I'm not convinced. I haven't heard Guido (Python) acting like that. Still, I've heard worse about Theo (one of the BSDs). So it's one way to herd cats.
I think the thing is that there are different effective management styles...but not an unlimited number of them. And Linus is manifesting ONE of them. Also that if you have an effective management style, the most likely effect of trying to change it is that you'll switch to an ineffective one.
That said, it's also true that we don't hear about the normal flow of things, unless we follow the developers list, so we only hear about the things that are "newsworthy". This is a strongly selective filter that tends to present people in their worst light.
Nobody criticizes Gnome anymore, because those who used to use it have switched to other desktops. Or use tablets. Perhaps it's better for tablets.
Speaking of which, I'll have to try Mate again soon. I really don't like KDE4 as well as I liked Gnome2 (or KDE3). And LXDE doesn't really satisfy my needs...comes close, but not there. There's also a third one I seriously considered, but I can't remember it's name at the moment. It uses the icon of a mouse to signify the menu. That was also close, but not quite,... note that all of these alternatives are better than EITHER Gnome3 or Unity, unless you are using a tablet. Or a phone. I don't know about those environments.
As far as I am concerned, KDE4 was a failure, because it's a considerably worse user experience than KDE3, but it's nowhere near the disaster that Gnome3 was.
What bothers me is that they don't say that it's truly parallel yet. This probably means that they've still got that fake parallelism in there to keep the libraries happy. They *REALLY* need to solve that.
It's true that what they introduced in 1.9.? was a lot better than nothing, but it's not good enough with MPUs becomming so dominant. And doing parallelism at the gross level of processes isn't very satisfactory. Threads should have a means of multi-tasking.
This is commonly recommended, but the incumbents have a nearly unbeatable advantage. It's much more effective to get involved at the local or state level. Even there, however, the expected payoff is negative. And even there there are entrenched interests with a large captive sector of support. Still, I've done that a few times with mixed results. Sometimes the person I supported didn't get elected, and other times they turned around and made deals that effectively betrayed their supporters. (Well, *some* of their supporters. The group I was a part of. Other interests were less affected.)
The thing is, my opinions are those of an extreme minority. The average person is of only average intelligence, and the average smart person still has a focus on short term issues. And among those who are more of more than average intelligence AND focus on long term issues, there is a divergence of interests. This isn't usually a matter of incompatible interests, but a matter of different issues being considered of different importance. But it means that each of these splinters has more to gain by affiliating with someone who controlls a larger power block. But to such people, the splinter groups are tiny, and relatively unimportant. So they will change their stands on issues that I consider important without much concern, because they aren't offending anyone powerful enough to do anything about it. Basically, all I can do is withdraw my support. And it's not like any of the other candidates are any better. (I've been using generic terms that apply to ALL of the successful candidates that I've come into contact with.)
Additionally, I don't enjoy politics. It's something I do out of duty. So if I'm not getting much support, it's quite likely that I'll just turn them off. (They turn me off without a qualm, after all.) I've got other things I need to do, that this is a situation that promises only a negative payoff.
So. I vote. I (very) occasionally write a letter or occasionally sign a petition. Probably once or twice a day. And I notice that nobody with significant power pays any attention, no matter what they promissed while running.
All that said, I'm moderately satisfied with my Representative, even though I consider both Senators nearly a total loss. (One of them could easily be worse, but is still bad enough that I give them both a negative rating.) The govenor could be worse, but is hardly good. Not as good as I expected when I voted for him, but probably better than his opponent would have been. (Faint praise indeed.)
At the primary level I have never supported a candidate who got the nomination, so I don't know how bad they would have been if they did. Probably better than the people who got in, but again that's pretty faint praise.
So you say I should devote more time and effort to this rigged losers game? Sorry, with the vote at plurality wins the game is rigged for the minor interests to lose. There's no particular reason for the candidates to compromise with minority interests, and coallitions don't work in this kind of game. Majority wins would be a different kind of game. So would instant runoff or Condorcet.
N.B.: both instant runoff and Condorcet voting are essentially majority wins, but adapted to practicality so that one doesn't need to hold multiple rounds of voting.
That's because legally it's not the government doing the accusation, but a private entity. That the entity is acting as an agent for the government is considered not worth mentioning.
Perhaps I've gotten too addicted to having an internet connection. It gives too much power into the hands of an unregulated monopoly (well, duopoly).
I informed my elected senators, and they told me "Thank you for your opinion", and voted in favor of the Mickey Mouse copyright extension.
I haven't trusted them since I started paying attention. But the only opposition with a chance to win is, I think, worse. Sometimes this means I vote third party, even though with the US election system this means I might as well not bother to vote. (The system is designed to support two, and only two, parties. A majority required would be different, but a plurality means that with three candidates, one candidate can win with 33.333333333334% of the votes. Instant Runoff or Condorcet voting would correct this problem, as would requiring a majority to win an election. But that's not the intent.)
If I'm understanding the changes in the law in the last decade, a class action lawsuit is not very likely. If I'm understanding things properly, now a corporation can sue a class of people, but a class of people can't sue a corporation.
I *do* hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
If it's old enough, it USED to be on a rail line. (Well, probably. Horse drawn delivery happened, but it was slow and expensive.)
The rail lines used to be a LOT more extensive. In some places they even shared the rails with passenger trolleys. (Need to use the same gauge rails, and need a lot more spur lines, of course. Still, cheaper than roads.) Note: Long distance trains never shared the rails with local trolleys. The appropriate guages for the two systems are too different. For fast trains you need a wide gague, but for slow trains narrow gague is good enough, you just can't take curves as fast.
Then there were the horse cars. These were local cars, usually passenger, that ran on rails but were pulled by a horse rather than a steam engine. Not really reasonable anymore, as engines have gotten a LOT more efficient. But, again, it was a rail transport that reached into a LOT of local areas.
These things have all been paved over now, and in most places their very memory has been erased. But they used to be common. If roads weren't subsidized, they still would be.
As for the "last mile problem", its cheaper to emplace and maintain a rail system than an asphalt road system. But rails are a lot less convenient when everyone is driving their own vehicle, and wants to be able to pass whenever they feel like it. It's not really a last mile problem, it's a grandfather problem combined with impatient idiots who can't wait a block to pass. (Spur lines aren't that expensive or difficult, but they do add to the expense, and they lead to a rougher ride, so you want to limit the number of places that they can occur.)
All that said, if you are going to have efficient rail travel, then you are going to have long trains with a need for constant speed which take a long time to stop. Perhaps a way around this could be found with electric motors in the wheels and automated switching, but nobody has been bothering, because of the grandfather problem: Even if you find a solution, it's nearly twice as expensive for rails and road to share the same space (ok, I exaggerate the price) and you to combine most of the inconveniences of each system. For some reason this isn't popular, and General Motors paid lots of money to ensure that rail would be junked. (This probably wasn't necessary, because impatient idiots are so common that roads would probably have won anyway, but it would have taken longer.)
P.S.: Some of what I said doesn't apply to older road systems, and has only become possible with electronically controlled switches. Which is another reason that roads originally won. Now, though, the reason is the network effect (also the grandfather effect...that which is already there is favored of something different, so a new competitor needs to be a LOT better).
Sure there's an off switch. Just forget to put it in a place in the car that the monitor can read, and you'll find out. (Currently the camera snaps a photo of your license, and you get a bill in the mail where I live.)
Because they are passive, and not embedded into the car, they are easy to place where they can't be read. In the glove compartment, under the drivers seat...lots of places that are convenient to reach for when you want to make them visible (to not need to pay that bill in the mail...which includes a surcharge for the extra work they needed to do).
Now if it were built into the car, that would be something different. I've heard rumors about rfids built into tires, but I'm not sure I believe them.
Influenze comes in many forms. Many of them are respiratory, but I remember years when there was the "G.I. flu". Some of them were quite impressive. And it wasn't salmonella. I can't say as certainly that it wasn't norovirus, as I don't know what that is, but I do know that both the newspapers and the doctors called it the flu.
OTOH, nobody did a genetic sequencing of it, so maybe everyone was wrong. Or maybe the terminology has changed. Or maybe....
But my guess is that it really was the flu, and you're just wrong when you presume that all past variants follow the same pattern as the recent ones.
Depends on the strain. There are strains of the flu that are very mild, and would match your description. That's not the one that everyone's worrying about this year.
Actually, I remember one year when everyone caught the "24 hour flu", which was moderately impressive, but quickly over. And I remember one year I caught a strain of the flu that... it was a GI flu, but it also depressed conscious functioning. So I nearly *don't* remember having it, just not quite making it to the john. But it lasted at least a week.
It varies a LOT. And there is occasionally more than one strain circulating at the same time.
FWIW, I'm over 70, and I think I ended up getting two flu shots this year (though I'm not certain). If so they were a month or two apart. For whatever reason I haven't picked it up yet, or picked up such a mild case that I was never certain. And I expose myself to contagious environments frequently (I take the bus over 4 times/week).
So, anecdotal though this be, *I* think the flu shot(s) was(were) worthwhile.
Got any reliable numbers on those? Percentages of the population, or of reasonable estimates of the population?
Otherwise I don't think your evaluation is significant. It's true my personal evidence is limited, but I'm never in my life experienced anyone having any of those effects, so the percentage of the population has to be very low.
Those, however, are INDEPENDENT methods. If you do both you get a strongly cumulative effect.
Also, it was already known that it would be less effective on the elderly. This is always true. Only 9% is exceptionally poor, but it was known in advance that it would be less effective on the elderly than on younger people generally. And it was still good advice.
Additionally, this flu isn't a binary event. You can have cases that are more or less severe. Even though the vaccine is less effective than expected in preventing the flue, it still reduces the severity of the infection. This can be litterally a life or death matter, especially for the elderly.
It seems, though, that some people have what appears to be a religious avoidance of vaccines. There fear them irrationally not only for themselves, but also for others. It would be easier if they admitted that their basis was religious, but in fact it seems that they usually aren't aware of this. And these fears are based on rumors rather than evidence. (Admittedly they started with purported evidence, that only later turned out to have been faked.)
Sorry, but there HAVE been prior stories. IPADs being stolen by border guards, etc. Even someone who got his computer back because it had Debian on it, the the guard couldn't use it.
But nothing was done. There was a wave of noise that was quickly submerged, and the thefts continued unabated, and, as far as I can tell, the thieves were never punished.
If you haven't seen it happening before, you haven't been paying attention. There have also been reports of border guards pulling aside pretty girls to feel them up, and I seem to recall one account where they made her strip first. Those, however, seem to have received more official notice, and I believe that, at least officially, now the girls are supposed to only by stripped by other women. But if I recall correctly, parents still don't have the right to be present.
Ah. So the Canadians were excluded, or had to go through that process. Nice.
I've heard many more reports about US border security being intolerable that of the Canadians OR the Mexicans. And those are really the only two alternatives that apply analogously.
I believe that the original phrase was "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". The bit in the us amendment was not directly connected to that. That one comes in as:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants...
So while the meaning that you stated is there (given certain interpretations of what you meant) the GP poster was also right to question your statement of it.
While in the extreme form that you describe, it does require a lot of external pressure to be maintained (which in turn implies that there is some group that is NOT equal), the extreme disparity which currently exists in the US is nearly equally destructive to social goods...including democracy.
The proper answer is a strongly graduated tax on income that doesn't have loopholes, and doesn't have any sharp boundaries (so that one is always better off when one earns more money). My usual answer to this is a tax of the form tax = taxRate * income - guaranteedBaseLevel This means that if you earn no income, you will still get a guaranteed income. The size of it is adjustable. Some people favor $0, but I'd go for a considerably higher level. My (current) idea is that with no income the tax should be sufficiently negative to equal a 40 hour/week job with a rate of $5/hour.
Note that I feel this should be a linear tax, but one could add in a higher power. This would make it more like the current tax system (except that there should be no loopholes and ALL income should be counted), but to me it makes more sense (and leads to a simpler tax system) to just have an adjustable base level. There is a question as to whether there should be a minimum age for this to kick in, but I don't believe that there should be. OTOH, the money earned should be the property of the individual earning it, NOT of their parents. So it should be held in escrow (earning interest at the same rate as long-term treasury bills) until they were, say 12, at which point they (not their parents) should be granted limited access to it. Say half the base level. But it should be available for legitimate expenses, like medical emergencies. Not routine expenses, though. That's up to their parents. N.B.: I'm also in favor of universal healh care at a basic level.
This would be a system which wouldn't unfairly penalize anyone severely, and which would make it more difficult for the wealthy to take advantage of the less wealthy. Naturally it wouldn't prevent them from paying people to do things, but that's hardly unfair, as long as they have a reasonable alternative.
FWIW, I consider most inherited wealth to be unfair in a system where many people are lacking basic survival needs (clothes, shelter, food, transport, etc....though I could public transport as transport, if it's available). However, I also consider confiscatory taxation of inherited wealth to be unfair. You need a system that balances in between. The system that I proposed does, by eliminating the threat of "Do what I say or starve!" and it's equivalents.
When I was growing up there weren't any computer games. TV was episodic. So most of my time I spent reading books. I never even considered computer programming until my junior year in college. The focus was much narrower.
Now attention is continually being diverted. And the things that one needs to lear are a lot wider. So one doesn't cover ANY of them as deeply.
That said, on entering college I was shocked to find that most entering freshmen had to take "Subject A" A.K.A. "Bonehead English". Today the high and junior high schools in the city in which I live must deal with 17 different languages, from Spanish through to Laotian. So the teachers need to spread their time more thinly. And additionally, fears of lawsuits have strongly restricted the projects that the teachers can do. Electrical construction is right out the window, though while I was in college my mother was teaching wiring electrical construction to a class of educationally disabled students. (Basic electricity is quite safe, but it does involve sharp tools and equipment. Like wires with the ends stripped of insulation.) But many children can't learn well when all they are presented with are abstracts.
Additionally, the test eat up an incredible amount of education time. Two tests a year would be quite reasonable, but not at the rate that they are required. Additionally, there are committees that go around and ensure that teachers aren't covering anything that isn't appropriat to the next test to be presented. Not teachers, but bureaucrats with no knowledge or interest in proper teaching, but only in ensuring that the regulations that have be promulgated are followed exactly. No matter how stupid.
I could go on. The "standardized tests" as implemented are a truely terrible idea, but there are also many other factors. But getting rid of most of the standardized tests is the easiest of the problems to solve. There should probably be two of these tests given per year, one at the start of the year and one at the end. Then one could judge the change in scoring. Even that would be wildly biased, and subject to gross misinterpretation, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as the current system. (And if it were done and interpreted properly it would provide useful information.) As it is they are designed to ensure that the schools fail. I'm not absolutely certain that this was intentional, but I consider it a high probability. Designing a system that bad by accident isn't very likely.
You pay the same amount for food as for water? Per unit weight?
Sorry, but while lunar colonists would be right to make that equivalence, water being the necessity in shortest supply within the ecosystem, on Earth that equivalence doesn't make sense. At least not if you live near an ocean or river, no matter HOW polluted. In most places it's cheaper to distill a pound of water than to buy a pound of wheat. In the other places you can do the equivalent via freezing (though the process is a bit more complex, being less efficient/step and so requiring multiple steps). Where this isn't true, the reason is political, not technical. (OK, it doesn't apply in the middle of a desert. But it applies at the boundaries of the desert. And few people live in the heart of a desert without having already made preparations *expecting* water to be difficult to come by. Still, falling groundwater levels can be expected to cause oasises to dry up.)
It wouldn't be shortsighted, but it also wouldn't make economic sense. Transportation costs for water would be excessive. Europe or Russia might manage it via a pipeline, I guess, but it would need to be around 500 times the size of an oil pipeline. The problem is extending it far enough to reach the areas where there is a great surplus of water. A secondary problem, since the best place to collect the water is at the mouths of rivers, is processing it to remove pollutants.
All in all, desalinization is probably cheaper. Especially in areas where there is lots of heat available from "solar power". (It's heat that is wanted, so no conversion to electrical power is needed...or only a minimal amount to run the controls.) And you probably need to use glass rather than plastic, because plastic degrades too rapidly under direct sunlight. But I'm seen solar powered glass kilns that create glass from sand, although I must admit that it was the work of an artist rather than a manufacturer.
I think you misunderstand. Most people won't care if it doesn't obviously effect themselves, their family, or their close friends. A few additional people will care if it affects others that they see frequently. Lots of people will care briefly if they see it on the news, but not be moved to action. A very few people will care enough about distant strangers to act to help them.
Race barely comes into it, though admittedly it's easier to empathize with someone who looks more like the face you see in the mirror. And that affects the proportions in EACH of the above categories.
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I'm not convinced. I haven't heard Guido (Python) acting like that. Still, I've heard worse about Theo (one of the BSDs). So it's one way to herd cats.
I think the thing is that there are different effective management styles...but not an unlimited number of them. And Linus is manifesting ONE of them. Also that if you have an effective management style, the most likely effect of trying to change it is that you'll switch to an ineffective one.
That said, it's also true that we don't hear about the normal flow of things, unless we follow the developers list, so we only hear about the things that are "newsworthy". This is a strongly selective filter that tends to present people in their worst light.
Nobody criticizes Gnome anymore, because those who used to use it have switched to other desktops. Or use tablets. Perhaps it's better for tablets.
Speaking of which, I'll have to try Mate again soon. I really don't like KDE4 as well as I liked Gnome2 (or KDE3). And LXDE doesn't really satisfy my needs...comes close, but not there. There's also a third one I seriously considered, but I can't remember it's name at the moment. It uses the icon of a mouse to signify the menu. That was also close, but not quite,... note that all of these alternatives are better than EITHER Gnome3 or Unity, unless you are using a tablet. Or a phone. I don't know about those environments.
As far as I am concerned, KDE4 was a failure, because it's a considerably worse user experience than KDE3, but it's nowhere near the disaster that Gnome3 was.
What bothers me is that they don't say that it's truly parallel yet. This probably means that they've still got that fake parallelism in there to keep the libraries happy. They *REALLY* need to solve that.
It's true that what they introduced in 1.9.? was a lot better than nothing, but it's not good enough with MPUs becomming so dominant. And doing parallelism at the gross level of processes isn't very satisfactory. Threads should have a means of multi-tasking.
This is commonly recommended, but the incumbents have a nearly unbeatable advantage. It's much more effective to get involved at the local or state level. Even there, however, the expected payoff is negative. And even there there are entrenched interests with a large captive sector of support. Still, I've done that a few times with mixed results. Sometimes the person I supported didn't get elected, and other times they turned around and made deals that effectively betrayed their supporters. (Well, *some* of their supporters. The group I was a part of. Other interests were less affected.)
The thing is, my opinions are those of an extreme minority. The average person is of only average intelligence, and the average smart person still has a focus on short term issues. And among those who are more of more than average intelligence AND focus on long term issues, there is a divergence of interests. This isn't usually a matter of incompatible interests, but a matter of different issues being considered of different importance. But it means that each of these splinters has more to gain by affiliating with someone who controlls a larger power block. But to such people, the splinter groups are tiny, and relatively unimportant. So they will change their stands on issues that I consider important without much concern, because they aren't offending anyone powerful enough to do anything about it. Basically, all I can do is withdraw my support. And it's not like any of the other candidates are any better. (I've been using generic terms that apply to ALL of the successful candidates that I've come into contact with.)
Additionally, I don't enjoy politics. It's something I do out of duty. So if I'm not getting much support, it's quite likely that I'll just turn them off. (They turn me off without a qualm, after all.) I've got other things I need to do, that this is a situation that promises only a negative payoff.
So. I vote. I (very) occasionally write a letter or occasionally sign a petition. Probably once or twice a day. And I notice that nobody with significant power pays any attention, no matter what they promissed while running.
All that said, I'm moderately satisfied with my Representative, even though I consider both Senators nearly a total loss. (One of them could easily be worse, but is still bad enough that I give them both a negative rating.) The govenor could be worse, but is hardly good. Not as good as I expected when I voted for him, but probably better than his opponent would have been. (Faint praise indeed.)
At the primary level I have never supported a candidate who got the nomination, so I don't know how bad they would have been if they did. Probably better than the people who got in, but again that's pretty faint praise.
So you say I should devote more time and effort to this rigged losers game? Sorry, with the vote at plurality wins the game is rigged for the minor interests to lose. There's no particular reason for the candidates to compromise with minority interests, and coallitions don't work in this kind of game. Majority wins would be a different kind of game. So would instant runoff or Condorcet.
N.B.: both instant runoff and Condorcet voting are essentially majority wins, but adapted to practicality so that one doesn't need to hold multiple rounds of voting.
That's because legally it's not the government doing the accusation, but a private entity. That the entity is acting as an agent for the government is considered not worth mentioning.
Perhaps I've gotten too addicted to having an internet connection. It gives too much power into the hands of an unregulated monopoly (well, duopoly).
I informed my elected senators, and they told me "Thank you for your opinion", and voted in favor of the Mickey Mouse copyright extension.
I haven't trusted them since I started paying attention. But the only opposition with a chance to win is, I think, worse. Sometimes this means I vote third party, even though with the US election system this means I might as well not bother to vote. (The system is designed to support two, and only two, parties. A majority required would be different, but a plurality means that with three candidates, one candidate can win with 33.333333333334% of the votes. Instant Runoff or Condorcet voting would correct this problem, as would requiring a majority to win an election. But that's not the intent.)
If I'm understanding the changes in the law in the last decade, a class action lawsuit is not very likely. If I'm understanding things properly, now a corporation can sue a class of people, but a class of people can't sue a corporation.
I *do* hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
If it's old enough, it USED to be on a rail line. (Well, probably. Horse drawn delivery happened, but it was slow and expensive.)
The rail lines used to be a LOT more extensive. In some places they even shared the rails with passenger trolleys. (Need to use the same gauge rails, and need a lot more spur lines, of course. Still, cheaper than roads.)
Note: Long distance trains never shared the rails with local trolleys. The appropriate guages for the two systems are too different. For fast trains you need a wide gague, but for slow trains narrow gague is good enough, you just can't take curves as fast.
Then there were the horse cars. These were local cars, usually passenger, that ran on rails but were pulled by a horse rather than a steam engine. Not really reasonable anymore, as engines have gotten a LOT more efficient. But, again, it was a rail transport that reached into a LOT of local areas.
These things have all been paved over now, and in most places their very memory has been erased. But they used to be common. If roads weren't subsidized, they still would be.
As for the "last mile problem", its cheaper to emplace and maintain a rail system than an asphalt road system. But rails are a lot less convenient when everyone is driving their own vehicle, and wants to be able to pass whenever they feel like it. It's not really a last mile problem, it's a grandfather problem combined with impatient idiots who can't wait a block to pass. (Spur lines aren't that expensive or difficult, but they do add to the expense, and they lead to a rougher ride, so you want to limit the number of places that they can occur.)
All that said, if you are going to have efficient rail travel, then you are going to have long trains with a need for constant speed which take a long time to stop. Perhaps a way around this could be found with electric motors in the wheels and automated switching, but nobody has been bothering, because of the grandfather problem: Even if you find a solution, it's nearly twice as expensive for rails and road to share the same space (ok, I exaggerate the price) and you to combine most of the inconveniences of each system. For some reason this isn't popular, and General Motors paid lots of money to ensure that rail would be junked. (This probably wasn't necessary, because impatient idiots are so common that roads would probably have won anyway, but it would have taken longer.)
P.S.: Some of what I said doesn't apply to older road systems, and has only become possible with electronically controlled switches. Which is another reason that roads originally won. Now, though, the reason is the network effect (also the grandfather effect...that which is already there is favored of something different, so a new competitor needs to be a LOT better).
And gave it eminent domain?
Sure there's an off switch. Just forget to put it in a place in the car that the monitor can read, and you'll find out. (Currently the camera snaps a photo of your license, and you get a bill in the mail where I live.)
Because they are passive, and not embedded into the car, they are easy to place where they can't be read. In the glove compartment, under the drivers seat...lots of places that are convenient to reach for when you want to make them visible (to not need to pay that bill in the mail...which includes a surcharge for the extra work they needed to do).
Now if it were built into the car, that would be something different. I've heard rumors about rfids built into tires, but I'm not sure I believe them.
Influenze comes in many forms. Many of them are respiratory, but I remember years when there was the "G.I. flu". Some of them were quite impressive. And it wasn't salmonella. I can't say as certainly that it wasn't norovirus, as I don't know what that is, but I do know that both the newspapers and the doctors called it the flu.
OTOH, nobody did a genetic sequencing of it, so maybe everyone was wrong. Or maybe the terminology has changed. Or maybe....
But my guess is that it really was the flu, and you're just wrong when you presume that all past variants follow the same pattern as the recent ones.
Depends on the strain. There are strains of the flu that are very mild, and would match your description. That's not the one that everyone's worrying about this year.
Actually, I remember one year when everyone caught the "24 hour flu", which was moderately impressive, but quickly over. And I remember one year I caught a strain of the flu that ... it was a GI flu, but it also depressed conscious functioning. So I nearly *don't* remember having it, just not quite making it to the john. But it lasted at least a week.
It varies a LOT. And there is occasionally more than one strain circulating at the same time.
FWIW, I'm over 70, and I think I ended up getting two flu shots this year (though I'm not certain). If so they were a month or two apart. For whatever reason I haven't picked it up yet, or picked up such a mild case that I was never certain. And I expose myself to contagious environments frequently (I take the bus over 4 times/week).
So, anecdotal though this be, *I* think the flu shot(s) was(were) worthwhile.
That worked quite well in 1918 didn't it.
Got any reliable numbers on those? Percentages of the population, or of reasonable estimates of the population?
Otherwise I don't think your evaluation is significant. It's true my personal evidence is limited, but I'm never in my life experienced anyone having any of those effects, so the percentage of the population has to be very low.
Those, however, are INDEPENDENT methods. If you do both you get a strongly cumulative effect.
Also, it was already known that it would be less effective on the elderly. This is always true. Only 9% is exceptionally poor, but it was known in advance that it would be less effective on the elderly than on younger people generally. And it was still good advice.
Additionally, this flu isn't a binary event. You can have cases that are more or less severe. Even though the vaccine is less effective than expected in preventing the flue, it still reduces the severity of the infection. This can be litterally a life or death matter, especially for the elderly.
It seems, though, that some people have what appears to be a religious avoidance of vaccines. There fear them irrationally not only for themselves, but also for others. It would be easier if they admitted that their basis was religious, but in fact it seems that they usually aren't aware of this. And these fears are based on rumors rather than evidence. (Admittedly they started with purported evidence, that only later turned out to have been faked.)
Sorry, but there HAVE been prior stories. IPADs being stolen by border guards, etc. Even someone who got his computer back because it had Debian on it, the the guard couldn't use it.
But nothing was done. There was a wave of noise that was quickly submerged, and the thefts continued unabated, and, as far as I can tell, the thieves were never punished.
If you haven't seen it happening before, you haven't been paying attention. There have also been reports of border guards pulling aside pretty girls to feel them up, and I seem to recall one account where they made her strip first. Those, however, seem to have received more official notice, and I believe that, at least officially, now the girls are supposed to only by stripped by other women. But if I recall correctly, parents still don't have the right to be present.
Read the party platform CAREFULLY. I'm not a Libertarian because I'm a libertarian.
And remember that this "border" is defined to include all international airports, no matter where in the country they are. Also all ocean shores.
IOW, they've defined it to include almost all the population. If you aren't covered now, all they need to do is redefine a current airport.
Ah. So the Canadians were excluded, or had to go through that process. Nice.
I've heard many more reports about US border security being intolerable that of the Canadians OR the Mexicans. And those are really the only two alternatives that apply analogously.
I believe that the original phrase was "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". The bit in the us amendment was not directly connected to that. That one comes in as:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants...
So while the meaning that you stated is there (given certain interpretations of what you meant) the GP poster was also right to question your statement of it.
While in the extreme form that you describe, it does require a lot of external pressure to be maintained (which in turn implies that there is some group that is NOT equal), the extreme disparity which currently exists in the US is nearly equally destructive to social goods...including democracy.
The proper answer is a strongly graduated tax on income that doesn't have loopholes, and doesn't have any sharp boundaries (so that one is always better off when one earns more money). My usual answer to this is a tax of the form
tax = taxRate * income - guaranteedBaseLevel
This means that if you earn no income, you will still get a guaranteed income. The size of it is adjustable. Some people favor $0, but I'd go for a considerably higher level. My (current) idea is that with no income the tax should be sufficiently negative to equal a 40 hour/week job with a rate of $5/hour.
Note that I feel this should be a linear tax, but one could add in a higher power. This would make it more like the current tax system (except that there should be no loopholes and ALL income should be counted), but to me it makes more sense (and leads to a simpler tax system) to just have an adjustable base level. There is a question as to whether there should be a minimum age for this to kick in, but I don't believe that there should be. OTOH, the money earned should be the property of the individual earning it, NOT of their parents. So it should be held in escrow (earning interest at the same rate as long-term treasury bills) until they were, say 12, at which point they (not their parents) should be granted limited access to it. Say half the base level. But it should be available for legitimate expenses, like medical emergencies. Not routine expenses, though. That's up to their parents.
N.B.: I'm also in favor of universal healh care at a basic level.
This would be a system which wouldn't unfairly penalize anyone severely, and which would make it more difficult for the wealthy to take advantage of the less wealthy. Naturally it wouldn't prevent them from paying people to do things, but that's hardly unfair, as long as they have a reasonable alternative.
FWIW, I consider most inherited wealth to be unfair in a system where many people are lacking basic survival needs (clothes, shelter, food, transport, etc....though I could public transport as transport, if it's available). However, I also consider confiscatory taxation of inherited wealth to be unfair. You need a system that balances in between. The system that I proposed does, by eliminating the threat of "Do what I say or starve!" and it's equivalents.
No. But this (following statement) explains it:
When I was growing up there weren't any computer games. TV was episodic. So most of my time I spent reading books. I never even considered computer programming until my junior year in college. The focus was much narrower.
Now attention is continually being diverted. And the things that one needs to lear are a lot wider. So one doesn't cover ANY of them as deeply.
That said, on entering college I was shocked to find that most entering freshmen had to take "Subject A" A.K.A. "Bonehead English". Today the high and junior high schools in the city in which I live must deal with 17 different languages, from Spanish through to Laotian. So the teachers need to spread their time more thinly. And additionally, fears of lawsuits have strongly restricted the projects that the teachers can do. Electrical construction is right out the window, though while I was in college my mother was teaching wiring electrical construction to a class of educationally disabled students. (Basic electricity is quite safe, but it does involve sharp tools and equipment. Like wires with the ends stripped of insulation.) But many children can't learn well when all they are presented with are abstracts.
Additionally, the test eat up an incredible amount of education time. Two tests a year would be quite reasonable, but not at the rate that they are required. Additionally, there are committees that go around and ensure that teachers aren't covering anything that isn't appropriat to the next test to be presented. Not teachers, but bureaucrats with no knowledge or interest in proper teaching, but only in ensuring that the regulations that have be promulgated are followed exactly. No matter how stupid.
I could go on. The "standardized tests" as implemented are a truely terrible idea, but there are also many other factors. But getting rid of most of the standardized tests is the easiest of the problems to solve. There should probably be two of these tests given per year, one at the start of the year and one at the end. Then one could judge the change in scoring. Even that would be wildly biased, and subject to gross misinterpretation, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as the current system. (And if it were done and interpreted properly it would provide useful information.) As it is they are designed to ensure that the schools fail. I'm not absolutely certain that this was intentional, but I consider it a high probability. Designing a system that bad by accident isn't very likely.
You pay the same amount for food as for water? Per unit weight?
Sorry, but while lunar colonists would be right to make that equivalence, water being the necessity in shortest supply within the ecosystem, on Earth that equivalence doesn't make sense. At least not if you live near an ocean or river, no matter HOW polluted. In most places it's cheaper to distill a pound of water than to buy a pound of wheat. In the other places you can do the equivalent via freezing (though the process is a bit more complex, being less efficient/step and so requiring multiple steps). Where this isn't true, the reason is political, not technical. (OK, it doesn't apply in the middle of a desert. But it applies at the boundaries of the desert. And few people live in the heart of a desert without having already made preparations *expecting* water to be difficult to come by. Still, falling groundwater levels can be expected to cause oasises to dry up.)
It wouldn't be shortsighted, but it also wouldn't make economic sense. Transportation costs for water would be excessive. Europe or Russia might manage it via a pipeline, I guess, but it would need to be around 500 times the size of an oil pipeline. The problem is extending it far enough to reach the areas where there is a great surplus of water. A secondary problem, since the best place to collect the water is at the mouths of rivers, is processing it to remove pollutants.
All in all, desalinization is probably cheaper. Especially in areas where there is lots of heat available from "solar power". (It's heat that is wanted, so no conversion to electrical power is needed...or only a minimal amount to run the controls.) And you probably need to use glass rather than plastic, because plastic degrades too rapidly under direct sunlight. But I'm seen solar powered glass kilns that create glass from sand, although I must admit that it was the work of an artist rather than a manufacturer.
I think you misunderstand. Most people won't care if it doesn't obviously effect themselves, their family, or their close friends. A few additional people will care if it affects others that they see frequently. Lots of people will care briefly if they see it on the news, but not be moved to action. A very few people will care enough about distant strangers to act to help them.
Race barely comes into it, though admittedly it's easier to empathize with someone who looks more like the face you see in the mirror. And that affects the proportions in EACH of the above categories.