murray; they've been saying these things to each other for years as far as I know. They're not all brave enough to respect a patient's verbal requests over family and staff objections (although even here Murray says he had copious, accurate notes of his correspondence with the patient), but Murray's blog hardly describes anything new or emergent.
It is a supreme falsehood that a government's responsibilities and resources must grow. Bureaucracies like the FDA may be immune to democracy, but the politicians who seek to grow them are not.
So therefore any and all attempts at increasing government spending represent greedy politicians squeezing more cash out of the populace?
Even the most hardcore libertarians I know believe the government has taxation authority for transportation infrastructure, weights & measures enforcement, and a military - including growing those things when needed. But not you, you saw through even those bullshit arguments! Guess the next time I-90 buckles or a new town with 2 million people thinks that *maybe* it's time they got a freeway we'll have to point out that: "No! Lee Greatrex opened our eyes and we know that government spending shalt never grow!".
Wake up and smell the rotting pig entrails, pal. The FDA has been underfunded and under-mandated since the 70's. If I recall, they don't even get inflation adjustments under some congresses. Increasing their budget by 33% is still not even 1/10th of the budget and none of the authority that epidemiologists, food safety advocates, and drug company whistle-blowers think they need.
Following your google search, I read the first three articles referencing food-related shutdowns. Every one, even the ones entitled "FDA shuts down" or claiming that the FDA "ordered" someone to stop production, ultimately acknowledged that the company "agreed" to cease production and signed a "consent decree" with the FDA.
So it's still exactly as I read in Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan books: the FDA finds violations and they have to whine, beg, and invoke publicity campaigns to get dirty producers to shut down or improve conditions. They still can't force anyone to do anything most of the time.
So anyway, thanks for playing, and judging by your second paragraph it's time for your thorazine, so please follow the nice nurse to your bedroom and she'll give you a nice gentle prick in the ass. Right where your opinions and your research come from.
Other than the summary - is there any reference that this promotes 'bacteria capable of infecting people who eat meat'? Or does it promote bacteria with resistance to the antibiotics in use that can affect everyone?
It's the second, of course: meat-eaters aren't a unique class of person vulnerable to completely different pathogenic illnesses than those who don't eat meat.
On the other hand, animals and animal products are an excellent way of acquiring any pathogenic illness that isn't transmitted by sex or air, and they're still the number one source of novel diseases. Anthropologists have pretty well established that major plagues usually jumped directly from animals, often livestock, into humans. They didn't call it swine flu for the nasty imagery.
The powerful connection between animal products in the food supply and infectious disease must be what they're really getting at - and the reason they don't want to risk making animal-borne bacteria any stronger.
This summary might be the most misleading I've ever seen on slashdot.
For one thing, the FDA has almost no authority in many of their jurisdictions; they can recommend things, but in most cases have no power to change policy or punish reckless companies. This is especially true with meat and produce. Do some googling about dirty slaughterhouses and meat packing plants and you'll find accounts of the FDA actually pleading with meat packers and state health districts to stop distributing meat from plants that had floors, walls, and packing equipment test positive for wide varieties of serious food-borne pathogens. The same goes for packing plants that had open holes in the walls and ceilings, or rodents literally scurrying underfoot on the packing line. The FDA had absolutely no authority to mandate closure of those plants, and still doesn't as far as I know.
They shouldn't have withdrawn their recommendation against antibiotics in feed (saying the right thing is never wrong in science), but that recommendation never affected policy in the first place; it's total bullshit to imply, quite strongly, that the FDA just doesn't care anymore and thinks it's totally fine for meat producers to inspect themselves.
They don't think it's fine; they fucking hate it. At least the scientists do, and the field inspectors do. The FDA does have a lot of senior management who, by many internal accounts, dedicate themselves solely to rubber-stamping industry proposals - and harassing any pissant scientist who objects. If this new policy is half as blase or half as scientifically ignorant as the linked article implies, and indeed came about to dodge a lawsuit, you can bet it came from some ass-covering prick at the top who doesn't represent the viewpoints of even 10% of the FDA staff.
So ultimately, the FDA doesn't have the mandate, the funding, or the legal prerogative to do even one-tenth as much as the scientists and lower-management would like - and which organizations like the NRDC expect them to do. The politically appointed senior management pull bullshit like this, and people like the NRDC and the submitter use corruption at the highest levels to denigrate a lot of dedicated, well-meaning scientists by calling the whole organization a bunch of lazy sociopaths.
If you want safe food and better drug testing then don't piss on the FDA: you should bitch at Congress about the fucking pro-corporate morons they appoint to lead the FDA, and about the shitty laws and budgets that leave the FDA with not even half the money and authority they need to do the job we expect of them.
Also your whining is part of the "I don't wanna listen because no one here is expert and I don't wanna hear that we have screwed up everything" crowd.
Criticizing pseudo-scientific babble doesn't amount to saying "I don't wanna listen because no one here is expert". I'll talk to an educated layman or an inquisitive ignoramus all day long. What I don't like is politically motivated fools with no training in any type of science babbling on about global ecology.
I'm also rather tired, as an evolutionary biologist with some training in ecology and climate, of hearing slashdoters with CS and physics degrees spout off about climate change, drug resistance, ecosystems, etc. when a solid 8 of 10 responses on those topics are so fundamentally wrong that any competent AP Bio student could correct them.
There's nothing pretentious or avoidant about saying it's a waste of time to carry on discussions I know for a fact will promote politics and wrong-headed intuitions over science. When someone so firmly believes a wrong opinion as to bother posting it, and 4 other people mod up their ignorant drivel, and not a single person mods it down...and this happens over and over and over...why shouldn't I point out that it's clearly a waste of time?
As for your contention that I simply "don't wanna hear that we have screwed everything up" accusation, I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion but I believe quite firmly in the dangers of anthropogenic global warming, and I have no problem facing that or any other problem of our species head-on. My criticism of this topic and this posting refers to the virulent climate change deniers I see on slashdot, people who are especially dangerous because they often have enough training in some sort of science and enough practice in informal debate to make some serious bullshit sound reasonable. So your second criticism is in fact precisely opposite the truth.
This has nothing to do with me being told I'm wrong; I've never posted in one these threads before. I've never put forth any opinion, that I can recall, on this topic. I'm simply tired - as someone with university training and research experience in evolution and ecology - of seeing global warming, drug resistance, etc. completely and inexcusably mangled by slashdotters showing off their distant memories of high school biology.
Nice try, though, dismissing my entire multifaceted objection as pure, simple stubbornness. Way to oversimplify.
Why even bother posting this? It will just dissolve into a global warming debate within seconds, and slashdotters are by far the stupidest people I've ever conversed with on the topic of climate change and global warming. Normally slashdot opinions are above average on a given topic, but with global warming they're well below average: it's all fuzzy, intuited 'science' from physicists and programmers with zero understanding of ecology, copious libertarian babble, and wanton libertarian bashing.
It's just going to be a giant flamewar, and the average reader will truly be stupider for having read it.
How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first.
Never gonna happen. There are too many politically conservative idiots, like my mom, who believe attempts at converting to metric represent a "socialist" conspiracy, and almost literally scream at any attempt to remove Imperial units in favor of metric.
Socialist? The fucking metric system? Seriously?
The government already tried to phase in metric sometime in the 1970s, if I recall, emphasizing it in schools and installing additional signage on highways with metric speeds and distances. People responded to this with caterwauling and by shooting the road signs into tatters. Dave Barry summed up the final results the best:
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
Here's the problem: I'd bet money that at least 1/2 of those *are* spam. Vindictive pricks who bomb the shit out of product review scores are becoming more common. They'll negatively review products they've never seen from companies or people they've never spoken to because of the author/companies political views, PR gaffs, a nerd-o-sphere uproar like this, etc. They'll organize campaigns to bomb the reviews of every single book from an author or every product from an entire corporation for purely political or vengeful reasons. We've discussed this problem on slashdot many times before.
These self-righteous bastards view it as some kind of justice, when in fact they're just polluting the review ecosystem with lies, hearsay, and crappy manifestos. If the product or company is that bad it will become clear, from the legitimate reviews, quite quickly. No need to break out your weird brand of street justice and fuck up the system for everyone.
This time the people at Ocean Marketing are arrogant, mismanaging pricks; most of the time you can't be so certain when you see this kind of event unfolding.
Honestly, when I was reading the Penny-Arcade post I started wondering whether this was really just a vengeful ex-employee, or even corporate espionage from another vendor. It wasn't until I read multiple older reviews and forum posts corroborating this story that I became convinced otherwise.
Beware internet justice: you never really know who's behind the keyboard or just what kind of destructive, ignorant campaign they're running.
Now we'll get to listen to conservative bitching about overregulation and how without so many damn environmental laws that recycling could happen here. Then the liberals will answer that corporations would never pay a living wage, or even minimum wage, to do that here when it can be done by miserable overworked hut dwellers in China - environmental laws or not.
They're both probably right, and both answers make me equally depressed. Exporting work and materials that American liberals won't allow here because of well-meaning but often moronic regulations, but which American conservatives probably wouldn't do here anyway because they're cheap fucks.
Surely in this case "the Jerusalem for Christmas tree light recycling" would be more fitting?
No, Mecca is the better word - there's a reason we use it. We say something is the 'mecca' for an activity or industry because of the Hajj. Almost two million foreigners a year visiting one city for one specific ritual makes a pretty good metaphor for colossal, single-minded undertakings - the kind of single-mindedness you see in one town recycling billions of pounds of electrical waste, for example.
Evoking Jerusalem would be a confusing and less accurate metaphor for the sake of being cute.
I can't believe the number of comments here about doctors being assholes, overpaid, incompetent, etc. You ungrateful, ignorant people need to wake up and realize that doctors are just as miserable under this system as the rest of you.
First, doctors hate the most expensive parts of medicine even more than you do; they'd be ecstatic to see that business go away. Patients incur as much as half of their lifetime medical costs in the last six months or year of their life. Doctors who know it's simply time for someone to die are forced to keep them alive for a few last weeks or months by whining families who can't accept death and by stupid laws that require extreme intervention to the very end. Many people won't sign DNR orders until they've already hung on far too long, if ever; the families rarely sign them for someone too far gone to sign themselves. It's gotten so bad there's even a phenomenon called the Silent Code, when the physician running an emergency resuscitation tacitly lets a terminal and hopeless patient slip away; they walk the line between honoring laws / families' wishes and the Hippocratic duty to do no harm by not prolonging suffering. Most doctors wish that palliative care and letting people go at their time could be official; a significant minority favor outright assisted suicide. Those brave enough to take some action now do things like silent codes. How does risking your license and reducing your billable hours by letting a patient die display the kind of greedy, insensitive behavior you people seem to think almost all doctors display?
And as for the money, doctors as a whole are not overpaid; doctors may average almost $200,000 a year, and the existence of specialist surgeons who make $700,000 a year makes it easy to assume they're all overpaid, but a complete statistical look at doctor's salaries - one that includes median, mode, and spread indicators- will tell you that the typical salary is pretty fair for a field that involves a minimum of 11 years higher education (often stretching past 15), $150,000+ in educational debt, and usually takes a lot more than 40 hours a week.
So some doctors are overpaid, and some doctors are callous. Show me a profession with neither of those problems. The majority of doctors are paid no more than a fair wage (or even not enough), care deeply about their patients, hate the waste and legal bullshit of medicine much more than you do, and are really tired of taking shit from people who think they like the system this way or got into medicine for the money.
The longer you assholes complain about doctors being stupid or only caring about money, the more stupid pricks who only care about the money will be the only ones willing to go to medical school. That's already starting, in my opinion. Enjoy reaping what you've sown.
Can we please stop this shit? Blaming doctors doesn't help you, and they are generally not overpaid. For the length and stress of their training, the debt they incur, and the difficult lifestyle many specialties must endure permanently, most doctors are actually underpaid - in overall salary, in compensation per hour, or both.
I know primary care physicians who've been forced quit the business after 30 years and had to go work somewhere else. How does a doctor who can't afford to be a doctor, and doesn't have enough savings to retire after 30 years, fit with your ignorant screed that doctors are overpaid?
I also know surgeons, many of whom do make $300,000 a year, and I've never seen one of them sit still for more than 15 minutes, to watch a movie or lecture, without passing out. They work a minimum of 60 hours a week and constantly get paged for surgery in the middle of the night, whether or not they're actually 'on call'.
So many types of doctor make so little that people are quitting left and right, while med students refuse to even consider the specialty, and many other types work so many hours with such a poor quality of life that their compensation per hour (not to mention per 3 am emergency call) makes engineering and business look like much better careers.
Many doctors are underpaid; many others are overpaid but massively overworked and overstressed. The cross-section of doctors who are both overpaid and live comfortable lifestyles is much, much smaller than you think.
If everyone who gave to charity gave to the one who deserves it the most, then all causes in the world except for the most worthy one would receive no money, until that most worthy cause was completely paid for, in which case the second most worthy cause would receive all the money, etc.
So I'd think a bit before giving to the most worthwhile.
Actually, I think it would be great to massively over-fund the best organizations, and then move on down the line of 'worthiness'.
When I've read about charities it's striking that more than half of charitable organizations never cross $10,000 in donations and/or never get enough money to truly achieve any of their aims. Even successful charities spend so much time stressing out about money; begging for donations, underfunding their projects, struggling to keep their recipients from getting worse as opposed to making their lives entirely better.
I'd love to see the best charities funded straight into full operating endowments, even at the cost of eliminating several other charities for each one that becomes fully funded. We'd get a lot more work done in the long run, with the best doing far more work in a more effective way, and weak or ineffecient charities dying off entirely (and thus ceasing to draw donations away from the best viable charities).
If you even remotely support LGBT rights, please don't donate to these people.
Yes, they actively campaign against gay marriage. Are you saying that negates the worthiness of their charity work? Do you think they spit on gay disaster victims instead of giving them food, or what?
Grow up, and realize that not all worthwhile organizations and benevolent acts must be 100% in line with your beliefs to be worthwhile or benevolent.
Excellent, we got a non-verdict almost 18 years after the events subject to the trial, during which time Microsoft, Apple, and most of the other serial abusers of anti-trust and/or patent law have only maintained or even increased their presence in the market.
in 2009 a woman in Quebec stopped receiving disability payments for major depression after Manulife decided, based on beach vacation photos on Facebook, that she seemed happy enough to work after all.
There's no mention of any further investigation, but this sounds like jumping to conclusions to me.
Well, it depends on what she told the insurance company. Major depression is a massive brain malfunction, the kind where many sufferers can't even get up out of bed for hours or days at a time, and not because they feel so miserable that they don't want to; they actually can't get up. Even major depressives can have good days, but if she told them she had catatonic major depression and never left the house (which would be plausible), and they saw recent photos of a smiling beach vacation, that would be a very serious contradiction to her story and the pathology of her illness.
So denying that claim based on photos is harsh, but possibly tenable.
They've dressed the issue up as something hypothetical, when in fact it already happens. It's just not banks that are doing it
Insurance companies are infamously snoopy and manipulative. They'll look at anything and everything they can possibly get their hands on, legal or not, to analyze your risks. I'd bet serious money that insurers already pry in social networks.
And they've managed acts of regulatory capture that would make even banks and defense contractors blush. Here in North Carolina you're not even allowed to have a driver's license unless you have car insurance. If you don't actually have a car that's tough shit; you can't even drive rentals or borrowed cars.
Anonymous would be a lot more effective if they focused on one thing longer than a week...they've done everything from embarrassment campaigns against child pornographers to hacking secret societies and crime syndicates to various political hacks to that one bizarre incident where they organized a hate mail campaign against a teenager with an anti-profanity site.
They fancy themselves hacktivists but they don't seem to try very hard at sending messages to the public, which I assume is who you'd like to reach if you think the entire government and corporate landscapes are irredeemably corrupt.
Bottom line, I don't get them. I don't think they have to be an absolutely coherent, focused force with an official spokesperson in a tie to be taken seriously, but they usually don't even seem like they're trying to change something; they're just fucking around and punishing people at random.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that he himself still has anything to do with determining the flow and popularity of new films. Seriously, the man is artistic poison. I used to like his reviews until I realized he gives 4 out of 5 big-budget films an automatic pass; it takes something as awful as the Transformers sequels to drag an F rating out of him. Roger Ebert reviews are the film equivalent of payola, I'm almost certain of it. I'm not saying he needs to be a pretentious, judgmental ass, but seriously: can he even remember back to the time when he had standards?
And that whole vintage review thing? I get that it's cute when video game magazines or music rags do it, but they make it a weird little back page bit - often with some self-mockery thrown in there. I continue seeing dead serious reviews of things like Gone With The Wind when I look up his work. News flash, Bob: even you, old and outdated as you are, were still egg #37 back up in your mom's ovaries when Gone with The Wind came out. Yes, the Wizard of Oz, too. Quit spewing your bullshit about old movies; we don't care.
And speaking of video games, I'm sure you've all read plenty about his pretentious screed(s) that video games are not, and can never be, an art form. If the jackass was born 40 years earlier I'm sure he'd have said the same thing about film. He looks at passing media coverage of crap like Saints Row, chooses to consider that the apex of the art form, and concludes it will never be Art at all. Never mind that Saints Row, Streets of Rage, or Halo are our equivalent to Chris Tucker movies: no one ever said those were high art, they're just mindless fun.
Anyway, I should probably stop validating him with so much attention. He's a self-involved tool with no sense of perspective or irony whatsoever, he can't critique his way out a paper bag these days, and hopefully he'll retire soon.
The salary is for a "Graduate Assistant to Stephen Hawking".
Most Graduate Assistants don't make 38k...
Not to mention graduate assistants generally put up with anything and everything that will get them better connections and research experience, typically with little regard to pay, and Stephen Hawking is a big frickin connection. I'm sure there are dozens of graduate students who would pay him to get that job, even take on loans to do it. Hell, I'd do that for this job and I don't give a rats ass about engineering or physics.
I finally get to join the club! The elite and ever whiny "I read this on an obscure technology/politics blog two months ago and slashdot is just posting it now?" club.
But seriously, this made serious rounds pretty quickly in medical and sociological circles, and even I read it more than a month ago. I'm actually astonished such an active submitter as Pickens didn't get it through till now. It's pretty much talked to death everywhere else (pardon the unintentional pun), and it's not exactly an old conversation to begin with. Most doctors feel pretty similarly to Dr. Murray; they've been saying these things to each other for years as far as I know. They're not all brave enough to respect a patient's verbal requests over family and staff objections (although even here Murray says he had copious, accurate notes of his correspondence with the patient), but Murray's blog hardly describes anything new or emergent.
You interested? Has your dick became and horny?
Yes!
But not horny for you. Good god, not for you.
It is a supreme falsehood that a government's responsibilities and resources must grow. Bureaucracies like the FDA may be immune to democracy, but the politicians who seek to grow them are not.
So therefore any and all attempts at increasing government spending represent greedy politicians squeezing more cash out of the populace?
Even the most hardcore libertarians I know believe the government has taxation authority for transportation infrastructure, weights & measures enforcement, and a military - including growing those things when needed. But not you, you saw through even those bullshit arguments! Guess the next time I-90 buckles or a new town with 2 million people thinks that *maybe* it's time they got a freeway we'll have to point out that: "No! Lee Greatrex opened our eyes and we know that government spending shalt never grow!".
Wake up and smell the rotting pig entrails, pal. The FDA has been underfunded and under-mandated since the 70's. If I recall, they don't even get inflation adjustments under some congresses. Increasing their budget by 33% is still not even 1/10th of the budget and none of the authority that epidemiologists, food safety advocates, and drug company whistle-blowers think they need.
Following your google search, I read the first three articles referencing food-related shutdowns. Every one, even the ones entitled "FDA shuts down" or claiming that the FDA "ordered" someone to stop production, ultimately acknowledged that the company "agreed" to cease production and signed a "consent decree" with the FDA.
So it's still exactly as I read in Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan books: the FDA finds violations and they have to whine, beg, and invoke publicity campaigns to get dirty producers to shut down or improve conditions. They still can't force anyone to do anything most of the time.
So anyway, thanks for playing, and judging by your second paragraph it's time for your thorazine, so please follow the nice nurse to your bedroom and she'll give you a nice gentle prick in the ass. Right where your opinions and your research come from.
Other than the summary - is there any reference that this promotes 'bacteria capable of infecting people who eat meat'? Or does it promote bacteria with resistance to the antibiotics in use that can affect everyone?
It's the second, of course: meat-eaters aren't a unique class of person vulnerable to completely different pathogenic illnesses than those who don't eat meat.
On the other hand, animals and animal products are an excellent way of acquiring any pathogenic illness that isn't transmitted by sex or air, and they're still the number one source of novel diseases. Anthropologists have pretty well established that major plagues usually jumped directly from animals, often livestock, into humans. They didn't call it swine flu for the nasty imagery.
The powerful connection between animal products in the food supply and infectious disease must be what they're really getting at - and the reason they don't want to risk making animal-borne bacteria any stronger.
This summary might be the most misleading I've ever seen on slashdot.
For one thing, the FDA has almost no authority in many of their jurisdictions; they can recommend things, but in most cases have no power to change policy or punish reckless companies. This is especially true with meat and produce. Do some googling about dirty slaughterhouses and meat packing plants and you'll find accounts of the FDA actually pleading with meat packers and state health districts to stop distributing meat from plants that had floors, walls, and packing equipment test positive for wide varieties of serious food-borne pathogens. The same goes for packing plants that had open holes in the walls and ceilings, or rodents literally scurrying underfoot on the packing line. The FDA had absolutely no authority to mandate closure of those plants, and still doesn't as far as I know.
They shouldn't have withdrawn their recommendation against antibiotics in feed (saying the right thing is never wrong in science), but that recommendation never affected policy in the first place; it's total bullshit to imply, quite strongly, that the FDA just doesn't care anymore and thinks it's totally fine for meat producers to inspect themselves.
They don't think it's fine; they fucking hate it. At least the scientists do, and the field inspectors do. The FDA does have a lot of senior management who, by many internal accounts, dedicate themselves solely to rubber-stamping industry proposals - and harassing any pissant scientist who objects. If this new policy is half as blase or half as scientifically ignorant as the linked article implies, and indeed came about to dodge a lawsuit, you can bet it came from some ass-covering prick at the top who doesn't represent the viewpoints of even 10% of the FDA staff.
So ultimately, the FDA doesn't have the mandate, the funding, or the legal prerogative to do even one-tenth as much as the scientists and lower-management would like - and which organizations like the NRDC expect them to do. The politically appointed senior management pull bullshit like this, and people like the NRDC and the submitter use corruption at the highest levels to denigrate a lot of dedicated, well-meaning scientists by calling the whole organization a bunch of lazy sociopaths.
If you want safe food and better drug testing then don't piss on the FDA: you should bitch at Congress about the fucking pro-corporate morons they appoint to lead the FDA, and about the shitty laws and budgets that leave the FDA with not even half the money and authority they need to do the job we expect of them.
Also your whining is part of the "I don't wanna listen because no one here is expert and I don't wanna hear that we have screwed up everything" crowd.
Criticizing pseudo-scientific babble doesn't amount to saying "I don't wanna listen because no one here is expert". I'll talk to an educated layman or an inquisitive ignoramus all day long. What I don't like is politically motivated fools with no training in any type of science babbling on about global ecology.
I'm also rather tired, as an evolutionary biologist with some training in ecology and climate, of hearing slashdoters with CS and physics degrees spout off about climate change, drug resistance, ecosystems, etc. when a solid 8 of 10 responses on those topics are so fundamentally wrong that any competent AP Bio student could correct them.
There's nothing pretentious or avoidant about saying it's a waste of time to carry on discussions I know for a fact will promote politics and wrong-headed intuitions over science. When someone so firmly believes a wrong opinion as to bother posting it, and 4 other people mod up their ignorant drivel, and not a single person mods it down...and this happens over and over and over...why shouldn't I point out that it's clearly a waste of time?
As for your contention that I simply "don't wanna hear that we have screwed everything up" accusation, I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion but I believe quite firmly in the dangers of anthropogenic global warming, and I have no problem facing that or any other problem of our species head-on. My criticism of this topic and this posting refers to the virulent climate change deniers I see on slashdot, people who are especially dangerous because they often have enough training in some sort of science and enough practice in informal debate to make some serious bullshit sound reasonable. So your second criticism is in fact precisely opposite the truth.
This has nothing to do with me being told I'm wrong; I've never posted in one these threads before. I've never put forth any opinion, that I can recall, on this topic. I'm simply tired - as someone with university training and research experience in evolution and ecology - of seeing global warming, drug resistance, etc. completely and inexcusably mangled by slashdotters showing off their distant memories of high school biology.
Nice try, though, dismissing my entire multifaceted objection as pure, simple stubbornness. Way to oversimplify.
Why even bother posting this? It will just dissolve into a global warming debate within seconds, and slashdotters are by far the stupidest people I've ever conversed with on the topic of climate change and global warming. Normally slashdot opinions are above average on a given topic, but with global warming they're well below average: it's all fuzzy, intuited 'science' from physicists and programmers with zero understanding of ecology, copious libertarian babble, and wanton libertarian bashing.
It's just going to be a giant flamewar, and the average reader will truly be stupider for having read it.
Binary is the way to go; it is the only irreducible base system.
Pfffft....maybe if you're an ignorant plebe. You'd be amazed what I can do with my unary counting system. It beats binary hands down.
Look at that, it's one o'clock again. Time for another beer. You know, just one....
How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first.
Never gonna happen. There are too many politically conservative idiots, like my mom, who believe attempts at converting to metric represent a "socialist" conspiracy, and almost literally scream at any attempt to remove Imperial units in favor of metric.
Socialist? The fucking metric system? Seriously?
The government already tried to phase in metric sometime in the 1970s, if I recall, emphasizing it in schools and installing additional signage on highways with metric speeds and distances. People responded to this with caterwauling and by shooting the road signs into tatters. Dave Barry summed up the final results the best:
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
The reply I got was simply "It's spam"
Here's the problem: I'd bet money that at least 1/2 of those *are* spam. Vindictive pricks who bomb the shit out of product review scores are becoming more common. They'll negatively review products they've never seen from companies or people they've never spoken to because of the author/companies political views, PR gaffs, a nerd-o-sphere uproar like this, etc. They'll organize campaigns to bomb the reviews of every single book from an author or every product from an entire corporation for purely political or vengeful reasons. We've discussed this problem on slashdot many times before.
These self-righteous bastards view it as some kind of justice, when in fact they're just polluting the review ecosystem with lies, hearsay, and crappy manifestos. If the product or company is that bad it will become clear, from the legitimate reviews, quite quickly. No need to break out your weird brand of street justice and fuck up the system for everyone.
This time the people at Ocean Marketing are arrogant, mismanaging pricks; most of the time you can't be so certain when you see this kind of event unfolding.
Honestly, when I was reading the Penny-Arcade post I started wondering whether this was really just a vengeful ex-employee, or even corporate espionage from another vendor. It wasn't until I read multiple older reviews and forum posts corroborating this story that I became convinced otherwise.
Beware internet justice: you never really know who's behind the keyboard or just what kind of destructive, ignorant campaign they're running.
Now we'll get to listen to conservative bitching about overregulation and how without so many damn environmental laws that recycling could happen here. Then the liberals will answer that corporations would never pay a living wage, or even minimum wage, to do that here when it can be done by miserable overworked hut dwellers in China - environmental laws or not.
They're both probably right, and both answers make me equally depressed. Exporting work and materials that American liberals won't allow here because of well-meaning but often moronic regulations, but which American conservatives probably wouldn't do here anyway because they're cheap fucks.
I need a drink.
Surely in this case "the Jerusalem for Christmas tree light recycling" would be more fitting?
No, Mecca is the better word - there's a reason we use it. We say something is the 'mecca' for an activity or industry because of the Hajj. Almost two million foreigners a year visiting one city for one specific ritual makes a pretty good metaphor for colossal, single-minded undertakings - the kind of single-mindedness you see in one town recycling billions of pounds of electrical waste, for example.
Evoking Jerusalem would be a confusing and less accurate metaphor for the sake of being cute.
I can't believe the number of comments here about doctors being assholes, overpaid, incompetent, etc. You ungrateful, ignorant people need to wake up and realize that doctors are just as miserable under this system as the rest of you.
First, doctors hate the most expensive parts of medicine even more than you do; they'd be ecstatic to see that business go away. Patients incur as much as half of their lifetime medical costs in the last six months or year of their life. Doctors who know it's simply time for someone to die are forced to keep them alive for a few last weeks or months by whining families who can't accept death and by stupid laws that require extreme intervention to the very end. Many people won't sign DNR orders until they've already hung on far too long, if ever; the families rarely sign them for someone too far gone to sign themselves. It's gotten so bad there's even a phenomenon called the Silent Code, when the physician running an emergency resuscitation tacitly lets a terminal and hopeless patient slip away; they walk the line between honoring laws / families' wishes and the Hippocratic duty to do no harm by not prolonging suffering. Most doctors wish that palliative care and letting people go at their time could be official; a significant minority favor outright assisted suicide. Those brave enough to take some action now do things like silent codes. How does risking your license and reducing your billable hours by letting a patient die display the kind of greedy, insensitive behavior you people seem to think almost all doctors display?
And as for the money, doctors as a whole are not overpaid; doctors may average almost $200,000 a year, and the existence of specialist surgeons who make $700,000 a year makes it easy to assume they're all overpaid, but a complete statistical look at doctor's salaries - one that includes median, mode, and spread indicators- will tell you that the typical salary is pretty fair for a field that involves a minimum of 11 years higher education (often stretching past 15), $150,000+ in educational debt, and usually takes a lot more than 40 hours a week.
So some doctors are overpaid, and some doctors are callous. Show me a profession with neither of those problems. The majority of doctors are paid no more than a fair wage (or even not enough), care deeply about their patients, hate the waste and legal bullshit of medicine much more than you do, and are really tired of taking shit from people who think they like the system this way or got into medicine for the money.
The longer you assholes complain about doctors being stupid or only caring about money, the more stupid pricks who only care about the money will be the only ones willing to go to medical school. That's already starting, in my opinion. Enjoy reaping what you've sown.
Doctors are overpaid
Can we please stop this shit? Blaming doctors doesn't help you, and they are generally not overpaid. For the length and stress of their training, the debt they incur, and the difficult lifestyle many specialties must endure permanently, most doctors are actually underpaid - in overall salary, in compensation per hour, or both.
I know primary care physicians who've been forced quit the business after 30 years and had to go work somewhere else. How does a doctor who can't afford to be a doctor, and doesn't have enough savings to retire after 30 years, fit with your ignorant screed that doctors are overpaid?
I also know surgeons, many of whom do make $300,000 a year, and I've never seen one of them sit still for more than 15 minutes, to watch a movie or lecture, without passing out. They work a minimum of 60 hours a week and constantly get paged for surgery in the middle of the night, whether or not they're actually 'on call'.
So many types of doctor make so little that people are quitting left and right, while med students refuse to even consider the specialty, and many other types work so many hours with such a poor quality of life that their compensation per hour (not to mention per 3 am emergency call) makes engineering and business look like much better careers.
Many doctors are underpaid; many others are overpaid but massively overworked and overstressed. The cross-section of doctors who are both overpaid and live comfortable lifestyles is much, much smaller than you think.
If everyone who gave to charity gave to the one who deserves it the most, then all causes in the world except for the most worthy one would receive no money, until that most worthy cause was completely paid for, in which case the second most worthy cause would receive all the money, etc. So I'd think a bit before giving to the most worthwhile.
Actually, I think it would be great to massively over-fund the best organizations, and then move on down the line of 'worthiness'.
When I've read about charities it's striking that more than half of charitable organizations never cross $10,000 in donations and/or never get enough money to truly achieve any of their aims. Even successful charities spend so much time stressing out about money; begging for donations, underfunding their projects, struggling to keep their recipients from getting worse as opposed to making their lives entirely better.
I'd love to see the best charities funded straight into full operating endowments, even at the cost of eliminating several other charities for each one that becomes fully funded. We'd get a lot more work done in the long run, with the best doing far more work in a more effective way, and weak or ineffecient charities dying off entirely (and thus ceasing to draw donations away from the best viable charities).
If you even remotely support LGBT rights, please don't donate to these people.
Yes, they actively campaign against gay marriage. Are you saying that negates the worthiness of their charity work? Do you think they spit on gay disaster victims instead of giving them food, or what?
Grow up, and realize that not all worthwhile organizations and benevolent acts must be 100% in line with your beliefs to be worthwhile or benevolent.
Excellent, we got a non-verdict almost 18 years after the events subject to the trial, during which time Microsoft, Apple, and most of the other serial abusers of anti-trust and/or patent law have only maintained or even increased their presence in the market.
I'm satisfied with our justice system. Everything looks totally cool. Everyone else happy?
From TFA:
in 2009 a woman in Quebec stopped receiving disability payments for major depression after Manulife decided, based on beach vacation photos on Facebook, that she seemed happy enough to work after all.
There's no mention of any further investigation, but this sounds like jumping to conclusions to me.
Well, it depends on what she told the insurance company. Major depression is a massive brain malfunction, the kind where many sufferers can't even get up out of bed for hours or days at a time, and not because they feel so miserable that they don't want to; they actually can't get up. Even major depressives can have good days, but if she told them she had catatonic major depression and never left the house (which would be plausible), and they saw recent photos of a smiling beach vacation, that would be a very serious contradiction to her story and the pathology of her illness.
So denying that claim based on photos is harsh, but possibly tenable.
They've dressed the issue up as something hypothetical, when in fact it already happens. It's just not banks that are doing it
Insurance companies are infamously snoopy and manipulative. They'll look at anything and everything they can possibly get their hands on, legal or not, to analyze your risks. I'd bet serious money that insurers already pry in social networks.
And they've managed acts of regulatory capture that would make even banks and defense contractors blush. Here in North Carolina you're not even allowed to have a driver's license unless you have car insurance. If you don't actually have a car that's tough shit; you can't even drive rentals or borrowed cars.
Blah blah blah, I can prove I'm enlightened and totally above this plebian shit if I just bitch about everyone equally without offering any solutions.
Did I sum up your argument well enough?
Anonymous would be a lot more effective if they focused on one thing longer than a week...they've done everything from embarrassment campaigns against child pornographers to hacking secret societies and crime syndicates to various political hacks to that one bizarre incident where they organized a hate mail campaign against a teenager with an anti-profanity site.
They fancy themselves hacktivists but they don't seem to try very hard at sending messages to the public, which I assume is who you'd like to reach if you think the entire government and corporate landscapes are irredeemably corrupt.
Bottom line, I don't get them. I don't think they have to be an absolutely coherent, focused force with an official spokesperson in a tie to be taken seriously, but they usually don't even seem like they're trying to change something; they're just fucking around and punishing people at random.