That clouds exist and can have an effect on temperature (apparently in either direction, depending on altitute? I don't know too much about it) doesn't change the fact that CO2 is a feedback. So why is there a problem asserting that?
The problem is that if CO2 is a week positive feedback, overwhelmed by a strong cloud/water vapor negative feedback, its existence may be difficult if at all possible to discern, and in the final analysis, its contribution is negligible.
There aren't any large, unknown negative feedback loops that "have to exist" to explain our present climate, to the precision we are able to explain it.
I didn't say they were unknown, but they certainly are poorly quantified at the moment in common climate models. If CO2 was a positive feedback that could possibly drive the climate into a runaway warming or cooling, it would already have happened in the past (since we've got clear measurements of much higher CO2 levels than we have today).
Also, regarding "runaway" cooling and warming. There's the fact that as things get warmer, they radiate more heat. This ultimately limits all feedbacks in either direction.
I'm not sure if that statement is strictly true (what is the "limit" of a negative feedback?), but I think I understand what you're trying to say. I would assert that understanding the limits of the feedback mechanisms we've observed is at a very early stage in the science, and that there is years if not decades of work to go before we understand it properly.
So it's not linear feedback of the kind you get out of a microphone. No one ever said that, and people who think so worry too much, in a sense. Of course, if that bleak idea convinces them to deny global warming entirely, they worry too little!
Well, since the predictions of doom (even just a little doom) are so weak in basis, it makes it very hard for people to worry at all, skeptic or not. I think when given the proper caveats, and when observing the times of human prosperity during warmer periods of history, global warming comes out as a good thing. Of course, "good warming" is anathema to the doom and gloom crowd...but I think there are good cases to be made that it might not be bad at all.
Well, if you're super poor, and burning wood or dung for fuel, the availability of cheap oil (and therefore cheap kerosene, or gasoline) can make a huge difference in quality of life.
Available energy per capita maps quite nicely to quality of life, so if you're trying to help the poorest of the poor, making energy cheaper is the best way to raise them out of poverty, period.
Diabetes no longer means a "short, disgusting, and painful" [wikipedia.org] life, but one of manageable testing and treatment.
Ironic, of course, that the dietary guidelines put forth by our government actually creates Type 2 diabetes, which we then cheerfully treat. Or perhaps you were just talking about Type 1 diabetes.
Curing the cause works wonderfully in the long run, but how far off is that for diabetes or cancer? Ten years? Fifty? Two hundred?
The answer to that question has more to do with political inertia and the inability of government to admit error than any scientific or technological hurdle. Type 2 diabetes, and the vast majority of cancers, can be laid at the feet of the high-carbohydrate dietary guidelines we've been given. You could change the world in a year if we just were willing to admit our error for the past 30 years.
My personal bet, we've got 20 years before it becomes common knowledge, once again, that bacon is healthy for you, and bagels are sugar-death-bombs.
treating the symptoms of the disease is equally important, and it's the relief of symptoms that results in the majority of patients returning to productive lives
I'll just have to disagree with you on that one. It may be important, but it simply cannot be seen as equally important. And I think the big problem with the "productive lives" argument is that the costs associated with the chronic disease care really should be counted against any productivity. So if your average 100k salary senior programmer gets to work another ten years thanks to 2 million dollars worth of medical interventions, you're lost the game.
I think that the past 30 years of increasing medical expenditures vastly outpacing inflation shows just how important it is to get to the causes of disease, rather than the symptoms. We keep kicking the can down the road, focusing on what is immediately underfoot, and our shortsightedness ruins us in the long run.
The problem with asserting CO2 is a "lever" for H2O is that you've missed out on clouds entirely. The negative feedback loops that exist in our system (and they must, otherwise we'd have already had either run away cooling or run away warming) turn those levers into negligible influences.
It's certainly useful to postulate possible levers, and possible feedback loops, but one must be particularly careful of confirmation bias here. Both in terms of biological negative feedbacks (plants growing faster in the presence of CO2, for example), and simple physical negative feedbacks (water heating up, increasing humidity, increasing cloud cover, reducing temperature), there is a whole host of caveats to the climate models used to predict the future.
I welcome skepticism provided that it's not skepticism that uses faulty claims by specific scientists to call into question the conclusions of the field as a whole.
I think the big problem here is that the falsifiable hypothesis being defended is not properly defined. In other words, I would welcome alarmism, provided it's not alarmism that uses ambiguity in order to make all data fit their phantom hypothesis.
Science is the ruthless application of skepticism to ones' *own* ideas - we develop falsifiable hypotheses, and we *try* to falsify them. Science isn't a popularity contest, it isn't a vote, it isn't a consensus - it's challenging others, and yourself, to prove things *wrong*.
If some physics researcher proposes a theory of anti-gravity, backs it up with a host of equations that all must be true for his theory to be true, and you find just *one* flaw in the chain, his theory is toast (at least in the context of whatever time/temperature/pressure/size his experiment may apply to - see quantum versus classical physics).
The thing about this is, the public-at-large is really incapable of making an informed analysis of this data itself
I'll grant you that, in the case of a dearth of data (such as simply two photos, sans any sort of historical collection of other relevant data), but really, given the raw data, any executable programs used to massage the data, the general public at large is probably better qualified to sniff out problems than you think. They might not pick up on certain subtleties, such as UHI, proxy problems, the inappropriateness of using black body radiation equations to assert the existence of a "greenhouse effect", or other definitions of technical constants. But there is no such thing as "the scientists" in the end - they're just people, some who may disagree with each other on various points here and there. The idea of some amorphous group of "the scientists" giving us wisdom we can't grasp is a generalization that warps the conversation, I think.
Phil Jones, couldn't trust that man to flush the toilet. Richard Lindzen, might not be a good prom date, but he's certainly as trustworthy as anyone else in the field.
I think the dilemma comes when we have two people we can trust, and they've both come to diametrically opposed conclusions. If anything, this should be a clue for us as to the current insolubility of the problem in question - but boy, if there's anything people hate it's ambiguity.
when the correct prediction suggests dire consequences for millions of people who rely on the rivers fed by those glaciers. "Several hundred years" might seem like a long time, but it is a geological blink of an eye. We should be very concerned.
The problem is that if we take the measures often suggested by warmists, and increase energy prices by eschewing the cheapest forms of energy available to us, we'll drive the poorest of the poor deeper into poverty and despair in several hundred days. If you're willing to assert we should be concerned about the fate of millions of people hundreds of years from now, surely you'll admit that we should be more concerned about millions of people hundreds of days from now, right?
Sceptic: I need to see evidence. A does not lead directly to C, show me B. Denalists: I dont believe in C therefore A must be some kind of conspiracy.
Interesting definitions. I'll add two more for you:
Warmist: The overwhelming weight of the evidence shows C, so any data that contradicts C must be wrong. Scientist: My fundamental hypothesis is predicated on C, so any data that contradicts C invalidates my hypothesis.
All too often, we forget science is the ruthless application of skepticism to one's *own* ideas.
Gotta love the cherry picking here. Take two arbitrary end points, get a downward slope, and then simplistically extend that slope forever. Never mind that another two end points would provide an upwards slope and reverse the prediction. Never mind that the system behaves in a demonstrably non-linear manner.
This is like saying the temperature from July to December decreased 20 degrees, and if that rate continued, we'll be at -200C in another ten years. I call BS on the church of global warming.
Instead, they deal with a lot of broken bones and other "normal" things like complicated pregnancies.
Actually, as a percentage of cost, chronic disease treatment, such as that for diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc, is much more than the broken bones or pregnancy category.
Most healthcare systems I've ever been involved in also already run giant public-education campaigns pushing for better diets. They usually are ignored.
It would be better off if they were ignored, but unfortunately, they're not. The problem with the giant public-education campaigns is that they prescribe the wrong diet. They say stay away from saturated fat, eat low fat in general, and bulk up on cereals and grains. The common wisdom on "healthy diet" from our government and healthcare providers is actually the cause of most poor health.
Polio has practically been eliminated.
Which is my point - polio hasn't been eliminated because we've gotten better and better at treating symptoms (which we currently do for chronic diseases), polio was eliminated because we attacked the cause. Over the past 30 years, health care has gone from acute care to chronic care, less about making us healthy again, and more about treating symptoms with more and more expensive and often useless methods.
Diseases that were a death sentence a few decades ago are now just minor inconveniences
And the sad part is that our current dietary guidelines promote these chronic diseases. Whether or not the inconvenience is "minor" or not aside, we currently run a health care industry that causes most of the diseases that they treat the symptoms of. It's as if nobody bothered to find a vaccine for polio, but instead developed drugs, surgeries and other treatments to mitigate the symptoms, while at the same time suggesting to the general public behaviors that would increase the incidence of polio.
those people can go on leading full (and productive) lives.
This is generally true for acute care (fixing the broken bone, fighting the infection or virus caught by accident, etc), but for a lot of chronic care I think the evidence is pretty clear that while we keep people alive longer, we don't necessarily keep their lives productive or full, Darth Cheney being the obvious exception.
Better healthcare leads to more healthy people, which leads to more productive people, which leads to a better GDP. That's one angle.
But that's patently not true. Getting healthcare does not necessarily make you more healthy, and even when it does it does not necessarily mean a more productive person -> take your average stroke victim, who racks up a bill of hundreds of thousands of dollars in surgery and rehab. This person is never going to be productive again. Yes, we've kept them breathing, and yes, one day they may be able to walk with a stroller, but they'll never add to the GDP again.
The real problem with healthcare, of course, is that we've set it up primarily to treat the *symptoms* of chronic disease while not addressing the *causes*. Diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer and other chronic diseases are all "treatable" in a myriad number of ways, but the cause, excessive carbohydrate intake, is actually encouraged by our USDA food guidelines.
Ironic, our government subsidizes the industries that create carbs and cause poor health (HFCS being ultra cheap because of corn subsidies), and now our government is going to subsidize the industry that treats the symptoms caused by these subsidized carbohydrates. If they'd just stop fucking with the levers on the machine, maybe the machine could take care of itself.
The problem I think you describe isn't one of the lowly IT worker, it's one of the clueless IT manager. Leadership counts, and even a group of the best people aren't going to be able to accomplish much when hampered by the management-idea-du-jour. They'd probably be better off by offering subsidies to MBA programs for clued in IT workers, so that you can get better blood in the ranks that matter.
About every 16 months, we have another reorg. The new boss of course decides that anything done before was wrong, so they've got to change it. As a consequence, any IT project that takes > 16 months (and most reasonable sized ones do) ends up switching gears to the detriment of the end product. In the kind of IT environment where leadership is transitory, top down change is done without thinking about the consequences, and where it is not unrealistic for a project manager to spend 5 years working and never ship a single damn system, even the best IT developer is screwed.
This isn't even bothering to take into account the sheer amount of process health care IT has as overhead - no kidding, even the best IT developer in health care probably spends, on average, less than an hour programming per day.
Actually, you've got a good point - reducing salaries for IT workers would reduce health care costs. So would reducing salaries for doctors, nurses and all other health care employees. The unintended consequences of such an activity are pretty severe though.
It's sort of like "affordable housing". Everybody is for "affordable housing", but nobody wants more foreclosures. However, foreclosures are exactly the kind of thing that would bring prices down and make things affordable.
The problem here though isn't the theory, it's the practical. Government intervention into markets creates distortions that cannot be sustained. Eventually, the best intentions implode on themselves. In the case of reducing IT salaries, I can only imagine that in the worst case, we have a big bucket of money, but not enough qualified people to take advantage of it, so we lower our standards so we can spend all the money. The resulting poor crop of IT workers ends up replacing more expensive IT workers, who find solace in other industries, and you essentially end up with less quality and less cost.
Of course, if they really wanted to reduce health care costs, they'd reduce disease, and the quickest, cheapest way to do that is to tell people to restrict their carbohydrate intake (contrary to the six servings of cereals and grains recommended by the USDA). Reducing the incidence of chronic disease, including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer and alzehimer's, by recommending a truly healthy diet, would not only reduce health care costs, it would improve health.
Yup, high carb fruits and stuff do help cause the "diseases of civilization".
Remember, back in the day, you got stuff only when it was in season, for a very short period of time. Strawberries and blueberries aren't too bad insofar as glycemic index, but yeah, oranges, apples, bananas, are pretty awful for you.
FWIW, apples have about 15g of carbs, which is about the equivalent of one slice of bread.
Insofar as taste, since giving up sugar, when the waiters give me regular coke instead of diet, the sugar water makes my entire mouth feel like it's being dissolved by acid. Your whole body changes when you stop eating the carbs that have been damaging it for so long.
All in all, the paleo crowd has it right -> our evolutionary path was one of primary meat eating, including the fattest portions of organ meats we could get our hands on. Apples didn't exist back in caveman days in the very sweet and succulent species of today -> wild apples are legendary for their inconsistency from generation to generation, and all apples today are grown by splicing.
Well, to be specific, HFCS is just as safe as normal sugar, sugary fruits, breads and cereals and grains, or any other high carbohydrate food...it's just that NONE of those are safe.
Perhaps you don't know this about the Kreb's cycle, but your body is more than capable of creating and maintaing a glucose balance without the intake of carbohydrate.
Left to its own devices, without damaging carbohydrate intake, your body is much better at regulating glucose levels (keeping them from being both too low and too high).
That being said, your cite is a misapprehension of the issue -> low blood sugar may be bad for mental processing, but that does not mean high blood sugar is good for mental processing. Blood sugar is very carefully regulated, and when the body is allowed to properly regulate it, everything works fine. When you eat a bunch of carbohydrates that flood your body with sugar, bad things happen, to all your cells, including your brain cells.
So, nice try!
Insofar as how long adults lived, if you can extract the infant mortality statistics from ages 0-3, you usually get a more reasonable number. That being said, it is clear that the health of native populations was negatively impacted by a high-carbohydrate western diet around the entire globe. Again, see the gary taubes lecture, and let me know what you think.
The privacy part would kick in as an extra layer of legal protection if a hacker or.com is caught with your data on their devices.
The problem is the word "guarantee". They cannot guarantee my privacy from third parties unless they violate my liberty. If I want to give my data to a.com, and they have it on their devices, that's my own decision. Unless the ISP can actually decide, packet by packet, what is "private" data for me, they simply cannot guarantee anything. The only way they could decide, packet by packet, what is "private" data, would be to inspect every packet I sent, and to be able to recognize my private data.
Now, perhaps the translation is a bit off, and the word "guarantee" wasn't properly used. But the essence of liberty includes the liberty to be unsafe and unprivate.
Look, let's be perfectly clear here - there were plenty of what at the time were very rational and "scientific" authorities that believed kooky shit, including a flat world and a geocentric universe. Scientists in the 18th century may have known that the earth revolved around the sun, but scientists in ancient greece certainly saw things a different way.
Scientific consensus is a made up term that has nothing to do with science. It currently reflects the politics, self-interest and public relations spin put forward by specific groups. To imagine that somehow, all the scientists in the world meet every Tuesday, have a vote on every hypothesis known to man, and come to a "consensus" is ludicrous. This is not science.
Science is coming up with a falsifiable hypothesis, ruthlessly trying to prove it wrong, and failing.
Citation - "Good Calories, Bad Calores" by Gary Taubes. Google "gary taubes berkeley" for a lecture that pretty much covers his whole book.
P.S.: where's your cite for brain cells thriving in high blood sugar conditions?
Oh, and last, but not least, life expectancy is a near meaningless statistic. It has more to do with childhood mortality than the ages adults lasted to.
Privacy would protect your usage logs, name, maybe data in transit from a Google like collection and storage when exposed.
And pray tell, how will they know what data must be protected without inspecting it first?
Look, it's simple -> liberty is the freedom to send whatever packets I want to wherever I want. If those packets have my social security number, hat size and address, so be it. They're my packets. It's not your job to know that any given packet I send is "private" or "safe".
You seem to think that there's a magical "private" or "unsafe" flag in the TCP/IP spec. There isn't.
Um, no. Your chance of getting cancer is regulated by carbohydrate intake, thank you very much.
Cancer cells thrive in high blood sugar environments. Native populations, which had never had cancer in the histories of their people, started getting these "diseases of civilization" when the western diet, with copious amounts of carbohydrate, was introduced. They probably had the same incidence of cancerous mutations as before their diet changed, but the newly enriched high blood sugar environment let these otherwise harmless cells outproduce and overwhelm the other cells of the body.
Carbohydrate is the ultimate carcinogen, so put down that bran muffin, orange juice and low-fat bagel.
Nah, the solution to health problems in the US is to reduce the consumption of carbohydrates. The "diseases of civilization", as they're called, can all be traced back to carbohydrate intake. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and other chronic diseases aren't caused by trace dioxins, they're caused by the cereals and grains we're admonished we should eat.
guarantee users' privacy and safety when surfing, and forbids them to restrict any liberty whatsoever.
Maybe the spanish translation needs help, but how can you guarantee privacy and safety without restricting liberty? What if I WANT to pay some Nigerian a bunch of money for zero return? What if I'm a security researcher looking for a virus to download and test?
In fact, the data sets are publicly available for download from multiple sources.
As mentioned before, the specification of what data was taken from the public data sets is the important part, and that was lost by Mr. Jones and his chums. Although certainly every word in "Catcher In The Rye" can be found in Webster's Dictionary, the dictionary is hardly a viable substitute for Salinger's novel.
How do you feel about unfunded mandates?
Well, since most of this research is being funded with tax dollars, that sounds pretty funded to me. For the whole FOIA thing, as mentioned by others, simply make it a stipulation for every government funded research project that all files, data, programs, and other work products be hosted on a publicly accessible website.
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The problem is that if CO2 is a week positive feedback, overwhelmed by a strong cloud/water vapor negative feedback, its existence may be difficult if at all possible to discern, and in the final analysis, its contribution is negligible.
I didn't say they were unknown, but they certainly are poorly quantified at the moment in common climate models. If CO2 was a positive feedback that could possibly drive the climate into a runaway warming or cooling, it would already have happened in the past (since we've got clear measurements of much higher CO2 levels than we have today).
I'm not sure if that statement is strictly true (what is the "limit" of a negative feedback?), but I think I understand what you're trying to say. I would assert that understanding the limits of the feedback mechanisms we've observed is at a very early stage in the science, and that there is years if not decades of work to go before we understand it properly.
Well, since the predictions of doom (even just a little doom) are so weak in basis, it makes it very hard for people to worry at all, skeptic or not. I think when given the proper caveats, and when observing the times of human prosperity during warmer periods of history, global warming comes out as a good thing. Of course, "good warming" is anathema to the doom and gloom crowd...but I think there are good cases to be made that it might not be bad at all.
Well, if you're super poor, and burning wood or dung for fuel, the availability of cheap oil (and therefore cheap kerosene, or gasoline) can make a huge difference in quality of life.
Available energy per capita maps quite nicely to quality of life, so if you're trying to help the poorest of the poor, making energy cheaper is the best way to raise them out of poverty, period.
Ironic, of course, that the dietary guidelines put forth by our government actually creates Type 2 diabetes, which we then cheerfully treat. Or perhaps you were just talking about Type 1 diabetes.
The answer to that question has more to do with political inertia and the inability of government to admit error than any scientific or technological hurdle. Type 2 diabetes, and the vast majority of cancers, can be laid at the feet of the high-carbohydrate dietary guidelines we've been given. You could change the world in a year if we just were willing to admit our error for the past 30 years.
My personal bet, we've got 20 years before it becomes common knowledge, once again, that bacon is healthy for you, and bagels are sugar-death-bombs.
I'll just have to disagree with you on that one. It may be important, but it simply cannot be seen as equally important. And I think the big problem with the "productive lives" argument is that the costs associated with the chronic disease care really should be counted against any productivity. So if your average 100k salary senior programmer gets to work another ten years thanks to 2 million dollars worth of medical interventions, you're lost the game.
I think that the past 30 years of increasing medical expenditures vastly outpacing inflation shows just how important it is to get to the causes of disease, rather than the symptoms. We keep kicking the can down the road, focusing on what is immediately underfoot, and our shortsightedness ruins us in the long run.
The problem with asserting CO2 is a "lever" for H2O is that you've missed out on clouds entirely. The negative feedback loops that exist in our system (and they must, otherwise we'd have already had either run away cooling or run away warming) turn those levers into negligible influences.
It's certainly useful to postulate possible levers, and possible feedback loops, but one must be particularly careful of confirmation bias here. Both in terms of biological negative feedbacks (plants growing faster in the presence of CO2, for example), and simple physical negative feedbacks (water heating up, increasing humidity, increasing cloud cover, reducing temperature), there is a whole host of caveats to the climate models used to predict the future.
I think the big problem here is that the falsifiable hypothesis being defended is not properly defined. In other words, I would welcome alarmism, provided it's not alarmism that uses ambiguity in order to make all data fit their phantom hypothesis.
Science is the ruthless application of skepticism to ones' *own* ideas - we develop falsifiable hypotheses, and we *try* to falsify them. Science isn't a popularity contest, it isn't a vote, it isn't a consensus - it's challenging others, and yourself, to prove things *wrong*.
If some physics researcher proposes a theory of anti-gravity, backs it up with a host of equations that all must be true for his theory to be true, and you find just *one* flaw in the chain, his theory is toast (at least in the context of whatever time/temperature/pressure/size his experiment may apply to - see quantum versus classical physics).
I'll grant you that, in the case of a dearth of data (such as simply two photos, sans any sort of historical collection of other relevant data), but really, given the raw data, any executable programs used to massage the data, the general public at large is probably better qualified to sniff out problems than you think. They might not pick up on certain subtleties, such as UHI, proxy problems, the inappropriateness of using black body radiation equations to assert the existence of a "greenhouse effect", or other definitions of technical constants. But there is no such thing as "the scientists" in the end - they're just people, some who may disagree with each other on various points here and there. The idea of some amorphous group of "the scientists" giving us wisdom we can't grasp is a generalization that warps the conversation, I think.
Phil Jones, couldn't trust that man to flush the toilet. Richard Lindzen, might not be a good prom date, but he's certainly as trustworthy as anyone else in the field.
I think the dilemma comes when we have two people we can trust, and they've both come to diametrically opposed conclusions. If anything, this should be a clue for us as to the current insolubility of the problem in question - but boy, if there's anything people hate it's ambiguity.
The problem is that if we take the measures often suggested by warmists, and increase energy prices by eschewing the cheapest forms of energy available to us, we'll drive the poorest of the poor deeper into poverty and despair in several hundred days. If you're willing to assert we should be concerned about the fate of millions of people hundreds of years from now, surely you'll admit that we should be more concerned about millions of people hundreds of days from now, right?
Interesting definitions. I'll add two more for you:
Warmist: The overwhelming weight of the evidence shows C, so any data that contradicts C must be wrong.
Scientist: My fundamental hypothesis is predicated on C, so any data that contradicts C invalidates my hypothesis.
All too often, we forget science is the ruthless application of skepticism to one's *own* ideas.
Gotta love the cherry picking here. Take two arbitrary end points, get a downward slope, and then simplistically extend that slope forever. Never mind that another two end points would provide an upwards slope and reverse the prediction. Never mind that the system behaves in a demonstrably non-linear manner.
This is like saying the temperature from July to December decreased 20 degrees, and if that rate continued, we'll be at -200C in another ten years. I call BS on the church of global warming.
Actually, as a percentage of cost, chronic disease treatment, such as that for diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc, is much more than the broken bones or pregnancy category.
It would be better off if they were ignored, but unfortunately, they're not. The problem with the giant public-education campaigns is that they prescribe the wrong diet. They say stay away from saturated fat, eat low fat in general, and bulk up on cereals and grains. The common wisdom on "healthy diet" from our government and healthcare providers is actually the cause of most poor health.
Which is my point - polio hasn't been eliminated because we've gotten better and better at treating symptoms (which we currently do for chronic diseases), polio was eliminated because we attacked the cause. Over the past 30 years, health care has gone from acute care to chronic care, less about making us healthy again, and more about treating symptoms with more and more expensive and often useless methods.
And the sad part is that our current dietary guidelines promote these chronic diseases. Whether or not the inconvenience is "minor" or not aside, we currently run a health care industry that causes most of the diseases that they treat the symptoms of. It's as if nobody bothered to find a vaccine for polio, but instead developed drugs, surgeries and other treatments to mitigate the symptoms, while at the same time suggesting to the general public behaviors that would increase the incidence of polio.
This is generally true for acute care (fixing the broken bone, fighting the infection or virus caught by accident, etc), but for a lot of chronic care I think the evidence is pretty clear that while we keep people alive longer, we don't necessarily keep their lives productive or full, Darth Cheney being the obvious exception.
But that's patently not true. Getting healthcare does not necessarily make you more healthy, and even when it does it does not necessarily mean a more productive person -> take your average stroke victim, who racks up a bill of hundreds of thousands of dollars in surgery and rehab. This person is never going to be productive again. Yes, we've kept them breathing, and yes, one day they may be able to walk with a stroller, but they'll never add to the GDP again.
The real problem with healthcare, of course, is that we've set it up primarily to treat the *symptoms* of chronic disease while not addressing the *causes*. Diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer and other chronic diseases are all "treatable" in a myriad number of ways, but the cause, excessive carbohydrate intake, is actually encouraged by our USDA food guidelines.
Ironic, our government subsidizes the industries that create carbs and cause poor health (HFCS being ultra cheap because of corn subsidies), and now our government is going to subsidize the industry that treats the symptoms caused by these subsidized carbohydrates. If they'd just stop fucking with the levers on the machine, maybe the machine could take care of itself.
The problem I think you describe isn't one of the lowly IT worker, it's one of the clueless IT manager. Leadership counts, and even a group of the best people aren't going to be able to accomplish much when hampered by the management-idea-du-jour. They'd probably be better off by offering subsidies to MBA programs for clued in IT workers, so that you can get better blood in the ranks that matter.
About every 16 months, we have another reorg. The new boss of course decides that anything done before was wrong, so they've got to change it. As a consequence, any IT project that takes > 16 months (and most reasonable sized ones do) ends up switching gears to the detriment of the end product. In the kind of IT environment where leadership is transitory, top down change is done without thinking about the consequences, and where it is not unrealistic for a project manager to spend 5 years working and never ship a single damn system, even the best IT developer is screwed.
This isn't even bothering to take into account the sheer amount of process health care IT has as overhead - no kidding, even the best IT developer in health care probably spends, on average, less than an hour programming per day.
Actually, you've got a good point - reducing salaries for IT workers would reduce health care costs. So would reducing salaries for doctors, nurses and all other health care employees. The unintended consequences of such an activity are pretty severe though.
It's sort of like "affordable housing". Everybody is for "affordable housing", but nobody wants more foreclosures. However, foreclosures are exactly the kind of thing that would bring prices down and make things affordable.
The problem here though isn't the theory, it's the practical. Government intervention into markets creates distortions that cannot be sustained. Eventually, the best intentions implode on themselves. In the case of reducing IT salaries, I can only imagine that in the worst case, we have a big bucket of money, but not enough qualified people to take advantage of it, so we lower our standards so we can spend all the money. The resulting poor crop of IT workers ends up replacing more expensive IT workers, who find solace in other industries, and you essentially end up with less quality and less cost.
Of course, if they really wanted to reduce health care costs, they'd reduce disease, and the quickest, cheapest way to do that is to tell people to restrict their carbohydrate intake (contrary to the six servings of cereals and grains recommended by the USDA). Reducing the incidence of chronic disease, including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer and alzehimer's, by recommending a truly healthy diet, would not only reduce health care costs, it would improve health.
Yup, high carb fruits and stuff do help cause the "diseases of civilization".
Remember, back in the day, you got stuff only when it was in season, for a very short period of time. Strawberries and blueberries aren't too bad insofar as glycemic index, but yeah, oranges, apples, bananas, are pretty awful for you.
FWIW, apples have about 15g of carbs, which is about the equivalent of one slice of bread.
Insofar as taste, since giving up sugar, when the waiters give me regular coke instead of diet, the sugar water makes my entire mouth feel like it's being dissolved by acid. Your whole body changes when you stop eating the carbs that have been damaging it for so long.
All in all, the paleo crowd has it right -> our evolutionary path was one of primary meat eating, including the fattest portions of organ meats we could get our hands on. Apples didn't exist back in caveman days in the very sweet and succulent species of today -> wild apples are legendary for their inconsistency from generation to generation, and all apples today are grown by splicing.
Well, to be specific, HFCS is just as safe as normal sugar, sugary fruits, breads and cereals and grains, or any other high carbohydrate food...it's just that NONE of those are safe.
Perhaps you don't know this about the Kreb's cycle, but your body is more than capable of creating and maintaing a glucose balance without the intake of carbohydrate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis
Left to its own devices, without damaging carbohydrate intake, your body is much better at regulating glucose levels (keeping them from being both too low and too high).
Interesting definition of "thrive" :)
That being said, your cite is a misapprehension of the issue -> low blood sugar may be bad for mental processing, but that does not mean high blood sugar is good for mental processing. Blood sugar is very carefully regulated, and when the body is allowed to properly regulate it, everything works fine. When you eat a bunch of carbohydrates that flood your body with sugar, bad things happen, to all your cells, including your brain cells.
So, nice try!
Insofar as how long adults lived, if you can extract the infant mortality statistics from ages 0-3, you usually get a more reasonable number. That being said, it is clear that the health of native populations was negatively impacted by a high-carbohydrate western diet around the entire globe. Again, see the gary taubes lecture, and let me know what you think.
The problem is the word "guarantee". They cannot guarantee my privacy from third parties unless they violate my liberty. If I want to give my data to a .com, and they have it on their devices, that's my own decision. Unless the ISP can actually decide, packet by packet, what is "private" data for me, they simply cannot guarantee anything. The only way they could decide, packet by packet, what is "private" data, would be to inspect every packet I sent, and to be able to recognize my private data.
Now, perhaps the translation is a bit off, and the word "guarantee" wasn't properly used. But the essence of liberty includes the liberty to be unsafe and unprivate.
Look, let's be perfectly clear here - there were plenty of what at the time were very rational and "scientific" authorities that believed kooky shit, including a flat world and a geocentric universe. Scientists in the 18th century may have known that the earth revolved around the sun, but scientists in ancient greece certainly saw things a different way.
Scientific consensus is a made up term that has nothing to do with science. It currently reflects the politics, self-interest and public relations spin put forward by specific groups. To imagine that somehow, all the scientists in the world meet every Tuesday, have a vote on every hypothesis known to man, and come to a "consensus" is ludicrous. This is not science.
Science is coming up with a falsifiable hypothesis, ruthlessly trying to prove it wrong, and failing.
Citation - "Good Calories, Bad Calores" by Gary Taubes. Google "gary taubes berkeley" for a lecture that pretty much covers his whole book.
P.S.: where's your cite for brain cells thriving in high blood sugar conditions?
Oh, and last, but not least, life expectancy is a near meaningless statistic. It has more to do with childhood mortality than the ages adults lasted to.
And pray tell, how will they know what data must be protected without inspecting it first?
Look, it's simple -> liberty is the freedom to send whatever packets I want to wherever I want. If those packets have my social security number, hat size and address, so be it. They're my packets. It's not your job to know that any given packet I send is "private" or "safe".
You seem to think that there's a magical "private" or "unsafe" flag in the TCP/IP spec. There isn't.
Um, no. Your chance of getting cancer is regulated by carbohydrate intake, thank you very much.
Cancer cells thrive in high blood sugar environments. Native populations, which had never had cancer in the histories of their people, started getting these "diseases of civilization" when the western diet, with copious amounts of carbohydrate, was introduced. They probably had the same incidence of cancerous mutations as before their diet changed, but the newly enriched high blood sugar environment let these otherwise harmless cells outproduce and overwhelm the other cells of the body.
Carbohydrate is the ultimate carcinogen, so put down that bran muffin, orange juice and low-fat bagel.
Nah, the solution to health problems in the US is to reduce the consumption of carbohydrates. The "diseases of civilization", as they're called, can all be traced back to carbohydrate intake. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and other chronic diseases aren't caused by trace dioxins, they're caused by the cereals and grains we're admonished we should eat.
Maybe the spanish translation needs help, but how can you guarantee privacy and safety without restricting liberty? What if I WANT to pay some Nigerian a bunch of money for zero return? What if I'm a security researcher looking for a virus to download and test?
Slippery slope, folks.
As mentioned before, the specification of what data was taken from the public data sets is the important part, and that was lost by Mr. Jones and his chums. Although certainly every word in "Catcher In The Rye" can be found in Webster's Dictionary, the dictionary is hardly a viable substitute for Salinger's novel.
Well, since most of this research is being funded with tax dollars, that sounds pretty funded to me. For the whole FOIA thing, as mentioned by others, simply make it a stipulation for every government funded research project that all files, data, programs, and other work products be hosted on a publicly accessible website.